Jubilee Hitchhiker (167 page)

The next afternoon, Richard went with Simone and the Dorns to a faculty/student garden party at Ginger Perry's home at 744 University. Brautigan's Chautauqua reading had been a success. Wendy Serkin paid Ginger back and offered to supply all the food and booze if she would host a party for the visiting author. Drink in hand, bored with the academic professorial chitchat, Brautigan scanned the large gathering until his eye alighted upon Masako Kano, an attractive young Japanese graduate student invited by Perry, a fellow classmate in Professor James Kincaid's comparative literature summer course.

Still a virgin at twenty-three, Masako was the perfect “daughter in a box.” Born in Tokyo into a strict, conservative family, she finished college at twenty and won a scholarship to the master's program at Hofstra University. This pleased her father, Masamichi Kano, a linguist, translator, and critic. Versed in twelve languages (including Latin and Greek) Kano spoke English with a British accent although he had never been to the United Kingdom.

Masako entered Hofstra in the fall of 1979, studying English and American literature under the direction of Dr. William D. Hull II, a distinguished poet and scholar. Her father allowed her to take a summer course at CU only after arranging for her to live in the Boulder home of a friend, Dr. Joyce Lebra, professor of Japanese history at the university. Dr. Lebra treated Masako like a daughter, giving her a large teddy bear. Masako named it Winifred Whimsy Bear.

Masako means “feminine elegance” in Japanese. She immediately caught Richard Brautigan's attention. “I noticed a very peculiar-looking guy was watching us,” Masako said. Kano had not gone to Brautigan's Chautauqua reading. She attended a university performance of
Hamlet
, a Freudian interpretation where the prince of Denmark wore pajamas and got cozy with his mom. Richard approached the group of students and asked Masako where she was from. “Japan,” she told him. Thinking Richard was an English professor, Kano launched into a discourse on literary theory. Brautigan stopped her.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

Masako had just eaten an appetizer. “Well,” she said, “I'm going to move on to the main course.”

“Why don't you sit underneath that nice tree, and I will bring you food,” Richard replied. While she waited, someone told her Brautigan said he wanted to see how she ate.

As a “very modest Japanese girl,” Masako did as instructed even though she found his reported remark quite unpleasant. In Japan, it was considered very rude to watch someone eat. Brautigan brought her a full plate and a plastic fork. Because of the difference in their heights, Richard fetched a small chair for Masako. He sat on the ground beside her. After some time passed and Kano had not taken a single bite, Brautigan said, “I'm waiting for you to eat.” Masako explained that etiquette in her homeland dictated against watching other people eating. “I know that,” Richard replied. “I know that.”

Brautigan told her about his four trips to Tokyo, describing in detail events that had happened to him in Japan and the people he'd met there. Masako felt Richard's storytelling transported him back to Japan. She was fascinated. Before she knew quite what was happening, Brautigan started feeding her, picking the food off her plate with his fingers and slipping it delicately between her lips. “I ended up eating it,” Masako recalled in amazement.

Before long, consumed by a mutual attraction, they were kissing passionately beneath the big tree. The dutiful daughter broke out of the box. “What a woman,” Ed Dorn said, watching the amorous pair from a short distance. “What a woman.”

“Is he talking about me?” Masako demurely asked Richard.

“Yes. Of course.”

Masako said it was the first time anyone had referred to her as a woman. “I was always called a girl in New York.”

“It's a very good start then,” Richard told her.

A fine gentle rain began misting around them. Most of the guests headed indoors. Brautigan wanted to remain outside, sheltered under the big tree. When the rain let up, he suggested they escape from the party. Masako said she probably should go back to Professor Lebra's house. Her father's friend was nice but very strict. She needed to feed the professor's Burmese cats. Brautigan said he'd walk her home, and they strolled off together. Masako didn't know Richard had come to the party with another woman. They left the gathering without saying a word to Simone.

