Jubilee Hitchhiker (173 page)

Perhaps the most
beau coup
of all occurred when Dick arranged an important date with an attractive coed from MSU that Brautigan had also been eyeing. Richard came across the pair in Martin's Café. Dillof mentioned he planned on bringing the girl to visit his wagon the next day. “How nice,” Brautigan said with the straightest possible face. “Dobie's going to show you his wagon.”

Dillof skillfully arranged his camp like a stage set, creating the atmosphere Richard called “quaint bait.” Every detail looked straight out of a vintage L. A. Huffman photograph. A tin cowboy bathtub sat next to the campfire. Cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens stood scoured and neatly stacked. An ax stuck at a rakish angle out of a log. Eager to create a wholesome initial impression, Dick did his laundry that morning, hanging a half dozen pairs of snow-white boxer shorts to dry on a clothesline in the bright spring sunshine, vivid proof that a guy who lived in a sheepherder's wagon need not be some musty old codger who never bathed or changed his underwear.

When Dick drove over the Bozeman Pass to pick up his date, Richard Brautigan snuck down through cottonwoods behind his house, a can of brown shoe polish in hand. Dillof's camp was deserted, not a soul in sight. With the artistic flair of a frontier Rembrandt, Brautigan dabbed a realistic stain down the backside of each pair of boxer shorts. By and by, Dick reappeared, guiding
his intended by the hand through the green meadow grass toward his romantic campsite. There to greet them, flapping in the breeze like soiled flags of surrender, the besmirched undies could not be denied, dead rats rotting atop a lemon meringue pie.

The sweet young thing pretended not to notice the unsanitary display. Dick wisely herded her straight into the wagon. They sat side by side on the bed as he proceeded to show her some of his scratchboard sketches. Turning over the third or fourth drawing, he uncovered a neatly folded set of instructions for Kwell Shampoo, profusely illustrated with pictures of prancing body lice. Beneath the bold caption kills the crab louse on contact, Brautigan had carefully printed, “Directions for Mr. Dillof.” The last dim hope of romance faded. “She suddenly remembered, or
pretended
to remember some chores she'd forgotten about,” Dick wrote. “The date was over. Sabotaged.”

Later that week, Richard invited Dick to dinner, and he discovered a can of brown Shinola on Brautigan's coffee table. No mention was made of shoe polish or the aborted date until the food was served. Years later, Dobro Dick Dillof set down their subsequent conversation in a brief unpublished memoir:

fifty-five: blowing in the wind

T
HE START OF 1981 found Richard Brautigan in a financial bind. His first
Tokyo–Montana Express
royalty payment wasn't due until June and big bills kept rolling in. On the first of January, Richard sent a $1,400 support check to his ex-wife. He deliberately made it out to her maiden name, “Akiko Nishizawa,” emphasizing that they were no longer married, while she endorsed the back as “Akiko Brautigan,” rubbing his nose in her continuing capitalization on his famous name. Along with other expenses, Brautigan wrote a $3,255 check to Joel Shawn's law firm on the twelfth. Anticipating more debt, early in the month Richard sent Helen Brann the first forty pages of his revisions of
The Pond People of America,
retitled
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
. Richard had written very little on the project prior to his divorce, not wanting the novel to become part of his settlement with Aki.

Brann found the opening pages “very strong” and sent them on to Sam Lawrence, asking to negotiate a new contract as soon as he read the manuscript. Lawrence wasted no time getting down to business. He thought Richard's book was both “beautiful and evocative,” believing it might “prove to be one of the finest things he will ever do.” Helen Brann asked for a $50,000 advance, half payable on signing.

Sam took these numbers up with the Dell hierarchy on January 15, sending Brautigan a telegram the same day. “What a beautiful childhood memoir,” Lawrence enthused, “may it go on and on.” Not knowing where to find his author, he wired it in care of Richard Hodge.

Negotiations with Helen Brann proceeded swiftly, and by the twenty-third they had worked out the details. The advance would be $45,000, half up front. All the other terms would be identical to the
Tokyo–Montana
contract. Richard assured his agent that he would finish a final draft “within the next two months.” Brann confirmed this potential delivery date with Lawrence. The final Delacorte contract was dated February 18, 1981, and duly signed by all parties within a few days.

