Jubilee Hitchhiker (134 page)

On the second Friday in October, after Richard worked on his novel and watched the last few moments of a high school football game in Livingston, he and Tony met an incoming flight bringing Siew-Hwa, Curt Gentry, and Gail Stevens. Back at Pine Creek, Brautigan “drank a lot, got maudlin and fought with Siew-Hwa.” The next morning he woke up with a “horrible hangover.” Brautigan spent the day in bed, out in his little sleeping cabin. “It seemed to be the best place for me,” he reflected. Richard got up as it grew dark and joined his friends and family in the main house, joking “about being a vampire cowboy.” Curt cooked a massive steak Brautigan thought was delicious. Later, Harmon Henkin dropped by and stayed up with Richard until one in the morning, discussing future trades.

On Sunday, Richard prepared a spaghetti dinner for fifteen, while he and Curt “talked about fame.” Brautigan went to bed very late. Once again, he drank too much “and disappointed myself by doing so.” It snowed that night, the first serious storm after a languid Indian summer. The surprise splendor of more than a foot of new snow on the ground brightened Richard's morning hangover.

Everyone reveled in the early winter. Ianthe built a snowman. Wild snowball fights spontaneously erupted. “We were like children,” Brautigan wrote in his journal. After the morning's frolic, when Richard took what Curt Gentry called “his weekly bath,” Curt, Siew-Hwa, Ianthe, and Gail filled a washtub with snow, carrying it to the bathroom window. They raised the window in whispered silence and dumped the whole freezing load in on top of the placid bather. Whooping, Richard ran from the bathroom “stark naked out into the blizzard,” grabbed a shovel, and decapitated Ianthe's snowman.

According to the improvised kitchen schedule, it wasn't Brautigan's night to cook. He was pissed when he had to do it anyway. Harmon Henkin and a girlfriend had been invited to dinner. Siew-Hwa didn't like Harmon and refused to cook for him. After a big fight, Beh locked herself in a spare bedroom. Brautigan “wouldn't speak to her.” He prepared rabbit he'd bought from Gatz. After dinner, Richard and Harmon “got into some trading.” Brautigan traded Henkin “a .22 caliber Ithaca carbine for a very good fly reel, a winter vest, a waterproof jacket and a dozen muddler minnow flies.”

A late night of drinking and trading followed by a bout of insomnia left Richard feeling “like shit” the next day. He and Siew-Hwa were barely speaking in the morning. Richard used his exhaustion as an excuse to stay home and not go with Curt, Gail, and Siew-Hwa when Tony drove them all to the airport. A nap didn't help. Neither did lunch at Martin's Café, where the food was “terrible.” Another nap in the afternoon “didn't help either.” Brautigan solved the problem by getting very drunk during and after dinner “with a bunch of people” at Becky Fonda's place. They got into a snowball fight out front, and Richard lost his eyeglasses.

Waking up the next morning with another hangover, Brautigan wrote “What's new?” in his makeshift journal. Tony drove him up to Becky's, and they found his glasses in the snow. Hangover therapy included a long afternoon nap, watching “very bad television,” soaking in a hot tub, and reading
Helter Skelter
. Richard wrote “What a horrible story” about Curt's book, intending it as praise. His day ended with a long nonargumentative telephone call to Siew-Hwa lasting until 3:00 am.

The morning's hangover marked the beginning of a ten-day stretch of relative sobriety and consistent hard work. Brautigan received word from Helen Brann on October 16 that
Willard
had sold 35,500 copies as of the tenth. “I was immensely happy,” he wrote in his daybook. Richard allowed only three hangovers to disrupt his industrious progress toward the conclusion of
Sombrero Fallout
. He finished on the twenty-second. “Hooray!”

The next day remained very cold. Richard spent most of the morning and afternoon proofreading his manuscript. A letter from Siew-Hwa arrived with the day's mail. Beh bared her heart in two handwritten pages. “I feel unconsolable, spiraling in unspeakable grief,” she wrote. “I can no longer feel your care only your violence, aggression, denials, and self centeredness.” They had lived together for just eight months, yet Siew-Hwa observed, “I wake up every morning house sitting with a ghost lover [. . .] I am lost to the world and can speak only to/from my loneliness. I'm waning fast becoming an apparition. Our love was too young and fragile to weather the constant premature pummelling of your many years of historical grievances.”

