Jubilee Hitchhiker (151 page)

With elaborate tact and courtesy, like a trained diplomat, Richard had arranged for Gary Snyder to read his poetry that evening. Everyone gathered around as Snyder thumbed through paperback editions of his work, giving voice to lines hewed with a woodsman's skill and shaped by the wisdom of a true sage. “Gary read this lovely poem,” Dan Gerber recalled. (The lament of the brain-dead: Japhy Ryder reading in my living room and I can't remember a damn thing.)

Afterward, there was “a lot of heavy drinking going on.” The party mingled in shifting conversational groups of twos and threes. At one point, Richard wandered off, perhaps to the kitchen to refresh his whiskey glass. At that time, Marian and I had a rodent problem. I'd set a rattrap in the pantry, where we kept the bags of dog food the big ones favored. These gadgets looked like an ordinary wooden mousetrap only much larger, a comic book exaggeration of the commonplace. When Richard returned to the living room, he carried the cocked rattrap in his hands.

He proposed a bizarre entertainment. The idea was to toss the trap around the room from person to person. The object: not to have the infernal thing go off and get your fingers snapped. “Well, Snyder was, I mean, he was just kind of like,
shhh
, these people are crazy,” Dan Gerber told me, describing the mock horror on the face of the guest of honor. But Gary played the game with backwoods gusto, catching the rattrap as if he'd done it all his life, flipping the thing across the room to another potential victim. It was thrown from hand to hand three or four times and never went off.

Disappointed by the lack of action, Richard balanced the rattrap, still cocked, on top of a door frame. He jumped up, banging the trap with his head to spring the mechanism. The rectangular metal bow snapped shut, cutting a large gash in his forehead. Richard's delighted laughter broke the stunned silence. He refused all offers to tend the wound and went around “very proudly” for the remainder of the evening with blood dripping from his brow. I don't remember any of this.

forty-nine: banned in the boondocks

A
FTER THEIR WEDDING, Richard and Akiko planned to travel to the East Coast. Helen Brann's office made hotel reservations for them in New York. Brautigan hadn't had much contact from his agent for several weeks, and the lack of attention troubled him. Richard depended upon Helen for much more than deal-making. He considered her a friend and expected undivided loyalty from his friends. Brautigan brooded on the matter until he could no longer stand it. After a long night of drinking, he phoned Helen Brann at 1:30 am. It was past four in the morning in Manhattan.

Helen had often spoken with her needy client at odd hours, but she was in no mood to deal with Richard on this particular night. Her “dear, dear friend” Pat Hemingway, someone Brautigan had met and liked, had been diagnosed with cancer two and a half months earlier. The day before Thanksgiving, Pat had been released from the hospital and came to stay with Helen Brann, who was nursing her when Richard called. She was in no mood to set aside her friend's medication to deal with Brautigan at this late hour. Their curt conversation ended abruptly. Richard said he would not speak with her again until after the new year and hung up.

Deeply insulted by his agent's continuing “lack of communication,” Brautigan sank deeper and deeper into a melancholy funk. Three days later, he sent a telegram to John Hartnett, who had joined Helen Brann as a coagent: “Cancel hotel reservations. Not coming east.” Richard had told Helen he would call “next week concerning business,” but made no mention of his recent marriage to Aki. Helen knew “something [had] gone terribly wrong” and “searched for a clue to what [she] might have done to offend him.”

Brann wrote Brautigan a heartfelt handwritten letter, apologizing for her lack of communication and explaining her current painful situation with Pat Hemingway. Helen asked Richard to call her. “I am worried and anxious to hear from you.” Richard did not call. Neither did he write back to Brann. Instead, he sent a comforting letter to her friend Pat, perceptively describing Hemingway's “special qualities.” Subsequently, Brann placed several phone calls to Brautigan, all answered by his wife. Her partner, John Hartnett, also failed in several attempts to reach Richard directly. Akiko was running interference.