Brautigan never let his short-term fiscal problems interfere with his social life at Enrico's, Cho-Cho, Specs', and the Washbag. He made no move to economize aside from moving into Eunice Kitagawa's place on occasion or sleeping on a twin bed in his narrow office above Vesuvio, where he collected his mail. Feeling a bit more flush once the first half of the Dell advance arrived, he booked a room at the Kyoto Inn whenever he wanted the comforting anonymity of a hotel.

Marian Hjortsberg and her sister, Roz Mina, were in town to escape the harsh Montana winter. Richard did his best to show them a good time. This meant frequent drinks at Enrico's. One afternoon he asked the sisters to a barbecue at Nikki Arai's apartment on Windsor Place after they finished “trucking around the city.” Don Carpenter had also been invited. By the time Marian and
Roz got there, “everyone was very drunk.” The boisterous drinking continued into the night. At one point, Carpenter and Brautigan began arguing over “who was a better writer.”

The disagreement escalated into a physical fight. Richard and Don grappled on Nikki's back balcony. It looked to Marian like Brautigan was about to push his old friend over the railing. The women “sort of galvanized” themselves and broke it up. Being most sober, Roz was delegated to drive Don Carpenter home to Mill Valley in Marian's VW Rabbit. “I was too drunk to fuck her, but I had to ask anyway because I figured she'd be insulted if I didn't,” Carpenter recalled. “So I did, and she laughed and said, ‘Thank you for the offer but no.'”

Richard told Eunice about his altercation with Don. He “was remorseful after the fact,” she said. “Very much like him.” Brautigan introduced Marian Hjortsberg to David Fechheimer not long after the incident at Nikki Arai's. The private detective and the admiral's witty daughter hit it off right from the start. One evening they went up to Kitagawa's place on Vallejo Street with Roz for a quesadilla dinner. Another night the trio started out at Cho-Cho drinking Calvados with Richard. They all got plastered. “I was just drunk enough to walk,” Fechheimer remembered, “and we decided to go up to Enrico's.”

Crossing Broadway, a baby blue Cadillac brushed against David. Acting with the incautious instincts of the inebriated, he banged his hand against the car and spat at the driver. “A big mistake,” Fechheimer recalled. About two minutes after they had all settled in at the bar, David was pulled from his stool by four angry Chinese gang members, not pleased at being disrespected by this bearded white guy. Before coming around to face the intruders, Ward Dunham told Marian to get in the bathroom and lock the door.

Marian did as instructed. She heard a lot of scuffling outside as Ward and the other bartender sent the Chinamen “flying through the door.” Within five minutes, the rest of the tong, “a hundred Chinese guys with guns, weapons, knives,” lined the sidewalk in front of Enrico's. “Like in a movie,” Fechheimer observed. The cook came running in from the kitchen. “They're out back too,” he cried.

“I know what to do,” David said. He picked up the bar phone, dialed 911, and demanded to be arrested. It took three squad cars to get the soused private eye out of the bar. They booked him into Central District Police Station a few blocks away in North Beach. While Marian, Roz, and Eunice scrambled about the neighborhood trying to raise bail money, Brautigan went down to Central Station with a book of his stories and sat outside his friend's cell all night long reading to him. “He stuck it out with me until six in the morning,” Fechheimer recalled.

Attracted to dangerous characters with an edge, Marian soon became romantically involved with David. He invited her on a trip to Africa. Fechheimer wanted to retrace his youthful
Wanderjahr
across Kenya and knew from Marian's own tales of third world adventures that she was unafraid of hard travel. Preparing for the journey, Marian asked her estranged husband to take care of their two children. At the end of January, Hjortsberg, along with his girlfriend and her young son, moved back into the spacious old house at Pine Creek.

