Jubilee Hitchhiker (148 page)

As Brautigan and Gerber walked the streets of Tokyo in the company of a robed Japanese Zen priest, they attracted considerable attention from the passing pedestrian swarm. Both tall, blond, and undeniably Western, they stood out, head and shoulders, above the crowd. “I was quite a sight in Japan,” Dan remembered. “Everybody always asked if I was John Denver.” Gerber recognized this simple cultural misunderstanding. Brautigan attributed the crowd's fascination with a pair of tall white strangers as a direct consequence of his own celebrity. “I'm very well known in Japan,” Richard commented smugly to Dan.

Another day, an angry Brautigan arrived at Gerber's hotel by taxi, outraged because the cab driver had just pulled an “Amerigoo,” on him. “Amerigoo” was Richard's term for the way Japanese took advantage of foreigners, thinking them dumb Americans. On this occasion, Brautigan's cabbie took him the long way around to Gerber's place. “He would be alternately delighted and then infuriated by what he called Amerigoo,” Dan remembered.

Brautigan complained of his recent herpes attack. He said it happened whenever he got upset. Richard wasn't sure “whether the herpes had erupted because he had gotten upset” or if it was the other way around. “The two things coincided,” Gerber observed. Richard made no mention of Akiko by name. He told Dan about a “mysterious” relationship with a married Japanese woman. “She would appear on her terms,” Gerber said, recalling the story, “and make love to Richard and then disappear.” Brautigan's emotions swung, week after week, from exhilaration and delight in everything Japanese to deep depression and disgust at the never-ending Amerigoo. Richard told Dan that “he was on an emotional roller-coaster within a roller-coaster. Lying in bed in his hotel listening to people fucking through the wall next door.” Hearing his friend's story, Gerber thought, “Anybody would be unhappy living in a luxury hotel as a hotel guest month by month.”

Brautigan wanted to show his friends something special. After lunch, he guided them to a little plaza at the north exit of Shibuya Station, pointing out a life-sized bronze statue of a dog. In the early 1920s, Hachi (“Hachikō”), a white male Akita, accompanied his master, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor at the Imperial University, to Shibuya Station every morning on his way to work. Each afternoon, the dog went back to the station to meet the professor when he got off the 3:00 pm train. On May 21, 1925, Ueno suffered a stroke and never came home again.

For almost a decade, Hachikō waited at Shibuya Station, rain or shine, day in and day out, for a best friend who didn't return. The faithful dog touched the heart of Tokyo. His death on March 8, 1935, waiting in the exact spot where he'd spent so many devoted hours, made the front pages of every newspaper in the city. Funds for the
chuken
monument were raised by public subscription. Over time, the statue became the most popular meeting place in Tokyo.

Takako Shiina told Brautigan the legend of Hachikō and took him to the Shibuya Station exit plaza. Richard loved the story. They often visited the site together. Richard knew Hachi's story would touch Dan's heart and deliberately staged this poetic street theater to please his old pal. Curiously, Brautigan never wrote a single word about the faithful dog.

Gerber, Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, and Bob Watkins left Tokyo the following day. Richard came to their hotel to see them off. With all the luggage, they decided to take two cabs to the station. Richard and Dan traveled in one; Kobun and Bob in the other. The two parties separated on the way to catch the Kyoto train. “One problem being in the Tokyo station is that everything is in Japanese,” Gerber recalled.

Lost, unable to either speak or read the language, Dan recalled running up a long flight of stairs, Richard huffing and puffing alongside him, both hauling heavy bags, only to find themselves on the wrong platform. “Richard took it upon himself,” Gerber said. “It was very important to him that I make my train.” They ran back down the stairs and raced to another platform, reaching the departing train with just moments to spare. Brautigan handed the last bag aboard as the doors closed on his red exhausted face. Gerber later joked that he expected to read a Kyoto headline the next day: american author dies on railroad platform. “This was the gracious host part of Richard,” Dan said. “I also think he was very happy to see somebody from home.”

On the train, Kobun reflected on meeting Richard Brautigan. “He's incredible,” the Zen master said, laughing softly to himself. “What is he doing living here? Why does he stay in Japan? He is miserable here.”

