Jubilee Hitchhiker (156 page)

“This is a new edition,” Richard concluded. When John Hartnett mailed Brautigan's flap copy to Sam Lawrence (Helen Brann was in the hospital, recovering from an operation), he included the author's thoughts on the jacket design. Richard wanted “a silver/gray background (not foil) with the title and his name in scarlet (not red).” On the back, Brautigan asked for “just a small confederate flag, centered.”

Don Carpenter remembered having lunch with Richard and Aki at Vanessi's around this time. A friend of Aki's was visiting from Japan, and they were showing her the town. “Right in the middle of lunch, somebody said the word ‘banzai' in some context or another,” Don recalled, “and Richard went into a furious tirade and stamped out of the restaurant and we all had to run after him.”

Brautigan's angry outburst came because he believed “‘banzai' meant emperor worship and he had lost friends in World War II and didn't want that word used in his presence.” In fact, ‘banzai' was a victory cry meaning “a life of ten thousand years,” used as often in sporting events as on the battlefield. Carpenter and the two women spoke Japanese. To placate Brautigan, they all pretended his version was correct. “I mean, the guy had surrealism for breakfast,” Don observed.

Richard discovered a new watering hole, the Albatross Saloon on Columbus at the intersection of Kearny and Pacific. Once the hub of the Barbary Coast, the corner joint was first called the Billy Goat Saloon and reopened a year after the 1906 fire as the Andromeda Saloon. Jack Dempsey, future heavyweight champ, worked as a bouncer there in 1913 and 1914. New owners rescued the venerable dive from oblivion in 1977, stripping layers of paint from the ancient bar, removing a false ceiling to reveal the original pressed tin, and installing a 1916 Pukka Walla vertically rotating ceiling fan. The drinks were generous and the food all priced at $2.50. The Albatross became a hip hangout. Francis Ford Coppola entertained visiting French filmmakers there.

Richard Brautigan celebrated his forty-fourth birthday at the Albatross Saloon. He had such a good time the management asked him to write a few words celebrating their establishment for future advertising. Richard obliged them, just as he had Kendrick Rand a decade earlier. “The Albatross Saloon provides a beautiful remembrance of days long since gone in San Francisco, never to return,” he wrote. “The Albatross is like eating and drinking in the past.”

Brautigan also spent time with Marcia Clay, savoring her beauty and keen intelligence. Once, after Richard complained about the fragile state of his marriage, the subject of obsession arose. “He was a very obsessive person,” Clay observed. Brautigan didn't want to hear about it. What Marcia had in mind was bondage. “How can you expect her to stay interested in you when you tie her up?” Clay demanded.

Brautigan reacted furiously, breaking off their friendship. “I'm not going to talk to you for six years,” he proclaimed and stalked out. Marcia felt devastated. “The loss of Richard in my life is one experience that has had a real effect on me,” she wrote in her diary. “The romance of his friendship was suddenly put into value [. . .] My regret with Richard was to have created a split when, deep down inside I longed for the unity. There's the immaturity. What is gone is gone—for now at least. I continue to hope that we will again be close.”

Another old friendship ended at Richard and Nancy Hodge's Page Street Christmas party. Erik Weber was among the many guests. Brautigan arrived later, already drunk, in the company of people Erik didn't know. They hadn't spoken in a month or two. Richard walked right by without acknowledging him. Later, leaning against the office wall, Weber found himself close to Brautigan. “Richard was pissed at me,” Erik remembered. Brautigan launched into his list of complaints, and Akiko walked into the room. Weber had never met his wife before. Richard made no introductions. He looked at Aki “with this drunken sheepish grin.”

“When men are having a discussion,” Brautigan said, “the women . . .” With a dismissive wave of his hand, he signaled for Akiko to leave. Erik found the gesture “really rude,” as if the wife was expected to always walk behind her husband. Richard went on to castigate Erik about the cover
for
June 30th
. The hardcover edition had not sold very well, and Brautigan blamed Weber. He had insisted Delacorte go with Erik's design. “That was it. He owed me no more,” Weber recalled. “That was it, the end.”

