Jubilee Hitchhiker (155 page)

“Living and dying is the only thing to write about,” Brautigan said. During their peripatetic nights together, the drinks kept coming and coming. Kelley's scrawl grew indecipherable. “Don't think in terms of public recognition,” Brautigan lapsed into his repetitive stutter. “I'm really interested in people living and dying here. The books I write describe living and dying here.” Reflecting on his insomnia, Richard said, “Life keeps me awake.”

Brautigan dubbed Truman Capote “one of the best writers in America,” praising
The Grass Harp
and
A Tree of Night.
Brautigan picked Capote's stories “Miriam” and “Jug of Silver” for special commendation. “Can't write anything better. Best American short story writer.” Brautigan thought Tennessee Williams the “best American playwright ever produced,” calling
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
the “best American plays.”

Richard told Ken he started writing at seventeen. He wanted to write novels, but he said he used poetry to understand crafting sentences. Poetry was “telegraphic.” It took Brautigan eight years, “learning how to write sentences,” before he attempted
Trout Fishing. Confederate General
required eight drafts;
In Watermelon Sugar
three drafts. Richard called
The Hawkline Monster
his “only narrative novel, A to Z.” He told Ken his next work would combine Tokyo, Montana, and San Francisco.

Kelley asked Brautigan about his musical preferences. Richard's favorite song was “May the Circle Be Unbroken” (performed by Mama Maybelle Carter). The soundtrack from
Chinatown
stood high on Brautigan's top ten. Richard told Ken about his introduction for the Dell edition of
The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics
. Proud of this association, Brautigan considered Lennon and McCartney's songs “some of the best writing ever done.”

After several boozy nights of genial schmoozing, Kelley asked Brautigan if he was ever called anything but Richard. “When anyone calls me Dick, I know they want something from me,” Richard said. “A nickname is unnatural familiarity. You should know people before you use nicknames.”

On October 3, the ACLU filed suit against the Anderson Union High School District in Shasta County. V. I. Wexner, along with William Woods, a fellow teacher, and three students (Donna Cartwright, Mary Osterday, and Brenda Galey) from Anderson High School, had filed a complaint with the ACLU, asking for legal help. Brautigan's publisher, Seymour Lawrence, joined the lawsuit. Sam flew out to San Francisco the previous week to consult on the matter. He had breakfast with Richard. A “splendid afternoon tea and Jack Daniel's” at Brautigan's apartment before flying to Mendocino to buy “a redwood house perched on a cliff over the Pacific.”

Margaret Crosby, the ACLU attorney representing Wexner and Woods, declared the case was “without precedent regarding publishers' rights to disseminate information free from government censorship.” The ACLU suit demanded the five banned Brautigan books be returned to the classrooms under a court order. Private practice lawyer Ann Brick volunteered for the ACLU. She stated, “By no stretch of the imagination could any of the Brautigan works be considered obscene. The school officials are trying to pick and choose so that students see only the social and cultural views of the administration.”

Not wanting to have the matter “clouded by his presence,” Richard Brautigan left town for Montana with his wife after a $94.74 farewell binge at Vanessi's. Before departing, Brautigan released a press statement (September 24, 1978):

Tony Dingman met Richard and Akiko at the Bozeman airport, driving them home to Pine Creek. Dingman stayed on in Montana over the summer, looking after Brautigan's place. Their congenial country life resumed as if uninterrupted. Aki showed Richard a letter from her aunt in Japan, written in Japanese. Akiko translated for her husband. Her aunt told her not to worry about the cabbages. They would grow and do well. The aunt treated Aki's bondage concerns in the same matter-of-fact manner. Some men have certain tastes, she wrote to her niece, it's nothing to worry about.

Brautigan did almost no writing in Montana that fall, although a few stories grew out of Tony Dingman's comic automotive misadventures and other ordinary events. A $400 offer in the local paper for a cherry 1953 Oldsmobile that turned out to be only an engine block became fiction, along with a tale about buying a $30 cake at a church bake sale and another concerning the time Tony failed to drive forward from an intersection in a small Montana town with no stop signs.

