Jubilee Hitchhiker (114 page)

When Brautigan and his pals arrived at the McGuanes' place on Deep Creek they found a full crowd already in attendance. “It was a wonderful summer,” Tom's wife, Becky, said, “because everybody was at the house, which was about twenty-seven people. The main thrust was what were we going to have for dinner.” Among those lining up for chow were Jimmy Buffett; his girlfriend, Jane; their chum Roxie Rogers; Guy Valdène and his gorgeous blond wife, Terry; Bob Dattila (who had operated his one-man Phoenix Literary Agency out of a studio apartment on New York's East Side for the past couple years); Jim Harrison; Scott Palmer (a young man who worked for the McGuanes); and Benjamin “Dink” Bruce, another friend from Key West, whose father hung around with Hemingway in the thirties, all drawn to Montana by what Don Carpenter called Tom McGuane's “magnetic Irish warlock personality.”

Everyone, men and women alike, was attracted to McGuane. Six foot four with hair hanging down past his shoulders, shooting from the lip, punning one-liners faster than the speed of delight, Tom reached new manic heights during the summer of 1972. He had taken up the mandolin and riffed duets with guitar-playing buddy Buffett. Hard at work on a new novel set in Key West, McGuane unwound at night presiding over roundtable literary discussions in his kitchen, half-gallon jugs of bourbon and vodka fueling the energetic conversation. Becky, a petite honey blond barely five feet tall, provided the domestic glue binding this disparate social mix with her cheerful disposition and hearty crowd-pleasing meals.

Brautigan was impressed with Becky's pint-sized beauty. When he phoned Sherry after arriving, he said, “I want you to lose weight. I want you to become devastatingly thin.” According to Sherry, “devastating” was a favorite word of Richard's at the time. Five feet tall and 108 pounds, Sherry reacted to her lover's request to lose weight with dismay. “God,” she thought, “I only wear a size 2.
Where
can I get any thinner?”

Becky made the new visitors feel right at home. She set Richard up in the guest house, a converted one-room log chicken coop a stone's throw from the main building. Weber and Junsch bunked down in the back end of a long living room, divided in half by a Sheetrock wall. The first night, everyone gathered as usual around the round oak table in the kitchen. Tom McGuane's initial impression of Brautigan was of someone “helplessly odd under all circumstances, pauses in conversation, some of the places you weren't used to. He started stories late in the story. He had a penchant for honing in on crazy seemingly inappropriate details.”

Erik remembered he and Bob “felt very comfortable, having a good time,” but Brautigan proceeded to get quite drunk. “He was really loaded,” Weber recalled, “annoying the hell out of
everybody. The only way Richard could really talk to people that he didn't know too well was just to get totally smashed.”

Late that night when everyone else was asleep, Brautigan, an insomniac, wandered into the mud room/pantry to get some ice for his drink from an old Norge refrigerator where cases of beer and soda were stored. The machine was not a defrost model, and the ice trays had frozen fast in the freezer compartment. Tugging at them, Richard pulled the whole outfit over on top of him, breaking the door off the freezer. “I heard this terrible crash,” Becky recalled. Brautigan moaned, “Oh, no . . . Oh, no . . . What am I going to do?”

What Richard did do was wake up Erik and tell him to “get going and fix the freezer door.” This was the sort of chore Weber normally handled for Brautigan, but he was too tired and told his friend to “fuck off.” After Erik rolled over and went back to sleep, Richard started creeping up the stairs, whispering, “Becky . . . ? Becky . . . ?” in a plaintive tone.

“What is it, Richard?” she answered, thinking his voice seemed so soft he really didn't want to wake her, yet “the whole house sounded like it was coming in.”

“I have a present for you,” he answered.

“You do?”

“Trout money,” Brautigan said. “I have tons of trout money for you.” He tiptoed into the McGuanes' bedroom with about forty sheets of typing paper, each hand signed and featuring a stylized drawing of a fish, his Carp Press logo. Becky thought they looked like something her son Thomas might have drawn when he was four or five.

Tom found Richard's behavior that night completely “inappropriate, crawling up and down the stairway dead drunk writing trout money on pieces of paper, pushing it into your room, saying you're going to be richer and richer.”

“These are worth a fortune,” Richard said.

