Jubilee Hitchhiker (115 page)

Over Easter vacation, when she spent a week in Bolinas, Ianthe and her father had a debate about the TV. Richard wanted to watch the Lakers game, Ianthe preferred
The Brady Bunch
. A bet was proposed. “We did a lot of wagering together,” Ianthe wrote in her memoir. “I got most of my allowance raises from winning bets.”

Betting with Brautigan “often involved elaborate preparations.” Father and daughter searched the backyard for perfect-sized pinecones. Teasing was part of the process, and Richard firmly insisting he was going to win. The bet involved tossing the pinecones at a wastepaper basket from a measured distance. Whoever made three baskets in a row was the winner and got control of the television. “He let me win,” Ianthe wrote, “and I was allowed to watch my program, only cutting to the game during commercials.”

“He was so good to her,” Sherry recalled. “And she loved him so much.”

Ianthe hung out on the beach near the Jefferson Airplane house, hoping “that this time the band would be home and someone famous would come to that gate and use the speaker phone.” No one ever did.

The Bolinas house provided ample space for dinner parties, and the second floor filled often with hard-drinking writers and poets. When the Creeleys came, the drink and talk went on until dawn. Sherry cooked elaborate meals, assisted by Nancy Hodge whenever she and Dick were on the guest list. Brautigan prepared his signature spaghetti dinner for Joanne Kyger, Bobby Louise Creeley, and Ron Loewinsohn, who brought his new girlfriend, Kitty Hughes, a graduate student at Berkeley, where he was teaching.

Kitty's parents hailed from Nebraska. She was a second cousin to Bruce Conner. Kitty studied at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Norfolk State, a black college in Virginia. Two of her colleagues there had known Loewinsohn at Harvard. Later, when she encountered them again at Berkeley, they introduced her to Ron. Tom and Becky McGuane also arrived for the spaghetti feast. Kitty Hughes thought they “looked sort of yuppie.” Becky struck her as “a suburbanite.” Kitty wondered what she was doing in this crowd. “She was perfect in some way,” Hughes recalled, “but she was also the domesticated kind of trophy of this guy.”

The first time Tom McGuane was introduced to Dick and Nancy Hodge, he showed up in Bolinas with a woman no one knew. Ianthe enjoyed all the wild evenings, “marathons [. . .] filled with a kind of foot-stomping, boisterous noise that chased all my kid fears away.” After a harrowing few days when Ianthe had been sick and throwing up, Brautigan phoned Sherry Vetter. “You've got to come up and get her,” he pleaded. “She's driving me crazy. I can't get any work done.” Inspired by his Montana trip, Richard had started the Western novel he had dreamed of for so long. He had not written a novel in six years and was desperate to avoid any distraction.

Vetter taught a fifth-grade class in the City. She regarded his request as “way beyond what a regular friend would ask.” Sherry called him on it. “This is what you do,” she told Richard, “you
never say please and you never say thank you. The request is always really beyond friendship. You're trying to get people to prove over and over that they love you and you want them to fail. Because then it would prove that they really don't love you like your mother didn't.”

Sherry still found the time to drive out to Bolinas. She sat in the little blue bug, with Ianthe beside her and the motor idling, preparing to depart, when Richard appeared at the open driver's side window. “He did a deep plié, his hands on the car door.” After repeated entreaties of “Daddy, Daddy, will you miss me?” answered by multiple pledges of devotion and an urge that they “get out of here,” Ianthe reached over to Richard and said, “Think of me.”

Brautigan stared past Vetter at his daughter. “I think only of you,” he said. The “beautiful sweet” moment hung in the air.

Sherry took Ianthe shopping and then drove her up to her mother's place in Sonoma (“the flies on the ceiling of the hippie house kitchen, the women forlorn, overwhelmed”). She hesitated on her return at the fork in the road. Either back to the City or over the hill to Richard. He'd begged her to come back, but his recent heavy drinking argued against it. Sherry turned right toward Bolinas, a place she always thought of as “spooky. God, did the sun ever shine over Bolinas?”

