Jubilee Hitchhiker (135 page)

Richard changed his mind and his plans once he got back to San Francisco. He would travel to Tokyo instead. Brautigan had several reasons for wanting to visit Japan. Four of his books had been published there that year. Kazuko returned to America that summer for a vacation. She was working on the translation of
Confederate General.
Earlier in August, still in Tokyo, she received a disturbing phone call from the firm planning to publish
The Pill versus the Springhill Disaster
in Japanese. Brautigan's contracts all stipulated Fujimoto was to be his official translator, but this outfit had another idea. They asked her not to do the translation.

Natsuki Ikezawa, a thirty-year-old poet, novelist, and essayist, had requested the assignment, and the publishers wanted Kazuko to step aside. She found this “quite odd,” replying she “was not in a position to alter the terms of a contract between them and [Brautigan].” Early in September, Fujimoto wrote Brautigan from Racine, Wisconsin, reminding him that item 17 in his publishing contract stipulated that she was the designated translator. By coincidence, Helen Brann also wrote to Richard on the same day addressing this very problem. Brann speculated if they “stuck to our guns,” they could force the Japanese publishing firm to drop the Ikezawa translation, but said she “didn't see that we can do too much about this at this point.”

Richard and Siew-Hwa had dinner at the Washbag with Kazuko and her husband, David, in mid-September. Fujimoto planned on taking a short trip down to Big Sur to ensure the “accuracy” of her
Confederate General
translation before returning to Tokyo. Kazuko told Richard that she wanted to work next on either
Revenge of the Lawn
or
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
. Brautigan's journal entry for the day included this observation: “I was pleased to know my work is popular in Japan.”

Ianthe flew to Hawaii from Montana over Christmas break to spend time with her mother and half siblings. She had not seen her father since just before Halloween. On her return, she stopped off in San Francisco for a brief visit. Ianthe stayed a week longer than she expected, coming down with a bad case of bronchitis. She ran a fever of 102. Brautigan walked his daughter down Telegraph Hill and across Columbus Avenue to see a doctor but was too preoccupied with other concerns to stay and learn what was wrong with her. He didn't leave Ianthe enough money to both buy antibiotics and take a cab home. After she filled her prescription she walked back to Union Street, “too tired and sick to cry.” She was only fifteen but “felt like an old, old woman whose life was coming to an end.”

Preoccupied with applying for a Japanese visa, breaking up with Siew-Hwa, planning his trip, and “drinking nonstop,” Brautigan paid scant attention to his daughter's illness, although he handed her money “by the fistful.” Ianthe ordered takeout food and somehow “managed to keep things together,” with the help of Siew-Hwa's nursing. After Richard also came down sick, Siew-Hwa took over all the cooking chores despite being “mad as hell” at him. When Ianthe asked what was going to become of her, Richard said she could either accompany him to Japan and attend a boarding school there, or go back to Hawaii and live with her mother. Neither option sounded very attractive. Ianthe planned on returning to the loving circle formed by Deane and Lexi Cowan in Montana, and as soon as she was well enough to travel, she did.

In an interview years later, Siew-Hwa Beh declared, “Richard destroyed the relationship. He started initiating a lot of destructive things that would cause rifts, like staying away until all hours of the night.” Brautigan never brought anyone home to the apartment but started seeing a “Latino [
sic
] woman who he had no feelings for.” Siew-Hwa didn't understand why he started cheating. “Now there are three of us,” Richard told her after he returned from one of his assignations. When the Latina woman called the apartment and Siew-Hwa answered the phone, she wasn't jealous. “I felt so much compassion for the situation,” she said. “He was troubled, and the darkness started to descend, and I didn't know what to do.”

Brautigan never brought other women home while Beh was in residence, but when they were apart it was another story. Sherry Vetter remembered spending time with him in North Beach during this period. She recalled the Union Street apartment in detail. The back room Richard used as a writing studio was bright with sunlight, something Brautigan, with his pale sensitive skin, couldn't tolerate. Richard seemed unable to make up his mind whether to have curtains installed or get wooden blinds instead. “It was the problem of making the decisions of what to buy and what was right or what was stupid,” Sherry said. “So he did nothing.” Brautigan left in place the cheap pull-down roller shades that came with the apartment for the duration of his tenancy.

