Jubilee Hitchhiker (197 page)

Brautigan's first purchases on his third trip to Amsterdam were several spiral-bound notebooks at a stationery store. Back in his room, Richard began writing again after three months of ricocheting back and forth across Europe, setting to work in a four-by-six notebook on “Owl Days,” a long narrative prose piece chronicling the details of his train trip from Barcelona and a series of misadventures during the next five and a half weeks in Amsterdam.

In another pocket notebook, Brautigan compiled his most curious list in a lifetime of compulsive enumeration. Richard listed every item in the hotel, a long column of mundane objects, starting with “lobby: 1 elevator / 1 large color photograph of a snowy owl / 1 telex machine / 1 bell on the front desk / to ring for the clerk if nobody is on / the desk / 1 cash register, etc. etc.” Richard even detailed the contents of his bathroom. His tally had a curious precision. “1 holder of paper bags on the wall. They are for sanitary napkins. 1 white round metal container to put used sanitary napkins in with a foot lever to raise and lower the lid with. 1 small metal hook on the wall to hang clothes from.” A sense of solitude pervades this singular list, each item isolated by empty space. Scratching away in his notebook, Brautigan created an unintentional poem about loneliness.

On January 5, Richard resumed his interrupted correspondence, writing longhand on Owl Hotel stationery to Masako Kano, his first letter in months. He was not entirely candid about his recent travels, which he called “a remarkable time.” Brautigan described his itinerary accurately but made it all sound like a business trip, “lecturing, on the move, meeting, meeting, meeting people and like that.” He signed himself, “E.T. in Europe,” referring to a peculiar ritual Richard concocted with Masako. Based on his affection for the Steven Spielberg film, Brautigan and Kano would touch their forefingers together in public places, replicating the movie scene, both simultaneously saying “E.T.”

“Can you believe?” Years later, Masako remained incredulous at the memory of this “childish gesture.” Brautigan enjoyed enacting his extraterrestrial finger touching with “real little boys” in Japanese restaurants and public places. “Everybody just stared at us,” Kano recalled. “Richard sometimes became oblivious that he looked so different from the general public in Tokyo.”

Brautigan lived mostly a sober life during his final stay in Amsterdam. He went early to bed and arose early. After shaving and brushing his teeth, Richard headed down to the dining room, which opened onto a garden and looked “pleasant, clean, attractive.” He called it the Owl Room. Breakfast was served at 7:30 by a motherly, cheerful woman. It was always the same. Coffee, a slice of Swiss cheese and a piece of ham on one plate; four slices of bread on another; two cubes of butter and a small pot of jam on a third; and a soft-boiled brown egg perched in an egg cup. Brautigan had never eaten soft-boiled eggs before. Richard liked his eggs fried sunny-side up, scrambled, or hard-boiled but served hot. He ate them soft-boiled in the Owl Room because the hotel served eggs no other way, and he thought it was “a nutritionally sound idea [. . .] to eat an egg for breakfast.”

After his morning meal, Brautigan returned to room 47, opened the curtains, and wrote for several hours. In the afternoons, he walked about the city. The first full blast of winter had not yet arrived, although the sky remained dark and overcast. Richard returned to his favorite hot mussel sandwich shack next to the Singelgracht. The owner recognized him. “Back in Amsterdam again?” he said.

“Yes,” Brautigan replied. “It's my third trip.”

The man looked up from preparing his sandwich. “You come for the mussels.”

“Yes.” Richard thought this was as good a reason as any to explain his return to the city. He wrote a story about the moment and called it “Mussels.”

Other afternoon strolls took Brautigan to the Rijksmuseum, a short walk from the Owl. He went to see Rembrandt's
The Night Watch,
the Dutch master's enormous (eleven feet plus by fourteen feet plus) 1642 group portrait of Frans Banning Cocq's company of arquebusiers. At some point in 1715, the painting was cut down on all four sides to fit between two columns in the Amsterdam Town Hall. Brautigan spent an hour looking at Rembrandt's huge masterpiece. He knew “a section of the painting had been chopped off” and looked at “the section of [the painting] that was missing.” The largest excised segment was a couple feet lopped off the left-hand side, eliminating two members of the illustrious military company. “A lot of people came and went and looked at the painting that was there,” Richard wrote later in the year. “They were satisfied with what they saw while I was looking at what was gone.”

