Jubilee Hitchhiker (164 page)

Richard was also influenced by his longstanding admiration for William Faulkner, who considered
Go Down, Moses
to be a novel and was shocked when Random House first released it in 1942 as
Go Down, Moses and Other Stories
. When the book was reissued in 1949, Faulkner insisted his original title,
Go Down, Moses
, be restored. He wrote to his editor, Saxe Commins, “
Moses
is indeed a novel,” chiding that only a publisher would ever see it otherwise. Brautigan had read and enjoyed Joseph Blotner's 1974 two-volume biography of Faulkner.

Richard added his preface to the limited 1968 edition Joseph Francl book to the mix, along with “The Menu” and “Homage to Rudi Gernreich,” as well as “An Eye for Good Produce,” “The Last of My Armstrong Creek Mosquito Bites,” and the story about discarded Christmas trees he did in 1964 with Erik Weber. Stories published in
Outside
,
TriQuarterly
, the
CoEvolution Quarterly
,
Evergreen
,
California Living
, and other publications were also included.

By adding copyrighted work from an earlier period to his book of short stories, Brautigan thought he “converted it into a novel.” Not everyone agreed with his assessment.

Robert Briggs told him flat out not to call the book a novel.

“What do you mean?” Richard replied.

“Just what the fuck I said,” Briggs shot back. “Call it a book by Richard Brautigan.”

More practical reasons demanded Brautigan designate his new book a novel. Twenty of the stories were in the forthcoming Targ edition bearing the same title. In a prefatory paragraph written for William Targ, Richard referred to the slim volume as “this small collection of short stories.” He was married to Akiko at the time and worried about the possible division of community property. Brautigan wanted to put as much distance as he could between the limited Targ printing and the big book he hoped to sell to Seymour Lawrence.

Richard assembled all the various “stations” on
The Tokyo–Montana Express
toward the end of January and shipped the whole package off to his agent in New York. She sent it to Dell as part of a previous option agreement. Helen Brann made an immediate deal with Sam Lawrence, confirming their verbal agreement on a $35,000 advance, payable on signing. The other terms remained identical to the
Dreaming of Babylon
contract, including a first refusal option on Brautigan's next book.

Near the end of January, Sandra Musser received a letter from Verna A. Adams of the San Francisco law firm Savitt & Adams. She had been retained by Akiko to represent her in the divorce proceedings. Adams requested Brautigan's financial records and other documents pertaining to his writing career. On the twenty-eighth, Akiko signed a partial financial declaration asking for spousal support to enable her to maintain her accustomed lifestyle. “My husband and I enjoyed a luxurious standard of living prior to our separation,” Aki stated. She alleged that Brautigan's income was “substantial,” asking that he “be restrained from molesting or disturbing the respondent” and “from selling any property except in the normal course of business.”

Earlier in January, Richard got together again with his old friend Marcia Clay. They decided to cohost a huge party as a diversion from his marital troubles. “We hatched it up together,” she recalled. The apartment was empty, most of the furniture gone. It seemed the perfect opportunity for one last big blowout. They scheduled the event for January 31, the day after Brautigan's forty-fifth birthday, to celebrate the start of a new decade. “We'll have ten years of your paintings,” Richard said, “and I'll do a poetry reading from the past ten years of my writing.”

Marcia designed a small printed invitation card, “most elegant,” with a “really gorgeous” photograph of her at seventeen on the cover. It read: “One evening of ten years ‘Art by Marcia Clay' at the home of Richard Brautigan who will read (don't worry, briefly) six or seven poems of his last ten years.” Clay used her parents' connections and contacted Pat Steger at the
Chronicle
, informing her of the planned party. Steger made mention of the coming affair in her social column. “Richard was like a kid when he saw that,” Marcia remembered.

Clay chose sixty of her paintings for exhibition, hammering nails into the bare walls of Brautigan's apartment to hang them. On the day before the party, Richard received a surprise birthday present. A telegram arrived at 2110 Green Street from Seymour Lawrence. “The Tokyo—Montana Express is a wonderful experience,” Sam wired. “I am filled with admiration for this wise and wonderful book. I had the same sense of discovery and astonishment as with Trout Fishing.”

