Jubilee Hitchhiker (199 page)

Kano spent time with Richard, but only on her own terms. When Tamio Kageyama, a former television scriptwriter and essayist, approached Brautigan about interviewing him for
Brutus
magazine, Richard called Masako for advice and help. He worried about what Akiyuki Nosaka might have said about him in his 1979 I-novel describing their drink-fueled train trip together. Brautigan feared Kageyama had read Nosaka's little book and asked Kano to translate it for him. She came to Richard's room at the Keio Plaza, remembering him dressed in jeans, “anxiously touching his mustache” as she read Nosaka's short novel to him in English. Masako toned down some of the nastier descriptions to spare Richard's feelings.

Nosaka called Brautigan “Q.J.” and invented most of the details and background information in his book. Richard relaxed. Nosaka's unflattering portrait was sufficiently fictionalized to disguise his identity, and Brautigan agreed to the interview with Kageyama. They met one night early in May at The Cradle. Tamio was fluent in English, having traveled to the States in 1968 as a hippie troubadour with his guitar. Kageyama ended up in Big Sur. He attended a folk concert featuring Joan Baez at Esalen, where Price Dunn duked it out with Michael Murphy.

Richard's Big Sur memories were also a quarter century in the past. He recalled camping and hitchhiking, eating abalone pried from the rocks along the beach at low tide, and fishing for trout in Limekiln Creek. In those days, the bohemian community had no concept of beatniks or hippies, paying scant attention to media terminology, Brautigan said. Kageyama's Big Sur trip in the sixties had been inspired by reading Brautigan. Tamio returned to Japan after wandering around America for a year and a half.

The men talked late into the night, emptying two bottles of bourbon. Brautigan described his hunting and fishing experiences. Kageyama talked about giving concerts when he played in a pop band before becoming a writer. They never saw each other again after going their separate ways from The Cradle. Richard returned to California soon afterward. Tamio went on to a distinguished career as an award-winning novelist and served for a time as a judge on the TV cooking series
Iron Chef
before dying in a suspicious 1998 house fire at the age of fifty.

All during Brautigan's final weeks in Tokyo, his financial woes provided a continual reminder of his diminishing literary reputation. None of his recent projects was selling in America, and despite his lifelong study of the movies, Richard found it difficult getting started on his new screenplays. Improving his income seemed increasingly remote. Takako Shiina paid his hotel tab. Brautigan's debt to her grew larger every day.

Richard's decision to leave Japan seemed abrupt. His cultural visa still had three months to run, and he was scheduled to appear in Fukuoka at the end of the month. The $100 honorarium provided little temptation when his daily bill at the Keio Plaza ran double that amount. Five days before his departure, Brautigan scrawled a quick note to Greg Keeler on hotel stationery, announcing the possibility of “pulling up stakes” and heading back to the States. “Alert the boys to wake up their livers,” he cautioned.

Richard phoned Masako at Motorola to say he was leaving. She was working in the computer room in her capacity as a systems analyst when his call came through. The place was noisy with the clatter of printers, and Kano moved away from her fellow workers so she could hear
“his mumbling long comments.” The other technicians looked on with disapproval. “Again that Richard,” their expressions declared.

Brautigan said an urgent matter had come up, and he had to fly immediately to San Francisco. He did not explain the nature of this emergency. Masako tried cajoling him into staying longer, suggesting she wanted to see him again and change her work hell into “his poetic cybernetic ecology to become mammal brothers and sisters,” their code for lovemaking. Masako heard Richard chuckle on the other end, but he turned down her invitation, saying if he saw her again he would not be able to leave. This was the last time Kano ever heard Brautigan's voice.

Before leaving, Brautigan went to see Takako Shiina at The Cradle. “In case something happens, should I write you an IOU?” he asked. Takako told him there was no need, nothing would happen. Besides, weren't they eternally brother and sister? After Richard's return to California, they never talked about money. Takako strongly felt that he worried about her borrowing the money to pay his bills. She knew Brautigan wanted to repay his debt to her as soon as he was able. “I think there would be no possibility that he committed suicide without returning the money to me,” Shiina wrote in a brief memoir after Richard's death. In spite of what Takako believed, he never paid her back before he died.

