Jubilee Hitchhiker (123 page)

“Made a hell of a racket,” Ron said. “A gun that big and that loud has a tendency to get everybody's attention.” It sobered Stanton up in a hurry. “Scared the shit out of him,” Little recalled. Harry Dean floored it. His car spun around a couple times in the driveway, a maneuver known among hot-rodders as a doughnut. Mad as he was, Ron Little began to find the whole thing amusing. “I thought about killing the fucking car and make him walk back into town,” he said. Instead, Ron fired a second shot into the ground beside the driver's side door, causing Harry Dean to concentrate wonderfully on his driving. The actor got control of the car and sped off into the night.

The construction project, including patching up the kitchen, came to an end a couple days later, about the same time
Rancho Deluxe
wrapped. To celebrate both events, Richard Brautigan threw a big housewarming party at his new home on the first Saturday in June. Most of the cast and movie crew were invited, along with the much-despised hippie carpenters. Harry Dean was there. Ditto Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston. Tom and Becky McGuane mingled in the crowd. Marian Hjortsberg brought over a roast suckling pig to the feast. After a long, cold, wet spring, the bright sunny afternoon came as a welcome treat.

G. Haller thought the party “was to honor the crew and Peter for the wonderful work that they had done.” She remembered Richard as being “very proud” of the redwood craftsmanship. At one point in the festivities, Brautigan took her over to a large cottonwood in the backyard, pointing out where he planned to plant his garden. G. felt concerned about the lack of sunlight. “Oh no,” Richard assured her, “this is the place to put the garden because the tree had been used as the slaughtering tree for all the animals on the farm.” He assumed the spilled blood enriched the ground beneath the cottonwood.

Ron Little sat off by himself, observing the proceedings, when a very pretty young blond woman approached, carrying two beers. She gave one to Ron and sat down next to him. After she asked his name, they chatted for a minute before she wondered what he did. “I'm just a carpenter,” Ron said, “a simple carpenter.” Without another word, the blond got up and walked away.

In a curious twist, a young couple who worked as the rural route mail carriers crashed Brautigan's party. They brought a preacher along with them and proceeded to get married among the merrymakers while various children pelted them with tossed grass. Taken off guard, Gatz Hjortsberg was drafted as their reluctant witness. After the ceremony, they used the potluck as their reception dinner. G. Haller recalled that Brautigan at first seemed very upset by the unexpected nuptials, but quickly adopted a philosophical attitude. “You don't want to ruin the party,” he told her, “so you just kind of let them do what they are going to do.”

By the next afternoon, almost all of the remodeling crew was gone. Peter Miller never had another conversation with Richard in his life. One day, several years later, he bumped into Brautigan on a San Francisco street. “Hello,” Peter said.

“Nice to see you,” Richard replied, walking on his way without another word. They never saw each other again.

The last of the crew to leave was John “Spaceman” Fenu and his family. Their truck had broken down, and Spaceman was working on his transmission beside the barn when Brautigan came striding up the hill from his newly completed house. “You have to get off my property,” he said. Spaceman, basically a quiet guy, just stared at him, uncomprehending. “You have all the rest of great big Montana in which to repair your truck,” Richard told him. Fenu got the message. He somehow managed to start his outfit and drive away, leaving Brautigan all alone in his new home in the mountains.

forty: over easy

I
N THE FALL of 1973, Richard Brautigan came into Livingston one evening for some serious drinking. He headed straight for the Wrangler, the bar of choice among the Montana Gang. The much-beloved watering hole has been replaced by a succession of restaurants in the ongoing yuppification of the West. Back then, Livingston was still a railroad town, boasting twenty-four bars and an equal number of churches. A fellow could tie one on every Saturday night and pray off his hangover on Sunday without ever hitting the same joint twice for six straight months.

Two rival drinking establishments stood on Park Street, across from the Northern Pacific depot. The Wrangler featured rock-and-roll bands and catered to a scruffier long-haired crowd, in those days most likely blue-collar guys, carpenters, and auto mechanics, not hippie weirdos. Next door was the Longbranch (now sadly transformed into a Chinese restaurant), a shit-kicker cowboy bar with country music and a frieze of the local ranch brands running around the walls. Most nights, customers wandered back and forth between the two long narrow rooms. Eventually, an interior door was cut through the dividing wall. Music came mainly on the weekends. The rest of the time, folks shot pool, played the Pong machine, and got slowly and religiously drunk.