Brautigan and Kano wandered down a gradual slope to the Farmer's Ditch, a narrow creek spanned by a sturdy little bridge. Richard asked Masako to sit on the rail. She confessed that she'd watched a performance of
Hamlet
instead of going to his reading. Masako had never read any of Brautigan's books. Richard suggested they each try to describe the other as Shakespearean characters. Masako couldn't think of any of the Bard's creations who reminded her of Brautigan. “You're more like, not a character,” she told him. “You're like a mountain cat.”

This greatly pleased Richard. He explained that this animal was called a puma. Thinking about Masako's “character,” Brautigan decided she was like Puck from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. From that moment, these became their pet names. In private, she called him Puma and Richard always affectionately referred to Masako as Puck. When Brautigan asked how old she was, Kano lied, embarrassed at being a twenty-three-year-old virgin. Masako told him she was twenty-one. “Oh,” Richard replied. “You're the same age as my daughter.”

Brautigan visited the Dorns nearly every day during his stay in Boulder. The next afternoon, he sat in their kitchen, drinking beer with Ed. “However obnoxious his behavior might have been the previous evening, it was easy to forgive him,” Jenny observed. “His mischievous or drunken behavior was more like that of a naughty boy than a disturbed adult.” On this day, forsaking an oft-repeated lament about his “complicated and painful divorce proceedings,” Richard was regaling his friends with tales of budding romance, when one of Ed Dorn's former students stopped by.

Brad Donovan, whose master's thesis at CU had been a book of poems (“sort of mainline stuff”), had started collecting a year's worth of unemployment and was looking for a place to live with a ski area nearby. Over “a few beers” with Ed, Richard told Brad about Bozeman, Montana, “saying how much fun [it] was.” Brautigan told Donovan the Bridger Bowl ski hill was a fifteen-minute drive from town. He should check the place out. They talked for a while about fishing. Brautigan invited Donovan to come up and fish with him on the Yellowstone. Brad reciprocated, asking Richard to a barbecue the next afternoon at a friend's house in the country “four or five miles north of Lyons,” where he was staying with his wife, Georgia. There would probably be some handgun shooting.

In their conversation at the Dorns', Brad noticed “Richard was not quite into the Boulder scene because it was so centered on Naropa.” Brautigan's issues with the tiny Buddhist institute reflected his independent spirit. He'd certainly heard of an incident at a Halloween party in 1975 when visiting poet W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend had been forced to strip naked by the “Vajra Guard,” Trungpa Rinpoche's personal goon squad. Ed Dorn had secretly distributed mimeographed copies of
The Party
, a compilation of eyewitness accounts by former Fug Ed Sanders. Dorn's good friend, poet Tom Clark, wrote “When the Party's Over” for the
Boulder Monthly
, an article expanded in 1979 into
The Great Naropa Poetry Wars
, an eighty-seven-page book designed and printed by Graham Mackintosh, who had published
Please Plant This Book
.

Richard always found such strong-arm tactics offensive. His low tolerance for fatuous pretension kicked into high gear when he learned that Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman had named Naropa's literature program the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.” Donovan had no connections to Naropa, and Brautigan seemed “very relaxed” talking with him.

The next day, Richard and Masako went to the cookout at Joe Wilson's place on the road to Estes Park. Among the half-dozen guests were writers Wayne Moore and Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee tribal historian. Wilson had a long-barreled .38 Colt, and everyone, including Masako, took turns shooting it. She had never fired a gun before. Empty beer cans provided the targets. Brautigan badly wanted to show the young Japanese woman that he was a good shot, but the others “were much better than he,” Masako observed. “Made him a bad mood after that,” she said.

Brad Donovan noted that Masako “was kind of standoffish. She pretended she didn't understand English.” He was later surprised to learn Kano was writing her master's thesis on William Butler Yeats's connections to Japanese Nō drama. In truth, Masako was self-conscious about her command of the language despite being a graduate student in the history of American and British literature. “My English was not perfect,” she confessed. The third time Masako saw Richard, he put her language skills to the test.

