Jubilee Hitchhiker (157 page)

fifty-one: trouble and strife

I
N MID-FEBRUARY OF 1979, the Brautigans started looking for another new apartment. Things hadn't worked out at the place on Lombard Street. A quiet single lady rented the flat below them, and Richard's constant pacing in his heavy cowboy boots disturbed her tranquility. Complicating matters, the landlord's daughter lived right upstairs, always available to receive the frequent complaints. The night Ron Kovic came to visit provided a final lease-breaking fiasco.

Kovic, a decorated (Purple Heart, Bronze Star with a “V” for valor) Vietnam vet, had become one of the leading opponents to the war after he was paralyzed from the chest down during his second voluntary tour of duty with the Marines in Indochina early in 1968. His powerful memoir,
Born on the Fourth of July
, was published in 1976, the same year Kovic addressed the Democratic National Convention. Ron and a lady friend arrived at 1264 Lombard by taxi. Brautigan and the cab driver carried him up to the second-floor apartment in his wheelchair. Kovic was also a heavy drinker. Richard wasted no time in uncorking a bottle of whiskey.

Loud music and laughter-punctuated conversation reverberated through the Brautigans' apartment. “Heavy discussion,” Akiko recalled. Increased whiskey consumption took the hilarity up a notch. Richard and Ron started throwing eggs at the wall. Aki decided it was bedtime and dimmed the lights, “a hint that they should be a little bit quiet.” The hint went unnoticed. Akiko headed for bed with “big music still going on.” When she awoke a couple hours later, the racket in the other room had not diminished. “It's time for sleep, babies!” Aki shouted. This did the trick. The carousing ended. Ron Kovic and his companion spent the night. In the morning, everyone nursed hangovers when the phone rang. The landlord's daughter was calling. There had been one too many raucous nights.

Ianthe remembered “a hysterical evening” at the Lombard Street apartment when her father brought Dennis Hopper home with him from North Beach. At nineteen and hoping to study acting, she was intrigued by Richard's Hollywood connections. Ianthe had gone with Richard to a screening of
Apocalypse Now
at Francis Ford Coppola's house and met the actor portraying a drug-addled photojournalist in the film. Hopper's character was partly based on legendary British war photographer Tim Page, celebrated for his reckless courage in Vietnam. After a traumatic head wound, Page became a caregiver for amputees and other gravely injured veterans during his yearlong recovery in the United States. One of those wounded soldiers was Ron Kovic.

Akiko went to bed early the first time she met Dennis Hopper. Brautigan headed out alone to a party. “I'm going to kidnap Dennis Hopper,” Richard told his wife when he phoned later, interrupting her sleep. Aki awoke to find her husband and the actor standing beside her bed. “Here's Dennis,” Richard said. “I kidnapped him.”

“He knew I admired [Hopper] so much because of
Easy Rider
,” Akiko remembered. Richard “always asked me to cook some noodle, the ramen. Hot noodle. Chinese type of a noodle to the guest. Middle of the night. Very late.”

Richard Brautigan loved hearing Dennis Hopper quote from Shakespeare, especially the
Hamlet
soliloquies. Drunken snatches from the Bard resonated through the apartment when Ianthe went off to bed. In the morning, she found her father asleep and Hopper raging about the kitchen, hunting for something to drink. Dennis recruited Ianthe in his search. He and Richard had consumed nearly all the booze in the house. Ianthe uncovered a bottle of a peculiar Chinese liqueur “with a small pickled lizard lying in the bottom.”

Furious at her husband and his friend for staying up all night, Akiko had left much earlier. She grew more angry when she returned and discovered Hopper still in the apartment swilling down lizard juice. “Shit, shit, shit!” Aki shouted. Ianthe had never heard her “classy stepmother” swear before. Another morning, Akiko sat her stepdaughter down at the kitchen table to discuss Richard's alcohol problem. Ianthe was unable to provide any help. The child of an alcoholic, she had become a classic codependent. She thought things had gotten “much better” since her father married Aki.

