Jubilee Hitchhiker (182 page)

Late-night gunplay during the Dorns' visit was but one ricocheting episode in a long summer of back porch shooting at Rancho Brautigan. One summer Sunday morning, suffering from a massive hangover after a hard night's partying, Marian Hjortsberg got a phone call from Richard. Dave Schrieber had arrived from Bozeman with his firearm collection. “I want you to come over, and I want you to try some of Schrieber's guns.”

“Richard, I just can't come over,” she said, “I have this terrible hangover. The last thing in the world I want to do is shoot guns.”

“But, my dear,” Brautigan said, “you must understand, it's the best thing in the world for a hangover.”

Marian walked down the road and joined the firing squad. They shot all through the morning. “It was so much fun,” she recalled. “I actually shot really well.” At one point Richard dragged out a pachinko machine that had been a Christmas gift from Aki. They shot it to smithereens. Schrieber hauled the bullet-punctured remnants home with him to Bozeman as a souvenir. The next time they shot together, a television set became the target.

When Richard read Masako's note about her father's death, he sent her a telegram on July 30 (“TODAY SOMEBODY IS BORN”), before moving back to Forest Park. After an afternoon at the Eagles, Brad Donovan and Brautigan went to see
Cat People
, playing a couple blocks up the street at the Ellen Theater. Released early in April, the movie had only then reached Bozeman. Directed by Paul Schrader (Siew-Hwa Beh's old grad school nemesis) and starring Nastassja Kinski, known as Nasty to her intimate friends, the picture was a remake of the classic Jacques Tourneur 1942 horror film.

When the show was over, Richard and Brad sat in the lobby of the Baxter Hotel with drinks from the Robin, “talking about all the ways the movie had fallen short.” They both found it “grotesque” and agreed “it should have been done as a comedy.” This led to inventing mock comic scenes for
Cat People
and a discussion of “slapstick comedy in general.” The more they talked, the more Brautigan and Donovan kept returning to the Marx Brothers movies. They were attracted to anarchy.

A couple days later, Richard and Brad wandered around Forest Park. “Life here is really weird,” Brautigan observed. “Once you move to a trailer park, you have no more illusions about your life.” Richard was captivated by the absurd reality of people living in metal boxes. They hit upon a notion of writing a comic script about the “different silly little things” in a trailer park. Brautigan called their screenplay “a goofy blueprint for a house that will probably never be built.”

“Why don't we just have fun with this one?” Richard told Donovan. They planned on putting anything and everything in at random, “and then [they'd] worry about it later.” Greg Keeler came
by Forest Park at the start of the project. Keeler noted that Brautigan “tended to let himself go” when he stayed out at the trailer settlement. Richard “smelled pretty funky” and hadn't shaved for several days.

In a story called “The Nightly Rounds,” Brautigan confessed, “I don't bathe as often as I should here in Montana, but I never really liked to bathe anyway. I don't like the feeling of water on my body, and frankly, I don't understand people who do.” Richard confessed that only women kept him clean. “They don't like to sleep with you when you smell like something that Boris Karloff just dragged in after making his nightly rounds of all the local cemeteries.”

“You look just like a Bowery bum,” Greg said.

“I'm on vacation,” Brautigan replied.

“No you're not,” Brad interjected. “You're working. I'm working.”

“Yes, I can tell.” Keeler suppressed a smile. “The whole trailer is atremble with the bustle of industry.”

“Tell him about the screenplay,” Georgia Donovan said.

Richard and Brad sat Greg down at the kitchen table and described their work in progress, at that point still in the bullshitting stage. They had a working title, “Trailer,” an homage to/rip-off of the film
Airplane
, along with an assortment of goofy characters, including a dwarf bird trainer, a Vietnam vet with a bowl of mechanical fish, a Nazi landlady driving a bulldozer painted with a swastika, the Borrower (a guy who always borrows things), and an old couple wrapped in tinfoil waiting for aliens. Keeler thought it sounded a lot like life in Forest Park.

