Jubilee Hitchhiker (168 page)

On other occasions, Brautigan carried the stuffed bear head himself. Then, he wanted Masako to hold her teddy bear, Whimsy. Kano understood the symbolism of the image, knowing their delicate dance could lead in only one direction. When Richard asked Masako if she used birth control, she told him she didn't need to worry about “those things” because she was a virgin. “I was kind of pretending I knew everything,” she confessed. “I was desperate to get rid of my virginity.”

Thinking Kano was only twenty-one, “Richard was a little bit hesitant.” Masako felt she had “missed something very important,” but “was waiting for the moment to come.” All along, as her relationship with Brautigan developed, she thought “it's a chance for me to become a woman. So, I didn't want to let him go.” Masako had never had a serious boyfriend. In Tokyo, if a young man ever called, her father answered the phone speaking Chinese or Russian and scared him off.

The gateway to womanhood swung open for Masako Kano one hot August afternoon in Richard Brautigan's room at the Boulderado. “I wanted to become a woman,” she said. In “waiting for the moment to come,” Kano allowed her imagination to invest the act with romantic elaboration. “Maybe too much imagination,” she recalled. Teddy Head, perched above them on the bureau, grounded their lovemaking in reality. The stuffed bear stared down with blind glass eyes.

“Always watching us,” Masako said.

Brautigan was gentle, approaching the anticipated union as a serene ritual. Once it happened, Masako asked, “Was it really? Did I become a woman? Is that it?”

She noticed Richard was crying. “I don't want to lose you,” he said. “You have to come with me.” Brautigan insisted she travel to Montana. He told her how beautiful and peaceful it was there. Masako could work on her Yeats thesis in tranquility. He had academic friends at MSU, Greg Keeler and others, who could help her. Masako had to finish her summer course at the University of Colorado first, but promised to come once it was over.

Brautigan had never discussed his divorce proceedings with Kano. A “Marital Settlement Agreement” had been successfully concluded. By the first of August, both Richard and Akiko had signed the document. Aki was awarded $15,000 in cash, plus $1,400-a-month spousal support,
beginning on the signing date and running through the end of December 1981. For his part, Brautigan retained all his earnings since the separation, his real property in Montana and Bolinas, as well as the rights to all of his literary works, including the as-yet-unpublished
Tokyo–Montana Express.
All things considered, it wasn't such a bad deal for Richard. He even got to keep the Plymouth Fury and all the fishing gear he'd bought for his wife.

As Brautigan's time in Boulder drew to a close, Masako continued sneaking out to spend afternoons with him in his hotel room. Richard wanted more. He dreamed of holding her in his arms through the night and couldn't wait until she came to Montana. Brautigan planned a weekend getaway in Estes Park. First he had to get permission from her protector. Dr. Joyce Lebra was a formidable individual. Born in 1925, she was the first woman to earn a PhD in Japanese history in the United States and the last person to interview Yukio Mishima in 1970 before his suicide. She had lived in Japan for ten years. Lebra knew far more about Asian culture than Richard Brautigan could begin to imagine.

Richard called Dr. Lebra “the witch professor.” He arranged for a private meeting. “A kind of session,” according to Masako. “Joyce wanted to make sure Richard would protect me.” Kano told her chaperone she was taking a course taught by Brautigan. This was a fabrication. As a writer-in-residence, Brautigan did not conduct classes at CU. He presented himself in a professorial manner during his interview with Dr. Lebra and persuaded the stern scholar to give him permission to whisk her old friend's daughter off on a weekend rendezvous. The decision caused Lebra some concern. Many of her Japanese friends were horrified. She immediately phoned Masamichi Kano in Tokyo. Kano, “an iconoclast in a society that doesn't foster such,” responded calmly, saying “something like, ‘she will use her own judgment.'”

Masako's heart, not her head, made the call. She went up to the beautiful home of a gun collector in Estes Park at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. After shooting more guns, the couple went for long walks. Masako felt “so simpatico” with the older man, remembering Richard stopping to make a comment about falling leaves that resonated within her. Brautigan introduced Kano to a creature she called a honeybird. A feeder filled with colored sugar water hung from the eaves of the house, and a jewellike miracle darted out of the trees to hover and sip. It was the first time Masako had ever seen a hummingbird.

