Jubilee Hitchhiker (202 page)

“Where do you want this?” Richard asked Bill.

“Put it in the whale rib locker,” Brown said, pointing to a corner of his garden. Brautigan carefully propped the arched bone against an ivy-covered hedge. It remained there, a curving white grave marker, long after his death.

On another reclusive beach walk, Richard paused at the mouth of the Bolinas Lagoon as the tide swept in, bringing with it a huge school of herring. Millions and millions of fish poured in from the ocean “like a solid stream of silver,” Brautigan told Klyde Young. When the tide went
out, the fish were trapped in the lagoon. There wasn't enough oxygen in the water to sustain them, and they suffocated.

About a week after this event, Klyde spent the day with Richard and gave him a ride over to Stinson Beach in the afternoon, along the narrow two-lane road winding around the lagoon. The stench of dead fish was overwhelming. “There was no way to get out of it,” Young recalled. They reached a spot where the receding tide had left millions of dead fish on the mudflats. Brautigan insisted they stop for a look. “Richard,” Klyde said, “let's just keep driving and get out of this fucking stink. You can look at it another time.”

“No,” Brautigan insisted. “I want to look at it now.”

Young pulled over. Richard got out of the car and stood at the edge of the lagoon, staring at acres and acres of dead fish. When Brautigan returned, he said, “Klyde, we're seeing something that neither of us has ever seen before . . . total war.”

They were on their way to Bob Junsch's house, where Klyde planned to drop Richard before continuing over the hill to Mill Valley. The plan included stopping at the Sand Dollar to have a beer and chat with Kendrick Rand. They pulled in by the firehouse, looking for a place to park, and Richard spotted a toddler, a little girl maybe a year and a half old, just barely able to walk, all by herself in the middle of the street. No adults were in sight. “Wait a minute. Slow down,” Brautigan said. “Drive very carefully. Something's going on.”

Klyde parked the car and Richard stepped out. “You might have to talk to the little girl,” he told Young, “because sometimes children are afraid of me.”

Approaching the child, Richard spoke softly to her, reaching forward to pick her up. She appeared very comfortable in his arms. “Well,” Brautigan said, “now we have to find out where this child came from.”

They opened the nearest gate and walked into the yard, hearing a party going on in the house. “Now I know what's happening,” Richard said. “These people are all inside the house snorting cocaine, and they're too fucking stupid to take care of their children. I'm going to talk to this child's parents.”

Klyde rang the bell, and the owner of the house came to the door. Seeing the little girl, he immediately realized what had happened and thanked the stranger for saving the toddler. Brautigan accepted the man's gratitude but refused to relinquish the child until he had words with her parents, wanting to “heat their asses for being careless.” The householder didn't care to make any more of it, and they started arguing. “They got into a pretty good argument,” Young remembered.

All the while, Richard did not let go of the little girl. Finally the man convinced him that the baby would be safe and that he wasn't going to bring the parents out for a lecture. That was the end of it. Brautigan surrendered the child, and he and Young walked to the Sand Dollar. Seated over beers, Klyde told Richard, “I know that guy. I've seen him around.”

“Who is he?”

“I don't know,” Young said. “He seemed like some kind of a goon character.”

Brautigan became alarmed. “Is he in the mob? Is there any chance that he might be violent?”

“It's a possibility,” Klyde admitted. “I don't think that the guy, if he was going to, I mean, he would have been.... It's over with, but I don't think you should push that guy.”

“I don't want this to go any further,” Richard said. “Would you please go back and straighten it out?”

“What can I straighten out? I can't—”

“Just go back and tell him something,” Brautigan instructed. “Smooth it over.”

According to Young, “it couldn't wait a minute longer,” and he went back to the man's house to explain that Richard was okay. He didn't mean any harm but was only looking out for the kid's welfare. He didn't mean anything personally. The stranger wasn't angry and held no grudge against Brautigan. “I had to go back and report that it was all taken care of,” Klyde said.