“What am I supposed to buy with it, Richard?” Becky asked.

“I would suggest you buy a new refrigerator.”

“Well, I was going to get one tomorrow, anyway.”

“You were . . . ?” Brautigan sounded extremely pleased. “That is just marvelous, because you could put these in your safe deposit box and someday they will be worth a lot of money.”

“Richard thought that everything he touched was worth something,” Erik Weber observed. “Anything that had his name on it was going to be worth a lot of money.” Twenty years before, Brautigan had given Edna Webster his early writing saying it would be her “social security.”

After handing the McGuanes a fortune in trout money, Richard crept back downstairs and exacted his revenge on Erik for refusing to help with the broken freezer door. One by one, he collected every chair in the house. As silently as possible for a staggering drunk, he assembled them over Weber's sleeping form, stacking a makeshift cage above him. Alerted by a strange noise, Erik awoke to find himself imprisoned within Richard's peculiar creation. “I couldn't get out of the goddamn bed,” he said, “without knocking down all of these chairs.”

After that, things settled into the usual summertime routine, badminton games out on the small patch of lawn in front of the McGuane farmhouse (“Badminton was the game of the year that year,” Dink Bruce recalled), a road trip up north to Ringling, fishing on the Yellowstone or over at Armstrong's Spring Creek on the west side of Paradise Valley, and long literary conversations
around the kitchen table at night. After the initial trout money fiasco, McGuane found Brautigan to be “pleasant and very nice to have around.” Tom was surprised to discover that “he was a product of a very normal evolution in literary history. He liked the mainline, liked to talk about Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson.”

Dink Bruce found Brautigan to be “standoffish.” He observed that “Richard was basically quiet and sort of subdued about meeting everybody. He and McGuane got into arguments about things.” Bruce eventually warmed toward Brautigan when he offered to assist in repairing a used Saks Fifth Avenue panel delivery truck Bruce had converted into a camper. Dink was installing a vent in the roof, and Richard wandered over to watch. “Can I help you?” he volunteered. Dink told him to get into the truck and hold things steady while he stood on the roof and put the screws in. “I thought that was pretty nice of him,” Bruce said. “I didn't know him from Adam's apple.”

At this point, Brautigan still fished as he had as a boy, without waders, no vest or net, only a minimal amount of gear besides his rod and reel and a simple canvas creel. For the first time in his life, Richard found himself in the company of world-class anglers. “He was not a very good fisherman,” Guy Valdène observed. Jim Harrison had his own opinion about Brautigan's technical skills, noting, “He had awful line control as they call it, just awful. But he kept at it.” Erik Weber, who knew nothing of fly-fishing at the time, accompanied the boys to Armstrong's Spring Creek, where he photographed Richard casting from the shore. He said that after observing the difference in everyone's technique, “once I saw Jim Harrison out there, I couldn't believe it. It was like two totally different ways of fishing.”

Every year on the third weekend in August, the Crow Nation hosted a large powwow and Indian rodeo on their reservation on the Little Big Horn River south of Billings. It was just the sort of festive hoolihan the gang at McGuane's place couldn't resist. Well-supplied with whiskey and accompanied by John Fryer, a self-taught expert on Montana history, they all set off for Crow Agency in high spirits. Everyone except for Richard, awaiting Sherry's arrival, and Becky, who remained at home because she knew the trip was really a guy thing. The boys were gone for two days and found Brautigan in a snit when they returned. Erik said his friend seemed “very angry, upset, and not saying anything, not talking.”

Richard's bad mood lifted once Sherry flew up from San Francisco for his final week in Montana. She remembered, on her first night at Deep Creek, sitting around the kitchen table eating Becky's freshly baked apple pie, along with Tom, Guy and Terry, Jim Harrison, Jimmy Buffett strumming his guitar, Erik and Bob, and a young journalist, “sort of a nerdy guy, short with glasses, dark hair,” who had a tape recorder. Richard was furious at the thought of having his words recorded. “He practically broke the thing,” Sherry said. “He was really angry.”

