Jubilee Hitchhiker (6 page)

In her touching memoir,
You Can't Catch Death
, Ianthe Brautigan wrote: “When he was about four, Mary Lou had pushed him into a room with his father. My father watched him shave without saying a word and then his father handed him a dollar.” A second meeting occurred when Richard was about seven, outside the restaurant where his mother worked as cashier. His father happened along and stopped where he was playing on the sidewalk. Just enough time to say hello and give the kid fifty cents. Then, he was gone forever, a memory lost in a dream.

Bernard Frederick Brautigan, the man later identified as Richard's father, also knew very little of his own paternal genealogy. He was born on July 29, 1908, in Winlock, Washington, an isolated logging town in rural Lewis County. His father, Frederic “Fritz” Brautigam, born on January 12, 1878, in Hirschberg, Westfalen, Prussia, emigrated to the United States, sailing from Antwerp on the
SS Kensington
and arriving in New York on September 12, 1899, to follow the path of his uncle Ferdinand, who had come over twelve years earlier.

The original spelling of the family name, “Brautigam,” so carefully rendered by Fritz in his fine Prussian copperplate hand on numerous courthouse documents, only gradually evolved into
“Brautigan.” In the 1910 census and the birth registration of his last child, Fritz spelled his surname with an “m.” At that time, his uncle Ferd was already known everywhere as Brautigan.

Fritz quickly learned English and became a naturalized citizen, moving to the state of Washington at the beginning of a brand-new century. On June 14, 1906, Fritz Brautigam married twenty-three-year-old Rebecca Kingston, in a simple Catholic ceremony. Rebecca was born in Oakland, California, to George Kingston and Hanorah Hayes, both Irish immigrants. By 1900, the Kingston family moved to Lewis County and bought a farm. Fritz Brautigam died on July 1, 1910, three weeks before his wife gave birth to their third child. At the time, Bernard was not yet two years old.

Rebecca Brautigan remarried a cook named William Morisette who had also come west from Wisconsin. Bernard Brautigan grew up next to the oldest in a mixed brood of eight kids. According to Mary Lou Folston, two of them died suicides, another drank herself to death at age twenty-four, and one succumbed to an infection from a self-induced abortion. “That was the craziest family,” Mary Lou remembered. “They never talked about anything they did. They just did it and forgot it.”

When first investigating the life of Richard Brautigan in January of 1991, the story of the missing father who resurfaced only after news reports of his famous son's suicide intrigued me. I found Bernard Brautigan's phone number in Tacoma through information and gave him a call. The voice on the other end of the line sounded gruff and impatient. He clearly had no interest in further questions six years after Richard's death. “Don't want to talk about it!” he grunted brusquely when I brought the matter up.

I mentioned the book I was researching and said I would be happy to present his version of events.

“Not interested,” came the curt reply of an old man who didn't want to be bothered.

Feeling uncomfortable, I muttered something about how he'd talked plenty to the newspapers when the story first broke. “Go read the newspapers then,” Brautigan snapped, slamming down the receiver.

The following June found me snooping around the Pacific Northwest again. I spent several weeks in Eugene, Oregon, where I interviewed Mary Lou Folston, as well as several of Richard's friends from high school, and unexpectedly stumbled upon a cache of six early Brautigan notebook manuscripts sealed for more than thirty-five years in a safe deposit box belonging to an old woman named Edna Webster. The key was lost, and I hired a locksmith to drill the box open. After Xeroxing this serendipitous literary treasure trove, I headed north to Portland and on to Tacoma, Washington, where I paid $11 for a photocopy of Richard's birth certificate at the Health Department's Bureau of Statistics.

Richard Gary Brautigan was born at the Pierce County hospital. His mother's maiden name was entered as Lula Mary Kehoe, age twenty-three; occupation, housewife. Bernard F. Brautigan, a “common laborer,” aged twenty-seven, had been listed as the father, with 813 East Sixty-fifth Street, Tacoma, recorded as their shared address. The baby's birth was declared legitimate.