She arrived back at Brautigan's house in the late afternoon. He had already gone to Smiley's. Richard left her a note: “I am at the bar.” Sherry felt happy being alone. She sat in the growing dark, “listening to the ocean, distant, murmuring.” Later, she read and prepared an omelet, glad “not to have to smile and listen to philosophical gibberish: writers' conversations.” After eating, Sherry picked up Ianthe's scattered play clothes and got ready for bed, putting on a pair of pajamas but not unpacking her canvas bag. Snug in the big brass bed on the second floor, she phoned Ianthe, who asked for her dad. “He's in the bathtub,” Sherry lied.

“Go holler at him and get him. Make him talk to me!”

“He'll call later, but don't wait up in case he forgets.”

Sherry prowled the house, examining the bouquets of dried flowers gracing every corner, ghostly decorations from the past she believed had been placed there by Mary Elizabeth Parsons seventy years earlier. She followed her own advice and didn't wait up for Richard. After she fell asleep, nothing disturbed her until she heard an approaching car around three in the morning. Sherry awoke as someone delivered Richard from the bar. She felt vulnerable in bed. Not knowing Brautigan's “state of inebriation” made her jump from under the covers and run into the kitchen.

The door to a screened-in outdoor cooler stood in the far wall. Sherry and Richard had long used this secret vantage point to observe who was coming to visit before deciding whether to lie low. She opened the cooler door and looked down through the bottom slats at the back stairs leading up to the second-floor redwood deck, “like a child in a hide-and-seek game.” Richard stood at the foot of the stairs, clutching both railings, “leaning forward, waiting for his head to clear.”

Brautigan threw back his head and called, “Sherry . . .” Getting no answer, he started laboriously up.

Sherry watched from above, frozen, unseen, and “by the weaving of his body, the looseness of his limbs, the shadow of his long torso cast across the hillside below him from the floodlights affixed to the house,” she saw he was quite drunk. Four steps up, Brautigan's right foot broke through a rotten tread, catching his leg, fracturing the femur when he tried to jerk it free.

Richard wailed in pain. He lurched forward, disappearing from view.

Sherry left the kitchen and walked to the French doors opening out onto the deck at the other side of the house. As she fiddled with the lock, she heard him coming and “a great overwhelming anger” rose within her. It squeezed the breath inside her chest. Sherry saw Richard's “white face leering through the glass” at the door. She pushed the door open and sent Brautigan “reeling across the deck in a crazy dance. Winding down like a top off its spin.”

Richard spun out of control, screeching, arms flailing. He collided off-balance with the railing and seemed in danger of toppling over. Sherry rushed out into the heavy ocean fog, tripping on a deck chair, grabbing the back of Brautigan's broad leather belt before he lost complete control. “Die now!” she thought, her inner rage ablaze, knowing a simple push would send him to his doom. Instead, Sherry pulled Richard toward her, and he collapsed in her arms.

“My leg,” he cried. “I broke my leg!”

“Come inside.” Sherry helped Richard to the bed and calmed him with coffee. Pulling jeans and a windbreaker over her pajamas, she set off through the night to the home of Dr. John Doss, who had given up his lucrative city practice to become “a hippie doctor” in Bolinas. The Dosses were not at home, but their three sons slept with their girlfriends in a converted garage behind the big Victorian summer house. Sherry woke them, pleading, “Please. I can't get him down the steps by myself.”

Jock Doss returned with her and helped Brautigan into Sherry's VW. The long day of driving had come full circle. “For the fourth time in one day,” Vetter recalled later, “over the hill and back into the city with the man she says she loves folded up like an accordion in the front seat of the bug, moaning out at every sharp curve.”

Sherry drove Richard to Kaiser Permanante near his apartment on Geary and waited while Dr. Daniel Boone from Kentucky set his leg. Something had changed in the past few hours. Sherry felt “the first break” in their friendship. She took Richard the final few blocks home, and had her last sight of him, leg encased in a fresh white cast, pulling himself backward up the front steps of his dilapidated building.

Over the next few days, Richard phoned, pleading, “What am I gonna do?”

“You'll have to get somebody else to take care of you because I'm not going to do it,” Sherry said. She didn't see Brautigan again for four months.

