Jubilee Hitchhiker (177 page)

As they drove to see the CCC totem poles, Brautigan's host complained about his “complicated love life.” Richard had no interest in these amorous details. The names of the local flora the man described meant even less as they walked through the woods toward a group of totem poles that Brautigan considered “very, very fake.”

Driving back to Ketchikan, a cold December rain pelting down on the car, the one-way conversation returned to the many complications of love. Brautigan had his own disastrous love life to worry about and paid scant attention to the man's rambling discourse, watching the reciprocating sweep of the windshield wipers as he retreated within, feeling himself growing smaller and smaller, “almost childlike.”

At 7:30 pm on Saturday, December 5, Richard presented “An Evening's Discussion with Richard Brautigan” in the humanities area of the Ketchikan High School. The next night, at the same time and location, he read selections from his poetry. A distinguished member of the state
legislature was among Brautigan's scattered audience on the second evening. Terry Gardiner had been born in Ketchikan in 1950. He started working as a commercial fisherman at fifteen, the perfect summer job. He went off to Western Washington University in Bellingham. He first read Richard Brautigan in college. He continued fishing professionally after he was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives at age twenty-two. The state government also conducted its business in the wintertime.

Gardiner served as speaker of the house from 1979 to 1980. He planned to retire from politics after completing the last of five successive terms at the end of the coming winter session. He had recently started Silver Lining Seafood, a fish processing company. At Brautigan's reading, Gardiner and a couple of his friends thought it might be fun to “invite him out for a beer. Show him the town.”

They set off together on a bar crawl of “Ketchitown,” settling in for serious drinking at the Fireside Lounge. Richard drank whiskey. Terry Gardiner preferred tequila. The two “hit it off,” their time together short and intense. Gardiner had just ended a passionate relationship with a Japanese woman from Chicago who felt Alaska was “too hard.” Brautigan commiserated, knowing a great deal about Japanese women. He told his newfound friend that he “looked forward to arriving at a period of grace in [his] life.” Richard's aim was to be “more realistic” and perhaps find some “tranquility.”

During the course of their single high-powered evening, Brautigan started calling Terry the “wild legislator.” When closing time rolled around, they bought a bottle to go. Richard opted for tequila, his new friend's beverage of choice. They staggered out into the falling snow. “Here, catch, wild legislator,” Brautigan called, tossing the tequila bottle across the street to Terry, who snagged it out of the frozen air “effortlessly.” Looking back, Richard remembered, “it was a wonderful drunken night in Alaska.”

The next morning, Brautigan awoke with an enormous hangover. He lurched from his fifty-four-year-old hotel, bought a hot dog with mustard and relish for breakfast, and found his way across the street to the boat dock. Richard sat, staring up at a moored Panamanian freighter, surrounded by a small murder of crows. Halfway into his tube steak, a wave of nausea overcame him. Brautigan threw the remainder of his fast food to the crows. Richard had an appointment for an interview with Bill Green, a reporter from the
Ketchikan Daily News,
a couple hours before departing for Anchorage. He didn't want to begin their discussion by vomiting.

Brautigan met the reporter at a nearby restaurant. Benumbed by his hangover, Richard felt an unaccustomed loss for words. Wanting “to break the ice, loosen up, and put the interview on a casual footing,” he launched into the story of feeding his leftover hot dog and bun to the dockside crows. Brautigan became “very animated” telling this pointless tale, getting up from the table and waving his arms in an insane crow-like manner.

Waiting to board his plane at the Gravina Island airport, Richard had time to befriend Pedro, a fat, friendly resident cat, who had free run of the terminal. On his flight up to Anchorage, which seemed to take forever, Brautigan wondered what the Ketchikan reporter would write about him. As it turned out, not a single word. Green had already assembled a file piece the previous Friday for the
Daily News
weekly art section (incorrectly claiming Richard had no phone in Montana). He had learned nothing new from Brautigan's incoherent interview.

Richard took off for Hawaii early on December 8, after spending the night in Anchorage. He made no new friends in the hotel bar and went to bed sober. Brautigan called flying with a
hangover one of the “Top 40 of terrible things to do in my life.” Eunice Kitagawa met Richard at the Honolulu International Airport and drove him to her home through the snarl of Honolulu traffic, “the worst case of ‘Los Angeles' automobile cultural damage” he'd ever seen. A singular object caught Brautigan's attention. It was a brand-new man's brown shoe lying alone at the center of an intersection remarkable for its quietness. There was no sign of an accident. The solitary brogue did not appear to be part of a pair. Richard thought the lone shoe seemed “almost haunting,” exactly the sort of odd urban detritus he always found fascinating.