As the new year of 1979 got under way, evidence began to surface that members of the John Birch Society were behind the banning of Brautigan's books up in Shasta County. Faced with such intolerant right-wing enemies, Richard decided to help the ACLU dig up information for their case. He got back in touch with Ken Kelley, who had passed some sort of unspoken test with his initial interview. While they were sitting around Brautigan's office discussing the project, Richard tossed a manila file folder onto Kelley's lap. An identification label read “First Amendment.”

The folder contained news clippings and documents on the removal of Richard's books from the library of the Anderson High School library in Shasta County. Brautigan had an undercover assignment for Kelley. He wanted him to go up north to Anderson and poke around, dig into the background of the individuals who opposed his books. “I want you to call Maggie Crosby first,” Richard said.

Ken didn't recognize the name. “Who's Maggie Crosby?” he asked. Brautigan explained that she was an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. This was Kelley's final test. If he pulled it off, Richard promised an invitation out to Montana the next summer. “You'll meet people you've never met before in your life,” he enthused. “You'll see mountain ranges climbing up under the sky.” Brautigan told Ken he'd take him trout fishing and promised to sit for a formal taped interview.

“You can be the cosmic Sherlock Holmes,” Richard said.

Kelley contacted Maggie Crosby, and she filled him in on the details of the case. Not long after that, Richard invited them both over to his place on Lombard Street for dinner. Ken knew “conceptually” that Richard had a wife, but “it never came up in casual conversation at all,” and he was taken slightly off guard on meeting “some Japanese person wearing Japanese clothes.” Akiko prepared an Italian/Japanese dinner: teriyaki steak and pasta con pesto, in accord with Brautigan's wishes. When they discussed the censorship case, Maggie Crosby said she had “pretty solid evidence” that several of the parties involved were members of the John Birch Society. Ken Kelley's job was to substantiate her case. Ken recalled this in great detail. Maggie Crosby cannot remember ever meeting Kelley.

In mid-January, Ken bought a $47 round-trip ticket on AirWest and traveled to Redding, a forty-minute flight from the Bay Area. He rented a Budget car, driving twenty-five miles east to Shingletown, where he located the rural home of V. I. Wexner, who put him up during his two-week stay. Ken talked with V. I. (Ken's host went only by his first initials) about his teaching techniques in the developmental class, focusing on how the censorship of Brautigan's work deprived some of his students of the only books they'd ever shown any interest in reading. “I think,” Wexner told him, “the library has room for six books by Richard Brautigan.”

Identifying himself as a reporter, Kelley roamed across the school district, interviewing a wide range of participants in the case, including superintendent Frank Robertson; Albert Davis, president of the school board; various students; Leonard Neutze, operator of Anderson Glass Company; and boat mechanic Morton Giesecke (the latter two Christian fundamentalists who supported the book ban and gave John Birch Society publications to Ken). “It's poison,” Giesecke said of Brautigan's writing. “It will destroy the minds of the kids.” After admitting all he had read of Brautigan were
the excerpts published the previous November in the one-shot eight-page “Concerned Citizens” newspaper, Giesecke remarked, “You don't have to explore every corner of a septic tank to know what's in it.”

Ken Kelley had his own secret undercover methods when it came to investigative journalism. If the subject of an interview objected to being taped, Ken made a point of turning off his machine and scribbling away in a reporter's notepad, with another active recorder hidden under his clothing. Kelley always got every word on tape. When Albert Davis left the quiet of his trustee's office, Ken followed him into a noisy basketball game in the high school gym and everything Davis said came through loud and clear above the clamor. Back in San Francisco, Kelley turned his research findings over to Richard Brautigan, who was so pleased he promptly extended Ken the promised invitation to Montana.

On February 15, Judge William H. Phelps of the Superior Court for Shasta County overruled the defendants' demurrer to the ACLU complaint, ordering that Brautigan's books be returned to the Anderson High School library. He appended an opinion that the books “could be placed in a restricted area, inaccessible to minor students unless they provided evidence of parental consent.” Both the plaintiffs and the defendants immediately appealed Judge Phelps's decision.

