Jubilee Hitchhiker (178 page)

By the end of a long day of writing, Richard had completed a dozen or more pages in his new notebook. He dated each day's entry, adding the word “Finished” when he was done. It had been Brautigan's intention to stay at the Kyoto Inn until he'd completed his short novel. After a week, when the plum trees in Japantown (just budding when he moved in) were in full bloom, Richard's funds ran low again. He went back to Berkeley the next day. Over the previous seven days, Brautigan had filled eighty pages, half of his notebook, with writing. He stood at the midpoint of his journey, the literary peregrinations meandering through Buffalo, Toronto, Ketchikan, and Honolulu, including a 1964 stopover in Mendocino.

Richard returned to 17 Eucalyptus Road on February 6. He had planned on staying in the Kyoto Inn to finish his book before going to Illinois for the university gig. He never wanted to return to the house on Eucalyptus. “It would no longer be a part of my life.” Once he was back, sleeping again in the dead woman's bed, Brautigan felt he needed more time to experience “the atmosphere of the house.”

Richard did no further work on his novel for nine days. In mid-February, he sat in the small den off the living room and began writing in the notebook again. He datelined this section “February 6, 1982,” nine days earlier. A cold rain fell outside. The lurking shadows in the room grew darker.
Imbued with morbidity, Brautigan spent the next several pages describing the interior of 17 Eucalyptus Road.

Two days later, Richard Brautigan sat in a San Francisco coffee shop, writing the next segment of his novel. He would fly to Chicago in the morning. Brautigan's spring term teaching appointment at Montana State had been approved. His brief stint at Northern Illinois University would serve as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Richard wrote about having no love life during his return to Berkeley. He was awakened each morning at dawn by the “soft animal moaning” of a woman enjoying sex. The sounds came from a house nearby. Upon reflection, Brautigan guessed they were “pretty loud.” Loud enough to wake him up. For reasons of his own, Richard dated this passage February 15, 1982, off by forty-eight hours.

On the eighteenth, Dennis Lynch met Brautigan at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. The weather was very cold, and dirty snow covered ground. They drove about fifty miles northwest to DeKalb. Richard was hungry. They stopped along the way at a McDonald's so he could eat a fish sandwich and drink a cup of coffee. Lynch took them to his one-bedroom apartment in what Brautigan described as “a student ghetto.” They stayed up until 4:00 am, drinking and shooting the shit. When Dennis gave Richard his bedroom, offering to sleep on the couch, Brautigan was too tired to refuse, a decision he later regretted when Lynch's cuckoo clock sang its mechanical song every fifteen minutes through the night.

The next afternoon Richard taught Dennis Lynch's English 105 class. When it ended, Brautigan scribbled signatures at an autograph party “that lasted almost three hours.” Later in the evening, Brautigan gave a formal reading at the NIU English Department. Afterward, James Mellard, chairman of the department, hosted a reception for Richard at his home. Mellard's book
The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America
(1980) included a chapter on
Trout Fishing
. He was a fan and welcomed Brautigan along with a crowd of student and faculty admirers. “They drank up all the beer and wine,” he recalled, “then proceeded on to our modest supply of liquor, leaving not a drop undrunk.”

Mellard remembered Richard sitting on the living room floor, telling stories. Discussing his critics, Brautigan said “he would like to line [them] up and shoot them.” Richard made a gesture of raising his hand like a gun “and shooting each one, complete with sound effects.” It grew late. Mellard and his wife needed to get some sleep and headed upstairs, telling the rowdy group, “Y'all stay here; we're going to bed.” After the Mellards' “modest” booze stash was consumed, the crowd didn't stick around much longer. They headed over to Dennis Lynch's apartment, where the party roared on until 4:00 am.

That should have been the end of it. During his book tour, Brautigan would have been on the morning flight out of town. This time he didn't leave, hanging around DeKalb for another ten days, enduring the nocturnal mechanical call of Lynch's cuckoo clock while his host tossed on the couch in the other room. For two straight days, Richard and Dennis ate nothing but franchise takeout, what Brautigan called “sub-generic” food. Slovenly bachelors, they tossed their Styrofoam containers, wax paper wrappers, and cardboard cups onto the floor, turning the small apartment into the aftermath of “a confused picnic.” The final straw came when one of Lynch's students “nonchalantly” threw the packaging from his to-go hamburger onto the surrounding trash heap.

