Jubilee Hitchhiker (140 page)

The glittering party swirled on toward the new year, when Thibeau spotted Nicolas Roeg seated at a candlelit table with his actress wife, Theresa Russell. When the moment seemed right, Jack approached them. “Mr. Roeg,” he said, “I am a friend of Richard Brautigan's.”

Roeg immediately pushed a chair aside for Thibeau. “I just wanted you to know that Richard's favorite story when he got drunk was about how he broke your leg,” Jack told the director.

“Richard broke my leg?” Roeg replied, looking totally nonplussed. “Do you know that for three days I stayed in my hotel room in San Francisco waiting for the police to come and get me because I thought I had killed him?”

As she listened to the conversation, Theresa Russell's “jaw dropped.” She asked Jack how he knew Richard. The other guests at the Roeg's table were also curious, chiming in: “How did you know Richard? How did you meet Richard?”

“Well, I met him in North Beach,” Thibeau explained. “We used to drink wine in alleys together.”

Nicolas Roeg rose to his feet, holding his drink aloft in a toast. “Here . . . Here . . .” he exclaimed.

Roeg and Brautigan never spoke again after the whiskey dispute at Richard's apartment. “So neither one knew what happened,” Thibeau said years later, “and it sort of drifted off into a memoir for both of them.”

Shortly after pushing Roeg down the stairs, Brautigan gave up his Union Street apartment. He planned on returning to Japan for an extended stay and didn't want to pay rent for an unoccupied place. Siew-Hwa Beh had left for Malaysia in November, so Richard arranged with Keith Abbott to truck her belongings over to Berkeley. His own larger possessions went into storage. The smaller stuff, books and manuscripts, his clothing and personal mementos, Richard packed in several large “beautiful trunks.”

Curt Gentry had purchased a modern house on Russian Hill with money earned from
Helter Skelter
. “It was an incredible house,” he recalled. Curt lived there with his second wife, Gail, his former girlfriend, whom he had married six months earlier. Brautigan called him and asked if he could come and spend the weekend, saying he was going back to Japan soon. Curt agreed, and Richard arrived with his new trunks in tow. “Well, the weekend passed,” Curt said, “then a month passed. Almost three months later, Richard was still there. I gave him his own keys, and he'd come and go, but he was wearing awfully thin.”

One annoyance involved taking all of Richard's telephone messages. The Gentrys got Brautigan his own phone for his bedroom. Curt and Gail quarreled frequently, but Richard didn't hear their arguments (“He was the only one in the neighborhood that didn't”) and decided during his extended stay that marriage could be a wonderful and happy thing. Richard immediately adopted the role of pampered husband, asking Gail when she planned to change his sheets, even though she had just changed them the day before.

All along, Richard kept telling the Gentrys that he planned on leaving “in a couple days.” Things came to a head when Gail received a telephone call from Japan Airlines confirming Brautigan's reservation two months ahead. “That was it,” Curt said. “I had to tell Richard to leave.” Brautigan was furious. “He got very, very mad,” Gentry recalled, “and he got very drunk, and so he didn't come home that night.” Actually, Richard did return to the Gentrys' house with Tony Dingman in the middle of the night to collect his trunks. Brautigan told Dingman he was “never going to speak to [Curt] again.”

Richard and Tony hailed a cab at one o'clock in the morning and hauled Brautigan's trunks to the Fairmont Hotel at the top of Nob Hill. When they attempted to check in, the desk clerks at first were hesitant to admit a staggering drunk with shoulder-length hair dressed like a refugee from the Summer of Love. Richard grew indignant and started throwing down $100 bills, shouting, “I can buy this place.” Dingman persuaded the management Brautigan was a world-famous author, and his friend was given a room.

