Jubilee Hitchhiker (120 page)

During the next six weeks, Brautigan spent time with both Anne Kuniyuki and Jayne Walker. The contracts for the poetry collection arrived at Geary Street the third week in February and were immediately signed. During this period, Brautigan helped Kazuko Fujimoto with her Japanese translation of
Trout Fishing in America
. He was impressed with her “knowledge and perception” of his book. When Helen Brann sent the contracts for the Japanese edition of
The Abortion
on March 12, he urged his agent to get Fujimoto (just finished with her work on
Trout Fishing
) the job of translating that book, too. An advance of $20,000 for the new poetry book was mailed two days later.

Brautigan flew down to Florida at the end of March. He stayed in an upstairs bedroom at the large airy home of Guy and Terry de la Valdène on White Street in old town Key West. Richard wrote poetry, swinging in the hammock on the Valdènes' screened-in porch. Guy kept busy working on a film about his passion, fly-fishing for tarpon, which he and his brother-in-law, Christian Odasso, who spoke only French, were codirecting. Financing came from the Valdènes' family. “We blew more budget money on food and wine,” Guy confessed. “I mean we ate like pigs.”

They had a French crew and a tight five-week shooting schedule, up every morning at six, except on days when they were weathered in. Christian was a professional filmmaker with some experience. Guy knew where to find the fish. He had been a still photographer for
Sports Illustrated
and
Field & Stream
. “The thing didn't quite work,” Valdène later admitted. “We wanted to bring a bunch of writers and sportsmen together and really try to capture the fishing and also get a lot of new views and check out the Key West scene.”

To this end, Guy Valdène recruited Jim Harrison, who flew in from Michigan with Dan Gerber, and Tom McGuane, who wintered in Key West. For about a week, Brautigan wanted no part in the film. Guy attributed it to Richard's “standoffish” disposition, calling him a “tall ostrich in the corner.” Brautigan followed his own agenda. He bought a “goofy” secondhand bicycle with high handlebars. Valdène recalled that “he'd just cruise the streets of Key West, back and forth, all day long.”

Richard's schedule also included working on a regular basis. He rented an Underwood electric typewriter ($15.60 a month) to type final drafts of the poetry he wrote longhand on sheets of unlined paper. Dink Bruce observed that Brautigan seemed a bit uncomfortable in the tropics. “He didn't like the heat.”

On his first day in town, Richard picked up a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl with “childlike eyes and a fragile mouth.” Knowing he was old enough to be her father added “a certain delicious something” to their lovemaking. Brautigan joined his fishing pals and the film crew for nightly feasts and drinking bouts. At the time, the Pier House was downtown Key West's most luxurious hotel. Its bar, the Chart Room, provided the locals their main hangout.

Tourists frequented Sloppy Joe's, a converted icehouse on Duval Street that had misappropriated the name of Hemingway's old 1920s drinking hole. The original Sloppy Joe's, now renamed Captain Tony's, was tucked away around the corner on Green Street. The Chart Room was a small intimate bar with sliding glass doors opening out onto the patio. Conchs (natives of Key West) gathered here to pick up the local gossip and play liar's poker, a game using bank notes instead of cards with the serial numbers providing the hands.

One night at about nine or ten o'clock after a long day's filming, the gang was kicking back in the Chart Room. Numbers of people wandered back and forth between the bar and the pool. Without a word, Guy stripped off all his clothes and jumped naked into the water. Soon, one after another, everybody took off his or her clothing and jumped in. Dan Gerber remembered “there must have been twenty or thirty men and women” paddling around together.

Foster, the Chart House security guard, didn't know what to make of the situation. In the end, he peeled off his makeshift uniform and plunged in to join the fun. Almost the only one not to go skinny dipping was Brautigan, never reticent in the past about appearing nude in public. Richard didn't swim. He stayed fully dressed in his jeans and tall black cowboy hat, running gleefully back and forth into the bar to buy bottles of Dom Pérignon and pass them out to the hedonistic bathers.

