Jubilee Hitchhiker (2 page)

All his work went to a professional typist who corrected any orthographic oversights. The idea was to get it all down on paper as fast as possible, straight from the unconscious to the page, first word—best word, a notion Brautigan acquired in San Francisco's North Beach during the early “Renaissance” days of the Beat movement. Breakneck first drafts proved an apt counterpoint to his pensive notebook ruminations.

Six typed transcriptions from earlier handwritten drafts were stacked neatly elsewhere in the room, untouched by Brautigan's blood. These included “The Complete Absence of Twilight” (a brief, haunting piece of fiction, which Brautigan optimistically referred to as a “book” in a letter sent to his agent, Jonathan Dolger, from Tokyo the previous April; three short stories (“Mussels,” “The Habitue,” and “Sandwalker”); a six-page extract from “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo,” compressing the manuscript into twin enumerated lists of monologue; and a finished version of “Russell Chatham: Portrait of an Artist in his Time,” which had gone through three previous incarnations in the notebooks.

Russell Chatham had lived in downtown Bolinas in the 1960s. The painter rented an apartment and a separate studio upstairs in the old H. Hoirut property, a complex of late-nineteenth-century buildings on Wharf Road. At the time the first floor was the home of a hamburger joint called Scowley's. Chatham and Brautigan did not know one another back then. The impoverished poet lived in San Francisco and would not buy the house on Terrace Avenue until 1972. The painter, yet to sell a single canvas, settled in Bolinas, attracted by the low rents.

For years, the simple, cheap life lured numbers of artists and bohemians north from the city. During Chatham's residency, Bolinas was also home to poets Robert Creeley and Tom Clark (then poetry editor of the
Paris Review
); painter Arthur Okamura; a movie-making outfit called Dome Film Productions; writers Thomas McGuane and William Hjortsberg (both unpublished at the time; Chatham later referred to them as “two guys like me who didn't have jobs”); and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, who owned a large home on the beach at the far end of Brighton Avenue, once a popular seaside teahouse called The Ship's Lantern.

Bolinas, California, had hardly changed in over a hundred years. Local citizens tore down the highway signs marking a turnoff from Route 1 faster than the California state road crews replaced them. At the time of Brautigan's death, the old blacksmith shop still functioned as an auto repair garage. Smiley's Schooner Saloon, built in the 1850s, had operated as a tavern almost all of that
time under various names. Across the street, a false-fronted grocery had been slicing cold meat and cheese at the same location since 1863. It was the town Richard Brautigan called “a hippie Brigadoon.”

Set above the street, the three-story house at 6 Terrace Avenue, a dark, brown-shingled Arts and Crafts movement building made of locally milled redwood around 1885, was part of the Grande Vista Tract, Marin County's first subdivision. Screened by several tall redwood trees and a growth of Scotch broom nearly two stories high that blocked a potentially fine view of the ocean, the place remained perpetually in shadow. Overgrown with ivy, the garage resembled a small hill more than a building. Richard refused to have any of it cut, preferring the illusion of privacy provided by the dense foliage.

The house was gloomy inside as well. Raw ceiling beams and dark redwood walls had been unaltered since drying bouquets hung from the rafters when the place had been the summer home of Mary Elizabeth Parsons, who wrote the influential guidebook
The Wildflowers of California: Their Names, Haunts and Habits
(first published in 1897). Brautigan's poet/playwright friend Michael McClure remembered Parsons's “jewel-like descriptions of California wildflowers” as “among the best prose-poetry of the end of the nineteenth century.”

On September 16, 1984, the musky smell of congealing blood lingered in the enclosed air, not the sweetness of dried flowers. The loud radio echoing from the kitchen drowned an insistent buzz of gathering flies. As it grew dark, the automatic timer controlling the electric lights switched on. A little later, the phone rang. After four rings, the answering machine picked up and the tape of Richard's voice sounded bland and noncommittal: “This is the recorded voice of Richard Brautigan. He's not in right now. Leave a message when you hear the beep and I may return your call.” But there was no beep, only a dull click. Richard had set the machine on “answer only,” making it impossible to leave a message.