Hungry after his hour-long excursion into conceptual art, Brautigan found his way back to the real world and the little wooden shack by the canal for another hot mussel sandwich under the oppressive leaden sky. “Often during the day I wished I was in Japan,” Richard wrote around this time. “Things would be better there. The streets are lively with people.”

Hoping to make his wish come true, Brautigan rented a typewriter and set to work on his Japanese entrance visa application. On the standard form, Richard stated that he was self-employed, listing his “principal former positions” as “Lecturer. University of Notre Dame, Stanford University.” He asked to stay for a period of six months, saying he planned to enter Japan in “January 1984.”

On a separate statement of “Personal History,” Richard compiled a list of the American universities where he'd lectured over the years. He made no mention of his recent appearances in Amsterdam, Zurich, and Germany, suggesting that he suspected any inquiry would yield an unsatisfactory assessment. Brautigan mentioned that he was profiled in
Who's Who in America
and concluded, “At the age of seventeen, I came in contact with Japanese culture and it has had a profound influence on my life. Japan has been my teacher. I wish to continue my education.”

Richard dated his application January 9, 1984, mailing it off, along with his passport, to the Japanese Consulate in The Hague. Approved by the ambassador's office, Brautigan was granted a six-month visa “for cultural activities,” valid within three months of the date of his application. The day after submitting the paperwork, Richard sat in his hotel room, outlining a plan of action in one of his little notebooks. He was in his element, making lists, yet desperation haunted every word. His prospects in February looked bleak. This time around, Brautigan tallied a wishful compendium of dream options.

“1984,” Richard wrote at the top of the page. “Plans to make $.” In descending order he listed: “Screenplay: Trailer / Finish: The Complete Absence of Twilight / Sell property / Write articles (very little money) / Can I borrow more money? doubtful / Perhaps making of Hawkline Monster?” Looking at his immediate future, Brautigan contemplated his planned trip to Japan and compiled pluses and minuses. On the plus side: “I'm writing again: love book with Takako / Soup book / I'm happier / Masako?” The minus column included “It's very expensive and where am I going to get the fucking money / How do I live in Japan / Ask Takako of [illegible].”

Richard asked Brad Donovan to send a copy of
Trailer
so they could get to work and finish the project. He'd made inquiries at Dutch
Playboy,
and they expressed interest in his work. The future looked bleak, but Richard held onto a dreamer's impossible hope that somehow his writing would provide some salvation. If not, he already knew how to solve all his problems.

Addressing his present needs, Brautigan prepared a third catalog of “ifs,” headed “A Plan of Action—Amsterdam.” Richard decided to stay in Amsterdam at least until the end of the month, and his designated “ifs” included “Assignment from Playboy / Transatlantic Tokyo piece / Perhaps Tokyo / Money from Hodge / Reading / Screenplay arrives and I finish it / If I get a Japanese Visa.” He ended the if list with the pluses of living in Amsterdam: “I can get a lot of work done,” and “I can live cheaper here than in Japan.” Brautigan didn't need his accountant to remind him of this.

During his first weeks at the Owl, Richard had no trouble sleeping through many nighttime storms. The rain became his “Amsterdam babysitter.” When the white noise of rainfall gave way to the haunting silence of snow, Brautigan's insomnia returned, and he lay awake, his brain wandering “all over the place without duration or plot.” Richard didn't like sleeping in the dark, leaving a light on in the bathroom with the door partway open to allow muted penumbral shadows to permeate his bedchamber. His difficulty falling back to sleep arose out of a fear of the “horrible nightmares” he knew awaited him.

In the daylight, everything looked different. A working copy of “Trailer” arrived from Montana and Brautigan went straight to work. He phoned Brad Donovan half a dozen times to collaborate on the project. Once, Donovan's phone rang at three o'clock in the morning. “Will you accept a collect call from Amsterdam?” the operator asked. There was something odd in her voice. Brad had no idea what she and Richard had been talking about.

“Sure,” Donovan said.

“You will?” The operator sounded incredulous.

“Yeah,” he said. “I really will.”