At four the next morning, Richard staggered into the Dorns' kitchen, encountering Ed and Simone Ellis having a late-night conversation. Teddy Head sat on top of the refrigerator. Brautigan had to have it. He started weeping. “Let me take it back to the hotel just for the night,” he pleaded. Pissed at Brautigan's foolish behavior, Ed told Richard to take the damn thing home for the night and go. Brautigan swooped it up and headed out into the early dawn, catching a cab straight to the airport. He kidnaped Teddy Head. When Dorn phoned the Boulderado the next morning, he was astonished to learn Brautigan had trashed his room and departed without taking his manuscripts, his clothing, or a crumpled pile of cash.

Back in Montana, Richard resumed long-standing habits, heading across Pine Creek in the mornings for coffee with Marian Hjortsberg and more frequently for glasses of white wine on her porch in the evening. Marian's younger sister, Rosalyn, who lived nearby, often joined them for a chablis nightcap. Embittered by his bruising divorce, Brautigan enumerated his grievances against Akiko. Marian, equally angry at her two-timing husband, eagerly joined in the litany of complaint. They compiled long lists, itemizing every bit of perceived abuse.

Vampires provided an appropriate metaphor for such perfidious spousal misbehavior. Fueled by cheap Almaden, they groped for the right name. “Vorpal is coming!” they cried, evoking Lewis Carroll's vorpal blade. The name that eluded them was Vlad the Impaler. They settled on Vopol. Doubled up with laugher, Brautigan cried, “Vopol is coming and the list grows” after each bitter expletive. Rosalyn went to Bozeman the next day and had T-shirts made for Richard and Marian with vopol is coming and the list grows printed across the front.

Toby Thompson had not been to Montana in four years. At the beginning of August, he checked into the Murray Hotel in Livingston with his new girlfriend, poet Deirdre Baldwin. It was a “crazy” relationship and Toby was “under a lot of pressure.” Thompson called his old bachelor pal Brautigan, who invited them out to dinner. Masako was still in Boulder and Richard was alone. He asked Toby to pick up a fifth of George Dickel on his way out of town. Said he'd pay him back but never did.

Brautigan was drunk when Thompson and Baldwin arrived at Pine Creek. Richard greeted them at the door, giving Toby a big kiss on the lips, his newest affectation. Thompson was disgusted. Brautigan “really took umbrage” and expressed his displeasure by “making snotty comments” about Deirdre upon learning she was a poet “with her own small press.”

“His nose in the air,” Richard played the part of a perfect host, preparing “this really marvelous dinner.” Brautigan served spareribs, fresh corn, and salad, preparing it all himself. “He was a very good cook,” Toby recalled. Thompson thought Richard's manner seemed different. “He was self-possessed in a way that made him standoffish.” When Brautigan offered Toby a vacant rental apartment he had in town, rent free, Toby declined. He knew conditions would be attached.

One Sunday in mid-August, Lynne Huffman strolled around Gardiner, the little Montana town at the north entrance to Yellowstone Park. He was dating a “savage,” a summer park employee up in Mammoth. They found their way into the Blue Goose Saloon on West Park Street and ran into Jeff Bridges playing the upright piano in the cool recesses of the nearly empty bar. This chance encounter set a pub crawl in motion. The group enlarged as it wandered northward down the valley. By the time they got to Chico Hot Springs, Toby Thompson, Deirdre Baldwin, and Dink Bruce had joined the crowd.

The celebrants found Gatz Hjortsberg and his girlfriend, Sharon Leroy, having cocktails in the tiny Chico bar. When Richard Brautigan arrived, the whole thing turned into an enormous dinner party. Later, Brautigan got up and left. After he didn't come back, Lynne asked his date where Richard had gone. “I think he's going to Japan,” she said, not knowing that Japan would soon come to him.

Another August evening, just before Masako flew up from Boulder, Toby and Deirdre were in the Wrangler Bar, waiting for Brautigan with Gatz and Sharon. When Richard came in with Marian's sister, Roz Mina, Thompson thought they looked a little surprised to see Gatz, who was “sort of out of favor” for his marital misdeeds. They had just come from the Empire Theater, having watched
The Empire Strikes Back
, the second installment of the
Star Wars
trilogy. “How did you like the movie?” Toby asked Brautigan.

“I feel like I just spent three hours in a pinball machine,” he said.

Brautigan mailed Masako Kano an airline ticket to Montana. In his meeting with Dr. Lebra, Richard had mentioned the possibility of just such a trip, suggesting the classmate who brought
Masako to Ginger Perry's party might come along as a chaperone. In the end, Kano just ran away and escaped. She arranged to sleep at her classmate's place. Instead of taking only enough for an overnight, she packed everything, including Whimsy, her teddy bear.