“Hello, Richard . . . ? Are you there . . . ? It's me.”

No answer, just the buzz of disconnection. The caller was painter Marcia Clay, an old friend from San Francisco who had reunited with Brautigan only two days earlier after a four-year estrangement. She'd phoned an hour before midnight the previous night. He said he'd call right back but never did. Marcia waited ten minutes and phoned back, getting Richard's answering machine message. Alone on a hot night in the city, she made a third attempt to reach him, hearing only the noncommittal message.

For the next few days, the old house remained a noisy tomb. No one came around to visit. Brautigan had alienated himself from most of his poet friends in Bolinas and had recently been eighty-sixed from Smiley's for his unpleasant, erratic behavior. Occasionally, the phone rang. Although she wrote in her diary that she didn't “have the energy or interest to play cat and mouse with him,” Marcia Clay kept trying to reach Richard. So did Curt Gentry, Don Carpenter, Andy Cole, and Tony Dingman, writing and drinking buddies from the old days in North Beach.

Montana poet Greg Keeler tried to leave a message. Ditto journalist Toby Thompson, calling from Cabin John, Maryland. Richard's attorney in Livingston phoned three times the following week. Jonathan Dolger, his New York literary agent, made several calls. He had good news regarding the possible sale of the film rights to
Dreaming of Babylon
to Warner Brothers. They all got the answering machine with its disconcerting click.

At some point early in October, one of the neighbors came over, annoyed by the blasting radio. Because the stairs to the upper deck had rotted and been removed, whoever it was knocked on the door of the true first floor, a nearly empty spare bedroom and storage area. No answer. Brautigan had departed on one of his lengthy journeys without having the decency to turn off the damned radio. Wanting to silence the round-the-clock radio playing, the irate neighbor found the central power breaker by the meter and switched off all the electricity to the house.

Upstairs, all was quiet now, except for the metallic drone of the flies. There were many, many flies, a nightmare population of blowflies, houseflies, bluetails, and greenbottles swarming everywhere in the melancholy twilight of the shaded main room. They clustered densely about Brautigan's corpse. Thickening blood and the enormous head wound provided powerful attractions for these rapacious insects. The inexorable process of decay began the moment his body hit the floor a couple weeks before.

With the power switched off, the automatic timer failed to trigger the lights that night and the house remained shrouded in darkness. The Zenos next door thought nothing of it. Richard was always coming and going mysteriously. He had his own peculiar reasons for the way he did things. He had mentioned that he might leave for a hunting trip to Montana in early October. Maybe he decided not to leave the light-timer on. When the phone in Brautigan's office/bedroom rang, the answering machine, running now on internal batteries, continued to pick up and deliver the same noncommittal message. It was a perfect vanishing act. The dead poet had managed to completely disappear.

The long, hot California fall days merged into weeks. Heat accelerated the process of decomposition and the eager swarming flies, finding easy access through the massive cranial damage, deposited thousands of their eggs inside Brautigan's body. When they hatched, the cadaver teemed with maggots, the rice-sized larvae writhing in his decaying flesh. At the same time, the batteries in the answering machine began wearing down and the recorded message grew distorted, the words slurred, like a man underwater. Even this final echo of the poet's voice began to die.

If no one in Bolinas seemed to care that Richard Brautigan had disappeared (either they were no longer talking to him and just didn't give a damn or else he had told them he was leaving on an extended journey), others among his closest friends began to grow concerned. At one point, Klyde Young, a housepainter and friend of Brautigan's who had done odd jobs for the writer off and on for the past dozen years, ran into Jim Zeno in Stinson Beach. Young was alarmed to hear that no one had been to Richard's house in more than two weeks.

Soon after, Young talked with Tony Dingman, saying if he got authorization from Ianthe he would get into the house, break a small window, and check things out. Dingman had also been worried. The last time he spoke with Richard on the phone, the day before he died, Brautigan said he'd swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night but that they'd had no effect. Knowing his buddy once made a similar halfhearted suicide attempt after the breakup of his second marriage, Dingman didn't take this latest pill episode too seriously. But weeks without any word caused concern, and Dingman had several conversations with Richard Breen, another Brautigan crony. They both hoped Richard had gone back to Amsterdam with a Dutch critic who had visited California earlier that summer.