Brautigan's final two weeks became a sequence of unintended farewells. The last time Simone Okamura ever saw Richard was just before she flew to Grand Junction, Colorado, to visit her father on his deathbed. Simone was downtown in Bolinas and spotted Brautigan sitting on the curb in front of the Gibson House restaurant, half-drunk with a gallon of wine by his side. He waved her over, and they wrapped their arms around each other. Richard told Simone he'd sent for Teddy Head. “Promise me one thing,” Brautigan asked, sounding very dramatic. “Promise me. Promise me.” Simone agreed.

“Anything I ask?”

“Anything, Richard.”

“From this day forth, he shall always be called Teddy Head.”

Simone gave her word, and they parted. When she returned from Colorado after her father's death, Brautigan had also died. Simone found Teddy Head waiting for her at home.

Dr. John Doss remembered seeing Richard in the Bolinas post office. Brautigan had “picked up a lot of stuff off the counter.”

“From my publisher,” he told Dr. Doss.

“Is it good news?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “She's going to publish something.” And they went their separate ways.

The last time he saw Brautigan, John was walking along Wharf Road with his wife, Margot. Fishing boats moored here in the lagoon. At the time, before Fish and Game regulations changed the practice, it was possible to buy fresh salmon off the boats. They ran into Richard, walking with a tall European stranger, a Dutch reporter in town to interview Brautigan for his newspaper in Amsterdam. Klyde Young had picked Richard up at the bus stop in Stinson Beach, bringing him back to Bolinas in time to make his press appointment.

Dr. Doss told Brautigan about having “discovered the joys of a Macintosh computer.” Knowing that Richard had trouble with spelling, John bragged how his new machine checked his spelling and grammar. Brautigan said he planned on waiting for the computer's next generation, sauntering off with the Dutch reporter.

Richard continued working on the IBM typewriter during his last two weeks. He continued revising his long piece on Russell Chatham and composed a rough draft of a letter to Paul Ferlazzo at MSU. Even asking for a job, Brautigan dictated his own terms. “I would like to teach one class of fifteen students each term in writing prose.” The letter was riddled with misspellings and awkward construction. A Macintosh might have come in handy.

Richard worked in the margins with his pen, adding words, altering words, attempting different spelling variations. It was at best a haphazard effort. In the end, he never finished or mailed his letter to Ferlazzo. Did Hemingway become a second-rate professor? At the deepest level, Brautigan believed in his lasting fame. A great writer didn't drop everything to go teach at some rube cow college. “Richard was never, ever, ever going to come down off his high horse,” Don Carpenter observed.

Jim and Karly Zeno, knowing Brautigan to be alone and nearly friendless, invited him over to their house next door for dinner one night. While attempting to remain perfect neighbors, the Zenos were “a little bit frightened of Richard.” According to Klyde Young, “he was like a monster to them” because of his strange behavior. Brautigan lived up to their worst fears, rewarding the Zenos' hospitality with a taste of monstrosity at the end of the meal. Having consumed a great deal of wine, Richard got on the phone and called Klyde. “Gee, I'm just over here at the Zenos, and they're so nice to me,” he told Young. “They cooked me this fabulous, delicious meal, and they've given me so much of their wonderful wine, and after dinner Jim Zeno just made the most gracious offer because he offered his wife to me. It was quite sweet of him, and he really just wanted to watch. It was a totally wonderful experience. In fact, Karly Zeno got three of her fingers up my rectum, and she did it so beautifully and joyfully. I always thought this would not be something I'd like, but when I saw what love she did it with, I can't think of any greater happiness than to have Karly's hand up my butt.”

Mr. and Mrs. Zeno looked on in disbelief, listening with utter horror as their esteemed dinner guest insulted them in their own home, spewing vile slander with a wicked smile on his face.

Richard Brautigan spent much of his free time with Bob Junsch during his last two weeks of life. On the eighth of September, he was over at the Junsches' house in Stinson and gave Bob and Shallen a number of signed books. He included a copy of
The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
, among the rarest of Brautigan's early books. He inscribed it: “‘wishing and concerned one more week. Let's see what happens. Why not?' (happiness + happiness).” Richard signed his name in full, his tiny signature pinched and cramped like engraving on the head of a pin.

