Jubilee Hitchhiker (5 page)

Over in Marin County, Dr. Jim Smith's dental x-rays arrived from Montana. Dr. Laverine took the delivery and completed his odontological presentation. At five minutes after ten, Sgt. Tony Russo was on the phone, conducting his first interview of the day. He contacted James Sakata, proprietor of Cho-Cho, a restaurant on 1020 Kearny Street in North Beach. The .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver Richard Brautigan had used to end his life was registered to Mr. Sakata, and his name was engraved on the butt. He stated he had loaned the gun to Brautigan in March or April of 1984, around the time he returned from Japan. Brautigan told him that he didn't have any weapons in his Bolinas residence and “just wanted one around.”

Sakata told Sgt. Russo that he lost Richard Brautigan's telephone number and had last seen him in September, when they discussed a long poem Richard wrote about the Los Angeles Olympics. Asked about suicide, Sakata said Brautigan never talked about it in a personal way but they'd once had a discussion about other writers who had taken their own lives. He remembered the focus had been on Ernest Hemingway. Sakata got the impression that Brautigan was “fascinated with his own suicide.”

At quarter to three in the afternoon, Russo telephoned Becky Fonda at Indian Hill Ranch, her home in Paradise Valley, south of Livingston. Their conversation was brief. She told the sergeant she'd last spoken with Brautigan on the third of September, when he talked about coming up to Montana for the bird-hunting season. She tried calling him two weeks before but was unable to reach him. Brautigan's answering machine appeared not to be working. Alarmed by this, she contacted David Fechheimer, asking him to look for their friend. Mrs. Fonda mentioned Brautigan's fondness for guns, adding that he was an avid hunter and an excellent shot. Asked about the writer's death, she said that she would suspect suicide before foul play.

Sgt. Russo phoned Marcia Clay in San Francisco at 3:00 PM. It was his last call on this case for the day. There wasn't much to tell. Marcia Clay had seen Richard Brautigan only once in the past four years, when she encountered him somewhat accidentally at Enrico's Sidewalk Café on Friday, September 14, 1984. She described their meeting and a subsequent phone conversation, shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of the fifteenth. Clay said Brautigan wanted to read her a new piece of his writing and asked her to call back in five minutes. When she did, he didn't answer. After that, she tried calling several times but was unable to reach him. Marcia Clay said that during her last conversation with Richard he “seemed to be saying his goodbyes.”

Tuesday, October 30, 1984, was the final day Sgt. Russo spent interviewing friends of the late Richard Brautigan. He made only two calls, the first at “1440 hours” to William Brown, a novelist who operated a landscape gardening business from his home on Brighton Avenue in Bolinas. Bill Brown had known Brautigan since the fifties but had not seen him recently. Pressed for particulars, Brown said as far as he could remember he thought he might have encountered Brautigan in Bolinas four or five weeks ago, just before his death.

Bill Brown stated that Brautigan was given to intense depression, especially when drinking. He referred to Richard as “a heavy drinker,” adding that his personality “seemed to go downhill when he was drinking.” He'd been particularly depressed during the last few months. Money was possibly at the root of the problem. Brown also mentioned Brautigan's admiration for Ernest Hemingway, saying they had talked some about Hemingway's suicide, although the subject of Brautigan actually taking his own life had never come up.

At 3:00 PM, Sgt. Russo made his last call, to Andy Cole, who refused to give his address. Living at the time in Bolinas, Cole said that he first met Brautigan in San Francisco approximately twenty years before. In his opinion, the author appeared industrious recently and happy with his current work. His only problem was that “because Bolinas had a small-town atmosphere, he was not able to cut loose as he could in the big city.”

Cole rambled on to Sgt. Russo, relating a secondhand story of a recent unexpected and unpleasant meeting in San Francisco between Brautigan and his ex-wife Akiko. However, he got his dates badly jumbled, talking about both April and October. Cole said Brautigan told him he planned on
returning to Montana soon to sell his “ranch,” indicating that he was no longer interested in the place. When Cole didn't see him around, he assumed he had gone.