After the initial sessions in the Donovans' trailer, work shifted to Brautigan's Pine Creek place. There was no implied hierarchy. Richard didn't pull rank on Brad. Both men worked as equal collaborators. “The rule was that anything we wrote was okay,” Donovan recalled. Brad came over to Rancho Brautigan for two- or three-day sprints. Brautigan wrote in his barn loft office. Donovan had the use of Richard's separate outside bedroom (“the little guest house”) for his studio. Brautigan now slept in a bedroom inside his home.

Shooting the breeze, the two men sat around for a couple hours in the morning, coming up with ten new scenes. After that they divided the scenes (“You want to write this one?”) before heading for separate work quarters. At the end of the day, they swapped drafts, adding “lines or description or layers of detail to what the other person did.” They both worked in longhand, Brautigan scribbling on yellow legal pads; Donovan on scraps of blank paper. They cobbled together “a thirty-page kind of treatment and showed it to Jeff Bridges and Peter Fonda, who both offered encouragement.

Proud of his ability to “crank it up,” Brautigan never failed to deliver his daily quota in spite of drinking and hangovers. In less than a month, three weeks at most, Brad and Richard produced a rough one-hundred-page first draft. “Just going over the top,” Donovan recalled. Greg Keeler remembered them working frantically. The project “seemed to have a life and death urgency about it.” At the same time, Brautigan dealt with the ongoing business details for his forthcoming novel, reviewing jacket and ad copy, scrutinizing the contracts for Jonathan Cape's British edition.

As Brad and Richard wrapped up their gonzo screenplay, an offer of a $15,000 advance arrived from Seymour Lawrence for Brautigan's new book proposal. Richard was stunned. It was $30,000 below his previous advance, and he immediately declined. Helen Brann wrote Lawrence on the first day of September, turning down the Delacorte offer. Sam was severing his own connection with
Dell, forming a new imprint (Dutton/Seymour Lawrence) with E. P. Dutton & Co. Lawrence made an identical offer for Brautigan's book on behalf of his new publishing house, which Richard also turned down flat.

This was a depressing turn of events. Publishers vote with their wallets. Having his last advance reduced by two-thirds was not a vote of confidence. Richard took it in stride, searching for fun at the Eagles with Greg, Scoop, Brad, and the usual suspects. One weekend Brautigan and Keeler sat drinking the night away. A band in the dance hall above cranked out two-steps, and elderly lodge members escorted their white-haired wives up the stairs to trip the light fantastic. The more they drank, the better these old ladies started looking to Richard and Greg. “Boy, wouldn't you like that?” they remarked. “Yeah, get a load of that one.”

“I've got an idea,” Brautigan said. “Why don't we just go into the women's room and hang our tongues over the toilet paper roll?”

The bartender overheard this remark. The next day, when Richard and Greg came into the Eagles for some hair of the dog, a sign had been posted. It stated that the management would now charge a patron twenty-five cents every time he used a swear word. Brautigan promptly marched up to the bar and dropped a sawbuck into the collection jar. “I'll buy a few,” he said. “Give me ten bucks' worth.”

Summertime meant frequent picnics, barbecues, and parties in Montana. At a gathering in the Bozeman home of MSU art professor Fran Noel, Richard was accosted by an obnoxious fan. “Are you really Brautigan,” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Are you really him?”

“Do you want to see my ID?” Richard asked, turning around and dropping his pants to moon the persistent stranger.

Mooning became a favorite gesture of Brautigan's. When Greg Keeler drove with him to the airport on his final departure from Montana a year later, Richard handed Greg a snapshot of him baring his ass for the camera. “Something to remember me by,” he said.

Not all nervous strangers got the same treatment as the pushy fan at Fran Noel's. At a dinner party in the Livingston home of Dennis Noteboom, Brautigan stood listening to David Stein, son of author and state senator Ben Stein, play the piano. By Stein's own admission, he was “pretty good at noodling out a tune.” Richard sat down beside him on the piano bench, saying he thought his playing was “very good.”

Stein replied that it made him nervous to perform next to “a famous person.”

“Don't worry,” Brautigan assured him, “famous people are just like everyone else.”