Richard spent a lot of time at the Wrangler. Cindy Murphy, a local gal who tended bar for proprietor Bob Burns, remembered him often arriving alone. Brautigan sat by himself drinking all night without saying a word to anyone. Cindy recalled that Richard always tipped well. Mary Burns, the owner's daughter, was about nineteen when Brautigan started coming into her father's place. He told her he was planning to raise ducks. “I ordered a bunch of baby ducklings,” he said. “They're coming in soon on the train.” After that, whenever Mary saw him in the bar, she'd ask about the ducks. Had they arrived yet? “Nope. Not yet, any day now.” This went on for a couple of years until it dawned on her that he was pulling her leg.

One time, standing at the Wrangler Bar, Brautigan was accosted by a weary salesman in a rumpled plaid polyester suit, wide necktie undone. After a difficult and frustrating day, the fellow radiated truculence and glared red-faced up at Richard. “You hippies certainly have it made,” he said, his voice acid with disapproval.

Whiskey glass in hand, Richard peered down imperiously through his bifocals at the angry little man. “I am not a hippie, sir,” he declared, enunciating each word precisely. “I work for my living.”

On another occasion, Richard came into the Wrangler with Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison after a day of bird hunting. Dick Murphy, Cindy's brother, remembered it was “a pretty crazy night in there.” McGuane and Harrison elbowed to the bar, shouting out drink orders. Richard had something else on his mind. “Brautigan's got this paper sack,” Dick recalled, “like a big
grocery bag, and he's got it kind of necked down, funneled down from the top, and I'm watching him, and he's got people sticking their hands in there, and people would scream. ‘Stick your hand in there,' he'd say, ‘so you can tell what it is.' The girls especially would all come out screaming.”

Murphy himself gave it a try. The bag contained seven or eight dead grouse. “There were so many in there that they were all still warm, of course, and so all you felt was this kind of plump feathered bodies. It was pretty funny. He was getting a big kick out of it.”

One night, after knocking back round after round of Black Jack and water, no ice, a drink known locally as a “ditch,” Richard and a group of fellow patrons straggled across the street to Martin's when the Wrangler closed at 2:00 am. An all-night café slinging hash seven days a week in an Italianate brick building that once served as a dining room for the Northern Pacific passenger depot, Martin's had a Renaissance villa exterior that matched the baggage room, one of three imposing structures built between 1901 and 1902. Inside, the place was pure 1950s moderne, Formica-topped tables and a color scheme running to pumpkin and aqua. Dedicated Livingston barflies all headed to Martin's for a greasy breakfast after last call.

The crowd from the Wrangler numbered about ten, including Cindy and Richard, an artist named Donna Bone, and a couple guys who recently moved to Montana from New Jersey. They sat at a long table in the middle of the large, high-ceilinged room. Orders were taken: eggs prepared various ways, hash browns, omelets, short stacks, biscuits and gravy. At some point, Brautigan, who hadn't been saying much, got up and walked silently away from the table. No one really paid attention. Richard was quite drunk, yet moved with a certain lurching dignity. Cindy Murphy remembered a gradual awareness of the displeasure building behind her, a barely perceptible murmuring, an uncomfortable mirthless laughter: the uneasy sound of people wondering if the joke was on them.

The folks at the long central table spun around to see what was going on. They beheld Richard, passing from group to group, deliberately sticking his finger in everyone's food, one plate at a time. He did so with casual indifference, like a royal taster working the house at the king's request. The stunned reaction behind him wasn't exactly that of a lynch mob, but people were plainly puzzled and patently pissed. The bunch from the Wrangler looked on in helpless bewilderment, having no ready explanation for their companion's peculiar behavior and expecting a massacre at any moment.