Richard and Brad hashed out the details of the final unwritten scenes in the screenplay, and Brautigan set to work typing a clean reading copy. Richard had previously farmed this sort of secretarial work out to professionals. Economic considerations now demanded that he undertake the task himself. A skilled typist, Brautigan spent hours every day laboring on the script. His busy work
schedule did not prevent him from further exploring Amsterdam. Long walks became Richard's only recreation. He took a break every afternoon, searching for “different things to look at.” Brautigan found his way into bookstores and outdoor markets, buying “some fruit, a passport holder, two candy bars.”

His leisurely strolls led him to new fiction. The few stories Richard wrote in Amsterdam (as well as ideas saved for later fiction) all arose from wandering around bleak unexplored side streets. “Real winter” raged into Holland at the end of the third week in January. Full-blown snowstorms replaced the insistent cold rain. The streets were “either icy or slushy.” Every time Brautigan ventured out he found himself involved in a snowball fight. “One look at me,” he wrote, “and kids want to start throwing snowballs.”

Soon after the weather turned frigid, Richard changed his room at the Owl, moving to number 15 on the bottom floor near the stairs leading to the dining room, where he ate breakfast and wrote in his notebooks. He made no detailed compilation of this room's contents. With the first winter snowstorm, Brautigan was surprised to see citizens of Amsterdam break out their umbrellas. “It had a dreamlike, almost musical quality,” he wrote in a story called “Umbrellas in the Snow.” Richard had written about umbrellas before. They seemed to fascinate him. He featured “Umbrellas,” one of the stories in
The Tokyo–Montana Express,
on the book's rear inside dust jacket flap. Three other umbrella stories, “Walking Mushrooms,” “The Umbrella Photograph,” and “Last Words About What Came and Went Yesterday” (about piles of shattered umbrellas in the aftermath of a typhoon), all from his 1979 Japanese notebooks, remain unpublished.

The umbrella story was one of four pieces of new fiction Brautigan took with him on his birthday to a meeting with an editor of Dutch
Playboy
. (The others included “Mussels,” “The Habitue,” a story about getting his shoes repaired in Amsterdam, and “Sandwalker,” a fantasy of wanting to reach through the wall of the Owl and kill a young boy in the next room who was keeping him awake.) Three days before, Richard had mailed Jonathan Dolger a fair copy of “Trailer,” asking his agent to make additional copies and send one to Brad Donovan in Montana.

Brautigan's passport stamped with a Japanese cultural visa arrived back from the consulate in The Hague. His plan had been to leave Amsterdam at the end of January. After trudging around the slushy streets, he came down with what he called “a very bad flucold” and decided to stay until he got better.

Richard Brautigan spent much of his forty-ninth birthday sick in bed. After meeting with the editor at
Playboy
earlier in the day, he mailed his agent a copy of “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo.” In spite of coughing and sneezing, Richard got his work done. Ill and alone in a strange city, low on funds, he had neither the means nor the energy to go out and party. Back home, his friends might have planned a celebration. Adrift in Amsterdam, he was on his own.

The two primary local pleasure providers, coffeehouses selling pot and streets lined with prostitutes displayed in shop windows like frosted cakes for sale in patisseries, held little appeal for Richard, who didn't smoke and had no interest in whores. Brautigan made at least one excursion into Amsterdam's red-light district, riding there in a taxi with a new friend whose “huge black dog” hulked in his lap. Richard went to a brothel for a drink at the bar. His companion wanted to get laid and had his eye on a blond working in the establishment, but he had forgotten his wallet and had no money. The whorehouse accepted MasterCard. Richard's new friend only had Visa. He asked Brautigan to pick up the tab. “I don't have a credit card,” Richard said.

“I thought all Americans had credit cards.”

“I don't.”

Wracked by fever sweats in his hotel bed, Richard gave little thought to brothels, credit cards, partying with friends, or even drinking whiskey. Nothing seemed like fun. A passport-sized photograph taken a few days before (perhaps for his Japanese visa) portrayed Brautigan as a doleful owl, mustaches frowning downward, hair parted to expose a head going bald, his mournful stare burning into the camera lens. “Yes, Europe has been good to me,” Richard wrote Greg Keeler when he sent him a print of the picture. Brautigan's final birthday held little joy.