Rude, drunken behavior inevitably takes a toll on love. One night during this period, Robert Briggs witnessed the Brautigans' marital discord firsthand. Briggs had gotten married a year or so before and his wife, Diana Saltoon, was “rather a Zen zealot.” Richard invited them over for dinner to meet Akiko. From the moment they entered the apartment, they knew the Brautigans “weren't getting along.” Aki, “a wonderful cook,” had prepared a gourmet French meal. Richard worked his way through a bottle and a half of George Dickel, growing increasingly abusive with every swallow. “Diana did not like the way he treated Akiko,” Briggs observed.

“They might have had a lovers' quarrel or something,” Diana Saltoon recalled. “She was a little bit sensitive and a little bit uptight. She was obviously younger, much younger than he.”

“He didn't know what to make of her,” Briggs said. “She was far too sophisticated for him and yet he was very much in awe of her.” This was the last time Robert and Diana ever visited with Richard and Akiko.

Aki soon discovered the new apartment of her dreams on the second floor of 2170 Green Street. Situated between Webster and Fillmore on the lower slope of Pacific Heights, a district known as Cow Hollow, it had once been the home of Lotta Crabtree, who began as a pint-sized red-haired child entertainer dancing in mining camps and went on to a notable career in the American theater. Crabtree commissioned the famous “Lotta's Fountain” at Kearny and Market in 1875. Her fountain once kept company at this intersection with the statue of Benjamin Franklin, which was moved to Washington Square, where it became part of Richard Brautigan's personal mythology.

Brautigan had never lived in such a classy neighborhood. The grand sunny apartment had sweeping views of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge from the rear windows. Ianthe described the living room as “cavernous.” Their building stood next to the Leander Sherman mansion, built in 1876 with a three-story ballroom where Paderewski and Lotta Crabtree both performed.

The Brautigans moved in to the palatial Green Street apartment by the first of March. The place was much more spacious than any previous residence, and their possessions weren't sufficient. Akiko had the perfect solution: time to go shopping. She bought rugs and lamps and big black imitation leather couches. Richard left all the interior decorating decisions to her.

Brautigan got a phone call from James D. Houston, hired by Bantam Books to edit an anthology, part of a paperback series on American literary regions. Jim signed on to oversee the volume covering West Coast fiction. He wanted to include excerpts from
Trout Fishing in America
. The other authors accepted $300 or $400 for reprint permission. Brautigan's publisher “wanted something like $1,800.”

Jim told Richard this was “going to be a one-of-a-kind collection, and it's going to define West Coast literature, and I want you to be in it.”

“How much can you pay?” Richard asked.

“Well, they wanted $1,800. We're looking at three or four hundred.”

“You call them back and tell my agent that we'll take whatever you can pay,” Brautigan said, “because I want to be in that collection.”

“He greased the wheels,” Houston recalled, “and we settled on, I think it was $350. The money wasn't as important to him as being in that [book]. He knew that this was going to put his work in the context that was important to him.”

“It was something he did as a favor,” observed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Jim's wife. The book was published later in the year. Richard's work was included alongside selections by John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Tillie Olsen, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Tom Robbins, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Sanchez, and Wallace Stegner.

Brautigan's residency at Montana State University began the second week in April, his first public appearance since 1971. Richard, always a scrupulous guardian of his image, gave careful thought to what he would do and say before the gathered students. Greg Keeler recalled that week (April 9–13) as “all sort of a blur.” The faculty found Brautigan a place to stay in Bozeman so he wouldn't have to commute over the pass from Paradise Valley. Aki had remained behind, decorating their new San Francisco apartment.

The Keelers hosted a party for Brautigan. Other nights, Greg and Richard hit the local bars, evenings lost in a fog of booze. One afternoon, Brautigan phoned Marcia Clay in Frisco. She was startled to hear his voice. She recognized it instantly, although he didn't announce himself by name. Richard sounded “cloudy” on the long-distance line, but Marcia thought “his voice was so real, just the same as ever.” Brautigan wanted to know if Clay had “gone to bed with such and such.” Angry, Clay said no. Even if she had, it was her own business. “Right,” Richard said.

She was happy to hear from Richard. A month earlier, Marcia wrote in her diary, “I miss him. I want his company late at night when there is only solitude and I know there is no one, before or since, but Richard that I can talk to.” Anxious to go out for a swim, Clay knew Brautigan was capable of talking for hours, so she said goodbye and headed for the pool.