Not long after his friends departed, Richard went to see the physician recommended by Helen Brann's doctor. Things did not go well during the consultation. Brautigan suffered further “pain and mental anguish” after applying the prescribed medication to his afflicted member. Richard complained to Helen, who responded with an apologetic handwritten letter. “I feel that you are desperately unhappy,” she wrote, “and I'd give anything within my limited power to help.” Brann felt Brautigan should return to San Francisco, “where you are so loved and missed.” She wanted him to come back for the ABA (American Booksellers Association) convention being held in Frisco in May. Sam Lawrence thought Richard should be there to promote
Dreaming of Babylon
. Helen felt sure Dell would pay Brautigan's travel expenses.

Richard did not return for the ABA convention. He remained in Tokyo, where the weather turned hot and humid. Knowing he would not be back in Montana for some time, he wrote to Gatz Hjortsberg, asking that he check on the placement of a new cattle guard on the road near his home and deal with any potential fencing problems arising from tearing down a nearby shed. About this same time, he shipped his corrected
Babylon
galley proofs off to Helen Brann in New York.

After three weeks, Dan Gerber returned to Tokyo and gave Brautigan a call. Richard said he'd take Dan out and show him the city's vibrant nightlife. Brautigan picked Gerber up at his hotel in the early evening, a time the Japanese call “the hour of the pearl,” and walked him to a nearby park. It was one of the very few parks in Tokyo that did not close before five o'clock and had become a popular trysting place for young couples. Richard mentioned this to Dan, indicating all the paired-up men and women sitting primly on the benches. They waited for darkness, when they could make out in relative privacy. This discreet mating ritual charmed Brautigan. “These people would go to the park and sit there very dignified until it got dark.” What tickled him most were all the public signs depicting what Gerber described as “a bear in black, sort of like a ghost, lurking up out of bushes over benches.” The signs meant “Beware of Peeping Toms.”

Brautigan wanted to show Gerber the mysteries of Tokyo at night. He took Dan to the Roppongi District. Gerber considered it “the Via Veneto of Tokyo.” They went to a number of “very brassy bars.” Dan felt, “the Japanese had seen a lot of American movies of the forties and fifties of what American nightclubs were supposed to be like.” Gerber remembered Brautigan being amused by the sight of “these absolutely glorious, gorgeous Japanese women” fawning over groups of American and European businessmen. “Geeks and nerds who in a bar in the States would be lucky to find any woman who would give them the time of day.”

Brautigan insisted “there were two kinds of Japanese women in Roppongi.” Those interested in European and American men who wore their hair long and straight. The others, interested in Japanese men, had permed hair cut short. Gerber thought it was a “very innocent evening,” walking around, taking in the passing crowd and the bright flashing neon. In their ongoing conversation, Richard told Dan about the whorehouse in Yokohama where prostitutes dressed like nuns.

Asked if he'd been a customer there, Brautigan insisted he had never paid for sex in his life. Emphasizing his denial, Richard gestured in the air with his right hand, writing an invisible script. “Ink for the pen,” he said.

Brautigan told Gerber a story about traveling to Seoul, Korea, “with this mysterious woman that he was seeing.” Richard said he had to leave the country every sixty days to renew his Japanese visa, necessitating a “miserable” overnight trip to Seoul. None of this was true. Brautigan never journeyed to Korea. Not with Akiko, the mystery woman, nor anyone else. When he needed to extend his visa, Richard went to the Immigration Department and had a sixty-day extension permit stamped into his passport.

As Brautigan's departure date approached, he tried planning for Akiko to come to America with him. Richard had given up his San Francisco apartment before leaving for Japan. Not having a permanent place to live provided additional complications. An incident late one night in Takako Shiina's basement bar brought matters to a head. Inebriated when he wandered into The Cradle, Brautigan got increasingly more drunk. The American screenwriter Leonard Schrader sat at the bar talking in Japanese with Ryu Murakami and Kazuhiko Hasegawa, a film director.

Between 1969 and 1973, Leonard Schrader lived a double life in Japan, teaching American literature at Doshisha and Kyoto Universities during the day and hanging out with the Yamaguchi-gumi family, the preeminent Yakuza gangster clan in Kyoto, at night. Leonard used this experience to cowrite his first screenplay,
The Yakuza
(1975), with his younger brother, Paul, who gained international fame the next year with a script for Martin Scorsese's film
Taxi Driver
.