In early October, Brautigan plunked down $16,500 in cash to Maverick Realty as a down payment for two little houses on South Third Street in Livingston. Richard worried what to do with his money. Brautigan told Dick Hodge, “he didn't want to invest it in stocks, bonds, [or] anything to do with capitalist America. He had no interest in a tax shelter or any other sort of passive investment. He thought that was kind of dishonest.” Richard went through a long list of investment possibilities. “Basically when he was done there was nothing left but real estate.”

Brautigan told Hodge that he didn't want to become a landlord. Tony Dingman remembered, “His legacy from his mother was ‘The rich steal from the poor.' Period.” The two houses Richard bought, a little compound clustered on the same side of South Third, were rental properties. Numbers 107 and 107½ were housed in a single structure. Number 109, set back off the sidewalk, was an older sandstone building used early in the twentieth century as a photographer's studio. The total purchase price for all three units came to $57,500. Their combined monthly rental income totaled $507.50.

On October 27, Richard signed a deal at Maverick Realty to buy another property in Livingston, a $52,000 purchase of a two-story brick building built in the 1890s at 311½ West Callender Street. Once the residence of a local tailor, and commercially zoned, it currently housed the Carden Big Sky School (a day care preschool). The down payment was $26,970. Brautigan paid off the balance at the closing on November 9, before he returned to San Francisco.

When Gary Snyder held a weeklong residency at Montana State University the previous fall, Richard phoned the MSU English Department, leaving a message inviting Snyder over to Paradise Valley. Previously, Greg Keeler, the thirty-two-year-old poet and literature professor who'd arranged for a National Endowment matching-fund grant to bring Snyder to the university, stuck a note on Brautigan's mailbox, “asking if you ever might want to come and read in Bozeman.” Keeler never heard back. Returning from visiting Richard and Aki, Gary told Greg he had urged Brautigan “to get more involved with the Montana community.”

A year went by. Brautigan made a second call to the secretary of the MSU English Department. Richard wanted a residency of his own at Montana State. He invited Greg Keeler and two undergraduates from the Associated Students of Montana State University (ASMSU) programs board over to his house in Pine Creek for dinner. At the bottom of the note to Greg, it said “bring wine.” When the three showed up at Brautigan's place on a snow-covered November afternoon, Keeler clutched a half-gallon of Almaden chablis.

Born and raised in Oklahoma, Keeler came from an academic family. His parents both taught at Oklahoma State University. Greg received his MA there and a PhD from Idaho State but was by no stretch of anybody's imagination a stereotypical academician. When Brautigan opened the front door, Keeler observed that he and Richard both looked (“tall, blond, and pink”) and dressed (“torn work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots”) very much alike.

To distance himself from Keeler, Brautigan took issue with all his literary opinions. He called Flaubert a “sack of shit,” and referred to William Stafford (one of Greg's favorite poets) as a “cunt” because Stafford had once told Brautigan that his children enjoyed reading his books. Later, Brautigan picked up Queever, the Hjortsbergs' long-haired cat visiting from across the creek, and tossed him into Keeler's face.

After a bit, Richard settled down, recognizing Greg more a kindred spirit than a stuffy academic. “You're just a sprout,” Brautigan said upon learning Keeler's age. He was very gracious to the students and deftly blunted their initial awkward attempts to talk business. “Let's not worry about that stuff yet,” Richard said, “you're in the country now. Relax.” They all sat down to a “very good” spaghetti dinner. Aki, who Greg thought looked “beautiful and appropriately inscrutable,” mentioned that she was interested in finding some local Japanese friends and perhaps continuing her education in Bozeman.

Late that night, having stuffed his guests with pasta and plied them with copious amounts of booze, Richard abruptly turned the conversation toward negotiation. “Welp, let's have a ballpark figure,” he said.

The two students, drowsy with drink and teetering on the edge of sleep, looked at one another in confusion. They weren't quite prepared for this. Restricted by the limitations of their ASMSU budget, which had to cover a variety of events over the school year, they fumbled for an appropriate amount, something affordable yet not insulting. Thinking of the $100 fees offered to other speakers, one of them groggily offered “Four . . .”

