Jubilee Hitchhiker (141 page)

When Richard Brautigan returned from his second trip to Japan at the end of June, he was fascinated by this photograph. Like discarded Christmas trees, rubber bands scattered across a city sidewalk, or a decrepit West Texas graveyard, there was something about the image that caught his fancy. He began talking with Lorca about the great trash pickup, trying to get to the heart of a story. Their conversations led to a curious and unexpected conclusion. Richard suggested he and Lorca collaborate on a screenplay.

The entire project may have been nothing more than a fancy to capture the imagination of a ten-year-old girl, nevertheless Brautigan, professional to the core, insisted Lorca agree to follow a rigid writing schedule. He asked her to come over to his house every afternoon to work for at least an hour. Being taken seriously by an adult has great appeal for a child, and she immediately agreed. To seal the bargain, Richard proposed they both sign a formal agreement. He found a paper
napkin from the Tastee-Freez, his favorite fast food restaurant, and drew up a contract with his ballpoint pen.

The fragile document became its own work of art. At the top, Brautigan printed “The Contract” beside one of his iconic fish drawings. In block capitals below that, he wrote the name of their project, “GARBAGE TRIUMPHS OR ‘JUST GARBAGE.'” Inside a much larger smiling fish sketch at the center of the napkin, the words “For a movie” were superimposed above “Share and Share a like [
sic
].” The signatures of Richard and Lorca appear beside the place of signing, “Pine Creek, Montana.” Richard added the date and the deal was done. Brautigan carefully folded the contract, preserving it in an empty plastic Dan Bailey's Fly Shop box.

An element of make-believe crossed over into the realm of reality, so often the case in the movie business. It seemed very real to a girl of ten. Thirty years later, Lorca still treasured her paper napkin contract with Richard Brautigan. She recalled going next door to Richard's house every day around noon, knocking on the door of his sleeping quarters, and working with him in his kitchen while he drank a cup of coffee. Brautigan employed a Socratic method. After instructing her in screenplay format, he asked Lorca questions about the story, and she wrote down the ensuing action in a school notebook.

The plot involved a conflict between the “good Indians” and the “garbage Indians.” The project lasted for week or so, until Richard took off on one of his periodic trips to San Francisco. Lorca can't remember what became of the “screenplay,” or even how much of their project was actually completed. Her memories of the script's contents remain equally vague. What she never forgot was the magic of “collaborating” with a famous writer who took her ideas seriously and stimulated her imagination with his own.

Bret Haller, Mike and G.'s youngest son, remembered a different sort of collaboration with Richard Brautigan. Bret, who later followed his father's film career footsteps and became a movie producer, recalled Brautigan as “definitely one of those guys that if you were gonna get on your bicycle and go riding around in Pine Creek, he was one of those guys you'd want to go visit. He would have an open-door policy, and you could go bug him if you wanted to. ‘Let's go hang out with our pal Richard.'”

One time, Bret took sick and couldn't go to school, staying home in bed. Richard came over to visit, as he had when Eric Haller broke his nose earlier in a bicycle accident. Brautigan brought along a model airplane kit, some jars of paint, and a tube of glue. He had owned the kit for some time, and the boys admired the Stuka JU 87 dive bomber, depicted on a colorful box-lid illustration. The Stuka was a formidable aircraft used by the Germans to great effect as an antitank weapon on the Russian front during World War II (Stuka is an abbreviation of
sturzkampfflugzzeug
, German for dive bomber), and the model airplane kit piqued Richard's abiding interest in WWII.

It took several days to assemble the airplane. Brautigan came over every morning to sit with the sick boy and work on their project. The Stuka had upswept gull wings and a fixed undercarriage and landing wheels, an ugly and instantly recognizable aircraft. Richard told Bret of the Stuka's fearsome capabilities as they pieced and glued the model's parts together. A rear gunner sat behind the pilot. The two-man Stuka dove at close to eighty degrees. It carried either one five-hundred-kilogram bomb or four fifty-kilogram bombs under the fuselage, and the wheel covers contained the “Trumpets of Jericho,” sirens screaming during the dive “to shatter the morale of enemy troops
and civilians.” Richard and Bret painted the plane a camouflage pattern and mistakenly applied the swastika decals backward on the wings.

