Jubilee Hitchhiker (174 page)

Brautigan was not all that far away at the time, traveling back to Boulder on Friday the thirteenth for a couple weeks in February. He stayed once again at the Hotel Boulderado, getting together with Ed and Jenny Dorn, hanging out in their kitchen like always. Dick Dillof was also in town, visiting the Dorns and performing. Afternoons, Dick played on Pearl Street to a small pedestrian crowd. He looked up and saw “a tall, gangly stork-like man” weave through the gathering with a bag of peanuts. No one knew who he was. Dillof didn't let on it was Brautigan.

Deadpan, Richard unzipped Dick's fly, placing an unshelled peanut in his crotch. He closed the zipper so that the peanut protruded from his pants. Next, Brautigan stuck peanuts into Dillof's right nostril, one of his ears, and the hole in his hat. To finish things off, a peanut was inserted into the dobro's resonator. “Sir,” Richard said archly, drifting back into the sidewalk audience without another word.

Later they got together, “happy to see each other,” and spent the evening “roaming around town and carousing.” A book of short stories about Dick's adventures hopping freights and riding the rails was soon to be published. A paperback original,
Hobo
was released by Tower Books in 1981, with the author listed as Richard Dillof, “known on the road as Rattlesnake Dick.” Dillof hoped that Brautigan, in spite of his stunts, would be enthusiastic and encouraging about the project.

Seated in a café discussing literature, Richard called “good and loud so everyone can hear” to a pretty waitress passing their table, “A drink for my friend.” The waitress paused. “One Shirley Temple for my friend,” Brautigan ordered, ending any chance for further lit talk with Dillof. “Strong with the Shirley. Hold the Temple.”

Richard checked out of the Boulderado on February 24. On his way back to San Francisco, he detoured to Bozeman for a few days and hung out with Greg Keeler. He made no attempt to contact Gatz Hjortsberg during his brief Montana stopover. Keeler invited Brautigan to take over his evening contemporary poetry class for a one-time guest appearance. Greg had never seen his friend teach before. Scanning the room for pretty women, Richard spoke of the influences on his poetry and “talked about how he saw various movements in American writing,” themes honed to perfection on his recent book tour. Greg thought “he was good. [. . .] The class hung on every word.” Keeler knew he had never held his students' attention like that, a fact perhaps not lost on the acting head of the English Department, who sat in on Brautigan's lecture and “loved it.”

Around the same time, in the beginning of March, Marian Hjortsberg came back to Montana from Africa. Gatz packed up his familiar third-floor Pine Creek studio for the last time, hauling his typewriter and works in progress to his office in exile, rented rooms on a hill above the Livingston railroad yard. Adrift again in Frisco, Brautigan experienced a similar displacement. Home was where he hung his hat, some nights at Eunice Kitagawa's apartment, others in his cramped
rented office on Broadway. By the middle of April, Richard had moved into the Kyoto Inn for an extended stay.

The energy generated by Brautigan's recent book tour attracted the attention of
People
magazine. They assigned writer Cheryl McCall, who had written the story on the Montana lit/art scene a few months before, to put together a piece on Richard. Roger Ressmeyer, a San Francisco photographer since his graduation from Yale in 1975, known for his work with celebrities (rock stars, politician, musicians, writers), was the editors' choice to handle the camera work. From conversations with Richard, McCall became fascinated with his eccentric inability to drive a car. She decided to build the story around Brautigan's distaste for automobiles, piecing together bits of their extended tape-recorded interviews into an as-told-to mini–memoir.

The day of the vernal equinox, following a formal portrait session, mostly head-and-shoulder shots, Ressmeyer took a number of impromptu pictures on the autophobia theme. Several involved Richard being hauled around Frisco in a rickshaw by his sturdy friend Dwain Cox, cable cars, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge variously in the background. An abandoned railroad siding provided another location, Brautigan wandering like a hobo with his knapsack. In a lighthearted moment, Richard executed a jumping jack of joy in an automobile graveyard.

Another idea was to stage a literary gathering and invite a bunch of Brautigan's old writer buddies. City Lights wasn't interested, so Enrico's became the obvious choice.
People
put the word out, hoping to draw about two hundred people. Curt Gentry figured he couldn't make it, as something else had come up. Don Carpenter called his home from the bar at the last minute. “You've got to get down here,” Don pleaded. “No one showed up.”