Soon afterward, the newlyweds returned to Montana and resumed their low-key life at Pine Creek with Tony Dingman as their unofficial resident jack-of-all-trades. December days were short and often gloomy in the Northwest. Freezing weather canceled the fishing possibilities, although the Yellowstone River remained legally open to anglers year-round. Housebound, surrounded by acres of frozen snow, Richard, Aki, and Tony all looked for amusing ways to pass the time. Brautigan had his morning writing schedule. Dingman wrote poetry, but had no long-range
projects under way and mostly worked in short bursts. Tony turned his attention to a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

The picture on the box cover showed a harbor scene, boats bobbing at anchor beneath a cloudless blue sky. Dingman set to work on the dining room table. After three days of solitary concentration, the puzzle remained 80 percent complete, everything done except the sky. Dingman avoided the puzzle. He sat in a rocking chair in the front room, staring in mournfully at the dining table. “I can't finish it,” he said. “The blue sky is hopeless.” Brautigan got the vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, and vacuumed the puzzle, piece by piece, off the table. Tony had never seen his friend look happier. “He loved it,” Dingman recalled. Richard returned the vacuum cleaner to storage. “There was just too much blue,” Tony said. Soon after, Brautigan wrote a short story he called “Blue Sky.”

Richard and Aki went back down to San Francisco for the Christmas holidays. After a spell of rural solitude, Brautigan welcomed the energetic bustle of city life. The Hjortsbergs had left to spend the winter in Haiti; Tom McGuane and his new wife, Laurie, were off in Key West; Russell Chatham had departed for parts unknown. None of the Montana Gang was around, and the weather had turned bitterly cold.

Brautigan's San Francisco friends all greeted Akiko warmly. John and Margot Doss thought the world of her. Don Carpenter sounded enthusiastic albeit sexist. “A very beautiful, very accomplished, very intelligent woman,” he said. “The best pair of tits in Japan, bar none.” Jack Thibeau remembered Aki as “very pleasant.” Although Ron Loewinsohn liked Akiko, he adopted a more pragmatic view. Richard “thought he had gotten the archetypical geisha, who would walk three feet behind him,” Ron said. “But Aki was really very modern and very tough.”

The Brautigan's new friends, Fumio and Mieko Wada, hosted a grand New Year's Eve party in their honor a month after the wedding. They had entertained Richard and Aki several times previously, “a number of wonderful evenings,” parties including Japanese film stars, models, and Nō theater actors. The Dosses, who lived across the street, were among the New Year's guests and remembered a ceremonial dinner “on a tremendous big tray, a big fish in the center surrounded by smaller fishes surrounded by even smaller fishes.” All the specialty seafood had been hand-carried to San Francisco from Japan by friends of the Wadas. “Richard loved this,” Margot Doss recalled. “It had been done especially for his benefit. That was an enchanted night. We all had such a good time.”

Don Carpenter recalled a drunken evening spent at the Wadas' place with Richard and Aki. Fumio's job involved working with a computer in a closet. Don thought he might be a Japanese spy. When he mentioned this to Brautigan, “he sort of didn't deny it.” As the evening progressed, Carpenter got very drunk and blacked out. “As I did when I was a drinking person,” he confessed years later.

Don woke up about four in the morning in the spare bedroom of the Brautigans' apartment. After an hour of lying in the dark, “eaten by guilt,” he got up and left the building. Outside on the street, not seeing his car anywhere, Carpenter reached into his pocket, coming up with “a huge bunch of keys that did not belong to me.” Don left them under the doormat and went home.

Later in the morning, after coffee and reading the
Chronicle
, Carpenter called the Brautigans' number. When Richard heard Don's voice on the line, he hung up. Don called back, “wondering what dreadful shit” he had caused. This time, Akiko picked up the phone. “I wanted to tell you about the keys under the door,” Carpenter said.

“You broke Richard's glasses and you bit me,” Aki shrieked.

“What! I did what?”

Brautigan grabbed the phone from his wife as Carpenter stammered in “this guilt paroxysm.” Before he could utter a word of apology, Richard said, “I don't want to talk to you, goddamn you, asshole!” and slammed down the receiver.

