Jubilee Hitchhiker (201 page)

A couple days later, Richard phoned Don Carpenter in Mill Valley and arranged to meet him for lunch at the Sweet Water. Brautigan arrived in the middle of the afternoon and proceeded to drink five martinis “in like twenty minutes.” Don was newly sober, having given up booze a few months before. “Let's go,” Brautigan said before they'd ordered any food.

Richard and Don headed to the Mill Valley Market, where Brautigan bought a banana and
ate it. He'd brought along his long poem about the Los Angeles Olympics and wanted to get some duplicates made. Richard told Don he thought
Newsweek
was going to publish it. After a search, they couldn't find a Xerox place in Mill Valley that could get the work done fast enough. Brautigan decided to go into San Francisco to have his copies made.

Don walked him to the depot and sat with him on the bench outside while Richard waited for his city-bound bus. “I'm seeing our friendship dissolve right before my eyes,” Carpenter remembered, “because I don't drink no more, and he's stoned drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Yammering and babbling. When you first quit drinking, you go through a period where you don't like drinkers. They piss you off. So we were kind of cool.” When the San Francisco bus arrived, Don watched Richard weave on board. The doors hissed shut. It was the last Carpenter ever saw of Brautigan.

A day or so later, Richard mailed a copy of “The Full-Moon LA Olympics” to Jonathan Dolger in New York. “If it is very good,” he wrote his agent, “I would like to place it where it can be read. If it is a piece of shit, then that's the way it goes.” The poem has never been published.

Sometime in the middle of August, Richard decided at last to close down his office above Vesuvio. He asked David Fechheimer to assist with the move. The private detective arrived in North Beach and gave Brautigan a hand packing it all up in cartons. When the last lid was sealed, Brautigan surveyed the stacked boxes and announced, “This is the total career of an American writer.”

Richard and David loaded all the stuff into Fechheimer's car. David drove them to Army Street Mini-Storage, where they packed everything temporarily into unit A-32. Brautigan had also decided to terminate his connection with the warehousing facility as well. The many cartons stored there and those formerly in his office had to go somewhere else. The logical solution would have been to truck it all out to Bolinas. Brautigan had a different idea. He wanted his archive shipped someplace with no rent, where he knew it would be forever safe. Running into Keith Abbott at Enrico's in the middle of his moving project, Richard said, “This stuff is going into storage and it won't be found for years.”

Brautigan went to his favorite bar to enlist Ward Dunham's help. Ward had an old pal, a six-foot-three, 250-pound professional wrestler named Mike York, who fought under the sobriquet “The Alaskan.” Friends for thirty years, Ward and Mike had worked together as bounty hunters and occasionally still moonlighted in the debt collection racket. “The Alaskan” always dressed in black. When there was money to collect, they had a method that never failed. Ward arranged to meet their “client” at a bar. If he didn't pay up on the spot, Ward steered him back to the men's room, where a stall door swung slowly open to reveal Mike York hulking inside, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves. “The Alaskan” enjoyed amusing himself in other bizarre ways as well. When Enrico's was packed with customers, really hopping and the waiters distracted, York would saunter back into the busy kitchen and piss in the ice-making machine

Mike owned a tangerine-colored hot rod, a car customized into a truck. He loaded all Richard's boxes, stuffed with manuscripts, letters, contracts, Digger handouts, galley proofs, old receipts, canceled checks, passports, batches of photographs—his “total career,” into the back and drove it to Colorado. Where “The Alaskan” deposited Richard's archive remained a mystery.

It lay undiscovered for years until 1996, when Ted Latty, a prominent L.A. attorney and avid Brautigan collector, saw the trove advertised for sale on the Internet. Latty was in Colorado Springs on business. In mid-March, he drove his rental car several hundred miles to the old uranium mining
town of Nucla, northwest of Telluride near the Utah border. The place sat a mile above sea level, boasting a population of about five hundred.

Ted located the archive's current owner, who worked in the town's only grocery store. The guy took him next door to a boarded-up drinking establishment, where all the cartons sat stacked on the bar. Latty spent hours examining the stuff, carrying boxes one at a time out to the sidewalk, where he could look through their contents in the cold winter daylight. The attorney negotiated a price, driving away with the treasure stash, which found a permanent home in an unused office at his law firm.

