Jubilee Hitchhiker (198 page)

During his last week in Amsterdam, Richard climbed from his sickbed and returned to work. He'd labored hard all his life. Ever since picking beans as a kid in the fields outside Eugene, Brautigan never stopped believing hard work would see him through. Even as the curtains of doom drew darkly about him, he peered into the shadows for a gleam of hope.
Avenue
magazine, one of the biggest publications in the Netherlands, had reprinted sections from
Tokyo–Montana
in three issues the previous year. Richard made an appointment with an editor at
Avenue
. The magazine agreed to publish the German model article later in the year.

All his European business concluded, Brautigan departed for Japan, flying KAL on the eighth of February. He left no record of his long, arduous journey, no notebook sniveling about jet lag and lengthy layovers. Richard had passed beyond such petty complaints. He looked deep into the well of nothingness, and mere trials of the flesh no longer seemed so important. Teetering with empty pockets at the edge of the abyss, Brautigan acted as if nothing had changed.

Richard checked back into the Keio Plaza as always. Money he expected to be wired to the hotel had not arrived. Unable to afford a room, he called Takako Shiina, who had first arranged his reduced rate back in 1976. She agreed to pay for Brautigan's lodging, considering it a loan. Takako believed in her soul brother's talent and had not the slightest doubt that he would pay her back. As a measure of her trust, Shiina borrowed the money needed to cover Brautigan's Keio Plaza bills.

Richard did not rent a typewriter during his last stay in Tokyo, an economy move equivalent to skipping breakfast. He wrote all his letters by hand. Recovering from jet lag, Brautigan suffered a weary depression. His first creative efforts were several bleak poems written on Keio Plaza stationery. The day after his arrival, Richard penned “Reflections,” nearly as brief as a haiku, in which he speculated about “all the shit” that would be written about him after his death.

Two days later, Brautigan wrote several drafts of “Death Growth,” a grim meditation on mortality revealing the bleak nihilism of his innermost thoughts:

Richard followed this stark lyric with another somber poem called “Death My Answering Service” and worked his way through four drafts of “Hopeless Candles.” (“The light of hopeless
candles / illuminate the vocabulary of dying roots / under freshly-burned trees.”) Brautigan had come to the end of a long road stretching back to the playfulness of “Xerox Candy Bar.” A poet delves deep inside for inspiration, and the Toonerville Trolley energy infusing much of Richard's early poetry gave way to a long mournful midnight dirge. Brautigan rode on the death train now.

Only writing new fiction provided solace from his morbid thoughts. Working in a notebook, Richard sketched out a piece about his friend, painter Russell Chatham, incorporating off-kilter thoughts on Rembrandt's
The Night Watch
. A few pages later, he began “The Same Story Twice,” an odd sequel to
Dreaming of Babylon
narrated by C. Card's son. “My chief character flaws have been alcoholism, insomnia and eternal (illegible) desire.” After five short pages, Brautigan ran out of steam and abandoned the story.

In the same notebook, Richard recycled a line about Amsterdam having the best light in the world for looking at diamonds. He liked the image, having used it first a couple times in “Wear Out and Die,” a screenplay treatment he began in the Owl Hotel but never finished, giving up after only four pages. Brautigan got less done this time around, quitting after the next sentence, “Diamonds to me are like very cold flowers that only grow in winter.”

Shortly after Richard's arrival in Tokyo, something odd provided a momentary distraction from darkness. Two weeks before Brautigan checked into the Keio Plaza, Alcatrazz, an American heavy metal band founded the previous year, gave a concert in Nagoya. The lead guitar player was twenty-year-old Swedish virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen. Only moderately successful in the States, Alcatrazz gained an enormous following in Japan. For reasons forever unexplained, Richard received two fan letters from young Japanese women written to Malmsteen. Both were in English. One was dated the day after the Nagoya performance. The other, composed on Keio Plaza stationery, suggested the impassioned fan, who'd spent the night with Yngwie in Nagoya, wrote it in the hotel lobby, believing the rock star was a guest.

