Jubilee Hitchhiker (131 page)

There were elaborate bouquets of hothouse flowers, hundreds of candles glittering like captive fireflies throughout the ninety-eight-year-old mansion. Nancy placed mirrors on each step of the stairs leading down to the law library. Every room scintillated with witty conversation and the sparkling play of candlelight on cut crystal and polished mahogany.

Full-scale high jinks began in earnest at the dinner table, the preceding cocktail hour having been relatively sedate. The low-ceilinged law library, long and narrow, echoed and amplified the shouted jokes and raucous laughter. Nancy “spent the whole night running back and forth” between the kitchen and the improvised dining room.

Jim Harrison called for everyone's attention, saying he “wanted to share a letter that he had received.” Harrison stood, unfolded the letter, and started to read “this dry-eyed, flowery tribute” to Brautigan. After a few minutes, he paused, saying “there's some other stuff in there you have to read because, you know, I can't read it out loud.” At this point, Jim passed the letter around. It went from hand to hand, and everyone who looked burst into spontaneous laughter. The “letter” was a blank sheet of paper.

During the feast, Bob Dattila dropped beneath the long redwood table, crawling along between the seated diners. Seizing a beautiful young blond by the legs, Bob hauled her off her chair, pulling her down into his private netherworld. Gatz Hjortsberg sat across from the woman. He thought it looked like a subterranean gopher feeding on a dandelion. The golden flower held her head up high, and suddenly she was gone, disappearing into darkness, fast in the rodent's grip.

After dinner, before the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake and coffee service upstairs, Nancy Hodge organized a tour of the venerable house. About a dozen guests followed her up the wide carpeted steps, past a towering mahogany newel post crowning the bottom of the banister where Price Dunn's previous rowdiness sent an antique crystal globe perched on top tumbling to a shattering conclusion. Entrance to the parlor on the second floor was gained through a pair of pocket sliding doors, a theatrical Victorian decorative touch designed to make a dramatic impression. When Nancy slid open the doors, the tableau revealed within was not what anybody had in mind.

Displayed on the couch before the gathered party guests, Margot Patterson Doss had her dress up over her waist, with bad boy Price Dunn kneeling on the carpet, his head buried between her outspread legs. Hearing the commotion behind him, “Price turned around with this big goofy smile on his face.”

“Hi, everybody,” he grinned.

“Oh . . . ! Uh . . . ! We'll see you later.” Nancy discreetly pulled the twin doors closed.

Back downstairs, the assignation above dominated the conversation. Dattila, one of the wide-eyed onlookers, “thought it was incredibly charming,” and remembered the guys commenting on Price's “heroic bravery.” Harry Dean Stanton, “the consummate Hollywood insider,” seemed “shocked” by what he saw, Dattila recalled. “She's kind of old for that,” the actor observed.
Joanne Kyger, another eyewitness, found this misbehavior on the part of a woman she regarded as “our sturdy Scots walker” a bit hard to fathom.

Richard seemed quite pleased by it all. “That's my pal,” he said of Price. “What a service! What a humanitarian guy!”

Nancy, the consummate hostess, took it all in stride. “It was absolutely a hilarious night,” she recalled. “I think Brautigan was very joyful and was having the time of his life.” He had every reason to be happy. The next day Sam Lawrence wrote to Helen Brann reporting the approximate sales figure for the four Brautigan titles under the Delta and Dell/Laurel imprint was one and a half million copies.

Three days following Richard's birthday bash, Keith Abbott transported the last of Brautigan's possessions from Geary Street over to the new Telegraph Hill apartment. Not long after moving in, Richard met Nikki Arai, a Japanese American photographer and art dealer, a neighbor who lived on Windsor Place, a residential alley off Green Street only a block or so away from Brautigan's residence. Arai had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Simon Lowinsky, who had also been her business partner, and was feeling “very down on men.”

Lowinsky and Arai had operated the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. A photo exhibit there on People's Park in September and October of 1969 showed her work along with that of Alan Copeland. This led to the publication of
People's Park
, a collection of their photographs she edited together with Copeland. Arai and Lowinsky moved to San Francisco in the early seventies and opened the Simon Lowinsky Gallery. They traveled often to Holland to buy the work of printmaker M. C. Escher, which they resold in Frisco for inflated prices. Copeland considered this “a Ponzi scheme.”