Bret Haller still owns the model Stuka dive bomber he built with Richard Brautigan. More than just a youthful memento, it's a reminder of a very special friendship. Bret remembered Richard “certainly wasn't one of those stern adults. He was a kid.”

Brautigan concurred with everyone's assessment of the eternal kid dwelling within him. In a poem, written in Japan in June of 1976, he had this to say:

forty-five: tokyo throes

P
LANNING FOR HIS first trip to Japan preoccupied Richard Brautigan through the early months of 1976. He had Helen Brann decline an invitation from the State Arts Commission of Washington set early in May because he would be out of the country. In mid-April, Gary Snyder answered a letter Brautigan had written asking for insights into Japan. Snyder's travel advice reflected his own unique interests. “Tokyo will absolutely take you over,” Gary wrote. He urged Richard to visit the National Museum and have a look at the rooms full of “naked medieval sword blades.” Snyder knew Brautigan would appreciate how they all seemed alike and yet each was subtly different. “Purity,” Gary called it. Along the same lines, Snyder included a list of temples in Kyoto “worth doing” (Ryoan-ji, Toji, Todai-ji, Horyu-ji), balancing this aesthetic tour by recommending Cid Corman's Kyoto ice cream parlor and Horagai (“conch shell”), a coffee shop run by an old friend in the remote Tokyo district of Kokubun-ji.

For a couple months before he left for the Philippines to work on
Apocalypse Now
, early in'76, Tony Dingman lived in Richard Brautigan's Bolinas house. Richard sometimes came out on the weekend, but mostly Tony was alone, “waiting to leave,” and working with Klyde Young, painting and fixing up the bathroom. “I met him like late compared to a lot of the guys,” Tony said, “but once we got to be drinking partners things were good for a long time.”

Brautigan wrote to his Japanese translator seeking information. “I'm so glad we have cleared up the business about The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster,” he told her. He planned to arrive around the end of April and remain until early June. He had heard the Imperial Hotel was “a good place to stay in Tokyo, centrally located, etc.,” and wanted to know what she thought about the idea. Kazuko reassured him that the Imperial was a five-star world-class hotel. Richard promptly booked a reservation.

Brautigan arrived at Haneda (Tokyo International Airport) on May 13, 1976. Having already obtained a valid travel visa from the Japanese Consul-General in San Francisco, he was unexpectedly detained by emigration officials. He had listed “writer” as his occupation on the entry form. Taking a hard look at his scruffy appearance, the officials decided Richard must be a “technical writer.” Seeking such employment in Japan might deprive a legitimate citizen of a job. Brautigan was not allowed to enter the country.

Desperate, Richard phoned Curt Gentry, who was staying at the Hotel New Otani with his fiancée, Gail Stevens. A couple days earlier, Curt and Gail had overheard an American speaking perfect Japanese in a bar. Piqued by his own dwindling knowledge of the language, Gentry approached the stranger and introduced himself. “I had read
Helter Skelter
,” Len Grzanka remembered, “and was really impressed.” Grzanka lived in Tokyo, working on a Harvard PhD and teaching English
part-time at Tsuda women's college. Len took Gentry and Stevens to a number of art galleries the next day (“Gail had a black belt in shopping”) and went out on the town at night with Curt.

Gentry phoned Grzanka to inform him of Brautigan's plight. “My sponsor in Japan was the Minister of Justice,” Len said, “so I had a little bit of clout.” Grzanka found his way to where Immigration authorities held Richard. He explained Brautigan was not a
teknakada
(technical writer) but a
shosetska
, “an author. And when I said
yimina shosetska
, a famous novelist, they backed off and let him in.”

Brautigan took a cab to the Imperial Hotel, the oldest and most prestigious in Tokyo. Located across from the forty-acre Hibiya Park, adjacent to the emperor's palace grounds, the hotel had a long and distinguished history. The first Imperial was built in 1890. Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1916 to design a replacement. His “Maya-revival-style” structure opened in June 1923, and survived the 7.9-magnitude Great Kantō earthquake, which leveled most of Tokyo months later. Wright's Imperial also made it through the Allied bombing of World War II, only to fall to the wrecking ball in 1968. (The Japanese saved the facade, entrance lobby, and interior reflecting pool, reconstructing them in 1976 at the Museum Meiji-Mura, a collection of historic buildings in Nagoya, outside of Tokyo.) By the time Brautigan arrived that same year, two new European-style high-rise buildings had been constructed to form the resurrected Imperial Hotel.

