Jubilee Hitchhiker (172 page)

On Saturday, Brautigan was on a 12:55 pm American flight from Little Rock to La Guardia. Richard decided not to call Masako Kano, just across the East River on Long Island, while he was in the city. She'd been gone from his life for two months, an eternity in the realm of heartbreak. Instead Brautigan made arrangements for Eunice Kitagawa to fly out from San Francisco and meet him for the weekend. Richard booked into a suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel at the bottom end of Lexington Avenue.

Built in 1925, the hotel maintained a shabby elegance, offering spacious quarters at reasonable rates. Like the Mayflower, uptown on Central Park West, it was popular with actors, musicians, and writers. The humorist S. J. Perelman had died in his room there the previous year. Gatz Hjortsberg stayed in the hotel just the month before on his way back from Europe.

Being with Eunice Kitagawa compelled Brautigan to call Masako Kano from the sanctity of his hotel suite bedroom. Stretched on the king-sized bed with Eunice by his side, Richard dialed Professor Turgeon's number on Long Island. Masako was happy to hear from him until she detected a voice in the background. Kano knew it was another woman. The woman was laughing.

“Was she listening in our conversation from the beginning?” Masako demanded.

“Yes,” Richard said. “We were listening to you. We're listening from our bedroom.”

“Why did you do this to me?” Kano pleaded. “I don't want to talk to you again.” Upset, she hung up the phone. Masako didn't communicate with Brautigan until after she returned to Japan.

Kitagawa flew back to San Francisco in time for work when the weekend was over. At 8:00 on Monday evening, November 24, Richard Brautigan read at the Poetry Center of the YMHA. The Y, located at Lexington Avenue and Ninety-second Street, had long enjoyed a reputation as an urban Parnassus. Dylan Thomas had read there to great acclaim during his American tours in the early 1950s. The list of other poetical heavyweights headlining at the YMHA included Robert Frost, T. S. Elliot, and e. e. cummings. In the past six months, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Mead, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Heller, James Dickey, Ted Hughes, Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, and Jules Feiffer, among many others, had stood at the podium in the Y.

Robert Creeley traveled down from Buffalo with his pregnant third wife, Penelope, to introduce Richard's reading at the YMHA. He thought of the place as “hoary with tradition.” Before the reading, Richard, Bob, and Penelope “had a very pleasant meal.” Brautigan seemed withdrawn. Creeley felt Richard's reception was not altogether welcome. Bob remembered the crowd as “not a pleasant audience. A very dead audience. It was there to see what [Brautigan] looked like. By no means sympathetic.” Richard was tired and the reading did not go over well. Afterward, swarms of people lined up to have books signed. “Every book dealer I knew in the city was there,” Creeley recalled. Brautigan dutifully scribbled his crabbed signature in each copy, all the while thinking, “Geez, I've got to get out of here.”

Richard's low-key performance stemmed not from lack of enthusiasm. He was coming down with something. By morning Brautigan felt very ill. A book signing party was scheduled at Brentano's on University Place in Greenwich Village for 1:00 pm on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. Richard felt too sick to make it. His truancy ignited a furor in the Delacorte offices. When someone phoned the hotel, Brautigan's petulant feverish attitude was interpreted as “insecurity and prima donna behavior.”

Charles Taliano, the Dell trade sales manager, wrote an indignant letter to Sam Lawrence the same day. “Should another incident arise as what happened in New York this morning, and Brautigan fail to appear for one scheduled autographing, or should he not be on his best behavior,” Taliano fumed, “I will recommend to the management of this company that we cancel immediately any further autographing parties at book stores for the duration of his tour.”

Richard called Eunice Kitagawa in San Francisco, asking her to come to New York and spend Thanksgiving with him. After work on Wednesday night, she jumped on a plane and flew cross-country for the second time in three days. She traveled first class because all the coach seats were booked. Eunice found Brautigan not feeling well. The next day he didn't want to go out to a restaurant. Ianthe came over to the Gramercy Park Hotel with her boyfriend, Paul Swensen, who also worked at the Roundabout Theater Company, located in a converted movie theater on Twenty-third Street. Their Thanksgiving holiday dinners were ordered up from room service. “Four adults sitting on a bed having turkey,” Kitagawa recalled. “How sad.”