In many ways, Richard Brautigan was better suited for a vacation in Ketchikan than Oahu. His fair skin didn't tolerate the sun. He preferred a cool, rainy Alaskan climate to the heat and beaches of Hawaii. Richard didn't drive. A small seaport town had everything within walking distance. In Honolulu, an automobile was a necessity. One rainy day, weather suiting Brautigan's sensitivities, he ventured out to a downtown restaurant with Kitagawa. The place had a sidewalk café, deserted due to the rain. As a devoted pedestrian watcher, Richard noted it would be a good place to sit and observe people in fair weather.

“You used the wrong word,” Eunice said.

Brautigan asked what she meant.

“Cars,” Kitagawa told him. “You watch cars, not people.”

Mostly, Richard watched TV. “He got into this sluggish mood,” Eunice recalled. “He just didn't want to move.” Wanting to pick up Brautigan's spirits, Kitagawa gave him a silk-screened T-shirt made by a friend. It depicted a rooster riding in the turret of a tank above the words “Fighting chickens.” Richard wanted his picture taken with a chicken while wearing it. Eunice had to work at the Pottery Steak House but asked her friend George Bennett to handle the photo session.

A big storm blew in that night, and it rained “on and off” all morning. It looked like the photo shoot might be off. When the weather cleared, Bennett phoned to say he'd located a chicken. They set off into the mountains above the city. Brautigan found the change of scenery “lush and provocative like an airplane ad.” Richard and George encountered numbers of free-ranging chickens at the farm. A docile rooster was quickly captured. Brautigan knelt before the camera, holding the bewildered bird. Bennett took several snapshots. Richard thought he might have the picture framed and hung in his Montana home. This never happened. Later, Brautigan convinced Greg Keeler that the photograph showed him with a genuine “fighting cock.”

Staying home alone at Eunice's place meant Richard spent hours on the phone (charging the calls to his Mountain Bell account). Back in November, Sam Lawrence had told Brautigan to get in touch with Tom Condon, assistant managing editor of Delacorte Press, if he wanted a dedication page for
So the Wind
. In mid-December, Richard sent him his dedication: “This Book is for Portia Crockett and Marian Renken.” Brautigan coyly used his friends' maiden names for the printed inscription. Portia was Becky Forida's actual given name.

Money problems nagged at the edges of Richard's mind. He called Greg Keeler at 1:00 am (Montana time), asking if there was any possibility of getting a teaching job at MSU the next spring. Brautigan's employment chances were enhanced by the recent appointment of Paul Ferlazzo, bright, young, and optimistic, as the new English Department head. After a number of late-night strategy sessions with Keeler, Brautigan called Ferlazzo with some trepidation and the “wheels started turning.” If things worked out, Brautigan would be appointed a visiting professor
for the spring term of 1982. He needed the work. Helen Brann sent a Form 1099 listing 1981 miscellaneous income of $58,275.67, but at the end of December, the balance remaining in Richard's checking account totaled $600.17.

Brautigan and Kitagawa left Oahu only once during his monthlong visit. They flew over to Maui on a day trip. Eunice remembered finding a now-defunct airline that charged only $13 each way. “Richard's kind of deal,” she said. Kitagawa, born and raised on Maui, knew every corner of the beautiful island. Brautigan had no interest in visiting the old whaling port of Lahaina, or exploring the Hana coast, or driving to the crest of Haleakalâ, Maui's dormant volcano. A self-confessed fan of cemeteries, Richard most wanted to see a graveyard, so Eunice took him to the churchyard where several of her relatives were buried. A Buddhist shrine with peeling paint stood beside the cemetery.

Brautigan and Kitagawa went separate ways inside the graveyard. She paid her respects to deceased family members, wondering why her boyfriend would rather be here instead of enjoying one of Maui's beautiful beaches. Richard wandered around on his own, observing the mundane details that always fascinated him. He stared at a pile of discarded tombstones and rows of fallen light poles entwined in rotting electrical wire. This seemed logical. Who needs lights in a boneyard?