Andy Cole telephoned Richard Brautigan on Sunday, September 16, but only got the answering machine. He said he called three days in a row and became upset on the fourth because he knew that Richard had a beeper and could access his messages even when away from home. Confined to a wheelchair, Cole asked a friend to go over to the house on Terrace Avenue. He claimed his friend knocked on Brautigan's door and got no answer. Cole stated that Brautigan “never used drugs,” and “was not constantly drunk as some others portrayed him.”

That night, an impromptu wake for Richard Brautigan was held at Enrico's on Broadway in San Francisco. Established in 1959 by Enrico Banducci, a prominent figure in North Beach since the days when he took over the hungry i from its founder, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, the sidewalk café had been a watering hole for the city's literary scene from the moment it opened. In his newspaper column, Herb Caen compared the place to the Algonquin Round Table. When Ted Koppel, in town earlier in July to cover the Democratic National Convention for ABC News, asked in an interview, “What kind of place are you running?” Enrico replied, “It's where sables and sandals meet.” Brautigan had been hanging out there for two decades. Whenever he was in town, he came in every day.

No formal invitations were issued. By word of mouth, news of the event spread over the telephone, one old friend calling another. Curt Gentry was there along with Michael McClure, Don Carpenter, Tony Dingman, Donald Allen, Keith Abbott, David Fechheimer, Jeremy Larner, Judge Richard Hodge, and Peter Berg, one of the original Diggers. The artist Bruce Conner was in attendance, as were film directors Frances Ford Coppola and Phil Kaufman. Many of the more colorful members on the local scene were present, including restaurateur Magnolia Thunderpussy and Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE, the prostitutes' union. Marcia Clay wandered through, feeling that, had such an assembly occurred while Richard was still alive, she “would have been at his side, a closest companion, a mate to his soul as we were once.”

The mood was very low-key. Enrico Banducci found it “grim.” When someone asked Don Allen, who had first published
Trout Fishing in America
in the sixties, if he expected a suicide, Allen replied, “I wasn't surprised.” Many of Brautigan's friends agreed. While Enrico thought Richard's death might have been a drunken accident (“he played Russian roulette with life”), Keith Abbott felt Brautigan “planned his suicide.” David Fechheimer was of a like mind. “I think he'd decided to do it [at least a year before],” the detective said. “He was more at peace during the summer, like he'd passed a hurdle.”

Everybody sat around, quietly talking, smoking, drinking to Brautigan. Glasses of Calvados, Richard's favorite drink, were raised. He used to call it “jet fuel.” Enrico stocked this exotic French apple brandy especially for him. No one else ever ordered it, and when what was left behind the bar was gone, Banducci knew he would not carry it anymore.

Enrico told a story about the time Brautigan poured half a bottle of Calvados into his boot. “I said, ‘What are you doing? Killing the bugs in your boot?' And he says, ‘No, I'm going to drink it.' I said, ‘Oh, okay, go ahead.' And he took the boot and drank it. It was running down his face.” Every so often, someone else tried to tell another funny story about Brautigan, but nobody laughed. It was grim.

Jimmy Sakata did not attend the wake at Enrico's. He worried about how Brautigan's daughter and friends might react to his presence. Curt Gentry observed that Jim “was very concerned at how
[Ianthe] might feel.” After the gathering dwindled, Curt and Tony Dingman took Ianthe down to Cho-Cho. “Jim was nervous about talking to her,” Gentry said. Sakata acted with wonderful grace, telling stories, showing them drawings and Richard's letters from Japan. Ianthe, at her loveliest, “wanted to reassure him that she didn't blame him for anything.”

At one point, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. When Ianthe was out of earshot, Sakata leaned over the bar and asked, “I don't suppose this is the time to ask when I can get my gun back?”

On November 2, 1984, Dr. Laverine filed his final Dental Reporting Form with the coroner's office in Marin County. He officially identified John Doe number 9 as the author Richard Brautigan. In the days and weeks that followed, newspaper and magazine stories appeared sporadically. The “Transition” section of
Time
carried the news of Brautigan's death on November 5. William Hamilton, the
New Yorker
cartoonist known for deftly skewering the fatuous small-talk of the filthy rich, had an unsigned lead piece in “The Talk of the Town,” saying that his late friend Richard “had a penchant for absurdity akin to the jolly-serious outrages cooked up by the young Dadaists of Paris in the early nineteen-twenties.” Even
People
ran a remarkably balanced and sensitive article, wishing Brautigan “So long,
sensei. Arigato
, pardner.”