The rocker never got the letters. The hotel manager gave the impassioned correspondence to Richard as a curiosity after Malmsteen's departure. Brautigan was a connoisseur of such cultural detritus, saving everything from an uncashed 10¢ check from Pacific Bell to a poster advertising a Denver foosball tournament. Brautigan had never heard of Yngwie Malmsteen but held onto the imploring, undelivered fan notes for the rest of his life.

Always a creature of careful habits, Richard resumed his familiar life in Tokyo after sleeping off his jet lag. Mornings were spent writing in his room. In the afternoons, Brautigan explored the city's obscure back streets. Nighttime after dinner meant drinking and literary conversation at The Cradle. Knowing Richard's financial situation, Takako picked up his bar tab as well as his hotel bill.

To increase his nearly nonexistent income, Brautigan phoned the USIS office at the American Embassy soon after his arrival, informing them of his return to Japan. A letter from the assistant program development officer arrived at the Keio Plaza before the end of February. Both Nagoya and Fukuoka had expressed interest in having Richard present programs. Nagoya was looking at late March, while Fukuoka preferred late May. In both instances, the USIS offered to pay all transportation costs, plus a $117 per diem and a $100 honorarium for each program.

Earning money on his mind, Brautigan turned his creative attention to new screenplay ideas. “Cliché,” intended as “an imitation B-movie,” was inspired by the mediocrity of the 1950s. Working on loose sheets of Keio Plaza stationery, Richard envisioned “a horror-murder comedy that could be cheaply made like ‘Trailer,'” with a “very strong role for a woman and a good solid role for a
man to play opposite her.” At the same time, Richard sketched out another screenplay notion on his hotel writing paper. He called this one “The Killer.” Brautigan described his lead character, Barbara Frederick, “a sort of attractive, very worried looking woman in her early thirties,” pushing a supermarket shopping cart and wondering if she should kill a total stranger, a Chinese woman in the next aisle. “Cliché” and “The Killer” were likely variations of the same idea.

Brautigan always found unexpected objects of interest on his long walks through remote Tokyo neighborhoods. When he first came to Japan, Richard was fascinated by the new: pachinko parlors, acres of neon, plastic food displays in restaurant windows. By his seventh trip, he'd come to appreciate the older aspects of the city. He wandered the back lanes looking at old handmade wooden shop signs. Brautigan recorded them in a Japanese notebook, filling several pages with annotated drawings. Many of the signs bore carved images of the products sold in the shop (red peppers, fans, knives) or of symbols representing the store's name (crane, tiger, temple). Other weathered signboards bore only old painted
kanji
characters. Brautigan had someone translate these unfamiliar ideograms (sake, vinegar, wasabi).

Early in March, the Tokyo weather turned wet and nasty. Richard caught a bad cold tramping about the narrow cobbled lanes in search of interesting shop signs. His phlegm-filled head felt like a swamp.
Washington Review
published the two Brautigan pieces brought to them by Toby Thompson in its February/March issue. Toby mailed Richard a copy. Brautigan liked the layout, looking the magazine over in his hotel room. He had no idea this was the last time he would ever see his work published in English.

One thing troubled Brautigan. He'd asked Thompson to make sure the publication assigned the copyright for the material in his name. This had not been done. Richard wrote back to Toby at the end of the first week in March. “No big deal,” he said in his letter, “but please take care of it.” It was a far bigger deal for Brautigan than he let on. As much as he needed the money, Richard decided not to cash the
Washington Review
check until he cleared up the copyright problem.

The details of Brautigan's last three months in Japan, like much of his time in Europe, remain obscured. He wrote very few letters and only a handful of short stories. In the past, these provided an unintended journal of his life. Without “specific information,” Richard's day-to-day movements were lost. Like most lives, Brautigan's remained primarily one of habit, each new day an echo of the past. Richard followed his usual routine, repeating yesterday again and again, another life measured out in coffee spoons.

