Jubilee Hitchhiker (136 page)

Richard told Keith, “I'll pay you whatever you make in a day.”

Abbott said he liked to “write in the morning and then go out and work.” Brautigan said fine. “He just sort of badgered me into coming up,” Keith related. Richard agreed on a daily wage and gave Keith a plane ticket to Montana. Considering it a “paid vacation” and planning on staying a month at most, Abbott arrived on the Fourth of July. A Dodge rental car awaited him at the airport, paid for with Peter Fonda's credit card. Brautigan claimed he had no plastic because writers were anathema to banks. Keith didn't buy it, considering Richard wealthy and successful, the owner of two homes. He thought Brautigan's unspoken pride on being denied a credit card was “one of his grandiose romantic fantasies” tinged by a “whiff of megalomania.”

Keith arrived on the night of the nation's bicentennial and went to the rodeo at the Livingston fairgrounds with Peter and Becky Fonda. Richard had something else to do. He was not with his friends in the bleachers. Ianthe had been competing in the Rodeo Queen Contest. His daughter's horse, Jackie, had broken her leg and had to be put down. Distraught, she tried riding Deane Cowan Bischer's troublesome palomino but couldn't adequately control the mount and only appeared in the arena processional on the first day of the three-day rodeo. Perhaps Richard knew of Ianthe's disappointment and chose not to attend. Thirty years later, Ianthe still wondered why her father didn't come to see her if he was actually in Montana.

After the rodeo, Brautigan connected with Keith Abbott for a tour of Livingston's bars. At the 2:00 am closing time, they repaired to a wild outdoor Montana party gathered around a telephone pole bonfire. Driving home in the rental car, Richard told Keith, “Put it up to a hundred.” Alarmed, Abbott accelerated to seventy. Brautigan demanded he go faster. Keith eased the sedan
over the century mark. Abbott was puzzled by his friend's request because he knew Richard's sense of caution. In California, Brautigan never wanted speed and always made Keith drive on the inside lane of the Golden Gate Bridge, fearing a head-on collision. That night, Richard bragged how Montana was a renegade state, extolling the virtues of “Cowboy Freedom.” Abbott felt Montana provided Brautigan “license to override some of his strongest taboos.”

The Fourth of July proved a true Independence Day for Timothy Leary, many miles to the south in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was finally released from federal protective custody. Leary's initial freedom from prison in 1974 came the old-fashioned way. He ratted out all his old friends. The ex-professor cooperated fully with authorities. Among the names he named were those of his former attorneys and his ex-wife Rosemary, currently hiding underground.

Leary later moved to L.A., hanging out with the Hollywood B-list. While a steady contributor to Larry Flynt's low-brow skin magazine,
Hustler
, he went on tour “debating” his old nemesis, fellow ex-con G. Gordon Liddy. The psychedelic guru and self-proclaimed “neuronaut” promoted the wonders of the Internet, extolling space travel to colonize other planets.

A couple days after the bicentennial, Richard Brautigan came over to the Hjorstbergs' for a late breakfast. He arranged the gathering himself, sly and mysterious when pressed for details. Marian baked a coffee cake and got out the homemade jam. Richard approached formally along East River Road. He wore an obi-belted, block-printed white cotton
yukata
, the summer kimono used by both men and women, his long hair flowing around his shoulders. He carried a colorful stack of exquisitely wrapped packages. Ianthe followed many yards behind, a distance suggesting that she had no connection to the strange-looking man farther up the road.

Following coffee, toast, cake, and genial conversation, Richard, with elaborate formality, gave a gift to each member of the Hjorstberg family, complete with head bows above his prayer-folded hands. The presents were not elaborate (a scarf, a mechanical tin toy, some stationery), but the gift wrapping was extraordinary, each box an extravagant example of
tsutsumi
, the Japanese art of wrapping. It was Brautigan at his finest, thoughtful, generous, a connoisseur of the perfect moment.

