Jubilee Hitchhiker (139 page)

Thompson extended his Montana visit and stayed on in his cheap room at the Murray. He asked Brautigan for a blurb for
Saloon
. Richard came through with “This book is a good place to get a drink.” Toby “was hoping for something a bit more expansive,” but thought it “classic Richard Brautigan.” Thompson hoped to interview Brautigan for his sixties book. Richard
remained elusive, telling Toby he didn't want him to write anything about what was happening in Montana. At the same time, Thompson felt that Brautigan really wanted to be included.

When Brautigan came into town, he often wandered into the lobby of the Murray. If he encountered Thompson, the pair embarked on bizarre shopping expeditions. Toby remembered poking around in Anthony's when Richard spied a collection of miniature felt doll hats, all in different colors, little fedoras and derbies and tiny Stetsons. “These are going to Rancho Brautigan,” he said, buying the whole lot. Brautigan took them back to Pine Creek and hung them on a row of nails driven into his dining room wall.

Another time, Richard and Toby went to dinner at a steak joint in the ghost town community of Cokedale, named for the ruined stone coke ovens lining the gravel road, remnants of the turn-of-the-century Montana coal industry. Brautigan liked this restaurant for its excellent meat and because the owners had decorated the place with a collection of tiny shoes. “They were all over the walls and the ceiling,” Thompson recalled, “weird little tiny sneakers. Richard loved that.”

Peter Lewis was an aspiring writer. Unlike Toby, he had yet to publish anything, and Richard rarely talked with him about literary matters. Once, Brautigan burst into Lewis's room while he was writing and told him to grab the vacuum cleaner and follow him to the barn. Richard led the way up the multilevel stairs into his writing room. Peter was shocked by the enormous number of flies (“hundreds of flies, thousands of flies”) inhabiting Brautigan's studio. “I know that had I tried to do anything there I'd have gone nuts,” he said.

Brautigan attempted to defend his private space against the invading insects by Scotch-taping the seams around the edges of the big picture window. Scotch tape had also been plastered in “odd patterns along the door jambs.” Richard asked Peter to vacuum up the dead flies littering nearly every surface of the office. Lewis went to work: floors, windowsill, Brautigan's desk. Richard yanked the vacuum nozzle out of Peter's hands and started using it like a hunting rifle to suck the buzzing flies out of the air. “He just went nuts.”

On a couple occasions, Brautigan shared literary thoughts with Lewis. Richard once observed that there was “only room for one general in Livingston.” Peter felt Richard was “upset that McGuane seemed to be leading the charge at that particular moment in literary history.” Lewis intuited “he clearly felt he was working in the shadow of McGuane's burgeoning reputation.”

Another time, when they sat together out on the back porch, Brautigan spoke of the ways in which great American novelists had achieved significant fame after their first publications only to be panned in midcareer. Brautigan mentioned Hemingway and Faulkner. Lewis understood he clearly meant to be included in the same league. “He felt he was writing in the tradition of the great American novel,” Lewis recalled, “and would assume his rightful place in the pantheon.”

When poet Ken McCullough and Brautigan returned to Pine Creek from a workshop in Missoula, they engaged in a long literary conversation that struck Peter Lewis as “as close to a statement of his credo as I ever heard him deliver.” They discussed the metaphysical poets. Peter remembered Richard maintaining “that there were two things that he most fervently believed.” One was, “Somehow in the act of making love one died. That you achieved death in lovemaking.” The other was “specific information,” a point Brautigan stressed often in literary discussions. “He kept repeating this phrase over and over again,” Peter recalled. “Specific information.”

Brautigan's disenchantment with Tom McGuane's growing success came to a head one afternoon at a party given by Russell Chatham's girlfriend, Sandi Lee, at her small Livingston home on
D Street. Richard had recently begun telling his younger writing colleagues that they hadn't “paid their dues.” Over barbecue at Sandi Lee's, Brautigan said this to McGuane and touched a nerve. Tom's volatile Celtic blood rose darkly to his face. Brautigan ignored this warning sign and pressed on with his non-dues-paying admonition. McGuane, his face the color of an eggplant, exploded. “You,” he bellowed at Richard, “you're nothing but a pet rock! A fucking hula hoop! You should get down on your knees every day and thank God for creating hippies!”

