Jubilee Hitchhiker (180 page)

Dobro mentioned he'd heard a rumor that the Range might soon be closing.

“I may be checking out before then,” Brautigan said.

“Out of the hotel?” the girl asked.

“Out of the Big Hotel,” Richard replied.

Back at Pine Creek, Brautigan started working longhand in a clean lined notebook. He called this project “American Hotels.” Sitting on his back porch after breakfast, he wrote: “Waking at dawn, then a cantaloupe and some coffee, with time to watch a feeding grey thrush in the backyard and a skunk lurching just a few feet away [from] the kitchen looking for grubs I guess or whatever they eat, I am summoned to American hotels as a ghost is called upon to haunt a house.” On page 5, Richard digressed from his title and launched into a description of his posh thirtieth-floor room at the Keio Plaza in Tokyo. The words flowed fast and freely. It felt good to write about better times long ago and far away. Nine pages later, Richard took a break from his new project and returned to work in the notebook novel he had started on his birthday. His working title was “Investigating Moods.”

Brautigan needed diversions to take his mind off life's harsh, insistent realities. His friend Nikki Arai was terminally ill. Troubled by unrelenting pain, she called Alan Copeland, who drove her to a San Francisco hospital. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Arai contacted Richard to tell him about her disease, sounding “very frightened.” Brautigan always thought of Nikki as “a very strong, purposeful woman with a very dynamic and aggressive personality. Cancer had reduced her to a frightened crying little girl.”

Brautigan's writing seminar drew to a close in the first two weeks of June. Grading his students presented a dilemma. “I don't want to discourage anybody,” he told Brad Donovan, “so I'll just give them all A's.” When Richard turned in his grades to the English Department, he was horrified to learn that MSU undergraduates evaluated their teachers at the end of the quarter. “When did this happen?” Brautigan complained to Greg Keeler. It was like “Zen students grading the masters.” He didn't have to worry. Paul Ferlazzo agreed to exempt Richard from the class evaluations. As a visiting scholar, Richard was “a one shot deal.”

John F. Barber (who had graduated from Boston University in 1974) was one student who would have given Brautigan high marks. Older than the others in the class, Barber had seen a bit of life, working in Yellowstone Park for several years before entering a graduate program in history at MSU in 1981. He withdrew after a year, maintaining his friendship with some of his professors. Knowing his ambition to be a writer, they told him about the upcoming Brautigan residency.

Barber's job, driving buses for the Karst Stage Company, provided a flexible schedule, allowing time to attend Richard's seminar and hang out at the Eagles with him after class. Again Brautigan compartmentalized, never introducing John Barber to his other friends or extending an invitation to the Friday night burger roundtable. Barber's final writing project for Richard was a narrative about his experience working as the purser aboard the paddlewheel steamboat hotel
Mississippi Queen
during her 1976 maiden voyage between Cincinnati and New Orleans. Brautigan liked his piece very much, phoning Barber to praise it. He told John he'd show it to Helen Brann but never did.

The next week found Richard back home in Pine Creek. The long cold wet spring had turned bright and sunny by mid-June. Snow still crowned the jagged peaks of the Absarokas, but the surrounding foothills were green, lively with wildflowers. Too late for a get-well card, Brautigan sent a telegram to Nikki Arai in her hospital room. “WORDS ARE FLOWERS OF NOTHING,” he wired. “I LOVE YOU.” Richard hoped “it would make her feel peaceful.”

On Father's Day, Ianthe phoned Richard from New York. He had not spoken to her since the previous November. There had been no communication between them at Christmas or on either of their birthdays. “It was not a pleasant conversation,” Brautigan recalled. He blathered on for fifteen minutes about his teaching experience while she listened patiently, “probably bored.” More succinctly, Ianthe told her father about her own recent life. Richard confessed to definite boredom.

“Well, I guess we've spent enough time talking on your dime,” Brautigan said, hoping to bring their conversation to an end without offering any invitation that might include her husband.

“I guess so,” Ianthe replied. After a long, uncomfortable pause, she said, “We'll have to have lunch sometime.”

Richard awkwardly replied that he might be in New York “sometime in December or later next year, maybe in the spring.” He'd been invited to France. Maybe they could get together either on his way over or upon his return. When they hung up, Brautigan “felt very disturbed and wished she had never called.”