Brautigan wove between the tables, serene as a drunken angel, dipping his finger dispassionately into the cheese omelets and sunny-side-ups on his way to oblivion. There were perhaps thirty other customers, railroad workers and ranch hands, the usual late-night crowd, and nothing like this had ever happened to any of them before. Not looking back, Richard made his way to the cash register by the door. He picked up the tab for everyone in the place. Three dozen free breakfasts anointed by the touch of the poet.

forty-one: the five-year plan

R
ICHARD BRAUTIGAN'S NEW Montana home and the Hjortsbergs' place to the north across Pine Creek shared a common underground gravity-feed water line. It was an ancient affair, the iron-bound wooden conduit laid sometime before the end of the nineteenth century. The line fed off two source boxes, the lower one, for use in winter, was located directly in the creek; the uppermost placed in an irrigation ditch running only in summer. A control valve regulated the flow down the branch line to Brautigan's house.

In the spring of 1974, while Richard's house was being remodeled, Gatz walked him up through the woods, attempting to explain the intricacies of their antique waterworks. The valve control was of special interest as Brautigan planned to shut off his supply in winter. Richard, unmechanical as always, proved a disinterested student. He preferred discussing books, his own work in particular. Brautigan told Hjortsberg about his “five-year plan.” Richard explained he would write a new book in a different genre every year for the next five years.

The first of these genre novels,
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western
, had already been written. By the time Brautigan moved in to his remodeled house, the book was three months away from publication. There were no interviews or plans for a book tour. Once again, the designer in charge of Simon & Schuster's book production was Helen Barrow. Richard Snyder, president of the company, had some new ideas about how to publish Brautigan. Instead of releasing
Hawkline
simultaneously both in cloth and as a trade paperback, Snyder decided to bring it out first as a hardcover.

The new marketing approach called for a corresponding shift in the overall book design. Instead of placing Brautigan's photograph on the front cover, Simon & Schuster hired noted dust jacket illustrator Wendell Minor, who produced an evocative sepia-toned painting of the turreted Hawkline Manor. Brautigan approved Wendell Minor's cover. Jonathan Dolger recalled that Brautigan loved Minor's work. Richard asked his friend John Fryer to take his dust jacket photo. Fryer, a talented amateur photographer, maintained a professional darkroom in the basement of his store in Livingston. Early in June, shortly after his housewarming party, Fryer took a photo at Pine Creek. Richard wore jeans, a dark untucked Western shirt, and the high-crowned black hat he had favored in Key West, his long blond hair hanging free past his shoulders. John Fryer was paid $125 for his work.

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western
was published in August of 1974 with an initial printing of forty thousand copies. No text accompanied the author photo, nor was there any biographical information about Brautigan printed inside on the flaps. Helen Brann agreed with Dick Snyder. Publishing Brautigan's new novel in a more traditional format would lead to increased
hardback sales. By the beginning of October, Simon & Schuster had sold enough books for Jonathan Dolger to order an additional printing of ten thousand copies. The usual array of naysayers lined up to lambaste Richard for “triteness and banality,” “self-indulgent whimsy,”and “irreverence and obscenity.” In the
New Statesman
, Julian Barnes regretted the novel's “watered style and paper-thin narrative.” Roger Sale (
Hudson Review
) said, “It is a terrible book, deeply unfunny, in no need of having been written.” There were a few exceptions.
Playboy
called
Hawkline
“certainly Brautigan's most simultaneously unified and eclectic work,” while
Booklist
raved, “With just the right blend of cowpoke humor and touches of the macabre, Brautigan hilariously spoofs the traditional western as well as the classic horror tale.”

Even as the bad notices started rolling in, there was much to celebrate.
Hawkline
was selling well, and Hollywood came calling, checkbook in hand. After
Rancho Deluxe
wrapped, Michael Haller returned home to Los Angeles and talked enthusiastically about
The Hawkline Monster
with his friend, director Hal Ashby. Haller first worked with Ashby in 1971, as the production designer of
Harold and Maude
, and again on
The Last Detail
, Ashby's third film as a director, finished the year before and featuring rising star Jack Nicholson. Michael thought that
Hawkline
was a perfect lead role for Nicholson. Harry Dean Stanton was eager to play the other hired assassin cowpoke in the story.