Across the creek, Keith Abbott observed the other side of Richard's personality, finding his old friend “harried, manic and humorless.” Brautigan had several projects requiring Abbott's immediate attention. Having bought thirty acres to the south (three adjoining subdivision lots) to protect his privacy, Richard wanted the irrigation ditch at the upper end of the property cleared out so he could get some water on his new pasture, maintaining his deeded water rights, liable to forfeiture if not used. He also needed the fences repaired and the tall grass around the house cut down before it became a fire hazard. Raised on “a stump ranch” in Washington, Keith was familiar with the tools of the trade. Up at the crack of dawn, Abbott “really wanted to get out of the house,” and away from Brautigan. His old friend seemed “in an extremely volatile state.”

Keith borrowed Tom McGuane's old Dodge Power Wagon, rented a field mower in Bozeman, and cut down the tall dry grass around the house, revealing a large swampy area in the front yard under the cottonwoods. Water seemed to percolate up from beneath the surface, puddling a short distance from the house. When Abbott told him, Brautigan erupted in a furious tirade, damning the phone company for the problem. Earlier in the year, Mountain Bell laid a new cable through the valley, cutting a trench along the length of the borrow pit along the road on the other side of Richard's house. Brautigan felt sure this had caused his water problem.

In what Keith Abbott described as a “vendetta” against the phone company, Richard spent the next several days haranguing various Mountain Bell executives and supervisors. A telephone crew was dispatched to line the ditch across from Brautigan's place with bentonite, a clay formed from the decomposition of volcanic ash capable of absorbing considerable volumes of water. When this didn't solve the problem, Richard resumed his tirade in between calls to Richard Hodge, who advised him to contact local lawyer Joseph Swindlehurst. Joe told Richard he had a legal right to protect his property.

Richard hired a backhoe to dig out the borrow pit. Keith Abbott tried to talk sense, taking his friend for a walk to the top of the neighbor's sloping pasture across the road. An irrigation ditch ran along the side of the hill. Abbott explained gravity caused the water to flow down the slope toward Brautigan's house. “You got it wrong, pal,” Richard replied, insisting he was within his rights to dig out the ditch. “My lawyer will handle this,” Brautigan said.

The backhoe arrived the next morning to dig up the ditch. Before long, the operator severed Mountain Bell's cable, knocking out telephone service to every home in the valley on the east side of the river south of Brautigan's place. The phone company dispatched a repairman to deal with the problem, and Richard's paranoia kicked into high gear. Fearing confrontation, he sent Keith out to talk with the man, who said it was no big deal, backhoes often accidentally cut phone cables in rural areas. Brautigan didn't buy this, convinced he would be hit with a massive lawsuit. He stewed over this until four in the morning, when he called Richard Hodge in San Francisco.

Earlier in the year, Richard had phoned his lawyer in the middle of the night from Japan. Dick Hodge had not been amused. He was trying significant murder cases and had to get up early in the morning. “Richard,” he sternly told his client, “the next time you call me after midnight, there better be a body on the floor and a smoking gun in your hand.” Mindful of Hodge's prior admonition, Brautigan said, “I remember what you told me. I want to know if you think this qualifies? I just caused the power to go out in three states.”

Richard settled down after the hysteria of the Mountain Bell fiasco subsided. Taking a break one afternoon, Keith offered to sight-in Richard's pride and joy, and old .22-caliber gallery gun from the twenties. Brautigan okayed the project but declined to accompany Abbott to the dump behind his house, where piles of rusted junk provided convenient targets. “No, I don't like to go shooting with anyone else,” he said cryptically. “I had an accident when I was young.” He remembered Donald Husband's death when he was fourteen, weaving the accidental shooting of a classmate by someone else into the fabric of his personal mythology.

Keith tried hard to be sympathetic to his old friend's eccentric behavior. Brautigan had just broken up with Siew-Hwa Beh but continued to have angry long-distance “shouting matches” over the phone. Lingering jet lag exacerbated his insomnia and increased his alcohol consumption. Knowing Richard eschewed all drugs but booze, Keith was “shook” to discover his buddy had a prescription for Stelazine, “which knocked him out for two or three dreamless hours.” Brautigan drank between one and three liters of wine with dinner, finishing every evening with copious quantities of whiskey. Abbott warned mixing alcohol with drugs might prove to be a lethal combination.

Richard ignored this advice, and Keith took matters into his own hands. Knowing Brautigan didn't enjoy drinking alone, Abbott started making long afternoon explorations into the surrounding
canyons, delaying the start of the cocktail hour. On his shopping trips to town, he would “forget” to buy any brandy or whiskey. Instead of the 1.5-liter wine jugs Richard favored, Keith brought home the smaller 750-milliliter bottles. This undisclosed intervention, along with a pleasant fly-fishing trip, cooled Brautigan down for a time.