Richard brooded on the contents of Beh's letter for the rest of the day. He cooked dinner for David Dill and Judy and Stuart Bergsma, who lived nearby on the Deep Creek bench, getting very drunk as the evening wore on. Once the Bergsmas departed, Brautigan and Dill, whose wife had recently left him, sat up drinking and talking about love until 2:00 am. After Dave went home,
Richard called Siew-Hwa in San Francisco. Discussing the contents of her letter precipitated a big fight. “I got mad at her and hung up,” Brautigan wrote later. After slamming down the receiver in a fury, Richard gathered all the telephones in his house and burned them in his cast-iron Franklin stove. “They burn with a strange blue flame,” he observed.

Ianthe slept through the whole thing. When she awoke the next morning, she smelled gas. “I could tell by a peculiar silence in the house that people had been drinking all night,” she wrote in her memoir. Ianthe found “a nest of odd wires” coiled among the ashes in the fireplace, all that remained of the phones. Gatz Hjortsberg remembered seeing a two-inch piece of coiled blue wire lying like a cartoon pig's tail on the fender. A hangover didn't help Richard deal with the problem when he finally woke up. He was at a loss on how to handle the telephone company. “They want to know what happened with my phones. I can't tell them I burned them, can I?” Brautigan asked his daughter.

Richard wanted Tony Dingman to take care of the problem. Tony just laughed at him, so he walked next door to Gatz's place and called Mountain Bell himself. “They sort of disappeared,” he stammered, answering the dread question. Dingman drove Brautigan into town, where Richard personally collected his replacement phones from the front office. Brautigan made no mention of any of this in his daily compendium. The fifth and last entry for the day had him using his new instruments: “A total, total stranger called me up on the telephone. They told me that they heard I was dead. I told them I wasn't and that made them happy.”

The cold weather held through the next day, a Saturday, and not much got accomplished. Richard took Ianthe into town to shop for daffodil bulbs. He wanted to see flowers in the springtime, he said. Deep inside, Brautigan wasn't really sure about what to do next. With his novel finished, he had no current work on hand. Tony would be leaving soon. A chinook blew up in the evening, and the temperature rose, but Richard felt winter creep inexorably closer. The prospect of spending several frozen months housebound with his daughter seemed less and less like something he wanted in his immediate future.

Brautigan had dinner that night at the Hjortsbergs' and drank only three glasses of red wine. “I was a good boy.” Back at home, he puttered about in his sleeping cabin for a while before going to bed. Vanessi's and Enrico's seemed a million miles away. Tossing and turning, struggling with his persistent insomnia through the night, Richard restlessly decided to close his Montana place for the winter and return to San Francisco.

Ianthe got the news on Sunday without “any advance warning” after she'd planted the daffodils. She was devastated. “Another part of my world collapsed,” she wrote in her memoir. “I knew the truth: [My father] couldn't take care of me. The ranch was an illusion. My bedroom was false. Anything he gave me would be taken away [. . . ]He just couldn't manage it.” Ianthe found herself in a quandary. Her mother had just moved to Hawaii and she didn't want to uproot and move halfway around the world. She felt exhausted and “couldn't imagine” having to start again at yet another new school (the eleventh she had thus far attended). Lexi Cowan and her older married sister, Deane, came to Ianthe's rescue, offering to take her in and look after her for the rest of the school year.

Both Cowan sisters lived on Mill Creek, where their parents had ranched, about ten miles south of Brautigan's place. Deane shared a double-wide with her husband, Ralph Bischer, a Vietnam vet, and her son by her first husband who had died in the war. Lexi had a house across the creek. Ianthe
left with only a suitcase and her little cat, Mittens, originally smuggled into the household over her father's objections. Richard opened a bank account for his daughter, promising to send money every month. He also established charge accounts at several clothing stores and at Sax & Fryer's. A week or so later, Ianthe returned with Lexi and rode her horse through the snow to Deane's Mill Creek pasture. She had no memory of saying goodbye to her father. For his part, Richard made no mention of his daughter's departure in his daily record.