Tony Dingman reflected on Brautigan's final move from Montana. “I never really believed that until he said ‘The place is up for sale.' All of a sudden he was bivouacked out at Bolinas, the last place in the world you'd think he'd hang out.” Dingman knew the jig was up. “When he moved out of that office, I knew something. The game was afoot.” For a time, Tony thought he might go out to Bolinas and stay with his old pal, but he worried about space when Richard decided to live on the main floor, “and he'd just need the whole house.” A film job came through and Dingman took it, solving the problem by default. “Then I just didn't see him much,” Tony said, “because he'd only come to town here and there and get drunk. I never went out there when I was working.”

Having Dingman around would have been good for Brautigan. He was running out of his longtime Bolinas friends. He'd temporarily been eighty-sixed from Smiley's for grabbing a guy by the balls and grope-walking him to the bar. “Mickey Cummings was a great big motherfucker,” Bill Brown recalled. Brautigan was drunk and wanted to fight, “trying to assume the role of a bruiser a little bit,” according to Brown. Richard got lucky when Cummings laughed the whole thing off.

Both Joanne Kyger and Bobby Louise Hawkins lost patience with Brautigan during his final summer, tired of his rudeness and drunken behavior. “Richard was starting to feel pretty stale to me,” Kyger said. “There was very little playfulness in him. It was like he'd used himself up.”

All sorts of stories circulated about Brautigan's presumed misdeeds. An anecdote about him picking up a young woman bartender at Smiley's became a tale of bondage that evolved into a lurid rumor concerning attempted murder. Magda Cregg claimed she'd heard Richard “made some chick give him head in front of the jukebox” in Smiley's. Unpleasant gossip proliferated. Don Carpenter recalled Kyger and Hawkins bad-mouthing Brautigan. “Those two old whores would sit down at Smiley's and insult Richard constantly. Talk about what a bastard he was.” Simone Ellis–Okamura remembered Bobby Louise Hawkins making a point of going around to people and telling them to stay away from Brautigan.

Amid the swirling scuttlebutt, Richard's inherent paranoia kicked into high gear. He'd had a misunderstanding with a man named Russ Trevira, a Vietnam vet who worked in the tree-trimming business. An old-timer in the Bolinas area, Trevira charged Richard $300 for taking down a dead tree on his property. Brautigan didn't have the funds to pay him, offering writing lessons instead or editing a manuscript Russ had written. Trevira demanded his money. “No, this is barter,” Richard insisted.

Their misunderstanding escalated into verbal threats. Brautigan already had Jim Sakata's gun in his house but sought additional firepower and borrowed a 9 mm automatic from Bob Junsch. “My wife didn't want it in the house,” Junsch said.

Klyde Young told of an episode involving gunplay one time when Bob Junsch visited Richard's
house in Bolinas. “They both had pistols,” Young reported, “and got drunk and fired them a few times in that same room where he killed himself.” A couple days later, Andy Cole limped in from the kitchen and saw the bullet holes. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “what's all this?”

Brautigan just laughed. “Oh, sometimes it gets kind of exciting around here,” he replied with a suppressed giggle.

Richard and Andy often had nostalgic discussions about the old days in North Beach. Brautigan kept referring to the halcyon days of the past. He pronounced it “hal-i-con.” After several repeats, Cole said, “Richard, don't take offense. We're old friends. I've known you for twenty-five years. However, there's a certain word you've mispronounced constantly in the last three days, and I want to call it to your attention.”

Before Andy got any further, Richard grew angry. “Did I misuse the word?” he demanded.

“No.”

“Was there anything in the context that indicated I didn't understand how the words were used?”

“No.”

“Is there any possible way that anyone could have interpreted this word any other way than I meant it?”

“No.”

“Well,” Brautigan had worked himself into full imperial mode. “Then who are you to tell me about it?”