The pair suddenly grappled in front of the astonished partygoers, lurching into Lee's tiny bathroom, slamming the door behind them. The argument continued, muffled and indistinct, the angry words punctuated by the sound of blows. When the door burst open, Brautigan, pink and flushed, stormed off. McGuane had nothing more to say on the subject of dues payment.

Peter Lewis recalled another incident revealing Richard's preoccupation with his rightful place in the literary pantheon. A postcard arrived from Donald Allen congratulating Brautigan on the recent publication of
Sombrero Fallout
. Don wrote that he considered him “one of the great American writers working in the humorous vein of Mark Twain.” Allen's praise was not received well. “Richard was furious,” Peter remembered, “just beside himself.” Years before, Brautigan had claimed to be Twain's reincarnation and deliberately cultivated a Twain-like nineteenth-century appearance. Now, he resented the comparison, especially the designation of humorist. Lewis regarded the outburst as “an absolute misgauge of his own importance as a literary figure.”

Compared to the manic emotional turmoil engulfing Brautigan's place, the Hjortsberg household next door struck Peter Lewis as a “bastion of conjugal and literary sanity.” He often walked over to buy eggs from Gatz and Marian and felt their home “projected a calm that was the complete opposite of Rancho Brautigan. It seemed to represent all that was sane and good about the literary enterprise.”

Peter also became aware that “Richard was very paranoid.” Whenever Lewis went into Livingston to run errands and shop for groceries, Brautigan rummaged through his personal papers. “I was writing a lot of poetry at the time,” Peter recalled, “and he seemed to feel somewhat challenged by my daring to undertake my own literary life under his roof. I was a threat to him.” Lewis complained about this to Toby Thompson. “God, he's driving me crazy,” Peter said. “He comes into my room, and he goes through my stuff, and he pulls the pages out of the typewriter and reads them. Things that I'm writing.”

Thompson thought Peter Lewis “was freaked out about it.” Peter told him Richard had said, “Everything you have is mine!” In addition to suspecting Brautigan of snooping through his work, Lewis was convinced Brautigan listened in on his telephone conversations with his family and his girlfriend from an extension in another room. “That upset me tremendously,” he said.

Peter had taken the semester off from Berkeley and hoped to stay in Montana through the fall. He found Paradise Valley “beautiful and compelling.” He also enjoyed meeting “a bunch of very interesting people.” Now, Lewis toyed with the idea of leaving. “It became clear that my position there was really untenable. [Brautigan] was becoming increasingly violent.” The final straw came at a small dinner party at which Harry Dean Stanton was the guest of honor. “Richard started to lace into me about my poems and who I chose to read and the composition of my library,” Peter recalled. He also said Brautigan “made reference to some of those phone conversations. That's when I really put the whole thing together.”

Lewis blew up, lambasting Brautigan about his “Hooveresque” behavior. Harry Dean, “who saw himself as a peacemaker,” came to Peter's defense, attempting to defuse the tension and calm Richard down. Lewis realized at that moment it was time to leave. A couple days later, while driving Brautigan to the Bozeman airport for a flight to San Francisco and his “fix of Chinese food and movies,” Lewis told him he wouldn't be there when he got back. Lewis remembered saying he “was very, very sorry,” maintaining he “simply couldn't continue to work for him given the situation.” Richard expressed disappointment, apologizing for his behavior. He respected Peter's decision and made no attempt to cajole him into staying. “That was that,” Lewis said.

Before he left late in September, Toby Thompson came for dinner at Brautigan's place. Guy Valdène prepared an elaborate meal. He and Jim Harrison had spent the day bird shooting, and a brace of rough grouse hung from the rafters of the porch ceiling. Halfway through dinner, Richard noticed one of the Hjortsbergs' cats prowling around. “Watch this,” he whispered to Toby. “Watch this.”

Brautigan snuck out onto the porch and cut down the grouse, stuffing them into his coat pockets. Back in the dining room, Richard feigned great concern. “Geez,” he said, “those grouse aren't there. The cat got your grouse.”

Harrison and Valdène ran out onto the back porch. “They were furious,” Toby Thompson recalled. “Just really furious.”

After dinner, the boys all headed into town for a nightcap (or two, or three) at the Wrangler Bar. A couple hours later, drinking with Guy and Jim, Richard reached into his pockets and pulled out the grouse. “I'll be darned,” he said, setting the dead birds down on the bar in front of his friends. Valdène and Harrison were pissed. “They knew they'd been had,” Thompson observed.

