Jubilee Hitchhiker (165 page)

Other nights, Brautigan would amble down to Cho-Cho on Kearny Street and spin a tale of woe for Jimmy Sakata. “Fuck it!” Jim told Richard. “You worry too much. Just say fuck it. Nobody can take everything from you. You have your life, your freedom.”

Brautigan brooded over the March 13 court order. He felt he had “received short shrift in the hearing,” and instructed his attorney to request a transcript. Richard was upset that he had not been allowed to provide oral testimony to rebut what he felt were the “exaggerated claims” of Akiko's counsel regarding his income and standard of living. At his urging, Sandra Musser filed a petition for a modification of the court order. Musser concluded the petition stating Brautigan's testimony “may not change the court's ruling but it will result in petitioner feeling as though he had his day in court and the matter will be equitably resolved.”

On April Fools' Day, having decided to give up the expensive Green Street apartment, Richard rented a narrow studio upstairs above the entrance to Vesuvio Café (255 Columbus), across the alley from City Lights. Known as the Cavelli Building since a bookstore by that name opened there in 1913, it sported an Italian Renaissance Revival second story added five years later. The move represented a return to Brautigan's earliest days on the Beach. Beret-wearing Henri Lenoir, proprietor of Vesuvio and a fixture on the bohemian side of Frisco since the early 1930s, had known Brautigan for twenty-five years. Richard was exactly the sort of tenant Lenoir enjoyed having. The rent was $125 a month.

Richard placed his desk (a hollow-core door resting across twin filing cabinets) directly in front of the lone window looking toward City Lights and installed shelves along the side walls.
Brautigan's big office electric typewriter sat dead center. Most of his papers remained stored in stacked cardboard boxes. Instead of thumbtacking artwork to the walls, he had everything properly framed. A large poster advertising
Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt
dominated one side of the office. Brautigan also displayed original Bruce Conner art, a drawing and a collage, from the early sixties. It was a much more upscale office than his previous workplaces.

A week later, Sandra Musser filed a Request for Admission of Facts and Genuineness of Documents with the court. Outraged by his wife's claims on his literary and real properties, Brautigan prepared the list of eighty-four numbered items requesting “separate and truthful responses” from Akiko. Brautigan endeavored to establish a “sole claim” to the Bolinas property and all his books written and copyrighted before the 1977 marriage. He specified that he did not “edit, amend or update” any of these works between December 1, 1977, and December 31, 1979, and that the $20,000 received in 1978 came from Hal Ashby productions for the film rights to
The Hawkline Monster.

Two telling domestic details enlivened this legalistic compendium of bank accounts, bookkeeping, and book titles. Number 6 stated: “That Mrs. Brautigan spent only two days at the Bolinas property, including one overnight, while married to Mr. Brautigan.” Item 7 provided fine-tuning: “That Mrs. Brautigan's sole contribution to the Bolinas property was to assist in cleaning the premises to ready it for rental.” To obtain precise information regarding Richard's various bank accounts and tax returns for the Request for Facts, Akiko met once with Esmond Coleman, Brautigan's accountant.

Around this time, producer Francis Ford Coppola pulled the plug on his production of
Hammett
in Los Angeles. The director, Wim Wenders, stopped filming. With his film job on hiatus, Tony Dingman came up to San Francisco and moved in with Richard on Green Street. Dingman was always good company for Brautigan, knowing how to make him laugh. Tony also provided a willing butt for Richard's teasing and practical jokes, accompanying him on his daily rounds to Cho-Cho and Enrico's.

Brautigan, Dingman, Ward Dunham, and Curt Gentry developed a shorthand alphabetic code to describe the slutty aspects they most admired in the passing parade of women. “VPL” stood for “visible panty line,” a fashion statement they believed indicated easy virtue. “VPL at two o'clock,” someone would call. All heads at the bar pivoted to watch the designated ass bobble past. “WS, WS,” meant “will suck, won't swallow” and was used to share secret information about those who'd gone out with one of the group. “The great thing about it,” Gentry recalled, “you could do it in front of people and they didn't know what you were talking about.”