The next morning, the Gentrys arose at their usual hour, walking around quietly not to disturb Richard, whom they assumed was still sleeping upstairs. When Curt went up at last to wake him, the phone rang. It was Brautigan, calling to say he needed to come and get something. Gentry
didn't understand. He thought Richard was calling from the guest bedroom on the other line. Things got straightened out, and Brautigan collected his stuff, leaving only Willard, his papier-mâché bird, behind at the Gentrys'. Not long afterward, on February 19, 1977, Richard flew to Tokyo, his second visit to the Land of the Rising Sun in less than a year.

forty-four: kids

A
LTHOUGH HE OFTEN said he didn't like children, Richard Brautigan possessed a natural rapport with kids. As Keith Abbott observed, “Children generally liked Richard, recognizing an ally in anarchy.” Brautigan's daughter, Ianthe, became the main beneficiary of his talent for thinking like a child. She felt young peoples' affinity for her father stemmed from his recognizing and sharing their latent fears. Richard was terrified lightbulbs might explode at any moment. This made perfect sense to a kid. As a child, Brautigan felt afraid of statues. He thought they were actual people covered alive with molten metal. He often walked blocks out of his way to avoid passing a statue. Hearing of this irrational fear struck a familiar chord in the haunted imaginations of children.

Richard and Ianthe often played games together. Waiting for elevators, they made bets on which car would arrive first. When she was around ten, Brautigan took his daughter to lunch with Bruce Conner. Richard and Bruce played a private game similar to the dirty dozens. The object was to ridicule and insult the other guy as comically and outrageously as possible without ever laughing or even cracking a smile. This went on until the bill arrived. After sitting straight-faced through the meal, Ianthe suddenly burst into gales of hysterical laughter while walking away from the restaurant. “Hey!” Brautigan said to Conner, “she understood the point of our game and was playing along with us.”

Richard never missed a chance to instruct Ianthe on his own peculiar view of life. He once told her that people were crazy when they were alone. The protective wall of solitude allowed an individual's innate insanity to emerge. People talked to themselves and did various other strange things when they thought no one was looking. Then, Brautigan explained, the phone rings or the doorbell chimes unexpectedly and they are suddenly sane once again.

From her earliest childhood, Richard shared his love of the movies with Ianthe. A weekend dad, Brautigan didn't simply regard moviegoing as an easy way to spend time with his kid. Richard's genuine passion for film stretched far back into his own boyhood. He didn't take his daughter to family movies suitable for children, light fare like Disney. They went to pictures that he was interested in seeing. Ianthe was treated to films like
Slaughterhouse-Five
,
Chinatown
,
Amarcord
,
Sleeper
, and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at a relatively tender age. During one “brief horrifying period,” they attended nothing but Japanese samurai films. Ianthe developed a liking for the Blind Swordsman series.

Although he never wore a watch, Brautigan had “a thing about time” and liked to arrive at appointments ahead of schedule. He always got to the movies early. He and his daughter often spent a quarter of an hour sitting together in an empty theater, eating popcorn and staring at a
dark screen. They both enjoyed comedies, becoming “hysterical with laughter.” In her memoir, Ianthe recalled her father's “wild, whooping laughter” filling the auditorium. Watching
Young Frankenstein
, Brautigan laughed so hard that he stuck his hand into his supersized soda instead of his popcorn.

Richard walked out of the theater when he didn't like a movie. Ianthe remembered him leaving with her during Woody Allen's
Manhattan
. Brautigan disliked
Black Moon Rising
so intensely he headed for the exit shortly after it started, this time in the company of Siew-Hwa Beh. Exiting a movie he didn't enjoy was Richard's way of saying that just because you get served crap, you don't have to eat it.

At fifteen, Ianthe needed eyeglasses, and her father brought her to an optometrist. A developing interest in boys caused her to worry about her appearance. Ianthe shared her fears with Brautigan. “Remember that Dorothy Parker poem?” she asked her father. “‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.'”

“Wrong!” Richard immediately replied. “Boys don't make passes at girls without asses!”

Brautigan took pains to treat Ianthe's burgeoning sexuality with dignity and offer serious advice. “Don't ever get involved with someone who has more broken wings than you do,” he told his daughter. He also warned her of the dangers of VD. Acutely aware of his own herpes problem, Richard advised Ianthe to always take a close look at a man's penis before having sex. Not one to avoid frank talk with his daughter, Brautigan cautioned her to “never do speed. You can come back from anything else. You can come back from heroin. But not speed.” He also instructed Ianthe to “always take care of your body [. . .] Keep your body safe.”