One afternoon, Richard sadly told Sherry about Siew-Hwa Beh, “his Chinese girlfriend,” and how she had called him a male chauvinist pig and told him he would have to reform. At this point in their relationship, Brautigan and Vetter had become close friends and were quite comfortable
discussing other partners. Sherry found this particular moment “so poignant and so sad.” Richard looked over at her and asked, “Do you think I'm a male chauvinist pig?”

“Oh, no, Richard,” she replied, “you're not a male chauvinist pig,” adding in the same breath, “Can you loan me $500?”

“Certainly,” he said and wrote her a check.

Throughout all of this, Beh remained faithful to Brautigan. “I trusted myself never to sleep with anybody,” she said, “and also I knew Richard couldn't handle it.” There was someone interested in her at the time, but Siew-Hwa never mentioned it because she knew it would make Brautigan jealous. “I had no idea how deeply jealous he could be. Because he told me how so many times he would come home to the apartment and his girlfriend or whoever was in his life at that time was fucking someone else in bed. And I said, ‘What did you do, Richard?'

“He said, ‘Sometimes I just sat there and watched them.'”

Beh, priding herself on her monogamy, felt deep sympathy as Brautigan related one bygone betrayal after another. She stayed loyal to Richard in spite of the tensions wracking their relationship. “I have to be loved not hated,” she told him, “accepted not suspected.” Throughout all their differences, the couple continued to live the celebrity life of successful artists in San Francisco, dining frequently at Vanessi's and the Washington Square Bar and Grill.

One evening at the Washbag with Tony Dingman, Tony suggested Francis Ford Coppola might like to join them. Richard was ecstatic. Tony made the call and said Francis would soon be on his way. And the long wait began. They waited and waited. A couple hours went by. Coppola stood them up. Brautigan glowered in petulant fury, unaccustomed to such rude behavior from fellow celestials. On another occasion, things went better. Harry Dean Stanton brought Al Pacino over to the Union Street apartment. After a bit, they all went out to join Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston for the evening. Siew-Hwa, a student of cinema, was away and missed the party, to her lasting regret.

Brautigan had every reason to be annoyed when Coppola snubbed him at the Washbag. Sherry Vetter recalled their “crazy little relationship.” She remembered one evening in North Beach when Richard and Francis competed in a mano a mano marinara sauce cook-off at Tommaso's, an Italian restaurant that opened in 1935 on Kearny, just across Broadway from Sentinel Tower, the venerable pre-earthquake building owned by Coppola and the headquarters of Zoetrope Productions.

Brautigan continued to have breakfast and lunch regularly with Dingman, Don Carpenter, and Curt Gentry. Carpenter had mixed feelings about these meals. “Richard very much liked to call me during working hours,” Don remembered. “If he knew I was working on a novel, he might call me every day for a month to go to breakfast. He'd call between six and seven, when I was just getting started. ‘Come on over.' And I was so deeply in his debt, financially, as well as a number of other ways, I had to do it. So, I'd drive over to the city. There he would be with a big bag of laundry or something, and we'd go by the laundry and then we'd go by the various breakfast places. He would make the decision as to where would meet, what we would do, where we would go, who would pay—he would always pay—that is how he controlled.”

On his way to visit Richard one afternoon, Keith Abbott spotted Bob Kaufman, the Beat poet, on the corner where Stockton crosses both Columbus Avenue and Green Street. Kaufman waited for the light to turn red and started to cross the busy intersection, “exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do.” The city traffic screeched to a halt as Kaufman, hands trembling, “wired
on whatever,” shambled erratically from corner to corner. Abbott considered this a “disgraceful performance.”

When Abbott got to Brautigan's Union Street apartment, he was harshly critical of Kaufman's behavior. Richard sat his friend down at the kitchen table, pouring them both a glass of whiskey. He explained how he first met Bob Kaufman back in the early days of the North Beach poetry renaissance, relating “little anecdotes about Bob's sense of humor, how he defused things, how he was hounded by this one cop [. . .] Sort of gave me Bob Kaufman's history.” Brautigan launched into another story about Kaufman, a sweet man and a pacifist at heart.