Gatz and Peter Fonda were both born on February 23, albeit a year apart. The Pine Creek place was perfect for parties, with large rooms flowing one into the other, allowing for easy circulation. It made sense to host a shared birthday celebration. About sixty people showed up on the night of Saturday the twenty-first. The impromptu guest list included the Fondas, Jeff and Sue Bridges, Tim Cahill, singer-songwriter Kostas, Dick Dillof, and Phil White Hawk, a Native American musician.

An antique upright piano stood in an alcove off the main living room. With so many musicians in attendance, it became the center of the action. Jeff and Peter uncased their guitars and got into the jam. War correspondent Philip Caputo, recovering from a wound received in Beirut, heard the commotion from his cabin at the Pine Creek Lodge—where he worked on the longhand legal-pad first draft of what would become his bestseller,
A Rumor of War
—and crashed the party. Phil was made welcome and left in the early hours with a long list of new friends.

Another set of party-crashers from the lodge wasn't quite so welcome. The new owners had a pair of wild teenage daughters. Away for a short vacation, the owners left the girls in the care of their easygoing grandmother. Not long after dark, the sisters showed up with a group of high school kids. Gatz told them it was an adults-only party and no minors would be served. They left, but not before stealing a case of beer cooling on the porch.

The next morning, the mother of one of the town kids phoned to thank Hjortsberg for giving her son such a wonderful house present. He didn't know what she was talking about. “You know, that lovely silver tray,” she said. “You told him he could go down to your big red barn and take anything he wanted.” Puzzled, Gatz hung up and went to his barn to check things out, thinking the teens might have used the place for an orgy of their own. Everything looked just the same, without any sign of disturbance.

The bit about the silver tray troubled him, nagging through the fuzzy hangover fog. It dawned on Hjortsberg that his neighbor Richard had an even bigger red barn than he did. Nursing his third cup of black coffee, Gatz trudged down the frozen road to Brautigan's place. He slid the barn door open on its overhead trolley and stepped into the dim cavernous space. Hjortsberg's worst fears were confirmed. The place had been vandalized.

Discarded beer cans and empty bottles lay scattered across the wide-planked floor. Old tools and farm equipment, not used by Richard but much treasured by him, had been abused and tossed about like junk. Worst of all, White Acre, Brautigan's beloved Plymouth Fury, backed inside for the winter, had graffiti spray-painted across its roof and sides. A six-foot length of two-inch pipe had been thrust through the hood like a spear. Looking in at the engine, Gatz found all the sparkplug wires ripped free, the carburetor and distributor missing.

Wandering about the trashed barn in numb disbelief, Hjortsberg came across a stack of cardboard shipping cartons in the far corner. Most had been torn open, disemboweled of their contents. Tom and Cindy Olson were selling their log home in the subdivision behind Brautigan's spread, and he had let them store their things in his barn until they found a new place. Gatz had discovered the mother lode that yielded the purloined silver tray.

Not knowing where to find Richard and assuming he might be off in Japan, Gatz's first furious instinct was to call the sheriff. But because the girls' parents were friends and neighbors, he phoned the grandmother. When Hjortsberg told her he planned to get the law involved, she begged him to wait. She would have her granddaughters contact all the kids involved and convene a meeting at the Pine Creek Lodge. Gatz gave her twenty-four hours.

The next evening, Hjortsberg stood in a small living room crowded with sullen seated delinquents. He excoriated his unhappy audience, telling the teenagers they all belonged in jail, assuring them that was exactly where they'd find themselves should Richard Brautigan ever learn of their crime. The only way to avoid the clink, Gatz said, was to clean up the barn, restore Brautigan's car to its original condition, and return the stolen items. All the kids agreed to cooperate.

A day later, Hjortsberg met with Tom and Cindy Olson in Richard's barn to inspect the pile of returned loot. After checking things over, they agreed everything was there, deciding to move all their stuff to a safer location. Gatz had a quick look around after the Olsens left. Things were off to a fast start. Cans, bottles, and trash had been cleaned up. The old tools all hung back in place. Best of all, the Plymouth Fury had been scrubbed clean of graffiti, and the impaling pipe had been removed. The teen contingent swore that among their peers were skilled mechanics who would have the car running like new in no time. Hjorstberg said that was fine as long as it got done before Richard returned.