Don immediately wrote Richard a letter “of abject apology with no literary attempt to palliate my evil.” He literally begged for forgiveness. During his “guilty hangover,” another friend, Bill Hamilton, the cartoonist, phoned him. Carpenter told the story, and the artist laughed. Hamilton made a drawing of the episode showing an obviously hungover man on the telephone. The caption read: “I did not break your glasses. I did not bite your wife.” It ran in the
Chronicle
and a number of other newspapers in Hamilton's feature, “The Now Society.”

Brautigan got a big kick out of the cartoon. He had long since forgiven Carpenter for his louche behavior. “I think Richard thought that Hamilton had class,” Don observed, “because Hamilton is always telling people or hinting that he is related to Alexander Hamilton.”

In January, J. D. Leitaker, principal of the Anderson Union High School in Shasta County, California, removed five of Richard Brautigan's books (
A Confederate General from Big Sur
,
Trout Fishing in America
,
The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
,
The Abortion: An Historical Romance
, and
Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt
) from the shelves of the school library and from the classroom of V. I. Wexner, who, for the past eight years, had taught Developmental Reading in Anderson, a small lumber mill community twelve miles southeast of Redding in the Siskiyou foothills. Wexner, a 1963 Princeton graduate, had been having great success encouraging his students to read by offering complete freedom of choice and providing a wide and varied cross-section of literature from which to choose. A native New Yorker who had attended an experimental high school, V. I. must have seemed an unconventional teacher in conservative Shasta County. For his part, Wexner considered Principal Leitaker to be a “bully.”

Leitaker's “suspicion” arose the previous month when Wexner ordered new books for his class and a discrepancy appeared between the titles as written on the purchase order and the full titles printed on the receipts received by the head of the school's reading program. Wexner had shortened two of the titles to
The Springhill Mine Disaster
and
An Historical Romance
. “I think the instructor could find works of a similar nature without the sexual references and the profanity that is in these books,” Leitaker said.

This wasn't Brautigan's first brush with censorship. Two years earlier, in April of 1976, Stefanie Rose, a Long Island high school teacher (Carmel, New York), wrote to Richard asking for his help. She had been teaching
In Watermelon Sugar
as part of her literature of fantasy course for three years. A month earlier, “a rather outspoken member” of the community had pulled his children out of the Carmel School, citing Brautigan's book as the reason. In an official complaint, this parent claimed “the explicit sexual passages” and “the completely aberrational behavior depicted” led to “the criminal corruption of my son's morals.” Although a teacher's committee, formed in response to this complaint, found nothing “wrong” with
In Watermelon Sugar
, Rose thought the “fireworks are still flying.” In the end, the Carmel School District took no action against Richard's novel, but clearly trouble was brewing from coast to coast.

Unaware of the controversy swirling about his author's work in Shasta County, Seymour Lawrence made a business trip to San Francisco. Among his many appointments, an invitation to
1349 Kearny Street came as a pleasant diversion. Richard Brautigan greeted Sam with a bottle of top-shelf bourbon. The other guests were Richard and Nancy Hodge. Lawrence and Hodge met for the first time, qualifying the occasion as a business deduction. Akiko prepared a “fine dinner” and charmed everyone with her considerable talents as a hostess. The recent marriage seemed destined for success.

When Richard and Aki returned to Montana at the end of January, their pleasant insular life with Tony Dingman picked up again without missing a beat. “Some very, very good times,” Tony recalled. “Lots of cooking, lots of drinking, lots of laughs.”

Occasionally, their isolation was interrupted by the arrival of a guest. One frozen day with the snow very deep and the temperature locked at thirteen below zero, Tony drove Richard over the hill to the Bozeman airport to pick up Harry Dean Stanton, who was flying in from Los Angeles for a short visit. Brautigan imagined the look of shock on Harry Dean's face when he first saw the frozen landscape after having left the palm trees of L.A. only hours before. They drove the stunned actor back to Pine Creek along a road Brautigan described as “an icy sword cutting starkly through country that wore winter like a suit of albino armor.”

On the way, they encountered six huge crows eating an abandoned truck tire in the middle of the road. Black and insolent, they made no move to fly as the car approached. Tony swerved around them, their double-ply dinner uninterrupted. “You've got some winter here,” Harry Dean said. “Those crows are hungry.” Brautigan later recorded the incident as a short story in
The Tokyo–Montana Express
.