Richard and Dennis cleaned up the mess and aired the apartment, hauling the trash away. It felt like an exorcism. After their garbage epiphany, they ate out, accepting occasional invitations
and seeking restaurants more gastronomically inclined than fast-food joints. One establishment offered Trout á la Brautigan on its menu. On another night, a student took Richard home to his parents' house for some “real” home cooking. At a faculty dinner party, Brautigan sat next to a young woman who sold Tupperware, a product Richard had never heard of before.

Brautigan attended many of Lynch's classes. Mainly he enjoyed horsing around with Dennis and the “stewbums,” Lynch's gang of “wacky” faculty pals. The most outrageous of the bunch was a guy known as Danimal. One afternoon Dennis drove Richard past the DeKalb home of Joseph F. Glidden, a man who got rich in the 1870s as one of the inventors of barbed wire. They did not go inside. It was Brautigan's only “sight-seeing” trip while in Illinois. Richard proved a perfect fit with Lynch's bar-hopping mob. He greatly enjoyed his ten-day stay in the Midwest, finding its people “surrealistically fascinating.”

Brautigan flew back to San Francisco on February 27, arriving late that Saturday night. He checked into the Kyoto Inn, spending all day Sunday in bed recovering from jet lag. Even the two-hour time difference between Chicago and California upset Richard's internal time clock. The morning of March 1 found Brautigan seated at a small wooden table outside a café in an enclosed mall within the Japanese Trade Center, at work once again on his notebook novel. Richard thought it was “a quiet place to work.” He dated the current entry February 16, 1982, calling his narrative “chronologically mischievous.” Brautigan had planned to end the little book when he left for Chicago but started back by writing about the trip to Illinois.

The next day, seated at the same café table, Richard described his time in DeKalb without mentioning any names. Having established the creative dictum of never rereading what he had written previously, Brautigan moved on with the narrative he called “a calendar map,” seemingly unaware of time lapses and apparently pointless digressions.

Like life itself, the little novel was filled with contradiction and uncertainty. It functioned like memory, in disconnected bits and pieces, where trivial moments take on the same emotional importance as powerful events. The photograph of a Hawaiian chicken and a suicide by hanging, annoyance with Dennis Lynch's cuckoo clock (Richard spelled it “coocoo” in his manuscript), watching a crow eat a hot dog bun, an unknown rapist and a broken heart: all were given equal weight. The “Rosebud syndrome” became Orson Welles's gift to the world. Much as we pretend this is not so, seeking dignity and drama in otherwise mundane lives, in the end it all comes out the same, the memories of a philosopher count no higher than those of a fool.

Brautigan had gone to Enrico's the night before, walking through Chinatown after leaving the bar to catch a bus on California Street back to his hotel. Along the way, Richard paused to look at the lobby cards outside a Chinese movie theater. This too went into the novel, digressing from DeKalb to describing an old woman standing beside him, frightened by the image of a ghost on a movie poster. After a passage about gorging on junk food with Dennis Lynch, Brautigan put another total stranger into the “story,” a Japanese man eating pastry at a nearby table. The literary diversion was completely unintentional, part of his compositional method in the little notebook. The second of March was the last day Richard worked on his novel for more than three months.

Brautigan and photographer Roger Ressmeyer had formed “a very close relationship” since meeting almost exactly a year earlier for the
People
magazine shoot. Richard asked Roger to take the photograph for the cover of
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
. They got together and Roger
bounced some ideas off Richard, who wanted a picture evoking the life of the “pond people” he'd described in the novel. He also requested a new author photo, one showing water in the background. Their creative energies meshed perfectly. Brautigan okayed the project.

About this time, French publisher Christian Bourgois purchased the rights to
So the Wind
and hired Marc Chénetier as the translator. He also approached Helen Brann about bringing Richard to Paris to promote the book's publication. The first week of March, Brautigan met with Ressmeyer and his assistant at the marina waterfront. Roger snapped head-and-shoulder shots of Brautigan posed beside the water. They moved on to the fountain pools in the Presidio for more portraits with an aquatic backdrop. From his earliest sessions with Erik Weber, Richard always micromanaged the photography for his book covers. This time around, Brautigan trusted Ressmeyer to get things right, giving him “total control” over the project.