Brautigan's duties as poet-in-residence included giving a formal poetry reading in the Student Union. He donned a sport jacket for the occasion and attracted “a small audience.” A larger crowd turned out for his performance at Cheever Hall, where he interspersed his readings and anecdotes with recordings by Pink Lady, an all-female Japanese pop group. Richard went fishing on his last day in Montana. Greg Keeler drove him to an irrigation dam on the West Gallatin River north of Four Corners. David Schrieber, an MSU senior writing a novel as an independent studies project, came along. Keeler described it as “an impromptu trip.” They had no waders and brought only a couple fly rods and several Woolly Worms flies.

Deep windblown snow banks piled against the edge of the irrigation ditch. Greg led them toward his favorite spot. Another fisherman saw them and started running to get there first. “Look at his little feeties go,” Keeler said. Richard loved this, repeating “little feeties” with great pleasure. They beat the interloping angler to the chosen hole, and the stranger sulked off with what Brautigan called “a crumpled Charlie Brown mouth.”

The three anglers were after mountain whitefish, a species native to Montana but not favored by fly fisherman because of their sluggish fight and small suckerlike mouths. Richard wanted three big whitefish for a special dish Akiko prepared. By day's end, Brautigan's departure time fast approached and they had only landed two. Keeler rose to the occasion, “walloped” his Woolly Worm on the surface, “and caught a large stupid whitefish.” Quota in hand, the fishing trio hurried back to town. Greg filleted the whitefish and packed them in rock salt (a requirement for Aki's recipe) before driving Richard to the airport just in time to make his plane.

The day after Brautigan's return to San Francisco, he and Akiko brought her salted whitefish dish over to a party at Francis Ford Coppola's. Richard reported to Greg Keeler that his catch had been a “hit.” On the last day of April, Marcia Clay reported in her diary that Francis planned to take Aki to Washington, D.C. to dine with President Carter and the Japanese prime minister. She heard this from Richard, who referred to the president as “that peanut farmer.” Brautigan had “reappeared” on Clay's threshold early in the morning ten days before, “persistently ringing the doorbell.” She was delighted to see him. “I've been in Dante's waiting room for so long,” she wrote. “A thousand flowers are opening for this new spring. Metaphors won't do.”

Aki did not travel east with Francis Coppola. She journeyed west instead, flying home to Japan during the second week in May. Her first few days were spent recovering from jet lag at her parents' home in Yokohama. Brautigan sent a number of small gifts for the family with her. Fusako Nishizawa, Akiko's mother, wrote him a thank-you note, her first handwritten letter in English, reworked six times, addressing Richard as “Dear my third son.” Shocked by the exorbitant price of fish in Japan (“my appetite immediately going away”), Aki enjoyed vegetables from her mother's garden, homemade sushi, and fresh bamboo shoots, a delicacy unknown in America.

Akiko traveled up to Tokyo in mid-May, staying at the home of her friends Yoko and Hiroshi Yoshimura. On her first night in the city, Aki stopped by a bookstore in Roppongi, pleased to find they stocked her husband's books.
Trout Fishing
was in its eleventh Japanese edition. The next day, she had lunch with Tom Mori, Brautigan's agent in Japan. Akiko also met with an editor at Japanese
Playboy
to discuss publishing Brautigan's short stories. They were sent to the magazine by the Tuttle-Mori agency.

On the twenty-first, Akiko got together with poet Shuntarō Tanikawa in Shibuya. He brought along the second volume of his complete poems and gave it to Aki. Walking through “the endless stream” of the crowded district, they both confessed to feeling “almost dizzy” from the swarm of people. Aki found Shuntarō a “really beautiful man.” They met to discuss Richard's wish to write an article on Shuntarō. Brautigan also hoped someday they might give a lecture together. Akiko asked about Shuntarō's planned contributions to the
CoEvolution Quarterly
, an offshoot of the hugely successful
Whole Earth Catalog
. Former “Merry Prankster” Stewart Brand, the creator and editor of both the
Quarterly
and the
Catalog
, had contacted Brautigan four years earlier, asking
him to contribute commentary on a recent article the magazine had published about the feasibility of space colonies. Richard declined the first offer, but agreed to help this time around.