Jubilee Hitchhiker (152 page)

Early in February, Tony got the impression that Richard and Akiko “wanted to be together on a honeymoon or something,” so he boarded the Northern Pacific at the Livingston depot and took the train back east to visit his sister in Boston. His timing left something to be desired, his arrival coinciding with one of the worst New England blizzards of the century. He got stuck in New York and, with much effort, finally made it to Boston. Montana now seemed a balmy paradise to Dingman.

Brautigan spoke on the phone with his agent early in February. He told Helen Brann he had decided it would be better to publish
June 30th, June 30th
in mid-October, rather than in March, as previously scheduled. If the book was published in March it would have only a couple months to catch on with college and university students, Richard's strongest audience, before the summer break. A mid-October pub date provided almost the entire school year for Brautigan's market. Richard wanted all of Jim Harrison's letter used as the jacket copy instead of cutting it down to a blurb. Brann conveyed Brautigan's wishes in a letter to Sam Lawrence in Boston.

Helen planned to leave for a vacation in the Virgin Islands. On the eve of her departure for St. Thomas, she spoke by phone with Richard. Her client had changed his mind once again about the dust jacket copy for
June 30th, June 30th
. Brautigan still wanted to use the Harrison letter in its entirety but asked that the publisher cut a long praise-filled paragraph (“the most intimate book Richard Brautigan has ever written [. . .] a unique look at Japan as seen through the eyes of one of America's most popular poets”) he had composed himself, substituting a simple biographical statement.

The same day, V. I. Wexner sent an open letter to members of the Anderson High school board. He asked to appear before the board when they met to discuss the banning of the Brautigan books. Wexner told the board members, “Richard Brautigan is a serious writer” and that his books were
“no more bawdy than Shakespeare or Chaucer.” Intuiting most of the board might be unfamiliar with Brautigan's work, he urged them to read
In Watermelon Sugar
, the title he “would recommend first, if a student wanted an unusual book.”

The Anderson Union High School District Board of Trustees, which eight years earlier had banned J. D. Salinger's
A Catcher in the Rye
, held a public meeting on Wednesday, February 22, to deal with the issue of the Brautigan books. Forty-four people, mostly parents, teachers, and former students, were in attendance for the ninety-minute discussion. The faculty Professional Relations Committee and the school administration's Administrative Council, acting under a district policy on resolving disputes over instructional material, both recommended that three of the books,
Trout Fishing
,
The Pill
, and
The Abortion
, be removed from the high school shelves. The committees differed on the acceptability of
In Watermelon Sugar
and
Revenge of the Lawn
and left the final decision on these books to the board of trustees.

After a comment period where one parent said, “We are sick of people teaching our children barnyard morals,” and an impassioned plea for academic freedom by V. I. Wexner, Trustee Frank Yanger made a motion to prohibit the three books, stating, “I read one of them and, frankly, thought it was garbage.” The board agreed with his assessment and voted to ban the three, citing Brautigan's work as “unfit” for Anderson High School. The next day the news broke in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. He didn't know it yet, but Richard Brautigan had just joined an exclusive and distinguished club. At one time or another,
1984
,
The Grapes of Wrath
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
Huckleberry Finn
, and
The Diary of Anne Frank
had all been banned in America.

At the time, Brautigan was more concerned with the status of his foreign editions. How many were still in print? Had any of the rights reverted back to him? Spurred on by Akiko, he wrote Tom Mori of the Tuttle-Mori Agency in Tokyo, his Japanese representative, asking these questions. Receiving no reply after two months, Richard had Dick Hodge handle the matter for him.

Brautigan continued working on his Montana stories during this period. Richard's short fiction often explored the poetic possibilities of the mundane. He wrote about buying lightbulbs and the much-anticipated spring opening of the Tastee-Freez, whose fast food he loved (the Big Tee burger, crispy onion rings, milk shakes in fifty flavors). Brautigan read each new short story aloud to Akiko, always first to hear them. “At that time, I have to be like a kind of a secretary,” she said.