At the front desk, oppressed by the opulent formality, Richard also felt the haughty scrutiny of the hotel staff. He had no credit cards and was asked to pay cash, up front, for his room. Being mistaken for a hippie drug dealer, the second indignity suffered since arriving in Japan, drove Brautigan to the sanctity of his posh quarters, where he spent the evening drinking and watching television. He wrote “Kitty Hawk Kimonos,” his first Tokyo poem, about the two young women in kimonos “standing beside a biplane” that he saw on his TV screen that night. Richard didn't understand a word of Japanese but felt an affinity for the “old timey airplane” and the women's “very animated / and happy conversation.”

The next morning, Brautigan went for a walk, beginning his habit of exploring the remote neighborhoods of Tokyo on foot. He wandered through the back streets of the Shibuya District wanting to see his first Japanese bird. Richard was surprised to hear the sound of a rooster crowing. He jotted down a poem (“Crow”) in his notebook.

The management of the Imperial remained adamant about payment up front from Brautigan, every single day. When it seemed things couldn't get any worse, the hotel asked him to leave. Richard appealed to Len Grzanka for help. He called the Imperial “and tried to straighten things out with them.” “They just said no,” Len recalled with a chuckle. “
Yanayatsu
. . . He's disgusting.” Richard complained about the situation to all who would listen. The next afternoon around three, he traveled to Kazuko Fujimoto's Tokyo apartment in the Harajuku/Aoyama District, with the hotel problem uppermost on his mind. Brautigan brought a bottle of Hennessy cognac, most of which he drank himself. Kazuko's other guests were Katsuya Nakamura, publisher of Shobun-sha (Brautigan's Japanese publishing house) and Kaitaro Tsuno, Shobun-sha's editor in chief.

Later, they all went to dinner at Szechwan, a fine Chinese restaurant in the Roppongi District, the most international area of the city. After their meal, Kazuko and her husband, David Goodman, brought Richard and the men from Shobun-sha to The Cradle Bar, also located in Roppongi. Both Shinjuku and Ginza boasted a greater number of restaurants and nightspots, but the high density of discos and bars in a much smaller district intensified Roppongi's pleasure-seeking atmosphere. The
Cradle opened in 1971 on Stars and Stripes Avenue (Seijoki Dori), a thoroughfare named for the nearby offices of the U.S. Army newspaper. The basement bar had become a favorite Tokyo hangout for writers, artists, and filmmakers by the time Richard Brautigan first walked down the stairs five years later. Known to its devoted habitués simply as Cradle, the place owed its congenial ambiance to the warmth and curiosity of the proprietress, forty-two-year-old Takako Shiina, whose father had translated
Alice in Wonderland
into Japanese in 1927. He later became a screenwriter and, between 1931 to 1941, directed fifty films under the name Saburou Aoyama.

In 1968, Takako met English playwright Arnold Wesker (
Chicken Soup with Barley
,
The Kitchen
,
Chips with Everything
). She was recovering from the tragic and unexpected loss of a child and had embarked on a pilgrimage, walking from temple to temple. Wesker had been invited to Tokyo as part of “Wesker 68,” a festival celebrating his work. Takako Shiina was one of three translators hired to serve in shifts during the official program. “I came to her at a vulnerable time,” Wesker recalled. “There was something about the way we hit it off, and she took courage.”

Takako decided to open a nightspot congenial to artists. Initial funding came from a wealthy American she met during a trip to the States. Shiina built the bar and block of flats. She lived upstairs with her actor husband. Takako asked Arnold Wesker to name the bar. “Well, you're creating a place that's going to be sort of a comfort for artists,” he mused. “Call it The Cradle.”

Wesker described the look of the subterranean boîte: “You went down a flight of stairs into the basement, and you turned right into The Cradle. Turn right again and you're looking down the length of The Cradle. On the left is a bar, and on the right there might have been bar stools or there might have been sofas. And further along, you stepped down into a well, and there was a table with lots of armchairs around it. That's really all it was.”