“Richard was having problems,” Gentry observed. “Michael McClure didn't want to have anything to do with [him].” Curt headed loyally down to the Broadway café, where he sat at a sidewalk table drinking and swapping stories with Brautigan, Don Carpenter, and last-minute stand-in Enrico Banducci while Ressmeyer snapped pictures. A quality of artificially induced merriment pervaded these images. Out of all Richard's purported friends through the decades, only two took the trouble to help out when he needed them.

Ressmeyer also shot a roll of film in Brautigan's narrow studio above Vesuvio, capturing him in a black Hotel Boulderado T-shirt, lobbing crumpled paper hook shots at a distant wicker wastebasket, and working at his electric typewriter by the tall lone window. The project occupying Richard's creative time was
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
, the melancholy novel about his youth in the Pacific Northwest.

With a central theme focused on the accidental shooting death of his ninth-grade classmate Donald Husband, Brautigan threw all the other ingredients from his hardscrabble childhood into the mix: poverty, an indifferent mother, living above a mortuary, fishing the neighborhood logging ponds, jigging for frogs, early entrepreneurial efforts: collecting discarded beer bottles with his wicker baby buggy and selling night crawlers to gas stations. Everything from his past that Richard had long refused to discuss, even with his closest friends, he now resurrected as fiction.

Sometime around the middle of April, the grandmother looking after things at the Pine Creek Lodge phoned Gatz Hjortsberg to say all was well: the teenage mechanics had Brautigan's car running like new. Pleased, Gatz nonetheless thought it best to drive to Paradise Valley for a firsthand look. The moment he stepped inside Richard's barn, Hjortsberg knew that even if White Acre's engine revved up like a drag racer at the starting line, it wouldn't do the trick. The kids had replaced
the punctured Plymouth Fury hood with one they found at an auto junkyard. The secondhand part came from the appropriate year. It fit perfectly. Just one problem remained. The hood was blue.

The next night, Gatz convened another teen culprit meeting at the lodge. He told them they'd done a great job and had nearly wiped the slate clean of all wrongdoing, but he warned that the replacement hood would never fly. Brautigan wasn't color-blind. If his car didn't start, it was no big deal. Junkers don't do well sitting idle through long Montana winters. But there was no denying a hood of a different color. Hjortsberg cautioned that Richard would be back by summer, no telling just when. If they didn't get the Plymouth repainted white before his arrival, the jig was up. All their hard work would mean nothing. An outraged Brautigan might even call the cops. The teenagers promised to take care of the problem.

Around the same time, Richard Brautigan worked with his ballpoint pen in his North Beach office, worrying various drafts of a brief précis of his growing novel on torn scraps of paper. He came up with: “So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is an American tragedy that takes place in the 1940's. It remembers the independence and dignity of a small group of people whose life-style was already doomed, even as they lived it, thinking that it would go on forever. The first television antenna on an American house was their tombstone.” He sent a copy to Helen Brann. She mailed it to Seymour Lawrence at the end of April.

On April 23 Brautigan settled his tab at Enrico's with a check for $500. He paid the Kyoto Inn $439.51 on Friday, May 8, squaring his account in preparation to depart for Montana. Richard changed his mind at the last minute and stayed on at the hotel through Saturday night. He arrived back in Montana that Sunday, stocking up his larder the next day with $70 worth of groceries at the Livingston Safeway.

With a book to finish, Brautigan didn't wait long before heading to his studio in the barn. The surprise sight of a blue hood on his white Plymouth struck with the force of one of his own disjointed metaphors. Richard wasted no time getting in touch with Gatz to demand an explanation. When Hjortsberg told him what happened, Brautigan flew into a furious sputtering rage.

“Why didn't you call me?” Richard fumed. Gatz said he didn't know where to find him. He could have been anywhere. The whole idea had been to simplify the situation. It was all about neighbors. Pine Creek Lodge being part of the local community, Hjortsberg hoped to take care of the whole mess without getting Brautigan involved. Richard had returned to find the cleanup completed and all the Olsons' stolen property returned. Repainting White Acre was in the works. Brautigan had nothing to worry about.