Margot Patterson Doss wrote a weekly Sunday column, “San Francisco at Your Feet,” for the
Chronicle
, and on March 5, it took the form of a letter to Richard. She began with a quote from
Trout Fishing
and thanked Brautigan for his $39.97 check covering the last phone call he made to Aki in Tokyo while her houseguest the previous year. Margot used the money to buy a new umbrella. The column described the Fish Roundabout at the Academy of Sciences (Steinhart Aquarium division) in Golden Gate Park. The Roundabout, “a surreal indoor ocean surrounded by wall-to-wall carpeting,” swirled upward like an aquatic Guggenheim Museum. The display struck Doss as an ideal Brautigan environment. “If you get any inspirations on how to fish this place, please let me know,” she wrote.

The morning the column appeared, someone read it to Richard over the phone. Brautigan so enjoyed the piece, he called the Dosses and said, “Margot, I'm going to go out and catch you a trout, and I will bring it to you on ice.” Richard proved true to his word. He caught the fish, flew the next day with it in a hand-carried cooler down to San Francisco, “put it on this beautiful tray of ice,” and proudly delivered it to 1331 Greenwich Street, a grand, extravagant Brautigan gesture.

Richard spent most of March and April in San Francisco. The art department at Dell didn't like the
June 30th
cover design based on Erik Weber's passport stamp photograph. They planned on not using it and refused to pay Erik for his work. Richard still had complete design control, and his friend appealed to him for help. Brautigan intervened, insisting the publishing house follow his original instructions.

Dell went through the motions. They paid Weber for his pictures, but graphic designer Walter Harper modified Erik's original concept of a centered passport stamp resembling an ancient Japanese seal. Harper used a more realistic image of the stamp, setting it off-center and turned at a slight angle. Weber hated this but demanded a design credit on the dust jacket. The Dell art department had the last laugh. Weber's credit read: “Jacket illustration adapted from photograph,” misspelling his name “Eric.”

On April 6, Emmett Grogan's body was found on a New York City subway car at the Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue station, the last stop on the Brighton Beach Line of the old BMT. He had died from a heroin overdose. The fast-living Digger outlaw had come to the end of the road. Brautigan had lost track of Grogan over the years since they hung out together in the Haight but retained an interest in his old friend. A copy of Emmett's crime novel,
Final Score
, published two years before his death, was one of the few books Richard kept in the small built-in bookshelf at Pine Creek.

Richard and Aki returned to Montana at the end of April. The lengthening days grew warmer. Pleasant sunny fishing weather blossomed between the snow flurries. Tony Dingman “rode the dog” from Boston to San Francisco. Two days after Dingman got off the Greyhound bus, Brautigan phoned him from Pine Creek, saying, “Come on back.” Tony flew up to Montana, and life with Richard and Aki picked up as if he'd never left.

Weather permitting, Brautigan and Dingman played “horse” under the basketball hoop at the Pine Creek School after the kids went home in the afternoon. “Richard was a very, very competitive guy,” Tony said. “He would get crazy if he would lose.” Both men wrote every day. “We kind of encouraged each other because it was fun,” Dingman remembered. A bit shy, Dingman almost never showed his poetry to Brautigan, although he remembered “one time Richard read some stuff I'd been doing up there.”

Brautigan worked on his short story sequence. Reading his work aloud to his wife started Richard thinking about a framework for his new fiction. He determined some of the stories should have a Japanese focus, deciding to return soon to Tokyo and write about life observed there. “There should be a book of short stories about life in Montana and Tokyo. I thought the contrast would be interesting and dramatic.” Brautigan planned on traveling alone to Japan. He explained this to Akiko, telling her she couldn't go with him for “residency requirements.”

Many evenings were spent drinking and carousing. “We had some good times,” Dingman said. Warren Oates stopped by to join in the fun whenever he was up from L.A. at his place on Six Mile. One time, a San Francisco friend of Tony's sent a lid of grass in the mail. Dingman smoked the weed, and his whiskey consumption tapered. His friend said it was Mexican weed. Brautigan read a magazine article about the U.S. government's drug policy of aerial spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with a dangerous chemical herbicide called Parquat. Richard pointed this out to Tony, who started coughing. Soon, he coughed more and more.

