Jubilee Hitchhiker (176 page)

While Richard and Penelope “numbly” sipped their drinks, Bob went outside. He returned looking grim and led them around behind the cottage. Creeley pointed to the spot where he'd just found a large butcher knife lying on the ground. It had not been there the day before. Richard thought it looked like something used in horror movies. The police again were summoned. The two dour detectives returned, not saying much, collecting the butcher knife in an evidence bag.

The Creeleys decided they didn't want to spend another night in their cottage on the little storybook lane. Brautigan had planned to go next to Canada and visit Mina and Rosalyn Mina, who had opened a delicatessen in Toronto. Bob and Penelope offered to drive him there. The odds of getting a good night's sleep without being awakened by knife-wielding rapists seemed a lot better up in Canada.

Richard checked out of the Lenox Hotel, paying $20 for his four-night stay. Economy remained a primary concern. As of mid-October, the balance in Brautigan's main checking account stood at $131.85. Four days later Joel Shawn deposited $20,313.89 in the First Security Bank of Livingston, Montana, the proceeds from the second half of Richard's book advance, plus some additional foreign royalty money. Brautigan did all his banking in Montana, maintaining two accounts, one intended only for the expenses of his three rental properties, although he frequently used it to pay for meals at Cho-Cho or an evening's drinking at Enrico's.

The drive from Buffalo to Toronto was a little over one hundred miles but took more than two hours due to occasional delays at the border. The Creeleys crossed the Niagara River to Fort Erie, Ontario, on the Peace Bridge, about twelve miles upstream from the falls. Richard always enjoyed his role as designated passenger. It got no better than this trip, full of sparkling conversation and views of Lake Ontario. Arriving in Toronto, they checked into an old hotel popular with the local bohemian crowd and went out to dinner.

In the morning, Richard set off with Bob and Penelope to search for Roz and Mina. They found them at Slices West, the Minas' new deli on Queen Street West in a neighborhood two blocks east of Parkdale, a “hub of drugs, alcohol and crime.” Mina thought the Creeleys were “two of the most kind and wonderful people” he'd ever met. They didn't stay long, leaving early to head back to Buffalo. Brautigan located his
querencia
, a tall stool off to one side of the shop, away from the customer flow, where he sat and peacefully watched the Minas slice meat and cheese, making sandwiches to go.

Like most actors, Mina E. Mina often had to look for other work to supplement his sporadic income. He'd been a college drama professor and a chef at a large Canadian resort. The delicatessen was the latest in a string of ventures guaranteeing the bills got paid. To make sure he always had a part to play, Mina assembled a one-man show
, How to Be a Great Writer,
putting together various pieces written by Charles Bukowski. He played Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's manic imagined alter ego. Because the set was a table and chair, and his only props a typewriter, a battered suitcase, and a six-pack, Mina could put the show on almost anywhere and performed the piece in venues as varied as Chico Hot Springs and the Odyssey Theater in Santa Monica.

Mina showed Brautigan his Chinaski script, hoping for some constructive input. “Garbage! Garbage!” Richard cried, hurling the manuscript out the second-floor window of Roz and Mina's apartment, his violent criticism aimed more at Bukowski's work than Mina's adaptation. The next day Brautigan went shopping. Browsing through Toronto's bookstores, he felt dismayed to find so few copies of his own books. Having sold out their initial orders, the Canadian booksellers neglected to reorder Brautigan's titles.

Richard returned to Slices West after buying two volumes of C. P. Cavafy's poetry. The esteemed Greek poet had lived most of his adult life after the age of twenty-two in the ancient Hellenistic port city of Alexandria, Egypt. Cavafy had been born in Alexandria in 1863 and died
there on his birthday, seventy years later. Knowing Mina was a Coptic Egyptian, Richard gave him the books, telling him he should write a new play about Constantine Cavafy.

Mina considered Brautigan “a born storyteller.” While they worked at the deli, Roz and Mina enjoyed the tales Richard spun as he sipped from his ever-present bottle. They frequently went out with him to buy wine and liquor. At one point during Brautigan's weeklong visit, Mina and Roz tried to organize an evening when he would read from his work, “but the alcohol started early and it did not happen.”