Sherry stayed with Richard out in the remodeled chicken coop. She hated the place and thought “it was full of fleas.” No fleas live in Montana, but there are plenty of other small biting insects. Sherry was also bothered by Brautigan's inability to see beneath the surface of the domestic situation surrounding him. Richard had been completely dazzled by the McGuanes, “hung the moon on them,” in Sherry's country idiom. He adored Becky and was “smitten with Tom. Thought Tom was so great.”

One night, when he and Sherry were having “a little argument” in bed, Richard held up the McGuanes as paragons of marital bliss. Sherry couldn't believe what she was hearing. How could her lover be so oblivious to what was going on right under his nose? She patiently explained what
she had observed in her first few days, detailing the rift in Tom and Becky's marriage. “Richard was flabbergasted,” Sherry said.

Several times, to repay the McGuanes' generous hospitality, Erik Weber cooked large Indian meals in a wok over a charcoal fire out in the yard. He acquired these exotic culinary skills during his travels on the Asian subcontinent. Tom remembered Erik cooking for as many as fifteen people at a time and regarded this as Richard's attempt at reciprocation. “He'd impose on you to the point he'd recognize his imposition,” McGuane said, “and then do some tremendous thing to pay you back. He'd see that his people cooked for a few nights.”

On their last weekend, Richard and Sherry went to the Jaycee Centennial Rodeo in Livingston with a bunch of McGuane's other houseguests. Before the bull rides, they watched skydivers drift down from the clouds into the arena at the Park County Fairgrounds. On a Monday morning near the end of August, Brautigan, Vetter, Bob Junsch, and Erik Weber bundled into the rental car and made “a beeline back to the city,” driving straight through to San Francisco.

Two days later, Richard wrote a letter of thanks to Tom and Becky. He knew an era of his life was drawing to a close. Up in Montana, Brautigan encountered an unexpected literary scene. Something different. At Tom McGuane's place on Deep Creek, he met a group of writers who enjoyed trout fishing, drinking whiskey, and shootings guns as much as he did—writers who rejected trendy urban coteries, yet remained passionate about art and literature. And in Tom McGuane, Richard found another attractive charismatic madcap whose free-spirited energy invested the rowdy misbehavior of the group surrounding him with near-mythic import.

Brautigan hired Erik Weber to photographically document his Geary Street apartment shortly after they returned from Montana. Shooting pictures, Weber noticed numbers of cardboard boxes filled with packing material, and he had the feeling Richard was preparing to move out. Brautigan kept the Museum for almost three more years, until the building was condemned, but psychologically he had already departed. Weber's photos provided an elaborate time capsule of Brautigan's former life.

Brautigan began spending more time in Bolinas. The fogbound town made a fireplace welcome even in August, but when Richard tried to light a fire he discovered a hive of bees blocking the chimney. They swarmed into the room in a raging cloud. Brautigan hired a couple guys to tackle the problem. The bees proved a greater menace than ghosts. Joanne Kyger believed Richard invented the story of the female Asian spirit because he wanted to live in a haunted house, but she joined in the “fantasy” with the same playful spirit as when they watched
Batman
on TV together in 1965.

“He had a quirky sense of humor,” Kyger said. Joanne's contribution to the haunted mansion make-believe involved helping Brautigan build a nest in his house on Terrace Avenue. “It was in an upper back room,” she said. “We built this kind of thing for the ghost child to stay in. We had some twigs, and we had some feathers. It was just an elaborate fantasy sort of nest. You could get into those things with Richard.”

The house in Bolinas provided Brautigan a place to entertain friends and a home for Ianthe when she came to visit. These were the first extended periods she'd ever spent with her father. She picked out her own bedroom up on the third floor, but nighttime presented a problem. Whenever the old house creaked in the wind, Ianthe thought “the ghost was going to come and visit me.” The nest in the room next door was not a fantasy for a girl of twelve. The Mickey Mouse sheets and
a happy face nightlight provided no consolation. Ianthe moved downstairs to a little second-floor bedroom closer to where her father slept.

In the daytime, the house transformed into a magical place. The deck was “wonderful,” and a secret passage connected two of the third-floor bedrooms through a closet. Ianthe found cupboards stuffed with mysterious musty magazines from the thirties and forties. She read a batch of letters written during World War II to a girl named Polly. She played an off-key piano downstairs. Sherry taught Ianthe how to bake chocolate cakes in the spacious kitchen.