“These are going to be worth a lot of money someday,” Richard said when he gave the couple his books. Brautigan had never played the role of a literary big shot around Bob, but Junsch thought it an “awfully pompous thing to say.”

A week later, the Junsches gave Richard a ride into the city in Shallen's new Peugeot. “He called for some reason,” Bob recalled. “He had to go over.” Junsch was on his way to the airport to fly down to Morro Bay. On the drive, Brautigan talked a lot about Japan. He also asked about Kevin Clancy, a bartender at the Washbag that he liked. Clancy was a friend of Bob's. Junsch told Richard that Clancy was a good guy, “but you have to watch him if you're out and about. He kind of likes his fisticuffs.”

The Junsches dropped Brautigan off at Kearny and Broadway, in front of Enrico's. They were in a hurry and didn't have time to stop for a cup of coffee. The next time Bob saw his friend, Richard had been dead for six weeks.

On a previous trip to San Francisco, Brautigan had stopped by City Lights. The bookshop featured a window display of Walt Whitman's books along with dried grass from the poet's grave. Lawrence Ferlinghetti spotted his old acquaintance and went outside to ask what Richard thought of the little exhibit.

“That sure gives a good argument for cremation,” Brautigan said.

Richard did not go to City Lights on his last visit to Frisco, heading straight into Enrico's for a drink. He had no way of knowing that his ex-wife Akiko was also in town for the day. She had come up from Los Angeles to work on an assignment with a photographer. When the job was finished, they had plenty of time before their return flight and stopped for coffee at a North Beach
café. Afterward, the photographer wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes. They went into an adult bookstore on Broadway to look for some smokes.

Inside Enrico's, Brautigan polished off the last of several drinks. He'd struck up a conversation with a strange woman and invited her to get something to eat with him next door at Vanessi's. They stepped out onto Broadway at the same moment Aki and the photographer left the adult bookstore down the block. Even from the rear and at some distance, Akiko recognized her former husband immediately. “That's Richard Brautigan,” she told her companion, following after the familiar form.

Richard and the woman went inside Vanessi's. Two glass doors, one on either side of a small vestibule, separated the restaurant's interior from the street. Aki entered the first door and through the second watched Brautigan talk with the familiar maître d'. Richard turned and looked straight at Akiko, seeing her for the first time in four years. He grew pale “like he saw a ghost.” Without saying a word, Brautigan walked away, toward the bar.

Aki knew in her heart she should not have attempted this surprise encounter with Richard. Feeling “so sad,” she hurried back down Broadway, “crying all the way to Los Angeles in the airplane.”

Richard lost his appetite but still ordered something to eat. Afterward, Brautigan parted company with the woman he'd just met and returned to Enrico's alone. In a coincidence like something invented in Hollywood, Marcia Clay decided to look for Richard, whom she'd also not seen in four years. Loading her baby into his carriage, she wheeled him over to Enrico's, hoping to find Brautigan there. Disappointed at not seeing him, she asked the bartender when Richard had last been in. “Oh, he's here now,” he told her. “He just went to the bathroom.”

Marcia waited for him. When he came out of the men's room, “he looked like he'd seen a spook.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, sounding startled.

“I'm looking for you, Richard.”

“I don't believe this,” Brautigan said. “My whole life has just happened in one day.”

Marcia thought Richard was “already drunk,” but she sat down to have a cocktail with him. Brautigan said, “I want to come to your house, and I want you to cook for me. I want to spend the night at your house.”

Clay felt her friend didn't understand reality. “I have a husband,” she said.

“All right.” Richard steepled his hands together and did his little formal trademark bow. Their conversation continued, and Brautigan told her about the book he was writing. He asked Marcia to read it.

“Richard, I don't know if I should read your book,” Marcia said. “What if I don't like it? I may say things that are honest.”