Soon after their indoor shooting spree, Junsch asked Richard to return his 9 mm. Bob phoned Brautigan one day and said, “I don't think you need that thing. I wouldn't mind getting it back.” Richard told him to come and get it. Around this time, Brautigan started packing Jim Sakata's .44 Mag wherever he went, even on trips into the city.

Enrico Banducci remembered one night about 2:00 am when Richard carried the gun into his restaurant. “He was drunk,” Enrico recalled, “and he scared the shit out of me. He pulled this fucking cannon out of his pocket and said, ‘I'll put this to my head and I'll blow my head off. Don't you want to see?'”

“Don't do that,” Banducci said, pushing the revolver aside. Enrico remembered exactly where they'd been sitting. “He had a big gun and he had it at his head, about a month or so before the accident.”

Sometime around the middle of August, Brautigan finally had a telephone installed in his Bolinas house. He'd become obsessed with the notion that writing screenplays might provide the yellow brick road to financial salvation. Knowing everyone in the movie business spent his life glued to a phone, Richard figured he'd better have one if he wanted to be a player.

Brautigan called Brad Donovan in Bozeman, asking if he wanted to come down to California and work on the
Trout Fishing
screenplay. Brad's son, Joe, had just been born, so he said no. “I'll see you up here in the fall.”

Next Richard called Gatz Hjortsberg, who had returned to Montana from London in mid-July. His troubled marriage to Sharon collapsed within days of his return, and he moved to a three-room log cabin without running water on a hill overlooking the Boulder River in Sweet Grass County. Working on two contracted screenplays at the same time, Hjortsberg made sure he had a phone
line hooked up before his plumbing was connected to the new well. When Brautigan called, all previous difficulties dissolved in the onrush of conversation.

Richard wanted to collaborate with Gatz on a screenplay. The idea he pitched was about an average midwestern housewife and mother, married to the local sheriff and normal in every way except she happened to be a serial killer. Gatz didn't know it at the time, but it was a retelling of “Cliché” and “The Killer,” a notion Brautigan had been toying with for most of the year. Film ideas either hold a kernel of something that will work or they are duds. This one caught Hjortsberg's fancy, and he agreed to join the team. Over the course of several phone calls, the two men sketched out an outline for the opening scenes. Gatz suggested a new title, “Skeletons in the Closet,” which Richard liked. It seemed they were on to something. And then the phone calls stopped forever.

During this period, Klyde Young became Brautigan's most dependable designated driver. One of the tasks Richard assigned Klyde was hauling away his garbage. Brautigan became paranoid about his trash. He didn't want people poking through it for souvenirs as someone had done to Bob Dylan, but he wouldn't pay for professional rubbish removal either. Security and economy combined in the same neurosis. After removing anything from the garbage with his name on it, scraps and letters that might identify him, Richard had Klyde take the trash away in the dead of night and dispose of the bags in dumpsters behind supermarkets and fast-food joints on the other side of the hill.

Young often went to Bolinas on a Saturday or Sunday and spent the day with Richard, laughing, drinking, and telling stories. They'd always have dinner together. Klyde thought Brautigan's ironic tales were very funny. At one point Young said, “Richard, there's enough material here to put into a book,” indicating that he'd lose the energy “if you keep telling stories about yourself like this.”

Brautigan's voice grew deep and decisive. “Not in my lifetime,” he said forcefully. “Not while I'm alive.”

Klyde took this to mean “that he at least considered the possibility that he might not be alive that much longer. Otherwise, he wouldn't be divulging these things.”

Richard seemed preoccupied with death during his last weeks. A large dead sea lion had washed up on the Bolinas beach. The rotting corpse stank, keeping sunbathers at bay. Brautigan strolled down the path from his house almost every day and stared for hours into the seal's deliquescent eyes, watching them decay into vacant sockets. He took long solitary walks along the beach toward Duxbury Reef. On one of these lonely excursions, Richard came across the bleached rib of a long-dead whale. Hoisting it over his shoulder, he staggered back toward town.

Bill Brown spotted Brautigan coming up the path to his house “with that whale rib on his back.” To Brown, “he looked like a comical crucifixion, carrying a cross to Gethsemane.”