About a week after his arrival, Brautigan traveled up to Miami to meet his daughter, who was flying in alone from California. As always, Richard allowed Ianthe plenty of freedom. They took many long walks through the old town together, especially at day's end, when they'd head down to the waterfront and watch the incredible Technicolor sunsets. Because there was no more guest space available at the Valdène's home, Ianthe stayed with Tom and Becky McGuane, who turned their son's room over to her. Every morning she awoke to the sight of Thomas, an angry displaced seven-year-old, glaring at her from the foot of the bed. Otherwise, she felt very comfortable at the McGuane's and had no trouble sleeping, unlike her father, who took Valium to combat his chronic insomnia. The drug did the trick, but Richard found it prevented him from dreaming, so he gave it up. “I don't dream,” he said, “and I have to be able to dream.”

A permissive father, Brautigan still remained very protective of his daughter. One night everyone went out to a traveling carnival that had set up in town (going full-blast through Lent in true Key West pirate tradition). Richard took Ianthe along, and the gang stood in line for the whirling
rides and lost their pocket money on dubious ball-tossing games. Brautigan allowed himself to be filmed anonymously among the merrymakers but would not permit the French crew to focus their cameras on his daughter.

A devoted swimmer, Ianthe spent much of her time in the water. She was disappointed to discover there was no surf in the Keys. Becky McGuane gave her a cute little bikini to wear at the beach. Terrified by dangers of the deep, Richard warned his daughter to beware of being eaten by barracuda. “Don't wear any flashy rings when you go swimming,” he told her. “Not if you want to keep all your fingers.” To ensure her safety, Brautigan arranged for Ianthe to swim at the Pier House pool. When she asked if he'd like to join her, Richard replied, “I just swim at night.”

After a spell of heavy weather things broke clear just when Guy happened to have some unexpected free time on his hands. “You wanna go fishing?” he asked Brautigan. Ianthe romped about in the tropical sunshine wearing shorts and a halter top, but remembered how her father's fair skin, so prone to burning, required him to cover up completely in trousers and long-sleeved shirts. Richard agreed to go out onto the flats and sat incongruously fully clothed in the fishing skiff, wearing a high-crowned black cowboy hat (Valdène remembered it as being “about two feet taller than his head”), while the rest of the gang stood around bare-chested in shorts, the wind whipping their salt-bleached hair. The camera crew came along in Dink Bruce's boat. McGuane, Harrison, and Scott Palmer joined them in Tom's skiff. Guy promised Richard that he wouldn't be filmed. Guy needed shots of jumping tarpon, and the three boats set off toward the Pearl Basin in search of fish.

Far out on the vast pellucid ocean wilderness surrounding the tiny island of Key West, where stillness and the endless open sky provided a welcome contrast to the frantic party frenzy of the tourist-crowded town, they came across a large school of tarpon. Outboard engines were switched off and tilted up out of the water to avoid spooking the fish. The camera boat and McGuane's skiff waited behind as Valdène, a bandanna wrapped around his forehead, pirate-fashion, silently poled upwind toward the feeding fish, elusive silver shadows in the sea grass. “I literally poled for forty minutes after this school of fish. I could see them rolling just out of range.”

Knowing Richard desperately wanted to hook and play one of the huge tarpon but wasn't skilled enough to make the cast, Guy did it for him, double-hauling the weight-forward line, expertly shooting the fly out toward his quarry. After many attempts, casting again and again, he finally had a take and set the hook. “I want you to feel the power of this thing,” Valdène said, handing the rod to Brautigan. For a few ecstatic electric moments, Brautigan played the big fish until it broke off. “He was so happy he was howling at the top of his lungs,” Guy observed. “So excited he literally couldn't talk for fifteen minutes.” Dink's boat was too far out of camera range for Christian to get a shot.

That night at dinner, still high from his tarpon experience, Richard asked Guy, “You want to film?”

High himself, having recently smoked a joint, Guy replied, “Why not?”

They shot the interview out on the porch. Richard swung in the hammock. Guy sat beside him in a wooden chair. “Tell me about the fish,” he asked, camera rolling.

“Massive,” Richard replied enthusiastically. “Very powerful. Extraordinary! So extraordinary as to create immediate unreality upon contact with the fish [. . .] Everything went into slow motion. My mind couldn't deal with it anymore.” Brautigan's poetic imagination provided the appropriate
metaphor. “The water is almost like marble breaking—liquid marble coming up—silver Atlantis coming out of the water.”