Despite peaceful interludes, life remained chaotic at Richard's place. Keith began looking for a way out. Watching Brautigan set fire to a signed copy of a book by Raymond Mungo (Mungo had made a mildly disparaging remark about one of Brautigan's books) and having a paranoid Richard tear up a page of his calligraphy practice (Keith chanced to use a few lines from a recent conversation as his text) made him determined to leave. The unexpected arrival of Bud Swearingen and his two teenage sons delayed Abbott's departure.

An affable Texan, Bud spent considerable time in Montana. Swearingen was an accomplished fly fisherman and showed the boys his favorite spots. Keith Abbott reported Brautigan's “black moods vanished” during the Texan's visit. The trio provided “distractions and companionship.” Keith recalled, “Life became a real pleasure, almost like the old days. When [Richard] got untracked from his problems, his humor was infectious.”

Once the Swearingens departed, Brautigan slipped back into neurosis. His depression alleviated only when the bound page proofs for
Sombrero Fallout
arrived in the mail. Keith helped Richard work on the dust jacket copy, “as he obsessively wrote and rewrote the description of the novel.” Making up for his seven-month absence from his daughter's life, Brautigan flew in her longtime childhood friend, Cadence Lipsett, to keep Ianthe company. They picked her up at the Belgrade airport, Keith Abbott driving. Richard sat in the backseat being “incredibly funny and charming.” He called Cadence by her mother's name, “Shirley,” comically correcting himself. Not long after, Abbott made Brautigan's “preoccupation with his book” an excuse to leave early. Before booking his flight to California, Keith arranged for a local company to continue the irrigation-ditch-clearing project.

Around this time, Brautigan invited Ed and Jennifer Dorn to come up to Montana for a visit. “He was a generous host and an enthusiastic cook,” Jenny wrote nine years later in an article for the
Denver Post's Empire Magazine
. Richard took them trout fishing and down to soak in the “scruffy, but marvelous” outdoor Chico Hot Springs pool. Jenny observed Richard “was such a keen student of life that he even turned the pathetic, worn-out cowboy nightlife of Livingston into a tour de force.”

Their last night at Pine Creek, the Dorns sat up late with Richard, arguing about the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical outlaw organization that had committed a string of bank robberies and murders two years earlier. They received nationwide press coverage when they kidnapped the heiress Patty Hearst. After being “brainwashed,” she joined the gang as “Tania,” her new revolutionary nom de guerre. Brautigan said he “did not like the idea of revolutionaries running around killing people.” Jenny considered Richard “a reasonably well-off landowner” unable to support any kind of revolution.

Needing a driver after Ed Dorn's departure, Richard called Don Carpenter, asking him up to Montana for a couple weeks to a month. Carpenter declined the invitation. “I told him that I refused to be at his beck and call,” Don said. He never visited Richard's place in Montana. Next, Brautigan phoned Loie Weber, who had split up with Erik and just might be free.

“He wanted me to come out for a month and drive him and sort of hang out with Ianthe,” Loie said. She looked at it as a job, not just helping out an old friend, so she “wanted benefits beyond
just a certain amount of money.” She felt her specific needs should be met because she was giving up all her other work. Brautigan said he'd think it over.

A couple days later, Richard called Loie back. “I've thought about it and I'm going to make other arrangements,” he said. A subtle dynamic shift had occurred in their long relationship. “He just went ice cold,” Loie recalled. “I had crossed the line, and I was ‘dead meat' from then on. He used that phrase.” She never worked for him again. Once, at a later date, Loie went to lunch with Richard in San Francisco. She told him what she was working on and asked for advice. “He was very sweet, very attentive, very generous, very distant, very formal,” she said. “I don't know if we ever talked again after that. I had no desire to talk to him. I felt we weren't really friends anymore.”

Brautigan finally got hold of his old pal Price Dunn, living on Hawthorne Street in San Francisco. He asked Price if he'd like to come to Pine Creek, adding that he really needed somebody to help him out. “Well,” Price replied, “I can come up and stay awhile.”