I looked up Bernard Brautigan in the white pages by a pay phone at the Board of Health. The address listed on Sixty-fifth Street was not that far away. I found the place easily, a modest one-story house on a side street off McKinley Avenue, set well back off the road behind a spacious sloping lawn fringed by fruit trees. A low fence bordered the property, and a sign on the gate read
BEWARE OF THE DOG. Walking to the front steps, I exercised a certain caution, half-expecting huge red-eyed Dobermans to leap savagely for my throat. My fears verged on the preposterous when a lap dog's enthusiastic yapping greeted the doorbell's ring.

A moment later, a small ancient man appeared behind the screen door beside the frantic leaping terrier. Veiled by wire mesh, his shadow-masked features were difficult to discern. I remember thinking it curious that two such tiny people (Mary Lou Folston was a petite woman) might have produced such a towering son. I introduced myself, mentioning my previous phone call seeking an interview. His brusque manner remained the same. He told me through the screen that he had nothing more to say about the matter. I said his son was one of the most famous American writers of the century. “He's not my son!” Brautigan spat venomously. “That woman even said so.”

Feeling like a gambler with little to lose, I called his bluff. “I'll pay you $100 an hour to talk with me,” I said. Bernard Brautigan shut the door in my face.

The late summer of 1993 found me back in the Pacific Northwest. I attended Richard's fortieth high school reunion in Eugene, an event he would himself have avoided like a dose of the clap. One inebriated woman unfamiliar with Brautigan's work cornered me in a banquet room at the sprawling Valley River Inn. “Why do you want to write about him for?” She waved her plastic cocktail glass and told me she wrote professional verse for greeting card companies, a career she considered more worthy of a biography.

Early in September, I worked my way back up the coast to Tacoma for more interviews. I took advantage of a sun-drenched day and explored Richard Brautigan's childhood neighborhood with a simple aim-and-shoot thirty-five-millimeter camera. Snapshots provide handy visual aids when writing description. I proved such an inept photographer that all of the film came out blank.

Circling the narrow two-story white frame house on East Sixty-fifth Street where Richard had lived as a small child, shooting a roll of film, I thought about Bernard Brautigan's place, only ten blocks away down McKinley Avenue. It made sense to get a couple of photos there. I drove to the little house set back from the road. Everything looked the same, the metal sign on the gate still warning of dangerous dogs. Not a soul in sight. With the aplomb of a spy, I pulled out the camera.

Perhaps never to be in Tacoma again, I decided to give the interview another try. “What can he do, shoot me?” I thought, retracing two-year-old footsteps. I rang the doorbell. A cosmic eraser swept clean the blackboard of the past. Ben Brautigan's mood (Mary Lou Folston said he was called Ben) seemed as sunny as the bright late-summer day. My first question got him talking and he stepped out into the afternoon's warmth, followed by Buff, his surprisingly docile little dog.

I asked if I could turn on my tape recorder. Ben Brautigan agreed. He'd been married to Lula Mary Kehoe for about seven years when they broke up. There was another man. “She was running around,” the old man insisted. “Yeah, yeah. Sure, she knew it was Ron Bluett. He lived not very far from us out there on 64th and McKinley. But, we were split up for a long time before we got a divorce. And I got sewered [
sic
] for divorce and got the divorce.”

“And you think this fellow, Bluett, was the actual paternal father?” I asked, as Buff sniffed around our feet.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, I know. I'd swear to it. Absolutely. She would, too, if she wanted to, you know, make herself clear.” Frowning with assumed sagacity, he tried to sum up his thoughts about Richard. “For her to say a thing like that, that's what hurt him. He knew that in his mind all this stuff was going on that he has no way to prove it.”

Ben tossed a worn tennis ball across the yard. Buff barked in frantic pursuit. I said Richard's mother obviously never told him anything about this man, Bluett.

“No, no, no. And if she ever told him anything about me being the father, it would seem like he'd come up here.”

Somewhat hesitantly, I brought up Richard's claim of seeking him out decades before in a barber shop.

“It's just a story, that's all it is,” Ben Brautigan said.

I asked him if he thought Richard had made the story up.

“Yeah. Because if I had a feeling that he was—I'd invite him over so we could talk. For coffee or a glass of beer or something. But, I have no idea, no idea.”