What occurred instead was a brief and “bitter” love affair. The Minas introduced Richard to Barbara Gordon, an “early friend” from when they first moved back to Canada from the States and settled in Toronto. Barb was an aspiring actor, sharing her hopes and dreams with Mina Mina, further along in his quest for that same impossible goal. Brautigan remembered waking up with Gordon in her apartment the first morning after spending the night. “It's a beautiful day here in Toronto,” Barb said, “and you're with a nice Canadian girl.” Richard agreed on both counts.

Gordon wanted everything to be “pleasant.” Brautigan prevented that from happening. “I fucked it up,” he wrote a year later. “It ended abruptly and badly, which was totally my fault.” Richard blamed the sudden breakup on an act of “outrageous stupidity” on his part, wishing he could “redesign the past.” His stay in Toronto came to an unhappy end. In need of traveling cash, Brautigan wrote Mina E. Mina a check for $1,000 on October 19.

Richard checked out of his hotel the next morning. He had a couple hours to kill before catching his flight back to San Francisco and went to the movies. It was a cold day in Toronto. Brautigan chose a cheap theater catering to derelicts to see
Tarzan, the Ape Man
, a film made in a tropic jungle. The movie starred Bo Derek and was directed by her husband, John. Its main attraction was watching the voluptuous star take off her clothes. Even that wasn't sufficient to warm the “sparse [. . .] misbegotten audience of transients.” The management elected not to turn up the heat, and “it was just as cold in the theater as outside on the street.”

On his return to Frisco, Brautigan registered once again at the Kyoto Inn. His favorite hotel in Japantown remained as close to the Land of the Rising Sun as Richard would get that year. He ventured to more accessible pleasure spots: Enrico's, Cho-Cho, Specs', and the Albatross. Richard had no regular old lady in town. Nikki Arai had a boyfriend. Sherry Vetter was married. Eunice Kitagawa was back home in Hawaii. Missing her, Brautigan phoned Kitagawa in Honolulu. She missed him too, inviting Richard to come and spend Christmas.

After three weeks in town, “dwindling finances” compelled Brautigan to seek new lodging. He could no longer afford the Kyoto Inn. Tony Dingman had a friend in Berkeley, a lawyer whose wife had hanged herself from a large wooden beam in the living room of their home on 17 Eucalyptus Road the previous Christmas. After the tragedy, the man had no desire to live there anymore but didn't want to sell the place. At the attorney's invitation, Dingman moved in, rent free.

Richard Hodge, stuck in the middle of a divorce, also needed someplace to live. He had been sworn in as a superior court judge in March 1981. Governor Jerry Brown had appointed him more than six months earlier, but because he was in the middle of defending a big federal case against the Hells Angels, Hodge had to postpone his appointment. At the time, he moved from one borrowed apartment to the next, all his worldly possessions in twelve paper bags. Tony's invitation to join him on Eucalyptus Road seemed the perfect solution. Hodge recalled this period of his life as a time when he poured vodka into his cornflakes for breakfast.

Built in 1907, the house on Eucalyptus Road was a two-story, four-bedroom carpenter gothic structure brooding under the trees on a street curving into the hills above Claremont Avenue. Once Richard Brautigan learned of a free place to live with a couple old pals, he packed his few belongings and moved over to Berkeley. The morbid house fascinated Richard. After the lawyer's wife committed suicide, he left everything untouched. Christmas cards from 1980 lined the mantel in the living room, where huge wooden ceiling beams held Brautigan's attention. The fatal noose had dangled from one of them.

It was a somber house filled with shadows. Wood paneling added to the pervasive darkness. High ceilings gave the shadows a place to linger. The downstairs consisted of a small office/den with a much larger living room off the front entry vestibule. A formal dining room with doors leading to the kitchen adjoined the living room. Shadow-shrouded antiques lurked against the walls. Plenty of gloomy space for lonely guys to wander around.

Last to arrive, Brautigan slept by default in the dead woman's bed upstairs. Dingman and Hodge had both avoided bunking there when making their sleeping arrangements. As soon as he settled in, Richard picked up the professional threads of his career. He phoned Sam Lawrence in mid-November, urging him to consider publishing Don Carpenter and complaining about the dearth of his books available for sale in Toronto. His publisher wrote back the next day (care of Joel Shawn), saying he'd “taken steps to remedy the situation.” Lawrence also promised to have a look at Don Carpenter's work.
So the Wind
had gone into production. Sam reminded Richard that if he wanted a dedication page, it was time to send one.