On a lighter note, Richard taught his daughter to love practical joking. In her memoir, she mentioned a time when she came home from school and was “considerably put out” because her father had eaten all the chocolate chip cookies she had baked. A couple days later, she found chocolate chip cookies hidden all over her room, in her shoes, in the desk drawers, under her pillow. Chocolate chip cookies turned up in odd places for weeks.

On another occasion, Richard appeared one morning in Montana wearing a Japanese kimono and cowboy boots and launched into an impromptu dance routine, reducing Ianthe and her friend Cadence to fits of uncontrolled laughter by “singing off-key, pretending to tap-dance [and] flapping around the kitchen [. . .]”

Siew-Hwa Beh recalled an evening on Union Street in 1975 when Brautigan was fixing diner. “I pulled this joke on Ianthe,” he told her, “and I knew it was the last time I could pull this joke on her.” His daughter was fifteen and growing wise to Richard's tricks. “I was with Ianthe, and we went into a shop with all these clocks,” Brautigan continued. “I said to Ianthe, ‘Ianthe, what time is it?' And she ran around trying to look for a watch so she could see the time. She kept asking the people around whether they had a watch so she could tell the time, but the whole shop was filled with clocks.” Richard laughed at the memory of his joke as he stirred the spaghetti sauce. “I just had to pull it on her,” he said, “because it would be the last time I could get away with it.”

In retaliation, the next year, Ianthe and Cadence Lipsett turned all the clocks in the Montana house back an hour while Brautigan worked in his studio out in the barn. With his concern for time and punctuality, Richard was furious with them when he found out the joke was on him. Resetting the clocks had thrown off his schedule. Cadence remained unrepentant. “He's blowing this way out of proportion,” she told Ianthe. At the same time, Cadence held Richard in high regard. “He
was so articulate and precise in the way he explained things,” she said. “One of the great things about your dad was that he was never condescending when he talked to us.”

In his memoir,
Downstream from Trout Fishing in America
, Keith Abbott wrote about helping Richard move his possessions out of the Geary Street apartment. On the final day of the project, he brought his seven-year-old daughter, Persephone, along with him. The little girl was sullen and bored. Brautigan suggested she sweep his bedroom floor, where he still emptied the coins out of his pockets every night. Persephone dragged the broom into the empty room. The little girl's mood changed the moment she saw what littered the floor. Brautigan “could barely contain himself” and hurried onto the back porch to fetch an empty mayonnaise jar for Persephone to collect the pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters she had swept up. Keith Abbott remembered “the look on Richard's face as he stood in the doorway, his hangover banished, watching delightedly [. . .]”

Not all parents appreciated Brautigan's subversive connection with their children. Dan Gerber's wife, Virginia, was “sort of horrified” when they stayed with Richard at Pine Creek and he regaled their kids, especially ten-year-old Frank, with wild tales from his youth. “You know,” Dan recalled, “it would be things like stealing stop signs away from the streets and causing accidents.” Brautigan related other pranks, included the episode of hiding rotten chickens in the freezer of the local market and his trick of sticking a garden hose through the open window of a neighborhood house when the residents were away and turning on the water. The Gerbers were appalled, but their children sat enthralled by Brautigan's juvenile delinquent memories.

Fascinated by Richard's towering redwood barn, Lorca Hjortsberg had frequently journeyed across the creek to play in its spooky deserted cow stalls. Her family's own leaning red barn, populated with chicken coops and workshops and a functional hayloft, lacked the labyrinthian mysteries of Brautigan's cobweb-draped basement-level byre, the floor caked three feet thick with ancient dried manure.

Two summers later, shortly after school got out in June, Lorca complained to her father about all the trash littering Pine Creek Road between the Yellowstone River and old Highway 89. Gatz organized an impromptu cleanup, enlisting his daughter, her best friend, Polly Story, and her three-year-old brother, Max. They worked all morning and into the afternoon, picking up discarded bottles, cans, and Styrofoam takeout boxes. When they finished, the gravel road was clean and the back of the Hjortsbergs' '49 Chevy pickup piled high with stuffed black plastic trash bags. Gatz posed the kids leaning nonchalantly against the heaped garbage sacks and took a quick snapshot.