Seymour Lawrence issued “An American Original, an official statement,” in which he said, “Richard was a joy to publish.” Sam concluded: “Richard was a consummate craftsman not only in his use of language but in his choice of typography, design, jacket art, advertising copy. He was deeply involved in every detail and aspect of his books. He had an unerring eye and we gave him autonomy and latitude few authors enjoy. In Hollywood, it's called ‘final cut.' He was an American original in the tradition of Mark Twain and he deserved the best. He never let us down except to die.”

Longer investigations were yet to come. Lawrence Wright arrived in San Francisco, asking questions for a lengthy article commissioned by
Rolling Stone
, where Richard Brautigan had published his short stories and poetry in the sixties.
Vanity Fair
hired Michael McClure and East Coast writer Peter Manso, who had a book due out on Norman Mailer, to assemble a spoken-word examination of Brautigan's life and death. McClure later wrote, “Perhaps Richard killed himself because he'd made his point and used himself up like a butterfly uses itself up in the process.”

McClure had been best friends with Brautigan in the early sixties. They had grown apart in recent years, but he still wished to protect his old white-port-drinking buddy's reputation when Peter Manso arrived from New York, eager to go for the jugular. Manso, a small, intense man, considered Brautigan's work “to be of very dubious significance,” his death “the price paid for overnight literary fame in a decade of media hype and narcissistic self-congratulation.”

Given Manso's preconceptions, Michael McClure did his best to rein in his new partner's killer instincts. At one point, they drove out to Bolinas to check out Brautigan's house. Approaching 6 Terrace Avenue on foot, Manso wanted to break in and snoop around. McClure dissuaded him. The place was still under seal by the police. They climbed up onto the second-floor deck and had a look in through the window. McClure clearly saw the death shadow of Richard Brautigan's body etched into the floorboards where his corpse had lain undiscovered for many long weeks. Brautigan's body fat had liquefied, what coroners call a “lipid breakdown,” and had seeped into the wood, leaving behind a phantom image.

McClure saw just where his friend stood when he raised the revolver to his mouth. Turning, he took in Brautigan's final view. More than a decade later, when McClure recounted this event,
slowly lifting his hand with the forefinger extended like a pistol barrel, tears welled in his eyes. Like a photographic ghost, Richard Brautigan's impression might have remained forever to haunt the old shingled house. The new owners tried scrubbing it free, but no solvents or detergent would do the trick. In the end, they had to rent a belt sander to erase the final tangible memory of the poet Ken Kesey called an American Bashō. “Five hundred years from now,” Kesey observed, “when the rest of us are forgotten, they'll still be reading Brautigan.”

two: honor thy father

A
PIRANDELLIAN PARADOX ARISES when an author turns out to be a character in the story he's writing. Aspiring to truth only adds another layer of mystery, a further dimension to the puzzle. This is the tale of Richard Brautigan's life. Gatz Hjortsberg is only a peripheral thread in a rich and complex tapestry. For narrative purposes, I plan on referring to myself in the third person. But, quick as a three-card monte dealer, I've slipped the first-person singular in under the reader's nose even when promising otherwise. Verbal sleight of hand. Nothing is quicker than the I.

Richard Brautigan was my friend, my neighbor for seven years, and a writer whose work I admired long before we met. In small, unexpected ways, my own investigative journey became entwined with Richard's story. While wishing to remain concealed behind a third-person identity, from time to time, I must step out of the shadows and into a personal pronoun.

Richard Brautigan knew nothing of his paternal lineage. A sequence of nearly anonymous stepfathers recycled through his young life. His true father's identity remained a mystery. In researching Brautigan's life, I spent more time with his father than he ever did. Richard rarely spoke of his impoverished childhood in the Pacific Northwest. One memory often retold involved a youthful search through downtown Tacoma for a man he'd been told was his father. His kid odyssey ended in a barber shop, the talc-scented bastion of 1940s masculinity. Richard approached the man he'd been told was his father. When he identified himself, the stranger steered Richard outside, handed him a big shiny silver dollar, and told him to go to the movies.