Toward the end of summer, the Bozeman poets staged another group reading at Chico Hot Springs. Greg Keeler remained in the lineup. Once again he invited Richard to participate. This time around, Brautigan agreed. At the reading, Richard got into a snit when he saw Greg sitting with Paul Ferlazzo, his department head. “I guess you know which side your bread's buttered on,” he jibed. After Brautigan read, the place erupted into an enthusiastic ovation.

Keeler's reading drew only “a polite scattering of applause.” Greg, just back from a summer in England, read a poem “about a British trash fish called a tench.” Brautigan leaned toward Keeler. “That was pretty pre-tench-ous,” he said. “You need a muse injection, big boy.”

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
was published in hardcover by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence on September 10, 1982. One of the 17,500 copies printed was hand delivered to Richard in Pine Creek by Dink Bruce at the personal request of the publisher. Sam Lawrence also sent along a quart of George Dickel sour mash and a short, hand-printed note: “You're the tops / You're the Eiffel Tower / You outshine General Eisenhower.” Finding no one home, Dink left a brief note of his own. The whiskey got delivered a couple days later.

Brautigan's reviews comprised his usual mixed bag of scornful denunciation and fawning praise. The detractors included the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
,
Publishers Weekly,
the
San Francisco Chronicle
(Richard told Greg Keeler that its reviewer “was a hatchet-person brought in from the outside”), and the
New York Times Book Review
. On the positive side,
Playboy
,
Booklist
, the
Oakland Tribune,
and the
Christian Science Monitor
all celebrated the novel.
So the Wind
almost always found favor with other writers. Rick DeMarinis, the only true novelist amid the honking gaggle of newspaper hacks, called Brautigan's book “a lyrical meditation told in a warm personal voice” in the
Chicago Tribune Book World.

Sam Lawrence wrote to Richard on the twenty-fourth, sending along two favorable reviews and the news that thirteen thousand copies had been shipped. “Which ain't bad in these recession times.” Brautigan was back in San Francisco at Japantown's Kyoto Inn. While he was away, another film crew from Pioneer stereo showed up in Montana. Finding Richard not at home, they sought out his sidekick, Greg Keeler, interviewing him about “how their products might function in the Montana wilderness.” Greg wrote a little humorous jingle and got paid $150 in cash.

Brautigan had gone down to San Francisco for business meetings with Joel Shawn, his attorney. The Bolinas property topped the list. Richard's primary asset, paid for in full, remained a potential income producer, either through a sale or rental. The place stood in a sorry state of disrepair. Brautigan lacked the capital required to get things back into shape. He and Shawn discussed the options open to him. Getting an estimate on repairs remained item number one. Paying for the work presented another problem. The lawyer suggested a “FannyMac” loan to cover expenses.

These discussions depressed Brautigan, each mundane detail a further reminder of his declining financial status. Debts kept piling up. Prospects for future income seemed few and far between. One bright spot came in an August letter forwarded to Shawn by Simon & Schuster from the Speakers Bureau at Stanford University, extending a “warm invitation for a winter visit to sunny California.” This meant a paycheck. Richard instructed Joel to turn the matter over to Lordly & Dame in Boston, his booking agent for the
Tokyo–Montana
tour.

Dick Dillof and Ed Dorn were also in Frisco at the same time. They had been invited to be part of a presentation with Tom Clark at the Intersection for the Arts. The performance space now was located at St. John's Methodist Church at 756 Union Street in North Beach, which had closed as a place of worship due to a lack of parishioners. Over the years, the Intersection had become a showcase for music, comedy, dance, theater, and the spoken word. Its current director was Jim Hartz, a poet and friend of Thomas Merton. He had studied with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and was a practicing Vajrayana Buddhist.

During the program, Hartz tried to engage Clark and Dorn in a discussion about “the Naropa Poetry Wars,” but they resisted, preferring to read their poems instead. When Dillof's turn came,
he read a story from his book
Hobo
about a runaway kid hopping a freight train. Dobro followed this by getting out his banjo and singing a railroad song. He was dressed for the occasion in his “rambling clothes”: soiled cowboy hat, colorful neckerchief, vest, and watch chain. Dick augmented his music with train sounds from a hidden tape recorder, acting surprised every time that lonesome whistle blew.