What particularly impressed Richard was that all the fly-rod-caught tarpon were unhooked and released unharmed once they were brought to the boat. “Hemingway said a thing about material possessions that I think is a beautiful thing,” he mused, swaying in the hammock, his expressive hands forming shapes in the air before him. “He said you can never own anything until you can give it away. And the ultimate keeping of the tarpon would be the releasing of it, and the killing of him then just becomes something that people block out on the walls, whereas if you release him, you have him in your mind forever alive.”

Watching from behind the camera, Dink Bruce almost couldn't believe what he saw. “Because here [Richard had] been sedentary this whole time, but he knew that Guy was up against the wall and he knew he needed a piece of Richard on this film because he's selling it, it's French TV, right? And they really liked Richard. And he put out this ten-minute special effort for Guy.”

Valdène shouldered the blame for the main fault of the final cut. He felt they had “fabulous footage” of wild fish and the Key West scene, but thought he didn't include enough coverage of his writer pals because he didn't want to be “a pain in the ass.” Instead of bugging Tom, Jim, and Richard for repeated filmed interviews, Guy more or less let them off the hook. “When we got to the editing, we had hundreds of thousands of feet that were not specific enough,” he said. “So, in the movie it was like what are these guys doing?”

Tarpon
, the finished film, with a musical score by Jimmy Buffett, was eventually presented on French television, but the first showing was at Richard Hodge's Page Street law offices later that year. Richard and Nancy hosted the celebratory event as one of their regular Thursday night soirees in the posh Victorian mansion. Guy Valdène was the guest of honor.

Others in the invited audience included Richard Brautigan, Curt Gentry, and Don Carpenter. Richard's cinematic concerns at the time were more involved with
Hawkline
's chances in Hollywood than his friend's fishing movie.

Back in March, Flora Roberts had forwarded a copy of a letter from Peter Bogdanovich to Brautigan in Key West. The filmmaker found
Hawkline
to be “a very intriguing and beautiful story,” but it was not something he was interested in directing himself. Roberts next planned to submit the book to Arthur Penn (her “very good friend”) and, if that didn't pan out, to Sam Peckinpah. Tom McGuane's first original screenplay was soon to begin filming in Montana, and the notion of scoring copious quantities of Tinseltown coin seemed a distinct possibility to all of his ink-slinging amigos.

After a visit lasting “two or three weeks” in Key West, Brautigan flew back to San Francisco with Ianthe. Richard returned his daughter to Ginny's care and resumed a busy romantic life, keeping simultaneous company with Jayne Walker, Anne Kuniyuki, and Mary Ann Gilderbloom, none of whom knew the others existed. Mary Ann remained his current main squeeze, dining with Richard at Vanessi's as often as three times a week. “There was copious amounts of drinking,” she recalled. “It's amazing that I staggered through it.”

Olav Angell, Brautigan's Norwegian translator, had recently arrived in town to consult with Richard about the upcoming edition of
Trout Fishing
to be published by Gyldendal in Oslo later that year. This necessitated much heavy drinking. One subject they discussed over multiple shots of aquavit concerned the handwritten signature of Trout Fishing in America. In the original Four
Seasons edition, this had appeared as a printed facsimile of Brautigan's own cramped penmanship. The production department at Gyldendal had struggled to render Richard's peculiar signature in Norwegian without success. The aquavit did the trick. Under Olav's tutelage, Richard carefully wrote the words “Orretfiske i Amerika” on a sheet of paper for Olav to bring back to his publisher in Norway.

It was time to collect Mary Ann after work for the evening's frivolities. Brautigan and Angell, in the company of another Norwegian writer, arrived at Philobiblon dead drunk. “Richard was only halfway there,” Gilderbloom recalled. They all bundled into a cab and headed to Enrico's for further drinking. “We sat there and drank and drank and drank,” she said. “Then we went into Vanessi's and sat in a booth in the back and continued to drink.” Mary Ann realized she had crossed the line of her capabilities. She was far drunker than she had ever been before. Fearing she might get sick, Gilderbloom staggered to the bathroom and decided it was time to go home. There were people she knew from the book industry having dinner in the restaurant, and she had no intention of embarrassing herself in front of them.