From time to time, Tony Dingman arranged impromptu gatherings at Brautigan's apartment, seeking diversions to take his friend's mind off his troubles. Far across town, Bruce Conner had the same idea. He invited Richard over to dinner in spite of his wife's objections. Jean Conner had been offended by Brautigan's habit of accepting an invitation and then canceling at the last minute if something better, often a date with a young woman, came along. Jean relented, and Bruce tendered an invitation to Richard.

Even as dinner simmered on the stove, Brautigan phoned the Conners to say he couldn't make it. Bruce heard the sound of loud voices in the background. A party was under way at Richard's place. Absolutely furious, Conner jumped into his car and drove all the way from Glen Park over to Pacific Heights. He stormed up the stairs and pounded on Brautigan's apartment door.
“Where's your address book?” Bruce demanded when Richard opened up. “Where's your address book?”

Confused, Brautigan said it was on his desk, back in the office. Conner pushed past him. As soon as he found the address book, Bruce turned to the “C” section and erased his name, address, and phone number from the page. Conner left without saying another word.

Richard kept busy all through April, working on the dust jacket and ad copy for
The Tokyo–Montana Express
. The minimal inside front flap material would be the final sentence from Brautigan's introduction to
The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl
, followed by “one stop on the route of the Tokyo–Montana Express.” Richard concocted a brief statement of self-praise, referring to his “daring imagination, humor and haunting compassion.” The inside back flap copy consisted of “Umbrellas,” one of the shortest stories in Brautigan's collection: “Another stop on the Tokyo–Montana Express.” Richard instructed his publisher not to use the words “a novel” to describe his forthcoming book in any of the ads.

A court order filed on April 18 directed Richard Brautigan to pay for his wife's attorney's fees and costs. By the twenty-seventh, these totaled $2,700. Discouraged by what he perceived as the failures of his legal counsel, Richard fired Sandra Musser, replacing her with Joel A. Shawn, a lawyer in the San Francisco firm Friedman, Shawn, Kipperman & Sloan. This led to additional expense. Brautigan had to pay a $3,000 retainer and sign a three-page agreement promising to keep the trust replenished to the tune of $2,500. Sandra Musser believed all of Richard's problems were caused by ego.

Sam Lawrence came out to San Francisco toward the end of the month. Brautigan always had fun with his publisher. Lawrence brought good news. Richard had been invited to read at the Poetry Center at the Ninety-third Street YM-YWHA in New York on November 24, during a three-month reading and book-signing tour for
The Tokyo–Montana Express
Delacorte had in the works. There were plans for paid college lectures to coincide with Richard's promotional appearances. The Boston booking agency Lordly & Dame, Inc., had been contracted to make the arrangements.

Sam met Enrico Banducci for the first time over the course of several jet-fueled conversations. The restaurateur offered to host an autographing party for Richard's new book at Enrico's. They agreed the launch party would take place on the publication date, Wednesday, October 26, between 2:30 and 6:00 pm.

The
Chronicle
's Sunday magazine,
California Living
, informed Sam they would feature an interview with Brautigan, together with a selection from
The Tokyo–Montana Express
, in their October 26 edition. More good news arrived. Richard's friend, poet Ed Dorn, currently teaching at the University of Colorado, had arranged for Brautigan to be writer-in-residence in Boulder from mid-July to the first of August. A speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Chautauqua Park had been scheduled for July 19. Lawrence anticipated the audience to number around two thousand.

Tony Dingman's company didn't dispel Brautigan's gloom. Aki's ghost still haunted the spacious Pacific Heights apartment. The place had been her choice. Faced with Akiko's financial demands, Brautigan was eager to escape the burden of the high Green Street rent. Tony helped Richard haul his typewriter and filing cabinets, boxes of papers, books, and the various drafts of current literary projects over to his new office above Vesuvio. The black Naugahyde sofa went out
to the Bolinas house. So much miscellaneous junk remained, Brautigan rented space number A-32 ($90 a month) at the Army Street Mini-Storage under the Southern Embarcadero Freeway. Richard trucked numbers of carton boxes over there before departing Green Street forever.