After Toby Thompson returned home to Cabin John, Maryland, Richard lacked a regular drinking buddy. With no designated driver and the weather growing ever colder, Brautigan arranged for the usual end-of-season shutdown, emptying his refrigerator, hiring someone to drain his water pipes, and bringing his television set, fishing rods, and gun collection over to the Hjortsbergs' for safekeeping. Back in Frisco, it was business as usual for Richard: watching double features, breakfast at Mama's with Don Carpenter, hanging out at Enrico's.

Early in November, Helen Brann traveled to San Francisco to meet with her new clients, some (Don Carpenter and Keith Abbott) recommended by Richard Brautigan. Brann hosted a cocktail party at her suite in the Stanford Court Hotel, Richard and Keith among her many guests. Brautigan brought along a manuscript copy of his latest novel,
Dreaming of Babylon
, to give to his agent.

Journalist John Grissam was also at the party. In collaboration with Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who had long written a medical advice column for the underground press under the pseudonym “Dr. Hip,” Grissam was at work on a book of interviews on the subject of jealousy and asked everyone in the room about experiences with the green-eyed monster. Swilling bourbon, Brautigan did not participate in these discussions. Richard ignored Grissam, making phone calls in the other room. As time went on, it became clear the journalist was one of his fans. Grissam told Brautigan of his perceptions about the freedom enjoyed by rich and famous writers. Richard deflected these comments. As the whiskey took hold, he sat down on the rug beside the journalist, insisting fame meant nothing, only the work counted. Grissam remained adamant. Surely the money provided by fame provided a boon to a writer.

Brautigan exploded. Reverting to one of his favorite Digger gestures, he tore up a $20 bill and scattered the shreds over Grissam. “This isn't real.” he shouted. “You think this is real? This is nothing.” As Grissam gathered up the torn banknote bits and stuffed the pieces into his vest pocket, Richard dropped to his knees beside him, grabbing one of the journalist's legs, banging his foot against the floor. “This leg is more real than any of that,” Brautigan insisted.

Grissam explained his leg had “mysteriously atrophied” at the disastrous end to an unhappy love affair. Brautigan became suddenly solicitous of Grissam and apologized to him, leaving the hotel suite shortly afterward. To Keith Abbott, it seemed as if Brautigan “had gone instinctively to the source of another person's pain [. . .] doomed to return constantly to his own pain.” Whatever Grissam may have felt about Richard's finding the source of his inner agony, he was grateful for the gift of the torn-up double sawbuck. “The next day, I Scotch-taped the pieces together,” he said, “exchanged the twenty at a bank, and paid my phone bill.”

Not long after this, Brautigan encountered filmmaker Nicholas Roeg. Their evening concluded over a bottle of Jurgensen's at Richard's Union Street apartment. By 1976, with the release of
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, forty-eight-year-old Roeg's reputation as a cinematographer had been eclipsed by growing recognition of his skills as a director. His first three motion pictures in the director's chair,
Performance
,
Walkabout
, and
Don't Look Now
, were all praised for technical innovation and offbeat insights into human relationships.

Late into the evening, a dispute arose between Brautigan and Roeg over the age of the whiskey they were drinking. Richard owned the bottle and maintained that it was eighteen years old. Nicolas insisted it was much younger. A check of the label revealed the bourbon to be sweet sixteen. Brautigan immediately claimed victory, claiming he'd owned the bottle for two years. Roeg refused to accept this false logic. A struggle ensued. Richard pushed Nic down a long flight of stairs in his apartment building, landing the Brit in the emergency room with a broken foot.

Years later after Brautigan's death, Jack Thibeau attended a New Year's Eve party at Helena's, a private celebrity supper club obscurely located in an industrial section of Silver Lake, a Los Angeles district east of Hollywood. No sign marked the large gray stucco building housing the exclusive hideaway, formerly the dance studio of proprietress Helena Kallianiotes, whose gold-spangled belly-dancing costume hung framed under glass against a far wall. A close friend of Jack Nicholson, Kallianiotes enjoyed a sporadic film acting career, most notably as the tough lesbian hitchhiker in
Five Easy Pieces.