At seven in the evening of the thirty-first, hordes of invited guests and assorted gate-crashers began arriving at Brautigan's second-floor flat. By the time the party reached its peak, three hundred
people packed into the place. Among the milling throng, one man caught Marcia Clay's eye. Born in China to Russian parents and raised in Japan, Alexander Besher wrote a weekly business column for the
Chronicle
. His friends all called him “Sasha.” Before the party was over, Marcia started calling him Sasha, too. They soon began spending a lot of time together. By the end of the year, they were married.

Nothing was said at the time, but the big decade-launching party marked the end of Marcia and Richard's friendship. When Clay removed her paintings from Brautigan's apartment, she left nail damage behind in the walls. “The landlords got pissed about all the holes,” she recalled, “and they made him pay for them.” It cost Brautigan about $400 to patch up the damage. He never mentioned this to Marcia, bottling up his resentment. The schism widened once he met Clay's new husband. “This man I'm not interested in,” he told Marcia. For his part, Sasha “couldn't stand Richard,” she said. “He called Richard a wimp. He called him a fink.” Clay had become a wife. Brautigan was never much interested in other people's wives.

Sometime in February, fed up with his marital woes and clomping about in his lonely, empty apartment, Brautigan flew to Vancouver in British Columbia. Not much is known about this trip. Richard went to the anthropology museum at the University of British Columbia to look at Pacific Northwest totem poles. He also took in some Chinese movies at a theater in Chinatown. It was a time of solitude, a familiar condition for Richard.

Back in Frisco, alone and depressed, Richard phoned his former lover, Siew-Hwa Beh, who was living in Berkeley. He told her he'd broken up with Akiko because she'd been unfaithful. “Aki slept with someone,” Brautigan said in despair. “I couldn't believe that this friend slept with my wife.” Richard never mentioned any name, saying only, “This friend is a close friend. I didn't know I would be so betrayed by a friend.” Siew-Hwa knew in her heart how much this hurt him, “because he was too fragile.” Beh had always been monogamous in her relationships and understood how much an outside affair would hurt Brautigan. “Once you are with Richard, you are with Richard,” she observed.

Beh headed straight to Green Street and consoled Brautigan. He said he wanted them to get back together again. “Why did you marry her?” she asked.

“I never wanted to marry her,” Richard replied. “I never wanted to marry her! You left me, so I wrote to her and she wanted to come and see me. When she got here, she said she couldn't stay unless I married her to get her a green card. I never wanted to marry her! I never wanted to marry her!”

Brautigan's desperate insistence unnerved Beh. She started to cry. “Crying and crying and crying,” she recalled. The winter afternoon darkened into night. They had no dinner. Richard's blood sugar plummeted. “Richard had a sugar thing,” Beh recalled.

“I've got to get out of here,” Brautigan shouted. “I can't deal with this. I'm hungry. I've got to get out of here!” Richard stormed out, leaving Siew-Hwa alone, crying in the empty apartment. This was the last time she ever saw him.

A little later, Siew-Hwa ran into Kitty Loewinsohn in Berkeley. They started discussing the Brautigans' split. Kitty told her “about how much she and Ron helped Aki about this and that.” Siew-Hwa thought Kitty forced herself “to be naive and blind.” Something her friend said struck a chord. At that moment, she “knew it was Ron Loewinsohn who slept with Aki.”

Beh called Brautigan soon after this conversation. “Richard, is it Ron?” she asked. Brautigan made no reply. “He kept quiet,” Siew-Hwa said. “He didn't say a word. He would not say a word. That was the way Richard [was] faithful to people.”

Brautigan's long-standing habit of pestering his friends late at night for advice on everything from punctuation to contractual nuance went into overdrive in March. Keith Abbott found these drunken monologues “unbearable.” Richard recounted the tiniest legal detail of his impending divorce “over and over, as if his memory were gone.” At one point, he told Keith, “I guess the only thing I can do is write. If that's so, then that's all I'll do.”

Brautigan phoned Sandra Musser often. Richard said Akiko was “trying to destroy me.” He described his wife as “a pathological and very clever liar,” claiming to have heard she'd told someone she only married him to get a green card. Brautigan's fury boiled over. He accused Aki of having had another lover, far back when “she was cheating on her husband with me.” He raged about overheard gossip. “She fucked an American pop star trying to get to the United States.”