Brautigan's health improved by the weekend. Norman Mailer invited him to Brooklyn Heights for dinner on Saturday night. Excited by the prospect of meeting the literary giant he'd once used as a fictional character, Richard and Eunice took a cab at the appointed hour over the East River to 142 Columbia Heights. They climbed the stairs in the old brownstone to Mailer's fourth-floor apartment with its crow's nest, catwalks, ship ladders, and an incredible view across the Promenade. At night the lights strung along the Brooklyn Bridge cables and glittering in the dark distant towers of lower Manhattan turned the scenic skyline into an enormous carnival fairyland. Far off in the harbor, bathed in floodlights, the Statue of Liberty glowed like foxfire.

Mailer's place, with its overflowing bookshelves, mismatched furniture, and haphazard collections of mementos and memorabilia, seemed like a more magnificent version of Brautigan's shabby Museum, the sort of palatial pad Richard imagined for himself if his income magically increased one hundred fold. What Brautigan never envisioned, and what most delighted him, was Mailer's role as the happy paterfamilias. His varied brood included nine children from six marriages. They ranged in age from a college girl to his two-year-old son, John Buffalo, whom Mailer bounced happily on his lap.

In recounting the evening much later to Sherry Vetter, Richard “thought that was so incredible that the family life was so beautiful and that the kids loved each other.” Little John Buffalo's mother was Mailer's sixth wife, Norris Church, a portrait painter, fashion model, and former high school art teacher, much closer in age to some of her husband's adolescent children. Born Barbara Jean Davis in Arkansas, she reinvented herself when she moved to New York in 1976 to live with Norman. He came up with the name Church. She appropriated Norris, her former spouse's last name. Norman and Norris were very recently wed. Mailer had just married his fifth wife, jazz singer Carol Stevens, in Haiti on November 9, to legitimize the birth of their daughter, divorcing her the next day.

The evening went well. Mailer was intrigued by a blue cloth wallet with Velcro fasteners that Brautigan had recently purchased. Richard gave it to him. Norman reciprocated by gifting Richard a bottle of Moët et Chandon champagne. Mailer “thought it quite heroic” that Kitagawa would fly coast-to-coast twice in a single week to be with her man. Before the couple left and returned to Manhattan, Mailer autographed the label, signing it, “To Eunice and Richard from Norman Mailer.”

Kitagawa flew back to San Francisco the next day with the champagne bottle in her carry-on. Between eight and nine that night, Spencer Vibbert, a reporter from the
Boston Globe,
came to Brautigan's hotel room to interview him. Richard was flying to Boston the following evening, and Vibbert wanted a story for Tuesday's morning edition.

At 10:45 Monday morning on the first of December, Brautigan stepped off the elevator on the thirty-fourth floor into the offices of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at 125 Park Avenue. Fifteen minutes later, Richard sat in a CBC studio taping a telephone interview with David Cole for his “slightly surreal” radio series
Here Come the Seventies.

After a break for lunch, Brautigan was over on the West Side at the ABC Radio studios on the fifth floor of 1926 Broadway. At 2:00 pm he taped a fifteen-minute interview with newsman Gil Fox. After 2:30, Richard was on his own. He had an open ticket on the Boston shuttle and was free to make his own reservation. Once he arrived later that evening, Brautigan checked into the historic Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the heart of the Back Bay. Winston Churchill and JFK had both been guests of the hotel overlooking Boston Public Garden.

After a late breakfast in the hotel, Richard met with Joe Fisher, a reporter for the
Toronto Sun
, for an interview at 1:00 pm. They talked in Brautigan's room. At eight that night, Richard gave a reading in the offices of the
Harvard Advocate
, the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the nation, whose past undergraduate editors and contributors included Malcolm Cowley, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, James Agee, Leonard Bernstein, and T. S. Eliot. Brautigan's Harvard appearance was not booked by Lordly & Dame. He arranged the details himself. Consequently, he received only $80 plus the cost of his lodging.

At 8:15 the next morning, Brautigan was on an American flight to Detroit on his way to the University of Toledo in Ohio. He had been advised by his sponsor that this route was more convenient than using the Toledo Airport. Richard's 8:00 pm appearance had been arranged by the Toledo Poets Center Arts Council. Brautigan's contract specified: “Poet will be available for an afternoon informal activity, travel permitting.” He received his standard $1,500 fee and was on his way back to San Francisco at 2:45 pm the next day, flying nonstop on United from Detroit.