Brautigan sent a young cowboy who worked occasionally for him to pick Masako up at the Bozeman airport. He was Ianthe's boyfriend from Park High in Livingston, back when she had hoped to become a vet. Masako remembered the drive, “the beautiful panorama to Livingston.” When the pickup pulled onto the short curved driveway, Richard sat waiting on the fence. They'd not seen each other for two weeks. “Good afternoon, Mr. Brautigan,” she said.

Brautigan soon introduced Masako to Marian Hjortsberg and Roz, along with other friends in the Pine Creek area. Marian had an antique upright piano in her living room, and Masako, musically inclined, came over in the afternoons to play. Greg Keeler made the trip from Bozeman to meet the comely graduate student. His first impression was one of impending doom. “He was so big and old and American,” he wrote later, “and she was so tiny and young and Japanese.” Keeler also saw how well they got along and how happy she made Richard in spite of his divorce woes. Late one night, Brautigan read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to Greg and Masako, turning his kitchen into “an odd little classroom.” Keeler was surprised to learn Richard liked T. S. Eliot. As a rule, he avoided academic poetry.

“Dobro Dick” Dillof owned a local reputation as a lady's man. It had a lot to do with his dark good looks. At certain angles he resembled John Garfield, although none of the women who fancied him had ever seen those old black-and-white movies. He almost never took off his battered cowboy hat, preserving a mysterious allure until his Stetson hung above them on the bedpost. His wondrous skills as a musician also proved powerfully attractive, as did his vagabond troubadour persona. He lived in a sheepherder's wagon parked behind the Pine Creek Lodge, and a steady procession of dewy-eyed farm girls paraded through for a serenade.

Dillof was a good friend of Ed Dorn, whom he first met a year or so before while playing a concert with Fiddling Red at the Hummingbird Café in Indianapolis, Indiana. “Thought he was brilliant,” Dick said of Dorn. “Hit it off right away.” As a wandering minstrel, Dillof had crisscrossed America for years, hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. Dick and Red's Midwest tour ended around Thanksgiving, and they stopped in Boulder to visit the Dorns on their way back to Montana. When Ed heard their destination, he casually mentioned that he knew Richard Brautigan, who had a place near Livingston.

Back in his sheepherder's wagon under the fir trees behind the Pine Creek store, Dillof had no idea that Brautigan lived just down the road until Marian Hjortsberg introduced them one August afternoon. As they talked, Richard was delighted to learn Dobro knew Ed Dorn, “who he considered a big brother.” Brautigan invited Dillof over, and the musician walked in on a phone conversation with Aki. Richard sat on the couch, speaking loudly, “in a big round voice” so Dick could hear. “Let me get this straight,” Brautigan intoned, “you took half of the money I make writing my books, sweating my blood. Half of my money you took in the divorce and you want to be my friend? That's very interesting. Could you tell that to a friend of mine here.” Richard handed Dillof the phone. Dick didn't want any part of it.

Having gotten off to an amicable start, Brautigan introduced Dillof to Masako. Later, at a picnic, she expressed an interest in seeing his “cart.” Dick saw nothing wrong with inviting her
over for a peek at the sheepherder's wagon. Masako felt no impropriety about making such a visit. Dillof and Roz Mina were obviously lovers. Kano observed them at the picnic “very nice and very close and being in love.”

Brautigan was often busy in the mornings, rewriting the “hamburger” passage from
So the Wind
over and over “because he wanted to get it exactly right.” Masako didn't mind the separation. She “loved being alone and just strolling around.” Richard told her to do whatever she wanted. One morning Masako walked up the road for a look at Dobro's horse-powered mobile home.

The sheepherder's wagon was as compact as the interior of a sailing ship. At the far end, above an ingenious Chinese-puzzle arrangement of cabinets and drawers, a built-in bed occupied almost a third of the living space. Arching translucent canvas roofed the tiny tidy compartment. Other amenities included a twin-lid wood-burning cookstove and a table that folded down from the wall. Dick added a windup portable Victrola to play his collection of old-time 78s and decorated the interior with nineteenth-century advertising flyers. The wagon also housed his exotic collection of antique musical instruments: guitars, Dobros, fiddles, concertinas, prairie zithers, and autoharps.