Richard told his daughter he broke his leg in broad daylight, tripping over an exposed root while walking on his property. No mention was made of Smiley's. Ianthe remembered the difficult time her father had getting about on his crutches, hating every invalid moment. “He did a lot of hopping around the Geary apartment, the sight of which made me giggle.” Brautigan felt imprisoned by his immobility. “Hopping got old very fast,” he told Ianthe.

A copy of the first book-length critical study of his work arrived in the mail.
Richard Brautigan
, a slim 206-page paperback original by Terence Malley, a young professor at Long Island University, was the second volume in a series of “critical appreciations” called “Writers for the Seventies.” Richard didn't particularly care for Malley's interpretations of his writing but wrote a short letter thanking the author for sending the book. Around the same time, Houghton Mifflin published
The Best American Short Stories—1972
, edited by Martha Foley. Along with work by Robert Penn Warren, Ward Just, and Cynthia Ozick, the book included Brautigan's story “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane.” The “East Coast literary establishment” Richard griped about had recognized his work along with the cream of contemporary American literature.

When Sam Lawrence came “out to frolic” for five days in San Francisco at the end of October, Richard, feeling miserable and incapacitated, spent only a brief amount of time with him. Sam thought of Richard as “the prodigal son” and longed to have him back under his imprint. Brautigan liked and admired the publisher but had been very unhappy with Dell's poorly designed first paperback edition of
Trout Fishing
. He resented the extra work imposed on him when the production department ignored his design specifications.

Housebound with a broken leg, having Loie Weber handle all the correspondence from her home on Potrero Hill, Brautigan worked on his novel. Richard had wanted to do a Western for years. His recent trips to Texas, New Mexico, and Montana charged his imagination. Standing out in the desolate Rosario cemetery taking notes on the crumbling Maderfield tomb suggested the notion of a cowboy gothic. After traveling to Texas, Richard jotted down a possible title for just such a book: “Which then from Death Will Come, A Gothic Western.” In his next four-by-six notebook, Brautigan listed fifty-seven possible titles, ranging from the prosaic (“Nurse on Nightmare Island, “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” “Mansion of Evil”) to the poetic (“Winterwood,” “Echo in a Dark Wind,” “Nor Spell, Nor Charm”). “House at Hawk's End” hinted at his eventual choice. Random notes followed: “Possibility of combining gothic novel with western ending,” he wrote. “A large gothic house in eastern Oregon.” The ideas took shape. “Have the plot that you've already written arrive the house and the book ends with them walking into the house and the door closing after them [. . .] Chapter with Mary Shelly [
sic
] as she is making love and all she wants to do is write [. . .] There are always beautiful young women on the covers of gothic novels. The dark mysterious power of gothic novels.”

On another notebook page, Richard sketched an enigmatic outline:

Again, as had been his practice ever since starting on
Trout Fishing,
Richard Brautigan began working on a new novel by setting down random notes. When the time felt right he knew the work would come in a rush of energy. The only new work since returning from Montana was either poetry or short pieces like “The Last of My Armstrong Spring Creek Mosquito Bites,” an off-kilter fishing reminiscence Brautigan wrote in Bolinas several days after his visit with the McGuanes.

In November, Mary Ann Gilderbloom returned to San Francisco after “four or five” months in Europe. She had left abruptly after Mark Dowie broke off their engagement with an unexpected “Dear Jane” letter. Back in the city, Mary Ann found a place to live on Ninth Avenue, a “hippie enclave” in the Sunset District, and got a part-time job as a bookkeeper at Philobiblon, a bookstore at 50 Maiden Lane, just off Union Square. Before long Gilderbloom was one of three comanagers.

Richard Brautigan was the first person to call Mary Ann upon her return from Europe. “I hear you're free,” he said and asked her out. They soon started dating regularly.

Richard's courtship proved both courtly and romantic, with many “long talky dinners.” Lots of time was spent in the Geary Street kitchen, where he would read poetry while they drank “copious amounts of Courvoisier with a Cointreau top.” Brautigan brought Mary Ann out to Bolinas, telling her he had recently purchased his house and adroitly avoiding any mention of Sherry Vetter. “The place in Bolinas actually kind of freaked me out,” Mary Ann recalled. “It was kind of creepy. I wouldn't have spent a weekend alone in that house.”