That night at The Cradle, Brautigan made several drunken attempts to insinuate himself into their conversation. They had no interest in talking with a boozy American who spoke no Japanese. Richard grew more insulting. He probably mixed up the two Schraders, confusing Leonard with Paul, who had treated Siew-Hwa Beh unkindly when they were film students at UCLA. Brautigan decided such behavior deserved retribution.

Stammering and repetitive, Richard grew increasingly nasty, drunkenly deriding Schrader. Kazuhiko Hasegawa had enough of hearing his friend abused by a loutish stranger. Rising suddenly, the film director flattened Brautigan's nose with a sudden karate chop. Richard stood dumbfounded, his bleeding, broken nose mashed like roadkill. Without a word, the director then reached out and took hold of the damaged proboscis, tugging it straight with a deft twist.

Speechless, bloodied, and humiliated, anesthetized by oceans of booze, Brautigan watched in a fog of disbelief as Takako Shiina asked her bartender to fill a bucket with water. Kazuhiko Hasegawa sat on a couch, savoring his triumph. Takako poured the water over his head. It was a July night, but the director fretted he might freeze to death on his way home from The Cradle. Takako promptly brought Richard to a hospital. A sodden memorial to the event, the couch at The Cradle took a long time to dry.

Observing Richard's broken nose a day or so later, Akiko said, “Why don't you go back right now. That would be better and I'll come to follow you.”

Brautigan asked if she wanted his old nose the way it was before.

“Yes,” she said. “I like your nose very much. So, please fix it.”

Knowing he needed nose reconstruction, Richard phoned Erik Weber in San Francisco before his departure. He asked if Weber had the latest pictures taken of him. Erik said yes. Richard wanted copies. “I just stopped what I was doing and ran in the darkroom,” Weber remembered. He made several prints. They got to Brautigan on time, and Erik charged him a “very minimal” fee of $3 or $4 per print.

“He was pissed off at me,” Weber said. “He thought I should have given him those prints without charging him. It was real petty. His idea of paying me back would be to take me to a $20 or $30 lunch.” After fourteen years, Weber and Brautigan's long friendship started to unravel.

Richard Brautigan flew home to San Francisco from Tokyo on June 19. He stretched his stay to the limit, departing a day before his extension permit was due to expire. Richard called ahead, alerting Tony Dingman of his arrival time. At 9:00 am Tony and Jack Thibeau waited at SFO when Brautigan's jet touched down. Richard traveled light, making room for two bottles of duty-free cognac in his carry-on bag.

Dingman and Thibeau drove Brautigan to the Russian Hill home of Dr. John Doss. Jack no longer remembers what was said about the broken nose. Dr. John had a look at Brautigan's damaged snout. Margot and John believed Richard “got in a wrangle in the airport with someone about his nose and this guy evidently was a karate expert and popped him on the nose and broke it.”

“It's OK until tomorrow,” Dr. Doss said after a quick examination. “I'm going to get you to see a specialist, and he'll set your nose, and everything will be fine.” Tony and Jack drove Richard over to Nob Hill, where he took a room at the Fairmont Hotel. In the morning, he went to see an ear, nose, and throat guy recommended by John Doss, and everything turned out just as predicted.

Staying at the Fairmont did not turn out so happily. One morning around two, suffering from insomnia, a day or so after checking in, Brautigan phoned the Dosses. “Margot,” he pleaded, “can I come and stay in your house awhile. All I can hear are toilets flushing and people fucking.”

“I felt very sorry for him and said all right,” Margot Doss recalled.

Brautigan checked out of the Fairmont and caught a cab over to 1331 Greenwich Street. The Dosses put him up in their unfurnished guest room. John inflated a new nine-by-twelve air mattress to serve as a bed. “He was with us for a month,” Margot remembered.

“I think it was only about a week,” her husband corrected. “It just seemed like a month.”

Brautigan wasted no time before calling his old girlfriend Sherry Vetter and inviting her over. Sherry had known John and Margot Doss “from a long time back.” She had no reservations about visiting Richard in their home. They soon got it on upstairs in the guest room. Their energetic lovemaking was no secret to the Doss household. The air mattress “made all this incredible noise.”