Brautigan took the young woman to his corner room at the Boulderado. She went with him naively enough, thinking she was much too young for him to be interested in her. Masako sat on
his “very big bed” watching Brautigan standing by the window. “Well, you said you would read some of your poems for me,” she said. “Now it's time. Why don't you read for me?”

Richard picked a small volume off the dresser top. “Here is a book,” he told her. “I actually want you to read aloud for me.” Brautigan handed Masako a copy of
June 30th, June 30th
, asking her to read the preface. She read very slowly because he “wanted to hear every word” as she pronounced it. At first she thought Richard was judging her and strove to perform well for him, but as she got into the content, reading about his uncle Edward's experiences in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, she reflected on how the details of the Pacific War had been overlooked during her primary education.

When she finished, after a long silence, Brautigan asked her to read it again and she did. “How did you know?” he asked at the end of the second reading.

“What?”

“How could you understand?”

After that afternoon, Richard and Masako endeavored to spend as much time together as possible. She found him “always very gentle, kind of fatherlike,” and felt completely natural around him. With Richard, Masako no longer had any need of pretending to be an adult. He made her relax. Richard held back his sexual desire, giving Masako the impression that he simply enjoyed going out with her and wanted to show her the natural and cultural sides of Colorado.

At the end of July, Sam Lawrence wrote Brautigan in Montana, thinking he had returned from Colorado. He hoped Richard hadn't run into any rattlesnakes. “Only adoring fans. Screaming for your books and your body.” Lawrence didn't know how on the money he was. Sam had good news. The number of bookstores requesting autograph parties on Brautigan's reading tour was “building beautifully.” Best of all, the Quality Paperback Book Club picked
Tokyo–Montana
as its featured alternate selection for January 1981.

Richard continued his daily sojourns to Ed and Jenny Dorn's kitchen. Simone Ellis also remained a regular visitor. One afternoon, she showed up with the stuffed head of a small female grizzly bear her father shot in 1955. It was among Simone's most treasured possessions, a connection to her dad's Native American heritage. She had taken it with her when she went off to college. One of the reasons Ellis came back to Boulder that summer was to retrieve her totem animal from a former roommate who held it for ransom until a number of “borrowed” books were returned. Brautigan took one look at the taxidermy bear head and fell in love. Many toasts were lifted to the ursine trophy. Richard had to have it. Simone explained the powerful family connection, how the head attained totem status. Ellis agreed to only loan it occasionally to Brautigan after calling her father for permission.

In order to spend time with Richard, Masako found ways to sneak out of Professor Lebra's elegant condominium with its swimming pool and beautiful gardens. “I was little bit in prison, I think,” she recalled. It was easy in the daytime when Kano had a class schedule. After dark, she pretended to go to the library or came up with other excuses. When Brautigan met her in the evenings, they'd stroll down Pearl Street, a pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare closed to automobile traffic, for dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant. Pearl attracted numerous musicians, buskers, mimes, and clowns. Masako remembered Richard, “when he was in a good mood, just dancing around me” in time to the ambient street music.

Their pas de deux continued as July slipped away into August. One afternoon, she waited for him outside a restaurant. Brautigan snuck up from behind and covered her eyes with his hand. “I have something special for you,” he said, “so please close your eyes.”

She did as he instructed. “He was kind of humming and dancing in front of me,” Masako remembered. “Can I open my eyes?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Brautigan handed her Simone's stuffed grizzly bear head. Masako remembered the trophy as “kind of a family cult thing,” a “spiritual thing.” She hated it on first sight. The mounted head was not meant as a present. It didn't belong to Richard, but from that day on the bear played a continuing role in their lives. Brautigan named it “Teddy Head.” He borrowed it often, carrying it to parties, making a joke of the doleful decapitated bruin.

Summertime in Boulder was “a carnival thing,” Masako recalled. Pearl Street throbbed with musicians and itinerant performers. Wherever Brautigan went with his lovely Japanese companion “he was always surrounded by people.” Richard asked Masako to dress in a colorful Indian sari and carry Teddy Head on many of these excursions. “So I looked quite noticeable.”