Early in April, Brautigan received a letter from Jonathan Dolger. Richard had been feeling out of touch, not knowing his last letter to his agent had been misdirected to Jakarta, Indonesia. He responded in the middle of the month with a cramped handwritten six-page reply, one of the longest letters he ever wrote. Along with discussing current publishing strategies and his screenwriting ideas, Richard launched into an extended lament about his current status in the publishing world. “My last royalty statement from Dell for A Confederate General from Big Sur showed that it did not sell a single copy in the previous 6-month royalty period.”

Brautigan expressed concern that “at this point in my ‘career' I've been pretty much written off.” He quoted from Chénetier's book that he'd been “systematically refused recognition as a major novelist.” When they spoke on the phone in January, Dolger repeated his conviction that
An Unfortunate Woman
was not the right book for Brautigan to publish next, suggesting another omnibus edition of his earlier work. Richard agreed with him, even though he'd fired Helen Brann
for expressing the same opinion. Brautigan liked the omnibus notion but didn't think he had “enough coin in the marketplace to pull it off,” suggesting instead, “I want to publish a hard, lean piece of machinery.”

Unlike most of his terse, humorous correspondence, Richard's lengthy letter to his agent became curiously confessional. This most private and guarded of individuals opened up his innermost thoughts and feelings as honestly as a man reclining on a therapist's couch. “Book sales are not paying the rent,” he wrote. “It's sort of sad to publish a book that is overpriced and looks like a piece of shit and is doomed from the beginning. [. . .] The publication of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away was a fucking nightmare.” Brautigan called himself “a youthful 49” and concluded on an optimistic note. “Anyway, there are eight months left in this year, and I want to take good writing advantage of them.”

Richard expressed his doubts to Jonathan Dolger about “The Complete Absence of Twilight,” saying it had a major flaw. Brautigan felt the ending was much more interesting than the beginning or the middle, claiming this was why he had not sent his agent more material. Richard was not being completely candid about what he insisted on calling a book. The eleven pages he'd mailed to Dolger from Amsterdam were not an excerpt. They were all he'd written and all he would ever write.

After a period of intense work in Amsterdam in January, when Brautigan finished “Trailer” and wrote a number of new stories (including “Twilight”), aside from recording observations in his notebooks, Richard did very little new writing during February and March in Tokyo. That all changed by the end of April. On the twenty-third, he wrote seven new poems. The twenty-ninth was Emperor Hirohito's birthday, a national holiday in Japan. Thinking the imperial birthday fell on April 30, Richard began a long story with the incorrect date. “Added Days” had nothing to do with Hirohito or the holiday celebrating his birth. It concerned a distant vague memory of whiteness from Brautigan's childhood.

After several pages, the narrator had a breakthrough, remembering a white two-story wooden apartment building in Salem, Oregon, on a summer afternoon in 1944. Perhaps unconsciously, Brautigan repeated an image from
Trout Fishing in America
. In the third chapter of his first novel (“Knock on Wood [Part Two]”), Richard had described seeing a waterfall in Portland as a child. Wanting to catch a trout, he rigged up a safety pin on a length of string, with bread balls as bait, setting off toward a mirage on his first angling adventure. “The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.” Near the end of his life, Brautigan had come full circle, recycling the poignant images of his youth.

A few days later, Richard watched a man vacuuming crumbs fallen from a large gingerbread house set up in the Keio Plaza lobby. The cottage made of cake was big enough for children to play inside. Its exterior walls were covered with cookies. Earlier in the week, Brautigan observed two Japanese women in kimonos posing for photographs in front of the gingerbread house. “They gave the word exotic a new definition.” Richard put it all into a short story he called “The Ad.”

Despite declarations to his Montana friends that he wanted to marry Masako and father a passel of kids, Brautigan saw much less of her this time than on his previous two trips to Tokyo. Kano had become involved with another man. Since she'd last seen Richard, an attractive French computer engineer had come to work at Motorola, and Masako spent more and more time with him. Kano did not feel “truly in love” with Brautigan anymore. Too much time had passed. No
longer the innocent schoolgirl Richard had seduced four years earlier, Masako now had a successful career in a world where Brautigan would forever be a stranger.