Roger and his employee drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Novato reservoir in northern Marin County, towing a U-Haul full of used furniture. In the afternoon, they arranged the secondhand furnishings on a narrow peninsula. When everything looked right, they waited for dusk, and once darkness enveloped them, Roger started the generator and lit a small fire in his prop cookstove. The lamps in his impromptu stage set burned ordinary light bulbs. Ressmeyer, experienced in celestial photography galaxies away from his celebrity mug shots, set the camera for a long exposure, “probably a second or two,” and took several pictures. The bridge lamp gleamed like a star gone nova. Once the images were developed, Roger picked the best and worked up the layout for a wraparound cover photograph, including textual elements, and presented the finished product to Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. Ressmeyer did all the work, but the publisher credited Susan Lee Weiss, an in-house designer, with the jacket design.

Brautigan had plenty to occupy his time once he set his novel aside. Students wishing to participate in his upcoming writing class had been asked to submit samples of their work to the MSU English Department. Faculty members picked the best of the crop. Paul Ferlazzo sent these off to Richard for final selection. Busy days didn't mean lonely nights for Richard in Japantown. He had his last sheet-tearing rendezvous with Sherry Vetter. Eunice Kitagawa “flew up to SFO a few times while he was at the Kyoto Inn.” Specific dates are lost in the fog of ancient memories. Eunice found these visits “disturbing.” Richard clearly seemed to be “spiraling down.” Back in Hawaii, Kitagawa called some guys she'd gotten to know at the front desk to check on Brautigan when he wouldn't answer his phone for long stretches. She worried about him. “Richard was already threatening to hurt himself.”

Nights when he lacked a female companion, Brautigan set off for North Beach in search of adventure. There was always chance of a casual pickup at Enrico's, but most often Richard rode home alone on the bus after closing time. One evening he ran into Allen Moline, a stranger in town enjoying “a wild night out.” They drank together and talked for three hours. “During the course of our conversation, Brautigan plopped a bullet in my glass of white wine,” Moline recalled. Richard's gesture added dramatic emphasis to his drunken talk of “contemplating taking his own life.”

Moline was shocked. He hated bullets. “With more and more wine,” he pleaded with Richard “to think it over.” They parted a little before 2:00 am, planning to meet at Tosca. Like many boozy late-night promises, it was all empty talk. Allen Moline never saw Brautigan again.

On March 14 Brautigan got up from the couch to change the channel on his TV and tripped over a coffee table in his hotel room, breaking his right leg at the ankle in two places. At first
Richard thought he'd only sprained it. After a day, the swelling didn't go down, nor did his pain diminish. Brautigan phoned Dr. Burstein, his regular physician, who referred him to Felton and Klausenstock, MDS, Inc., specialists in the sort of fracture he described. Richard made an appointment for the sixteenth, taking a cab in the morning. X-rays revealed clean breaks. No cast was necessary. Brautigan's leg was bound. He was advised to use a cane and take it easy for six weeks or so. Felton and Klausenstock billed Richard $56 for their services.

Brautigan flew to Bozeman, Montana, on April Fools' Day. Greg Keeler met him at the airport as he limped off the plane with his new cane. In addition to his Montana State University salary of $1,500 a month, a faculty apartment had been reserved for Richard at the Peter Koch Towers on campus. He went to stay at Greg's place instead. A long-standing friction between Brautigan and Judy Keeler was exacerbated by his unexpected visit. A few days later Richard wandered into the living room carrying an armload of laundry. He was “fresh from the bath,” clad only in a towel. “Where should I put these dirty clothes?” Brautigan asked Judy.

“Up in the washing machines at faculty housing,” Mrs. Keeler answered.

Brautigan took the hint and moved to his new apartment: a bedroom with a living room and kitchen divided by a Formica-topped counter, furnished in standard dorm-room modular. The place reeked of “industrial strength sanitizing agents.” Long accustomed to the anonymity of hotel rooms, Richard felt comfortable there. He told Greg Keeler he especially liked the toilet paper. Suffering from a recent herpes outbreak, Brautigan stuffed wads of tissue around his genitals to keep from chaffing. Little bits of toilet paper started “falling out of his jean cuffs.” Keeler found it funny. “He walked around with toilet paper all over the place.”