Brautigan flew back to San Francisco on the eleventh of March. He spent several days in the city, staying at the Kyoto Inn, where his discount rate provided affordable lodging. While in town, he got together with Tony Dingman and Richard Breen, his regular Enrico's drinking buddies. In a “rat-fuck” reversal, Dingman introduced his friends to Grasslands, a dingy Korean dive on Kearny Street near Jackson. According to Breen, it was a dangerous joint. “I wouldn't dare walk in there without Tony,” he recalled. The doors opened at 6:00 am and didn't exactly close at closing time “if you knew some people.”

Another regular described Grasslands as “the mother of all shitholes.” A Formica-topped bar highlighted the minimal decor; tables along the far wall, empty boxes and giant bags of rice stacked everywhere. Dingman's drink of choice was a Stolichnaya gimlet. “The last of the Barbary Coast,” Tony enthused about the establishment's seedy charms. The three men chatted with the Korean hostess and drank “about four or five vodka gimlets so that they would remember us.”

Dingman had entrée to Grasslands. Pretty soon, Brautigan did as well. One night Richard sat at the corner of the bar beside Breen, who was seated next to “this crazy Oriental fellow.” The stranger talked “a line of blood and guts bullshit” and took an “intense dislike” to Breen, pulling a knife and threatening him. “The bartender didn't give a shit,” he recalled. The guy wanted to cut Breen's throat.

Brautigan got up, walked over, and sat on the other side of the knife-wielding Asian, staring hard at him. “What the fuck are you looking at?” the menacing stranger growled. Richard didn't reply. He started making weird facial and hand gestures, “like one of those people who talk deaf language on television but behind a hit of acid. Everything was exaggerated.”

Brautigan freaked out the Korean. “Are you crazy?” the guy with the shiv demanded. “Are you nuts?” Richard continued his bizarre gesturing, “like arthritic karate.” Finally the tough guy had enough, folding his knife. “I'm getting the fuck out of here,” he said, and he split.

Richard returned to his seat. Picking up his brandy snifter, he swirled the amber liquid beneath his nose. “It always works,” Brautigan said with satisfaction. “It always works.”

For the next several days, Richard told anyone who would listen how he saved his friend's life at Grasslands. “Macho Brautigan and his weirdo apoplexy,” according to Richard Breen.

Brautigan stopped by Cho-Cho soon after he got back. Talking with Jim Sakata, Richard mentioned he was moving out to his empty house in Bolinas. He said he didn't have any firearms in the place and “just wanted one around.” Said he'd feel “more secure if he had a gun.” Sakata owned a big pistol he much admired, a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum on a custom Model 28 frame, made up specially for him by Lieutenant Bill Traynor, late a member of the SFPD's tactical squad. Jim's name was engraved on the butt. “This is big enough to scare anybody,” Sakata told Richard when he loaned him the revolver. “Just show it to somebody and they'll bug out.” In return, Brautigan gave Jim a brick. Sakata had no idea what it meant, but he placed it on the bar in the corner where Richard always sat. After Brautigan's death, the brick remained at his spot as a private memorial.

The house at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas had been unoccupied for almost four years. Brautigan had “just closed the door and walked away.” When Richard arrived back, the place was a mess. He got busy, cleaning out an area on the second floor where he could live and write. He had no one to help. It was “a hell-of-a-lot of work.” Eating downtown in the little town's limited selection of greasy spoon restaurants exceeded his meager budget. Brautigan's kitchen was still disorganized, but he knew it was time to start dining at home.

On a rain-soaked day early in June, he wrangled a ride to Mill Valley and returned with six big bags of groceries, cursing himself for forgetting to buy sugar. Richard spent the afternoon sweeping and mopping the floors. Afterward, he worked on his various writing projects. That night, finished with dinner, Brautigan cleaned his kitchen. He felt he had “so many things to do” and thought his home in Bolinas was “a good place to do them.”

Brutus
magazine published “Story of Brautigan and Big Sur,” Tamio Kageyama's article about Richard Brautigan, in its July 1 issue. It appeared only in Japanese. When Masako Kano read the magazine in Tokyo, she found it a “nice easy interview, recalling the times in their lives as a real young hippie from Japan and the young [American] writer.” Richard had asked her about the
Brutus
article in a letter written two weeks earlier. Kano enjoyed the piece very much and wished she had sent a translation to Brautigan in Bolinas. “It might have boosted his ego a bit.”