It was nevertheless a lucrative endeavor. Nikki Arai drove a Mercedes Benz SL convertible and lived in a luxury apartment. She had flair. Brautigan was immediately attracted. When Nikki brought Richard to her boudoir the first time, he discovered she kept a pair of shackles attached to the headboard of her bed. She once told Alan Copeland, “I just love running a razor blade over warm flesh.” This was a bit more bondage and S&M than Brautigan had bargained for, and their affair was short-lived. But a link had been forged. They remained friends for the rest of her life.

Very soon thereafter, Siew-Hwa Beh moved in with Brautigan at 314 Union Street. Living with this intelligent, outspoken, liberated Malaysian woman whom, from the very start of their relationship, he called “an avenging angel” charged his life with high-voltage emotional intensity. At first, he felt delirious with happiness. Don Carpenter remembered when Richard met Siew-Hwa, “he just couldn't stop talking about it. He was so happy, he literally walked into lampposts.”

For Beh, the two years she spent with Brautigan felt like ten. “You know how you can spend a whole lifetime with someone and never have that intensity of intimacy?” she said. “The first seven, eight months were so ideal it was like I felt in my soul and in every way that I had come home. All my life I had looked for a playmate, another person to play with me. I never had a boyfriend or even a girlfriend who was such an ideal playmate. Our life was so unreal. He never had to go to an office. We read poetry. We talked a lot. We loved to eat. We had great sex.”

There had been previous lovers, and Beh had been married for four years while in college, but still she admitted, “I was so new to a whole sexual life because I came from a place where you're not allowed to be sexually that free.” Part of the new freedom included bondage. The ever-independent Siew-Hwa set her own rules in that department as well. “I was into freedom and being able to
express myself,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Only if you allow me to tie you, too.' I think no woman had ever told him that and I think that thrilled him.”

The open give-and-take early in their relationship extended beyond the bedroom into even more sacred territory, Brautigan's work. Unlike any previous muse, when something Siew-Hwa said in conversation inspired the writing of a poem, she teased him, saying, “What part of the commission do I get from this?”

Intrigued, Richard told her, “They're paying me $200 for this poem; I'll give you sixty bucks for it.”

“That's good,” Siew-Hwa said. “Next poem. Muses have to eat, too.”

Beh believed Brautigan paid her so much attention that he spoiled her “in a sense.” He enjoyed drawing baths for her. While the tub filled, Richard lit numbers of candles on the window ledge and the vanity top and along the edge of the sink. After Siew-Hwa immersed herself in the steaming water, he brought in a “cold, cold bottle of white wine,” usually Pouilly-Fuissé, and sat on the toilet seat and just stared at her. “It's like he noticed everything about it,” Beh recalled. “He would look at me in silence like he was trying to hold on to every moment.”

Richard liked taking a book into the bathroom and reading to Siew-Hwa as she washed her hair. Often, they cracked jokes during these intimate bathing moments. “He looked so angelic,” Beh said, “but other times he would look melancholy, like he couldn't believe this would ever last. He would be so simple and yet so complex at the same time. We were both very conscious about class. We both felt we were outsiders. We understood each other because in many ways I was just as primitive as he was. As kids, we would just run around the streets wild. And I enjoyed being a loner with him. Two outsiders found each other.”

Together night and day during those first months, Richard and Siew-Hwa forged a unique bond. “It was a wonderful gift,” she said. “I couldn't have dreamt of a better dream.” Beh described Brautigan as “the perfect house-husband. He cooked every day. I would just love it,” she said. A perfectionist in the kitchen as well as in his writing studio, Richard took care to get things right.

“He was a gourmet,” Beh recalled. “He knew his wine and his food, and he knew every corner of every street, so he would go to different delis. He was playful. He was like this eternal child who would keep discovering and rediscovering and having the joy to discover again.” At home, Richard and Siew-Hwa didn't watch much television, but their nighttime ritual before sleep involved watching
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. Beh noted that Brautigan was not “placid” in his television watching. “He had a unique way of seeing things,” she said. “He could turn anything that's mundane into something funny or witty. And that was such a joy because that was a real gift.”