“It's the Parquat,” Brautigan insisted. “It's the Parquat!”

Dingman's cough worsened. Finally, he flushed his stash down the toilet. “Richard loved it,” Tony remembered, “he thought that was the greatest.” The cough went away. Tony learned later that the marijuana had been grown in Sacramento. “It was psychosomatic, man,” Dingman said. “There was no Parquat.”

Bourbon-infused evening conversations ranged freely from country music to politics to literature to girls and back again, but one topic generally remained off-limits. Brautigan never talked about his childhood. “I never asked, and he never volunteered,” Tony recalled. “We had a truce at that level.” Richard did briefly mention he had lived in Great Falls for a time as a child. Akiko was curious, wanting to know more about her husband's early life.

To please his wife, Brautigan planned a return trip to Great Falls, the only time he ever deliberately revisited a scene from his childhood. They picked a bright sunny day for the six-hour round-trip drive, setting out in “White Acre” with Tony at the wheel and Aki entranced by the sprawling enormity of the Montana landscape. Reaching the little city on the Missouri River, their first destination was the Great Falls grade school Richard attended for a few months when he was nine. After a bit of driving around, they found the old brick building. Brautigan got out and walked to the entrance, taking hold of the doorknob. “He remembered sticking his tongue on this doorknob,” Dingman said. “It froze, and they had to come out and pour warm water to get his tongue off.”

Akiko told the same story six years later to journalist Lawrence Wright, only from a different perspective. “It was so cold,” she said. Richard “put very great stress on the coldness of the doorknob. He was scared of it. He would touch the doorknob and go home again.”

After finding his old grade school, they searched out the establishment where Tex Porterfield had labored as a fry cook. Tony recalled it as being “a kind of a
hofbrau
.” Brautigan stared at the building where he had once lived, a place he hadn't seen in thirty-four years. “One of my stepfathers used to work here,” he said. “After he got off work, he used to come upstairs and beat me.” Richard's stories of his hardscrabble youth varied, depending on his audience. He once told Rip Torn he was only four when the fry cook tied him to the bedpost while away at work, saying, “He gave me enough slack so I could get to the can and, more important, so I could get to the corner and look out the window.”

His long-distance trip down memory lane finished, Richard said, “Let's go,” and Tony Dingman drove them back to Pine Creek.

April drew to a close. Brautigan made plans for his trip to Japan. He wanted to leave at the beginning of June. Aki mentioned that her mother was celebrating her sixtieth birthday right around that time. Richard wrote to Fusako Nishizawa, telling her of his intended itinerary, saying he hoped to see her on her birthday. Brautigan and his wife headed back to San Francisco at the end of the month. They discussed traveling on to New York for a week in the middle of May. Richard reasoned such an excursion might take the onus off his upcoming solo jaunt to Japan.

A peevish five-page letter from Helen Brann, written on her new stationery with the letterhead “THE BRANN-HARTNETT AGENCY, INC.,” reached Brautigan soon after he returned to San Francisco. (John and Helen established a partnership at the beginning of 1978.) “I have tried to reach you several times in the last couple of weeks leaving messages on your answering machine or with Aki, and you have not returned my calls.” Brann got to the point by page 3: “On a larger issue, Richard, I am very distressed that the spirit of cooperation seems to have gone out of our
relationship; I cannot work with a writer who avoids talking with me, who communicates with me through a lawyer, or who seems to take offense when I cannot take a non-emergency call long after my office has closed.” Helen clearly felt her professional and personal relationship with Richard was coming apart at the seams. She ended, “I only know I will not continue as things are now.”

Richard read Helen's letter several times. He underlined key passages with a pencil. On the first of May, Brautigan wrote Brann a formal typed reply. Half as long as Brann's, his letter was a lengthy message for a terse correspondent. Richard addressed the matter with cold logic. He agreed their ten-year relationship was too important to throw away “because of a misunderstanding,” and that unless they reestablish that relationship “on a professional footing,” it would be best to “each go our separate way.”