“Four thousand it is,” Brautigan shot back. To the astonishment of the bewildered students, the deal was done.

A week later, Greg Keeler and his wife, Judy, who also taught at MSU, invited Richard and Aki to their home in Bozeman for a reciprocal dinner. Akiko, the designated driver, took them over by way of Trail Creek Road, Brautigan's favorite graveled back route, traversing the Gallatin range from Paradise Valley and connecting with I-90 at the old coal mining town of Chestnut. Richard had insisted that Greg return home this way the previous week. He and Aki had escorted Keeler and the two sleeping students as far as the junction with Highway 89 on the east side of the Yellowstone.

The two students were once again in attendance at the Keeler's, watching in amazement as their $4,000 visiting author leaned so far back in his host's “cheap wicker Kmart love seat” that he toppled over backward. They also watched Brautigan work his way through Greg and Judy's liquor cabinet, swilling down Canadian whiskey, gin, vodka, and rum after polishing off the wine and bourbon. Richard became drunk and drunker, lapsing into “a small Oriental voice and getting very serious.” Keeler, who dubbed Brautigan “The Captain,” called “this late night voice the Imperial Mode.”

Around midnight, the students were almost asleep on the couch. “Any more liquor?” Richard demanded. Greg rustled among the empties, finding only dead soldiers. Every drop had been
consumed. “Time to go,” Brautigan said. Keeler remembered neither wife being much amused by the abrupt departure. Judy took an instant dislike to Richard that evening. Aki also “didn't seem too thrilled about the exit.” She had to drive her inebriated husband home over the Bozeman Pass. For Greg Keeler, the evening began an improbable and enduring friendship.

The Brautigans returned to San Francisco in the middle of November. On the sixteenth, an anonymous group called “Concerned Citizens” published an eight-page newspaper under the headline “Does ACLU Push Smut?” The paper contained excerpts from
The Pill
,
Rommel
,
Confederate General
,
The Abortion
, and
Trout Fishing
, along with the disclaimer “We regret the necessity to print and review this material, but we feel there is no better way to inform you of this but to let you see for your self.” The excerpts were all deliberately selected to emphasize sexual content.

The front page printed a quotation from
Biographical Dictionary of the Left
, by Francis X. Gannon, referring to “the Communist Character of the American Civil Liberties Union,” along with a statement directed to the “Dear moral and Christian people of Shasta County.” The piece was signed “Morton” (Morton Giesecke), and read, in part, “I have looked over these books in question, and I judge them to be vile and foul to my tastes, they are contemptible by the light of God's Scriptures. I feel that material of this sort will lead to further moral decay and perversion of all that is good and decent in our American Society.”

The distant buzz of Birchite gadflies greatly annoyed Brautigan. Keith Abbott recalled him spending an entire evening talking about “his current censorship problems.” Richard knew every detail of the case. He repeated them over and over, quoting the public statements of the principal and the school board. “The next step to look for is book burning,” Brautigan solemnly warned Abbott, “just like the Nazis.”

Other literary matters distracted him. Richard had long resented how Grove Press handled
A Confederate General from Big Sur
. Barney Rosset continually reissued the novel in small printings while Brautigan's other titles were selling tens of thousands of copies. Sam Lawrence dreamed of acquiring the one that got away. After protracted negotiations and with the considerable help of Helen Meyer, chair of the board of the Dell Publishing Company, Sam's dream came true in mid-November when Dell bought the rights to
Confederate General
for a single payment of $15,000.

Lawrence planned to reissue the book in September 1979, simultaneously as a hardcover edition and a Delta trade paperback. To get the ball rolling, Sam asked Richard for his new jacket art suggestions. Lawrence also needed fresh front and back flap copy from Brautigan before the end of the month. Richard mailed new dust jacket copy for
Confederate General
to Helen Brann, which reflected long-standing resentments. Written in 1962–1963 when he was twenty-eight years old, the novel was about the year 1957, “a preview of things to come in America.” The book “sold less than a thousand copies and was immediately forgotten,” Brautigan wrote. “It was reprinted in 1968 and identified with the hippie movement and thought to be a description of the way they lived, though the book took place eleven years before when the hippies were still in grade school.”