Richard had no telephone for most of the summer. When he needed to make a call, Brautigan went next door to the Zenos and used their phone. He did this sparingly, not wanting to become a pest. When Richard gave out the Zenos' number to a selected few he felt should have it, he was careful to ask that they not “spread it all over.” He began writing letters again. Having his IBM Selectric handy, Brautigan typed many of them. Just as often, he wrote by hand. There was no order to this process, just whatever struck his fancy. Either way, Richard always typed the recipient's name and address on the envelope first before starting the letter.

At the end of the first week in June, Brautigan wrote to Marian Hjortsberg. He'd written her an amiable one-line note from Tokyo three months earlier. Richard clearly wanted to make amends. His tone was chatty, mentioning he planned on returning to Montana “in the autumn.” In a PS, Brautigan asked Marian to give his address to Gatz “and tell him that I would like to get in touch with him.” Gatz still lived in London at the time, alone, starting work on a new screenplay, his brief second marriage already unraveling.

Soon after his return, Richard visited Simone Ellis, who had moved to Bolinas a year before and married the artist Arthur Okamura. Simone's father was ill, and she asked Brautigan to return
Teddy Head. Richard refused. Teddy Head belonged in Montana. “It's his home.” An argument ensued. Simone had seen a snapshot of the stuffed grizzly hanging on the exterior wall of Brautigan's barn. “You had him outside!” she raged. “If he's bleached, I'll kill you.” Worse, she threatened to sue him.

In spite of taxidermic disagreements, Richard and Simone resumed a platonic friendship. Brautigan now regarded screenwriting as the surest way out of his financial woes. The new Mrs. Okamura was an experienced filmmaker, and he asked if she'd like to collaborate on a script based on
Trout Fishing
. They met often at the house on Terrace Avenue, acting out sections of the book, searching for dramatic structure. Both got “high as kites.” Richard guzzled wine. Simone snorted coke, working late into the night almost every time. “Stay until dawn,” Brautigan pleaded.

Simone felt there had long been an attraction between them. She was married now, and Richard let her know she was safe with him. Stoned, they sat side by side on Brautigan's black Naugahyde couch. Richard gently sifted through her hair, one strand at a time. Not much work got done. On another night, Brautigan and Simone both wrote to Bob Gorsuch on the back of one of Arthur Okamura's Bank of America deposit slips. They asked him to carefully pack Teddy Head and ship it COD to the address printed on the other side. Richard set the deposit slip aside and did nothing more about it until a couple of weeks later. Near the end of June, he typed a letter to Gorsuch, instructing him to take the stuffed bear from the attic and follow the instructions on the handwritten note he enclosed.

Brautigan complained often to Simone about his life. He told her he had three deals pending but worried he couldn't do the work even if everything worked out according to plan. “I'm fucked if they come through,” he said. “I'm fucked if they don't come through. I'm going to kill myself.”

“Oh, Richard, don't be morbid,” Simone said.

Ianthe and her husband, Paul Swensen, had moved back to California and were living in Santa Rosa, about an hour's drive north of Bolinas. She phoned Brautigan at the Zenos' number on Father's Day, filling him in as best she could on everything that had happened in her life since she saw him last. Telephones provide a poor substitute for intimacy, so Ianthe made plans to come down to Bolinas for a visit.

Even as Brautigan's increasingly eccentric behavior began alienating him from his old poet pals in Bolinas, he forged closer ties with long-standing companions living across the lagoon in Stinson Beach. Kendrick Rand owned the Sand Dollar on Shoreline Highway, a restaurant built originally in 1921 from the amalgamation of three beached barges. Bob Junsch lived with his wife, Shallen, and baby son in a house with an ocean view in the hills above town. Andy Cole, another poet friend from the early North Beach days and Michaela Blake-Grand's boyfriend before she took up with Richard, had moved to Bolinas after many years in Stinson Beach. Brautigan visited them often. All three knew one another, Stinson Beach being a small, tightknit community. Richard never introduced them, keeping each in a tidy compartment. None ever realized the others were friends of Brautigan's until after his death.