I looked carefully at Ben Brautigan. Although he was a short man and eighty-six years old there was something about the sharpness of his long nose and the emphatic candor of his distant blue eyes clearly reminiscent of Richard. “So,” I asked, “your marriage with Lula Mary Kehoe had broken up considerably long before the child was born?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I was probably single, away from her, for three, four years.”

When I mentioned that Mary Lou had listed him as the father on the birth certificate, Ben replied, “Yeah, yeah. But, she comes out now and she says that she got that child alongside the road. Why did she use that figure?”

I said I didn't know. We talked some about Mary Lou's other three children, each by a different father. I mentioned it must have been a terrible shock to learn about Richard only after his suicide.

“Yes, it was.” Ben's anger resurfaced. “I said, my god o'mighty! You know, to be a father and don't know nothing about it . . .”

“That's why I really wanted to hear your side of it,” I said. “You never met Richard or even saw him and—”

“I don't know none of the family!” Ben Brautigan interjected.

“And when he was born, she never notified you then?”

“No, no, no, no.”

I said it seemed highly unlikely that had he been the father she wouldn't have gotten in touch with him.

“Right in the neighborhood even,” he snorted. “She's over there and I was here and he was over in the hospital.”

I was astonished. “You were living in this house in '35?” I asked. “Right here on Sixty-fifth Street?”

“Yeah. It's in the phone book.”

“Right. And she never said a word to you?”

“No, uh-uh, not a word. Why should I hide it?”

“She put your name on the birth certificate but didn't bother to tell you?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Old Ben Brautigan stared thoughtfully out over the fruit trees shading his lawn. “I wish I had the opportunity to see him, not even talk to him, but see him. And, too, his mother to lie like that, to hurt everybody. Not only the poor kid had to suffer about it, but that it'll go on for years and years and years, till they find out what in the hell the real truth is. You know, if Lula knew that was mine,” he mused, “why didn't she have nerve enough to step over a couple of doors and tell me?”

I asked if his ex-wife had ever requested any child support from him.

“No. It's funny, the hospital didn't come after me to pay for the bill.”

“They never did? They never approached you?”

“No, no. It's funny. It isn't a lot of things, you know, that we try to figure out ourself [
sic
] in our own mind, but that's as far as we get, is to try to figure 'em out.” Ben Brautigan struggled to express the great eternal conundrum of never knowing the answers to anything. Wrestling with the ineffable seemed to tire him. Something inside sagged a little. His watery eyes lost their focus for a moment as he stared at the endless sky.

A more relentless and diligent investigator might have probed on, but I didn't have the heart for it. Ben and I talked about the trolleys that once ran the length of McKinley Avenue in the thirties and how he had worked as a laborer in a local plywood factory for most of his life. I remarked what a pretty spot he had, saying I understood why he'd happily lived here for nearly sixty years.

“Yeah,” the old man murmured, “I lost two wives living here. I was married to one, I was married to her for thirty, about thirty-two years.”

“Your second wife?” I asked, patting Buff as he nosed around me.

“Yeah. And my third wife, I was married to her. She died not too long ago, about five years. She died of cancer. She didn't have cancer when I married her, but she got it and picked it up fast.”

Not knowing quite how to reply, I told Ben Brautigan that he looked to be in very good health. I said I hoped he continued to have it.

“I do, too. I do, too. There's a lot out here yet to enjoy.”

We talked a bit longer but I couldn't think of much more to say. “Any time I can help you, stop in,” he called as I headed back to my car. I figured on phoning him once I sorted out my notes. I might as well have been a paving contractor on the highway to hell. When I tried to get in touch with Ben Brautigan again, he was dead.

three: american dust

I
N HIS WONDERFUL short story “Revenge of the Lawn,” Richard Brautigan combines details from the lives of his grandmother and great-grandmother to create a character who, “in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past.” Brautigan's great-grandmother had a poem for her name. Madora Lenora Ashlock was born on April 20, 1856, in Collin County, Texas, just across the line from the Indian Territory. There had been Ashlocks in North America since 1720.