It took ten years, long after Richard Brautigan's suicide, for the book-banning case to be finally decided. On April 25, 1989, the California Court of Appeals for the Third District, in a two-to-one decision, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and the ACLU. The prior judgment restoring the banned books to the school library was affirmed while the provisions “addressing restrictions on the classroom use of the Brautigan books and a system of prior parental consent for access to them” were struck from the ruling.

The court's opinion strongly rebuked the school district for claiming their authority to remove books from the high school library, even those not deemed obscene, on the grounds that their contents were not “socially acceptable to the people of the district.” The concurring judges ruled, “The problem is all the more serious because the type of action, book-banning, is the archetypical symbol of repression of free speech and because it occurs, in a manner of speaking, ‘in front of the children.'”

The Court of Appeals noted that allowing the school board to remove nonobscene books based on “the nebulous terminology ‘pervasive vulgarity' and ‘educational unsuitability'” would upset the “complex and closely balanced questions of state and federal constitutional law.” Such action “would afford a disruptive and divisive focal point for pressure groups to politicize the public educational system. Every book in the library would be a litmus test of the Board's adherence to conventional views” and “the narrowing of the breadth of school library collections to the blandest common denominator.” Poetic justice enhanced the court's opinion with a footnote quoting, in its entirety, Richard Brautigan's poem “Education” (from
The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
, one of his banned books), saying that it “foreshadowed [. . .] this state of affairs.” This would have delighted Richard had he been alive to read the final decision.

fifty: rashomon

E
ARLY ONE JULY morning when dew glistened on the ripening grass and the mountain air retained a chill memory of the previous night, I wandered over to visit my neighbor Richard. In an hour or two, the relentless summer sun would burn the deceptive freshness out of the day and send all creatures in search of shade, but for the moment, the crisp, crystalline clarity seemed like a sneak preview of paradise. Usually it was Brautigan who came calling at breakfast time, coffee mug in hand, looking for a hot “cup of joe” and the latest gossip. Since his recent marriage, he'd grown more domestic, preferring to stay home with his delicate Japanese bride.

I recalled a moment on Richard's back porch a week or so earlier. My friend sat on the rail, leaning against a support post as he watched Akiko picking wildflowers under the cottonwoods. She wore a flowing, patterned kimono, her dark hair immaculately coiffed, and moved with such grace that every delicate step seemed choreographed. Brautigan's mooncalf grin revealed his unrestrained joy. “Isn't she beautiful?” he whispered, a teenager in love.

The front door stood open when I stepped up under the archway onto the recessed alcovelike porch. A screen door obscured the interior of the house. Hearing voices, I called out a greeting and let myself in. This was standard procedure in Montana at the time. No one ever locked his door, and a certain casual informality prevailed. Before I got halfway across the narrow combination living/dining room in front, a bizarre tableau framed by the kitchen doorway stopped me dead in my tracks.

Just beyond the unintended proscenium, Richard Brautigan knelt on the linoleum floor. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a faded pair of blue jeans. Shockingly pink and bristling with curling blond hairs, he appeared almost larval, an enormous golden caterpillar. His potbelly pillowed over the waistband of his jeans. He clutched a serrated bread knife in both hands, pressing the tip against his navel, staring pleadingly up at Akiko. His wife seemed to tower above him in spite of her slight stature. She wore the same kimono, the obi belted tightly about a narrow waist. Her hair sprang in a wild Medusa-like disarray around a pale oval face contorted with rage. “You no commit seppuku,” she shrieked. “You got no guts!”

I stood transfixed by embarrassment, not quite comprehending what was going on in the kitchen, and found myself eye to eye with Aki, her beautiful face transformed into an inchoate demonic mask. Backing silently to the door, I felt certain Richard had not noticed my intrusion in the intensity of the moment. The air of unreality seemed so tangible as I walked home it felt like I was floating above the ground. I wondered what exactly I had seen. A melodramatic domestic
dispute? Inexplicably intense sexual game-playing? The rehearsal of an amateur Nō play? None of it made sense. No matter what the truth, I knew for certain I would always remember the unexpected moment as something abstract: a dream fragment, an image projected on smoke, a terrifying glimpse into the unknown.