After leaving palatial Pacific Heights, Brautigan checked in to a cheap SRO residential hotel in North Beach. The tiny room brought back painful memories of Richard's penniless days in the fall of 1963 when he couldn't afford the rent on a similar shabby crib and the landlord had locked him out, holding his manuscripts for ransom until he paid up. This time, Brautigan felt his wife had hijacked his life.

Akiko called Don Carpenter often, “to try to get me to take her side in this fucking thing.” Don said Richard's notion of loyalty was that he shouldn't even talk to her. Carpenter thought the Brautigans' breakup was “the most horrifying divorce I've ever heard of in my life.” Richard “was really savaged by it. He was unable to deal with the concept of the way women and lawyers come after you in a divorce situation.” To illustrate his point, Carpenter recounted an episode when “the lawyer reopened the divorce case over a pair of Czechoslovakian duck decoys that someone had given Richard. He's sitting in a restaurant waiting to meet the lawyer to sign the papers. The lawyer doesn't show up. Hours go by.” When Brautigan asked his attorney what went wrong, he was told Aki wanted the decoys. “The whole fucking thing collapses over two duck decoys!”

Petty legal infighting took its toll on Brautigan. Tony Dingman understood Richard's deep depression. Alone in his cheap hotel room, working his way through a bottle of Jack Daniel's, Brautigan swilled down a handful of pills and lay back on his narrow bed for the final glide into eternity. In the morning, he woke up as usual, an all-too-familiar hangover made even more bitter by failure. “He knew that he could not dose himself with pills,” Dingman said. “He was just that strong, a horse, a bear, and he knew he was just going to have to blast himself. It was inevitable.”

Richard always told Tony, “We never get out alive.” In retrospect, Dingman felt Japanese culture and poetry, which elevated suicide to a status at once honorable and romantic, had an undeniable appeal for Brautigan. “He was pulled to it,” Tony observed. “It was irresistible.”

Richard started walking to Enrico's early, right after it opened, now that he lived in the neighborhood. He made a new friend, Richard Breen, a decade younger, often the only other person at the bar in the mornings. They found themselves eyeing each other from opposite ends. “A conversation was pretty inevitable,” Breen observed.

Richard Breen was the son and namesake of an Academy Award–nominated Hollywood screenwriter. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, he became fond of Frisco during his college years at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Breen never graduated but acquired a taste for scotch, “pretty much my college experience.” For most of the seventies, he worked in L.A., writing scripts for television private eye series:
Mannix
,
Shaft
,
Ironside
, and
Columbo
, “dozens of different shows.”

Breen used his residual checks to buy drugs and “had a hell of a time.” He was young “and got bored real quickly,” so he gave up Tinseltown for Fog City and took a job parking cars at the Flying Dutchman lot next door to Enrico's. He called it “the most significant car lot in the Western hemisphere.” It was a good job for a writer. “It made for great copy,” Breen said, “because all the weirdos were coming to me instead of me going to the weirdos.” Breen's tales of “catering to the insane” attracted Brautigan. Richard soon found his way to the valet shack, clutching a bottle, to observe the weirdness first hand.

They made a strange pair: Breen in his long white valet's coat, Brautigan wearing a denim jacket and a cowboy hat. “I'd have my bottle of Beefeaters,” Breen recalled, “and he had his bottle of Calvados.” Sometimes, Brautigan stayed there all by himself. “Richard used to hang out in a shack on the parking lot whether I was there or not,” Breen said. “Just sit there and watch the movie go by.”

A parking lot at night can be a dangerous place. Breen remembered customers pulling knives on him and having to talk his way out of bad situations. “Richard would never do anything to help out. He'd just take two drinks instead of one from his bottle, figuring if things were getting hairy it's your fault for putting on a white coat.” Street people and petty criminals gravitated toward a parking lot, according to Richard Breen. “They don't have a car, but they come up and ask for directions and ask for money, offer to sell drugs.”

The passing riffraff also sold stolen merchandise, stuff fallen off a truck. Breen claimed Brautigan bought “three hot television sets that I know of. It was irresistible to Richard. He had to buy something hot. Thought he was getting a deal.” There was no electrical outlet in the valet shack, no place to plug in appliances. It was never certain if the hot TVs even worked. Brautigan just left them there and forgot about it. Breen sold them back to the thieves at a lower price. “I made a killing,” he said.