Spotting an old Japanese couple fussing about the untended graves, Brautigan pointed them out to Kitagawa, and she went over to ask why they were there. “They are very unhappy with the condition of this cemetery,” Eunice reported back. Richard felt sympathetic with their impossible task. He wondered about the pile of abandoned tombstones. Kitagawa explained that they were all from graves that surviving family members didn't want to maintain. The remains were disinterred and cremated, and the ashes stored away in the shrine. This made no sense to Brautigan. Why bother to bury the dead in the first place if their graves would not be their final resting place?

Eunice didn't really care. She wanted to catch the 2:00 pm flight to Honolulu so she'd get back in time for a nap before going to work that night. If they left right away they could drive to her mother's restaurant, Tokyo Tei, for lunch before departing. “My mother makes good tempura,” Kitagawa told him. Richard thought the Japanese graveyard was the most interesting thing he had seen on Maui. He knew he'd never return. Brautigan “had used [Maui] up.”

Richard didn't realize it at the time, but he'd used up the entire Hawaiian archipelago. After returning to San Francisco in mid-January, Brautigan never went back to the Aloha State. Eunice Kitagawa's next Bay Area visitors were Nikki Arai and her black boyfriend, George Bowles. Richard moved again into the dead woman's room at 17 Eucalyptus Road. He had enjoyed a rent-free month in Honolulu and his current finances demanded more of the same.

A letter from Dennis Lynch, who had chaired the MLA “Zen and Poetry” panel discussion a couple years before, brightened Brautigan's financial prospects. Lynch, a graduate student and English instructor at Northern Illinois University, invited Richard to give a presentation there in February. This was not a promissory note. Lynch's invitation came authorized by James M. Mellard, chairman of the English Department, and Jerome Klinkowitz, a rising lit/crit star.

Accustomed to living with a ghost in his gloomy Bolinas house, Richard felt no trepidation at sharing a bed with the spirit of a woman who had hanged herself downstairs. What he did feel was curiosity. Brautigan explored the spacious Berkeley home, roaming from one shadowed room to the next, trying to imagine the details of the tragedy. He wondered if the phone rang at the moment
the woman hanged herself. Perhaps, barely alive, her last breath choking from her dangling body, she heard the telephone's insistent
briiing . . . briiing . . . briiing.
Maybe it was good news. She would never know. Whoever called got no answer. No one home anymore.

Brautigan knew he wanted to write about this. He decided to give himself a birthday present, an uninterrupted week at the Kyoto Inn. On Saturday morning, January 30, Richard rode the BART train under the Bay to the City, fighting an urge to tell the stranger sitting next to him, “Today is my birthday. I'm forty-seven.” Before checking into his favorite San Francisco hotel, Brautigan paid $2.50 for a 160-page notebook at the Kinokuniya bookstore, a branch of an international Japanese book and stationery chain, in Japantown.

Later in the day, armed with a brand-new Pilot ballpoint pen, Richard began work in the notebook on his next novel. Financial circumstances demanded prudence, playing it safe once again in familiar Brautigan territory, but artistic impulses ran too deep, and Richard set out to explore the outer uncharted edges of experimental fiction. He arbitrarily decided that his novel would run no longer than the notebook in which he composed it. Once Brautigan reached page 160, the book was over. He also resolved not to reread any of his work until he finished the novel. No going back to revise along the way. Richard planned on flying blind into the vast unknown emptiness of the blank page.

“I saw a brand-new man's shoe lying in the middle of a quiet Honolulu intersection,” Brautigan wrote on the first line of the first page in his Japanese notebook. “It was a brown shoe that sparkled like a leather diamond.” Richard set out on a circuitous examination of the impact that staying in a house where a woman had hanged herself made on his life, retracing his travels over the past three months, weaving in and out of 17 Eucalyptus Road. Because he determined not to reread his material as he went along, the lone shoe spotted in Hawaii remained masculine until Glenise Sibbern typed Brautigan's handwritten manuscript. Richard altered the opening line and changed the gender of the abandoned footwear to better fit his theme. The shoe became a woman's. Deliberately haphazard, Brautigan did very little revising when he edited the typescript. Like a jazz solo, the novel flowed from him in a fluid improvisation.