To simplify the telephone situation on Eucalyptus Road, Brautigan made all his calls using his Montana number. The Mountain Bell bill for November totaled $409.88. Hoping to cut down on expenses and maybe make an extra buck or two, Richard wrote to Helen Brann, questioning why she had taken a commission on the deal that moved
Confederate General
from Grove Press to Seymour Lawrence's imprint. Brann was furious. “I find it incredible that I have to defend my taking a commission on any work I have done for you,” she wrote, reminding Brautigan of all of the effort she'd made on his behalf getting Grove to sell the rights to Lawrence. Helen rubbed salt in the wound, pointing out that the last royalty S&S statement for
Willard
“showed an unearned balance of $40,189.42.

Earlier in the month, Sam Lawrence was out of town when a letter postmarked Paris arrived at his Boston office from Marc Chénetier, “the leading French authority on RB,” a professor of American literature at both the Sorbonne and the Université de Orléans. A deconstructionist critic, Chénetier had first gotten in touch with Helen Brann in 1975, after he'd been approached by Boise State University about writing a “longish piece” (forty-eight pages) on Brautigan for its Western Writers Series. This project didn't pan out for Chénetier, although Boise State eventually included Richard in the series (no. 79, written by Jay Boyer) three years after his death.

This time around, Professor Chénetier requested a meeting with Richard “sometime between now and early January.” Chénetier had written six articles on Brautigan, translated
Dreaming of Babylon
into French, and recently been asked by the British publisher Methuen to write a short book (to be released simultaneously in the United States) on Richard's work. Seymour Lawrence's office forwarded Chénetier's letter to Helen Brann, suggesting she arrange a meeting with Brautigan.

Richard had made several friends in the Hells Angels over the years. He enjoyed talking with Judge Hodge about his final case as a defense attorney, which resulted in the acquittal of twenty-six
members in the motorcycle club. The feds had indicted the Angels under the RICO statute. Unable to nail them on drug dealing, the prosecution hoped to gain a conspiracy conviction. Hodge's client was Jim Brandes, an enforcer for the outlaw bikers, charged with conspiring to sell meth and six counts of conspiracy to commit murder. At one point during jury selection, a prospective juror was asked what he knew about the Hells Angels. The man could only recall that they hosted an annual blood drive. Brandes leaned over to Hodge and whispered, “Give a little, take a little.”

Sharing a house with a couple bachelor buddies brought back Beaver Street memories, a simpler time in Brautigan's life, when he was always broke and didn't worry about money because he had none. As a man who enjoyed visiting cemeteries and wrote about living above a funeral parlor in his youth, Richard derived perverse pleasure from living in a house haunted by a hanged woman, but when an invitation came from the Ketchikan Humanities Series to give a pair of readings, he booked an immediate flight to Alaska. The very name, Ketchikan, had long held potent magic for Brautigan. When his daughter was a newborn infant, he had written a poem, “The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan,” about her 2:00 am feeding. Brautigan sat aboard a plane flying north the first week in December.

Brautigan found Ketchikan among the loveliest villages he'd ever seen. A month and a half later he wrote, “Ketchikan flows like a dream of wooden houses and buildings around the base of Deer Mountain, whose heavily wooded slopes come right down to the town, beautifully nudging it with spruce trees.” Richard didn't enjoy this view of the “First City” for long after his plane touched down on Gravina Island airport, half a mile across the Tongass Narrows (future proposed location of “the bridge to nowhere”) from Ketchikan, a community of seven thousand spread along the shoreline of Revilla Island. Brautigan's presentations were sponsored by KRBD-FM (assisted by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum). He was met by a representative from the radio station, who proposed a local scenic tour.

After Richard checked into the Gilmore Hotel on Front Street, the fellow took him to see some totem poles. Brautigan had observed lots of totem poles in a museum on a trip to Vancouver the previous year. Ketchikan boasted the world's largest collection of freestanding totem poles beneath the towering spruce forest. These totem poles were exposed to the weather (average annual Ketchikan rainfall: 137 inches), the real deal, not a bunch of hothouse museum-enclosed totem poles. Some of them were replicas carved by Native Americans employed by the CCC during the Roosevelt administration. Richard referred to them as “fake totem poles.”