Brautigan's little “journal” avoided emotional issues but detailed the trivial issues that preoccupied him. An entry three days before taking off from Pine Creek was typical:

Hjorstberg remembered this evening vividly. It became one of those nights, causing Marian to remark, “For once, I was glad I was the wife, so I could go upstairs to bed, while you had to stay down in the kitchen and be the host.” After Richard drank all the whiskey, he went to work on the vodka and the gin. Once the hard stuff was gone, he demolished the liqueurs, polishing off remnant bottles of crème de menthe and Kahlua. All the while, Brautigan remained relatively coherent, but his stutter grew more pronounced. He focused on a single thought, repeating it over and over and over like some insane mantra. Gatz listened to Richard's rambling rant, a smile frozen on his face, mentally repeating a silent prayer, “Please, God, make him go home. Please, make him go home.” It was past four when Richard finally departed.

A hangover wasted the next day, and Brautigan went to bed “with a feeling of not having done anything.” On Tuesday, Richard finished correcting
Sombrero Fallout
, took the manuscript into town to make Xerox copies, and mailed one off to Helen Brann in New York. During the afternoon, he and Tony washed White Acre, keeping the promise they'd made to the car at the start of summer. The rest of the day was devoted to packing, after which Brautigan and Dingman went up to the Bergsmas' for a fine roast lamb dinner.

Wednesday, October 29, was Richard's last day at Pine Creek for 1975. He and Tony stayed busy preparing the house for the winter. They drained the pipes, unloaded the fridge, and shut off the gas to the stove. Brautigan organized all of his business papers up in his tree house office in the barn. That afternoon, he brought his chainsaw, his television set, his fishing rods and tackle, along with an arsenal of assorted firearms, over to Gatz and Marian's for safekeeping. On learning Margot Kidder had given birth to a baby girl earlier in the day, Richard wrote a short poem to celebrate the occasion. Because the child had not yet been named, he left a blank space in the title when he typed the poem. Later, although she was called Maggie from the start, he wrote the baby's given name by hand: “Margeret [
sic
] in October.”

Richard and Tony spent the night at the Holiday Inn in Bozeman, flying out to San Francisco the next morning. Siew-Hwa failed to meet them at the airport, which precipitated “a horrible argument later on.” Brautigan started drinking and “didn't stop,” heading out in the evening for a drinking tour covering half a dozen bars. “No good came of it,” he observed later. Brautigan had nothing to eat until one in the morning, when he wolfed down a hot dog. “Some dinner.” A “hideous hangover” followed the next morning, accompanied by fighting with Siew-Hwa.

Over the next couple days, their ongoing argument continued, interrupted only by eating out in restaurants and going to the movies. Brautigan ended his daily record-keeping experiment on November 3. He breakfasted with Don Carpenter and had lunch with Curt Gentry. The day was warm and pleasant. Richard's penultimate entry read, “I'm trying to get my shit together here in San Francisco, i.e. the rest of my life.” Much of the “shit” Brautigan needed to deal with stemmed from his turbulent relationship with Siew-Hwa. He took the path of least resistance by getting out of town six days later.

Richard flew to New York on American Airlines. He spent a lot of time with Helen Brann, dropping by her apartment so often that she felt compelled to write him after he left town, explaining that because her office was located in her apartment building, she could not “see clients except by appointment [. . .] If you have manuscripts to leave off or pick up they must be left with the doorman. We are always happy to see clients, but you must call us and make an appointment first.”

Helen Brann was a tough cookie, hard to get along with and often disagreeable, but she and Brautigan enjoyed a special relationship that went beyond the usual agent/client arrangement, verging into an improbable friendship. Richard had recently brought her two new clients. One was Don Carpenter. Brautigan thought Brann might find a new home for his out-of-print books. The other was Peter Najarian, a young writer who had been a Stegner Fellow at the time Richard read at Stanford in 1968. Gatz Hjortsberg reintroduced them when Peter came out to visit that fall. Peter had published
Voyages
, a well-received but poorly selling novel, with Pantheon in 1971. Helen called Richard “a great scout!” Brautigan contemplated spending the winter in Key West and invited Brann to come down and enjoy some time in the sun.