Brautigan moved in with Eunice Kitagawa once he returned to the city. Her Vallejo Street apartment was convenient, close to both Enrico's and his new office above Vesuvio. After a grueling month on the road, alone in hotel rooms almost every night, a solitary stay at the Kyoto Inn lost its appeal. He felt exhausted. Brautigan believed his tour had been successful. That's what he told Keith Abbott in Enrico's one afternoon after getting back to Frisco. The bar provided familiar company and a place to recharge his energy. “Apropos of nothing,” Richard turned to Keith and said, “You know, there are two people I wouldn't ever fight: you and Tom McGuane.”

Abbott realized his old friend had been thinking about the possibilities of an altercation. “Richard had been exhibiting such contrary and contradictry behavior that I knew it was only a
matter of time.” Unnerved and feeling sad, Keith got up and walked out of Enrico's, the end of an eighteen-year friendship.

Cash poor after his divorce, Richard faced a year's worth of $1,400 monthly spousal support payments to Akiko. He'd earned $1,500 for each of eleven college appearances, but after Lordly & Dame's commission, the total fell short of what he needed. Healthy sales figures for
The Tokyo–Montana Express
remained Brautigan's best hope. When he picked up the bundle of mail waiting in his tiny office, batches of clipped reviews were of particular interest.

In the
Chronicle Review,
Don Carpenter called Brautigan “a great writer,” going on to say, “Not since Ernest Hemingway has anyone paid so much attention to the American sentence. [. . .]

‘The Tokyo–Montana Express' is Brautigan writing at the peak of his powers.” In the
Santa Barbara News & Review
, Tom Clark, another old acquaintance, called
Tokyo–Montana
“a train that travels faster than the speed of light—at the speed of mind, in fact.”

Other reviewers weren't quite so enthusiastic. Writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, Barry Yougrau dismissed Brautigan: “[His] instrument is the penny whistle. So either he's trilling cutely [. . .] or he's tweeting melancholically under the bedclothes. [. . .] [His] frail pipings are only random marginalia, quotes without a context.” Darryl Ponicsan (
The Last Detail; Cinderella Liberty
) came down even harder in the
Los Angeles Times Book Review.
“The best that can be said for these wee snippets is that they are harmless and inoffensive, occasionally even cute,” he wrote. “The worst that can be said [. . .] The writings are probably too lightweight to register on even the most aerated of consciousnesses.”

By the end of the year, the first sales reports were in.
The Tokyo–Montana Express
had sold twenty-seven thousand copies in hardcover. With royalties of $44,374 (plus $5,000 from the Quality Paperback Club), Brautigan had more than earned out his Delacorte advance. To celebrate, Richard took Eunice on a trip to Mendocino over Christmas. He failed to make restaurant reservations, and after “waiting forever for a table,” they ended up heating two servings of Cup O' Noodles in their motel room microwave for Christmas dinner. “Typical,” Kitagawa observed.

fifty-four: shinola

S
EEKING GREATER PRIVACY for his love nest on wheels, Dick Dillof asked Marian Hjortsberg if he might park the sheepherder's wagon on her property, out of sight across Pine Creek below the house. She immediately consented, liking Dick and finding him agreeable company. When Richard Brautigan learned of this arrangement, he stormed over to his neighbor's place to protest. “I don't want to smell Dobro shit all day long.”

Marian assured him the wagon would be too far away for anyone to sniff out Dick's presence. Besides, Dobro would doubtless use the bathroom facilities at her house or up at the store. In the end Richard relented. Brautigan liked Dillof, and there was nothing he could do about it in any case. He thought of Dick as his younger “little buddy.” Having emerged from a bitter divorce, Richard enjoyed regaling Dick with horror stories of love gone wrong. Sometimes he'd appear outside the wagon window, comically pleading, “Dobie, throw me your sexual scraps.”

A confirmed practical joker, Brautigan manifested his affection for Dobro Dick by playing elaborate tricks on him. Counting coup, he called it.

“Counting pickled turkey gizzards” was Dillof's assessment, recalling an afternoon at the Eagles in Bozeman when Richard slipped a pickled turkey gizzard (a curious bar snack favored by two-fisted Montana drunks) into his glass of ginger ale when he wasn't looking. Everyone sat around waiting to see Dick drink it.