After repeated phone calls from Akiko, Richard hung up and called Sandra Musser. He wanted his attorney to inform Verna Adams that they “would take serious action if Aki ever tried to get in touch with me again.”

While protecting his privacy, Brautigan took steps to pry into his wife's personal affairs. Richard asked a friend, a “very perceptive person” who didn't want his identity revealed, to investigate Akiko's feelings. Under the guise of lending a sympathetic ear, the friend encouraged Aki to divulge a number of confidences. He reported everything back to Brautigan. Akiko said she still loved Richard and felt “very bitter” about the failure of their marriage. She didn't want to go to court, proclaiming her fondness for Ianthe. The undercover friend thought they “could definitely get together and work things out.”

Helen Brann and Seymour Lawrence “consummated” their deal for Richard Brautigan's new “novel” early in February. The advance remained unaltered, and another $25,000 was added if either Dell or Laurel published a paperback edition. The author was also to receive a straight 15 percent royalty on all hardback sales and retain 100 percent of the subsidiary rights (British, translations, serial, dramatic, radio, film, and TV). Sam planned to publish in October. Helen got her dates confused and assumed the book was coming out in September.

Helen called Richard with the good news. Having final design approval, Brautigan wanted to avoid the production problems he'd encountered on
June 30th, June 30th
. Kathy Simmons would now oversee all the details involved in coordinating catalog copy, advertising, flap copy, and jacket design. Brann put Brautigan in direct touch with Simmons. The Delacorte contract was finalized on February 12.

A finished copy of Targ's edition of
The Tokyo–Montana Express
arrived at Helen Brann's office a week later. It was a beautiful book hand-set in Garamond on laid Guttenberg paper, with a title page printed in three colors. Limited to 350 copies, the slim hardbound volume was priced at $50. Helen instructed William Targ to ship the author's copies to Brautigan's address in San Francisco.

At the end of February, a check for $1,000 went out to Akiko from Sandra Musser's office for “spousal support,” in accordance with an agreement with Verna Adams. Richard signed his Delacorte contracts a week later. Richard's ten complimentary author's copies of the Targ edition never arrived. He called Helen Brann and complained, leaving the matter in her hands. With
Brautigan's court date two days off, he told Sandra Musser he “thought they were running pretty close.” Richard heard Aki wanted $1,600 a month in support. He thought this was “ridiculous.” With time running so short, he asked his attorney to get a postponement. Sandra told him she was ready to go to court the next day.

On March 11, Sandra Musser filed an Income and Expense Declaration signed by Richard Brautigan. It spoke volumes about the author's declining popularity. In 1977, Brautigan's net income was $94,799 ($77,813 was a release of royalties earned between 1966 and 1977 but held back by Dell Publishing). His 1978 net income fell to $16,464. By 1979, it was only $15,620. In addition, the declaration stated “that because
Dreaming of Babylon
failed to realize the projected sales, Dell Publishing has reduced Petitioner's advance against book publications from $125,000 per book to $35,000 per book.” As a result, Richard anticipated his net income for 1980 to be between $15,000 and $16,000.

Musser and Brautigan walked into the courtroom on Thursday, March 13. Sandra instructed him not to wear a denim jacket and jeans. “Richard couldn't understand why not,” she reflected years later. They had not been told Beverly Savitt, Verna Adams's partner, would be waiting for them. Savitt went on the attack. Their entire strategy up to this point had been based on mutual cooperation. Brautigan expected to make an offer between $750 and $1,000, based on his net income. The court awarded Akiko $1,900 a month in support, a judgment using gross income as its basis. “Bam!” Richard wrote, describing the episode a couple months later.

Most evenings, Brautigan went looking for action at Enrico's. Failing to find old friends or attractive women, he'd sit at the bar and tell his troubles to Ward Dunham over several snifters of Calvados. “After Aki left,” Dunham said, “he was never happy after that.” One evening, Richard mentioned to Ward that he felt haunted. “You deserve to be haunted,” Dunham replied.