Gatz felt he had handled the incident well and perhaps deserved some faint praise. He'd devoted hours of his own time to orchestrating the project. Instead, Richard grew more and more strident, lecturing his friend like an insane school principal. “There are two kinds of delinquents,” he ranted, beginning a long tedious reprimand, “juvenile delinquents and adult delinquents. Juvenile delinquents vandalize private property. Adult delinquents shirk their responsibilities.”

And so it went, on and on, Brautigan tracking on the subject of “adult delinquency.” Hjortsberg swallowed his pride and took the whole onslaught without further protest. When Richard sputtered to a conclusion, Gatz apologized profusely, hoping he'd heard the end of it. He never imagined what was still to come.

Over the next several weeks, Hjortsberg was awakened repeatedly by late-night calls from a raving, drunken Brautigan. The inebriated message remained the same, delivered in an almost
incomprehensible stutter. “Ad-d-d-dult . . . d-d-d-delinq-q-q-quency,” Richard stammered into the phone, repeating his boozy mantra again and again. Four in the morning became Brautigan's hour of choice to deliver his carbon-copy message. Finally Gatz had enough. “Richard,” he yelled, “don't ever call me anymore! I never want to hear your voice again as long as I live!” He slammed down the receiver for emphasis.

Hjortsberg wasn't the only one hearing about delinquency that summer. Greg Keeler wrote of sitting with Richard on his back porch listening to “long painful discussions” about “the teenagers who had ‘vandalized' his barn.” Marian Hjortsberg got an earful when she drank wine with Brautigan in the evenings. He also griped about his divorce. Agriculture provided a diversion. Richard announced that he planned to put in a garden over at his place.

Marian said she'd gladly help get things started. She already tended a big garden of her own and told him, “I can't come over and weed.”

“I don't want you to,” Brautigan said. “I want to get it in and have a stand. I want to have a vegetable stand right on the road in August.”

“What're you going to plant?” Marian asked.

“I'm going to plant onions and potatoes.”

“How come nothing else?”

“Because, I just want spuds,” Richard told her. “And the sign is going to read richard's alimony spuds, and I'm going to go out there and sell spuds to passersby.”

“We used to talk about alimony spuds all summer,” Marian recalled. “He never weeded the garden, of course. The grasshoppers came, and they ate the tops off even the onions.” David Fechheimer got most of the crop. He kept the gift potatoes in a burlap sack in the freezer of his San Francisco home. On an attached tag, Brautigan wrote, “Richard Brautigan's Montana Spuds.” To commemorate David's recent adventure with Marian, Richard added these words: “They've gone to Africa and traveled together and traveled in style.”

One Saturday in early June, Richard went out on the town, starting at the Wrangler, where he drank up $50 before moving on to the Sport for dinner and more booze. Another $100 later, he felt no pain, his handwriting reduced to a wavering sprawl. On such nights, being not willing to drive became Brautigan's greatest gift to the world.

The article in
People
, “A Happy but Footsore Writer Celebrates His Driver's Block,” appeared in the “Coping” section on the eighth of June. The byline read, “By Richard Brautigan.” A short introduction mentioned that the story stemmed from a “conversation with” senior editor Cheryl McCall and referred to Brautigan's monthlong book tour as “four months of campus-hopping,” perpetuating another of Richard's elaborations.

As late spring moved into the full dazzle of summer, Brautigan kept busy working on his novel. He'd missed his deadline by three months but was not bothered by being late. Richard cared more about seeking perfection than the tantalizing second half of his advance. He wanted to get this painful quasi memoir of his youth just right and worried over every word and sentence. His social life continued as always: bingeing in town, barbecues at the homes of friends, hanging out with Greg Keeler. Ianthe had gotten engaged to Paul Swensen. For reasons he never explained, Brautigan didn't care for the young man.

One afternoon, talking with Ianthe's fiancé on the phone, Richard motioned Greg Keeler over. “Here's a big local bruiser,” he said. “Tell this guy what you're going to do to him if he doesn't
treat my daughter right.” Brautigan handed the receiver to Keeler, who “gave the poor kid some sort of macho bullshit.” On reflection, Greg felt happy that Ianthe and Paul “both seemed to be good sports about antics like that.”