This didn't seem right to Klyde Young. He drove to Bolinas and wandered outside the gloomy house on Terrace Avenue. Nothing looked amiss. No mail had accumulated. Klyde figured if a
body was inside he would smell it. There was no odor. The front porch steps were gone, yet, for inexplicable reasons, he couldn't bring himself to attempt the interior entryway stairs. Young looked through the windows. The blinds were drawn all the way around. He couldn't see a thing. No one remembered Brautigan being in town lately. Klyde Young assumed that he had taken off for the start of bird season in Montana, and headed back to Tiburon. Doubts remained, but he didn't want to take any drastic action on his own. How would he explain it to Richard when he returned?

On October 4, Jonathan Dolger sent a Mailgram to Brautigan's address in Bolinas reading: “Have been unable to reach you these past three weeks. Stop. Please call to discuss two new book and movie offers.” This was exactly the sort of good news Richard had been waiting for. Receiving the message might not have saved his life but almost certainly would have prolonged it.

Up in Montana, things felt very bad. Where was Richard? He had missed the opening of the upland bird season and wasn't answering his calls. Becky Fonda felt particularly troubled by the garbled message on Brautigan's machine at the Bolinas number. Even when drunk, Richard didn't sound like that. She made several calls and discovered no one, including his agent, had heard from him in over a month. Joseph Swindlehurst, Brautigan's Montana lawyer who handled his accounts in Livingston, told her that Richard hadn't written or cashed a single check in all that time. Joe said mail was being returned unclaimed. He had called Dick Hodge and Joel Shawn, the author's former and current California attorneys, asking them to look into the matter. Something seemed terribly wrong.

Becky and her husband, actor Peter Fonda, talked things over and determined to find out what was going on. On October 23, 1984, they phoned San Francisco private investigator David Fechheimer, protégé of the legendary Hal Lipset and a pal of Brautigan's since the early sixties. The detective had also been worried about his friend. He told Becky Fonda that he'd been over to the Bolinas house before leaving on a business trip about three weeks earlier. He'd found the lights on and the radio playing within. The door downstairs was locked. Fechheimer made no attempt to force an entry after knocking and not getting any answer.

He didn't tell Becky he suspected there might have been a booby trap waiting inside. After twenty years in his peculiar business, Fechheimer figured it would be unwise to go into Richard's empty house in Bolinas under those circumstances without thinking about “Take this, you cocksucker!” Another thing he didn't tell Becky was that he knew the moment she informed him Brautigan hadn't written any checks in over a month that his friend was dead.

David Fechheimer assured the Fondas he would get to the bottom of things. He told them he'd go out to Bolinas the next day. It had been on his mind to have another look at Richard's house later that week. Fechheimer asked Tony Dingman if he wanted to come along. Dingman declined, fearing it might turn out to be a “horror show,” but suggested an acquaintance named Dwain Cox, a big guy who'd once been photographed for
People
magazine hauling Brautigan around San Francisco in a rickshaw. Dwain knew some people in Bolinas. Maybe he could get them to investigate.

Later the same day, twenty-four-year-old Ianthe Swensen called Dingman from her home in Santa Rosa. She had not spoken with her father since the previous June, but people had recently asked about him, and now she wanted to know, “Where's my daddy?” Dingman immediately phoned Curt Gentry and told him about Fechheimer's request. Having coauthored the best seller
Helter Skelter
with Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson, Gentry was well acquainted with the appalling grotesqueries hidden behind locked doors.

The writer had an old friend, a commercial fisherman named Bob Junsch, who lived in Stinson Beach. Curt had known him since the early days when they both worked as bartenders in San Francisco. Junsch also knew Brautigan, having accompanied him on his first adult trip to Montana. Gentry promised Tony Dingman he'd call out to Stinson right away. Bob was a stand-up guy, someone who could be counted on when the chips were down.