Richard shared his love of basketball with Siew-Hwa. Professional and college games provided more opportunities to nest in front of the television set. Another aspect of popular culture Brautigan greatly enjoyed was country music. He introduced Siew-Hwa to Dolly Parton by playing her the song “Coat of Many Colors.” “You're a feminist,” he told his Malaysian girlfriend, “you must listen to Dolly Parton, who was really quite a feminist before her time.” (Ianthe remembered her father playing Parton's “Jolene” over and over again during the summer of 1976.)

The second week in April, Jim Harrison and Guy de la Valdène arrived in San Francisco for a short visit. They stayed with Brautigan at his new sun-filled apartment. Russ Chatham came over from Marin to join the fun, later described as a “riotous couple of days.” The boys were in
a mood to party, wanting to visit the Golden Gate Foundation, an upscale fifteen-room Pacific Heights brothel at 2018 Bush Street. The place had opened several months earlier, quickly gaining a sub-rosa reputation by discreet word of mouth. They also gave out gold calling cards, “a member organization” advertising the “preservation of fine traditions.”

The problem for the gang was a shortage of funds. This was no two-bit whorehouse. Prices ranged from around fifty bucks a pop to $300, depending on the customer's sexual preferences. Sitting at the bar at Vesuvio on Columbus Avenue, the boys discussed their dire financial straits. Richard came to the rescue. He dug through the pockets of his old army jacket and started “pulling out bills.” Brautigan found between $1,100 and $1,300 in the faded fatigue coat and turned it all over to his buddies. Curt Gentry joined their party. He had published a book called
The Great Madams of San Francisco
a decade earlier and had a long-standing scholar's interest in brothels.

Richard accompanied the gang to the cathouse on Bush Street but didn't partake of its main attraction. They trooped under an ornate iron gate and up twenty steps beneath a drooping oleander tree to the canary yellow doorway of the Victorian mansion housing the Golden Gate Foundation. After being treated to “free” drinks (champagne), the boys took bubble baths upstairs with the girls of their choice, before retiring to the six tangerine-lit, sumptuously furnished bedrooms.

While his friends caroused, Richard had drinks in the bar, where he encountered Joseph Alioto, mayor of San Francisco. “What are you doing?” Brautigan inquired.

“I'm sort of running the town,” His Honor replied.

Kitty Desmond, the madam, billed as the “executive planning director,” listed her occupation as “researcher.” She had been granted a business license by the city to operate an “emotional therapy research foundation.” Her place was raided by the police a month later and shut down for good. Russell Chatham found himself unable to collect on an arrangement to trade a large nude painting for “a dozen glorious pieces of [Kitty's] matchless ass [. . .]”

After returning from Montana in the fall of 1974, Brautigan's monthly tab at Enrico's and Vanessi's provided an accurate yardstick of time spent at his favorite North Beach establishments. In December of '74, Richard charged $556.04 at Vanessi's and another $238.51 (mostly drinks) at Enrico's. More than a convenient watering hole, Enrico's served as a quasi-private club for its regular customers.

In his newspaper column, Herb Caen described “an ordinary day” at Enrico's. Caen stood inside at the bar with Charles McCabe, taking it all in. Over “at the family table,” Scott Beach played his handmade psaltery for editor Blair Fuller. “Nearby, Barnaby Conrad was arguing movies with Mel Torme. A newly bearded Herb Gold, just back from Haiti, toyed with his eggs-in-hell while listening to Enrico practice his violin.” Out on the sidewalk terrace, Richard Brautigan sat “scribbling poetry on an old envelope.” A couple tables away, Evan Connell occupied his time “staring into space.” Dressed to the nines “except for an incongruous white tennis hat,” J. P. Donleavy paused for a drink on his way to visit John Huston in Mexico. Caen felt the scene rivaled the fabled Algonquin Round Table from the 1920s.

Herb Caen neglected to mention Ward Dunham, Enrico's affable, bearded Herculean bartender (and occasional bouncer), who gave the place much of its character. Born in Denver, Dunham came to San Francisco in 1965 after getting back from Vietnam. Before signing on at Enrico's, Ward worked as the night manager at a club called the Roaring Twenties while studying history and journalism at San Francisco State during the day.