One night on the Beach in some forgotten gin joint catering to interracial couples, an enraged bigot approached Kaufman and his date and started harassing him. “This guy just pushed Bob to the breaking point.” To make his point, Brautigan mimed the action in slow motion. How Kaufman picked a wine bottle off his table (Brautigan's hand moved slowly through the air a couple of inches) and cracked it over the loudmouth's head. Richard's tone grew more serious. He told Keith that he'd only seen something like that once before in his life. “It came out of left field,” Abbott recalled. Brautigan told his friend about the time one of his stepfathers (most likely Tex Porterfield) hit his mother on the head with a cast-iron frying pan and knocked her out cold.

Earlier in the year, Richard met Klyde Young, an old friend of Bob Junsch. Young, a house-painter who lived in Mill Valley had been to Japan when serving in the Merchant Marine. Conversations about his upcoming trip to Tokyo led Brautigan to ask Young if he'd paint the Bolinas house. Klyde thought the place “was in pretty bad shape. Sometimes you couldn't get the front door to lock because it was warped.” Noticing how badly the house was overgrown with trees and shrubs, Young suggested he cut some of them down. “Who wouldn't want to see the ocean if you've got an ocean view house?”

Richard wouldn't hear of it. He liked the seclusion. Brautigan also wouldn't move a number of old pine-needle-covered stoves and refrigerators in his backyard. Richard told Klyde he liked to go out and look at them because they reminded him of dinosaurs. The house painting job also proceeded in an eccentric manner. Young ended up staying a long time and living in the place. “He wouldn't say, ‘Paint the house.' He'd say, ‘Paint this room,' and then he'd disappear for weeks and the next time I'd hear from him, he'd say, ‘Okay, paint this room. Okay, start painting the windows. Okay, now paint the eaves.'”

This went on and on, the work proceeding in reverse order. During the wet winter months, Brautigan had Young work on the outside of the house. “So there were days when I couldn't do anything outside,” Klyde recalled. During the warm months, Richard had him working inside, “because he did it backwards.” Over the long haul, they got to be friends.

Brautigan's passport was issued on April 4, 1976, with a photo showing him long-haired, smiling smugly, very pleased with himself. He received a Japanese visa for a stay of two months early in May and left immediately for Tokyo. Siew-Hwa stayed at Union Street for another day before moving to temporary quarters in Berkeley. She returned to Richard's apartment several times to clean and do the laundry.

At Brautigan's request, Beh installed a timer for the lights in the living room, setting it to go on at 8:30 pm and switch off at 2:30 am. Richard wrote her a “long” letter, and she replied, telling him of everything she had done. Siew-Hwa made occasional trips to Bolinas, checking that “everything
was okay” at Richard's house. She cleaned the place and installed another light-timer, set to switch off at 2:00 am.

Beh's memory of her first visit to the Bolinas house remained vivid. Brautigan told her the story of the ghost dwelling upstairs, convinced the spirit was trapped in the building. Siew-Hwa proposed he install a mirror above the stairs to free the ghost. She recalled a Chinese folktale relating how ghosts didn't know they were dead until they chanced to look in a mirror and saw no reflection. Once a deceased spirit recognized it had passed away, it could move on into an afterlife.

Around the first of June, Siew-Hwa traveled to Kingston in Ontario, Canada, where her ex-husband had a teaching position in the Department of Film Studies at Queen's University. Richard wrote a long and “formal” letter. She wished it had been more personal and intimate. After Beh arrived in Canada, Brautigan phoned her from Tokyo. Japan was “a tremendous experience,” but he felt exhausted, having stayed up all night writing. Their conversation went badly. When Siew-Hwa told him she was thinking of going to Malaysia, he replied, “That's fine, certainly. You should do what makes you happy.”

Brautigan flew back to San Francisco from Japan on June 30. Tony Dingman planned to return to the Philippines and continue working on Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
once the sets destroyed by Typhoon Olga were rebuilt, so Richard found himself without a drinking companion/ designated driver for the summer in Montana. He also needed some work done at his place and figured it was too late in the season to hire anyone locally. Keith Abbott recalled Brautigan literally calling him “in a panic,” begging him to come up to Pine Creek. At first, Abbott declined. “Richard, it's summertime,” he said. “It's my big season. It's when I make money here in Berkeley and I just can't do it.”