Late in June, Brautigan typed a letter to his agent. In his barn rafter office, he crafted a book proposal to the Dell Publishing Company, complying with the option clause in his
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
contract. Brautigan had shown his work in progress to Becky Fonda. She didn't like the title “Investigating Moods,” making some “appropriate suggestions.” Richard listened to her advice. When he wrote Helen Brann, the working title for his proposed new work had become “An Unfortunate Woman.” The book would contain “four long sections.” The first, his unfinished novella, would “examine the varieties of human existence revolving around a tragedy.”

The second section, “Japanese UFO,” would contain stories “about contemporary Japan” written during his last trip to Tokyo, ranging “from humor to tragedy.” The third part was to be “American Hotels.” Rounding out the quartet, Richard proposed a final section of short stories set in Montana, none of them yet written. He proposed calling these tales “Waiting for the Deer.”

The same afternoon, Brautigan sat on his back porch, watching a distant thunderstorm gather as he started writing again in his
Unfortunate Woman
notebook. Richard did not pick up where he left off. He itemized all the calendar days he'd missed (“MARCH 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8”—all the way through to “19, 20, 21” of “JUNE”) and followed this odd countdown with a long digression about breaking his leg. After a brief attempt to get back on track regarding the tragedy of the unfortunate woman who hanged herself in Berkeley, Brautigan remarked that at the beginning of his “journey,” he counted all the words on every page after each day's writing “because [he] wanted to have a feeling of continuity,” a practice abandoned after twenty-two pages.

Following a three-day break, Richard returned to work on Friday the twenty-fifth, filling twenty more pages in his Japanese notebook. That night, after a long phone conversation with a depressed drunken friend, Brautigan called Nikki Arai. He had only recently learned she had a private telephone in her hospital room. Nikki's sedated voice sounded “very delicate.” Richard heard “a gentleness” that had never been there before. She said she was feeling better and didn't mention her cancer. Arai told Brautigan “how much she liked the telegram,” asking him to keep in contact. “It made me feel good,” Nikki said. “It was beautiful. Please write me more.” Richard thought she was “getting used to the idea of dying.”

Too much tragedy and solitude took a toll on Brautigan. He headed back to Bozeman on Saturday in a futile search for the Great American Good Time. As usual, he “did a lot of drinking” and failed to find a willing female partner before the bars closed. The Range had nothing available at that hour. Richard, without the aid of his abandoned cane, limped almost a mile east of town to the Alpine Motel (“very modest and clean”), where he rented a room for $9.95.

The next morning, hangover throbbing, Brautigan phoned John Barber for help. “Meet me for breakfast,” he said. “I'll buy and then you can give me a ride home.” Barber was driving a Karst bus over the hill that afternoon to pick up a group of kids who'd spent a week at Luccock Park, a United Methodist Church camp directly above Richard's place at the head of the Pine Creek Trail. Richard had never been the only passenger on an old-fashioned yellow school bus before. He traveled in one of his own short stories. Barber stopped at the Safeway in Livingston while Brautigan bought a week's worth of groceries.

On June 28, 1982, Richard Brautigan came to the end of his 160-page Japanese notebook. His little excursion into experimental fiction was over. Brautigan left the last line blank. “I'll leave it to somebody else's life,” he wrote, having filled the little book with “so many inconclusive fragments, sophomoric humor, cheap tricks, endless detail.” Richard promised his future audience, “You have read the book. I have not.” After stating, “writers are notorious liars,” Brautigan emphasized that he had only reread his book to see where he'd left off during his many lapses. “Iphigenia, your daddy's home from Troy!” he wrote in conclusion.

Richard closed the cardboard covers, “like a door,” on the most extraordinary literary adventure he'd ever embarked upon. Brautigan, a poet who reworked each word and line over and over until he got it right, abandoned his precision, returning to the old beat mantra “first word, best word.” He promptly gave his handwritten manuscript to a professional typist and sent the fair copy off to his agent in New York.

Brautigan wanted to celebrate finishing another book and finagled a ride into Livingston. He wandered from bar to bar, hoping to luck out and get laid. At closing time, Richard was dead drunk and alone. Instead of calling a cab, he took a cheap room at the Murray Hotel. At the time,
the establishment was a bit down at its heels. The turn-of-the-century lobby had been divided in half, with a short-order grill occupying the Park Street side. There was no one available to operate the ancient elevator. Brautigan limped up the stairs and collapsed on a narrow bed in a drab cubicle with no toilet or TV. He checked out early the next morning.

Just before the Fourth of July weekend, Dennis Lynch descended on Rancho Brautigan with his pal Danimal “like a plague of drunken, farting locusts.” Richard made them welcome. They proceeded to drink him “out of house and home” as promised. Brautigan arranged for rodeo tickets at the Livingston Roundup for Friday, July 2, calling the Donovans to come over and join the fun. Lynch wore an Arab burnoose into the fairground temple of ten-gallon headgear. Upping the ante, during the intermission show, when the featured performer with a trained bison pretended to sleep while his enormous shaggy animal bent over him, Dennis shouted, “Make it good for the buffalo too!”

Rip Torn also came out to Montana over the Fourth of July weekend to visit his three children, all working at Chico Hot Springs. After visiting Joe Sedgwick, his cowboy rancher pal, Rip gave the kids a lesson in stick-shift driving in the rental car on the way back from Two Dot. They lurched and bumped down East River Road, stopping at Richard's house. Finding no one home, Rip left a brief note saying he was at Chico.

Brautigan phoned the resort, inviting Rip and his kids for dinner on the third. Dennis and Danimal were off on their own. Richard launched back into “American Hotels,” digressing into a long reminiscence about his relationship with Sherry Vetter a decade earlier. He fit this to his theme by describing all the motels with swimming pools in northern California where they had stayed together.

Rip Torn and his three children drove down to Pine Creek from Chico. When they arrived, Brautigan descended from his nest in the barn, blinking “like an owl” in the sunlight. “Your dad's timing is still good,” Richard told Rip's kids with a grin. “Let's jump in your car and get some groceries. [. . .] I was finishing my novel. It's done. I've turned into a hermit, but I want to celebrate.”

After a quick trip to Safeway, Brautigan told Torn he didn't fish anymore. “I've given my gear away.” Rip went out alone on the river and caught a couple nice trout for dinner. Richard came up with champagne and a can of mushroom soup. “Let's poach these beauties in this soup,” he said. “And how about a dash of champagne?” They had a feast. Brautigan also produced a couple bottles of “hootch—Daniels or Dant.” They drank until dawn. Richard's “excitement made him a kid again.”

“Brautigan took his parties seriously,” Brad Donovan observed. When Richard phoned to say he was throwing a wang-dang-doodle for Rip Torn, and “bring some food,” the Donovans headed straight for the supermarket with their food stamps. It was a big shindig. The Fondas were there, and Marian Hjortsberg. Brautigan dispatched Brad to the kitchen to work on the spaghetti sauce with Dennis Lynch. Donovan thought Lynch was “typical of Richard's friends: fun loving, witty, tactful.”

While Brad chopped onions, Dennis pulled a slip of paper from a softcover book. “Look what I found,” he said. “It's a bookmark. An edible bookmark. Try it.” Dennis tore the paper in half, eating one piece. He gave Donovan the other half. It was stamped with a purple dragon. Brad chewed it down and rode the dragon into fantasy land for the rest of the night.

The party raged on until dawn. Richard, not tripping on acid, told a long story about Baron von Richthofen. After a long day dueling it out in the skies over France, the Red Baron liked to
head into the Black Forest alone at night, hunting wild boar with a knife to relax from the rigors of being an ace. Dennis Lynch greeted the sunrise on the roof of the chicken coop, shouting, “I'm a morning person.” Rip Torn had left long before, heading back to Chico with his sleeping kids. It was the last time he ever saw Richard Brautigan, who drove back over to Forest Park with Brad and Georgia Donovan.

Ed and Jenny Dorn had been out of touch with Brautigan. Dick Dillof had recently moved an antique railroad caboose onto Marian Hjortsberg's property, parking it not far from his sheepherder's wagon. He invited the Dorns to come and stay in it. They drove up from Boulder with their kids for the Fourth of July weekend, stopping off first to visit the Donovans. When they pulled into Forest Park in their station wagon, the Dorns were “surprised and delighted” to see Richard sitting on the trailer steps at number 66, working his way through a quart of Dickel early in the afternoon.