Jubilee Hitchhiker (169 page)

Masako's was the briefest of visits, only a few minutes at most. She found Dillof taking a nap. He groggily offered to show her around. When Brautigan heard about it, he hit the ceiling, furious as a suspicious old rake upon learning his latest conquest had been to the boudoir of a younger rival. “He's very jealous,” Kano recalled. Masako told Richard not to worry. Dick was in love with Rosalyn. Nothing had happened, so the event blew over without incident.

Later Masako met Roz's husband, Mina E. Mina, a Coptic Egyptian whose family had fled to Canada during the Nasser revolution. She asked Richard what would become of such a complex triangle. Mina was an actor frequently away for long periods, looking for Hollywood work or touring in his one-man show based on the writings of Charles Bukowski. Richard laughed. “She loves her husband but she is in love with Dobro Dick too,” he explained. “You have to learn about this.”

To make amends for even the presumption of betrayal, Dillof offered a demonstration of his antique instrument collection at Brautigan's place, along with lessons for Masako. Marian and Rosalyn got wind of this. In retribution for a recent Richard prank, they planned to retaliate with a stunt of their own. The afternoon that Dobro Dick brought the autoharps, banjos, and National steel guitars over to Richard's place, the two sisters headed for town. At the hardware store, inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, they bought a number of large metal funnels, fitting them on their heads like hats.

It grew dark in Pine Creek. All remained serene at the Brautigan household. Richard had gone fishing earlier. Masako filleted his catch and made trout sushi. According to his wishes, she dressed in her special cotton kimono, the obi belted tight. Brautigan had planned a tranquil evening “of Zen-like perfection” and had arranged Dick's exotic instruments around his long dining table, placing cut daisies and dried flowers into the sound holes. “To make me surprised,” Masako recalled.

Dillof stopped by Marian's house on his way over to Brautigan's and encountered the sisters preparing their costumes: black capes, Donald Duck and Arabian masks, topped off by funnels tied to their heads. “I don't know if we should do this,” Dick protested.

“Dobro, you're the biggest prankster of them all,” Marian remonstrated. “We
have
to do it.”

Decked out in outlandish getups, the trio snuck down East River Road to Richard's house. Inside, tranquility prevailed. Green tea and trout sushi had been prepared. “We are kind of celebrating,” Masako recalled, “kissing each other as usual, and suddenly there is noise.” They looked out the windows and saw three masked Boschian zanies cavorting on their porch.

Brautigan struggled to maintain an inscrutable composure. “He wanted to laugh, but he was going to one-up us,” Marian remembered. “He wasn't going to fall for it.”

Richard came to the front door. “Is there something I can do for you?” he solemnly asked the masqueraders, taking the wind out of their sails.

“He turned the whole situation around so that we ended up feeling like complete assholes,” Marian Hjortsberg said.

Brautigan and Kano's new life together soon found a harmonious groove. Richard wanted Masako to see Yellowstone Park because “it's really wild.” On an overcast, rainy day, inauspicious for sightseeing, Brautigan remained determined to go. Brad Donovan joined the party as the designated driver. They wound up past Mammoth Hot Springs, climbing high onto the Yellowstone Plateau toward the Upper Geyser Basin, where Masako got to see Old Faithful.

After observing fumaroles and mud volcanos, they strolled along the banks of the Firehole River. When Kano commented on the numerous bleached bones and animal droppings, Richard produced a small volume from his satchel on a shoulder strap. It was a scatological encyclopedia. Like an amateur coprologist, Brautigan proceeded to identify the various types of excrement they encountered.

Greg Keeler remembered watching Richard teach Kano to fish, “like his little girl, and she loved every minute of it.” Kano called Brautigan “my old Puma” and “Papa” and “Big Fuzzy Bear.” Richard was delighted. “Isn't she cute as a bug's ear,” he whispered to Keeler as they watched her practice fly-casting. “I can't believe she's real.” Greg fished with them on Little Mission Creek, where John Fryer lived during the summers, and up Mill Creek to Brautigan's favorite beaver ponds.

Richard had a morning ritual. He got up first and always put George Benson's record
Breezin'
on the phonograph, saying it got him going. Next Brautigan started a pot of coffee percolating and made fresh-squeezed orange juice while “lots and lots of bacon” fried crisply on the griddle. Masako found Richard “quite domesticated in that sense.” To commemorate their union, they took photographs of Whimsy Bear and Teddy Head posed together in an open field behind Brautigan's house.

After breakfast, Richard usually went to his barn-loft studio to work for a couple hours. They spent the afternoons together, fishing with Greg Keeler, going to picnics (one at the Fondas' spread involved flying kites with Jeff Bridges), playing one-on-one basketball at Pine Creek School (Masako had shot hoops in high school), and making love outdoors. “To be honest,” she confessed, “we made a lot of love.”

The lovers had a special secret place down in the woods near a number of old tepee rings on the Hjortsbergs' property. Richard told Masako, “there's no wind there.” They'd bring a blanket and perhaps a pot of coffee to the spot, just across the creek from a mysterious oblong stone formation that long ago supported the frame of a large Salish bark lodge. It was rumored
Daniel Boone spent the winter here on a trip up the Missouri to the Yellowstone River sometime around 1810, when the old trailblazer was in his seventies. It was a magic place, imbued with a timeless aura.

At day's end, Richard and Masako watched the sunset blazing over the Gallatin Mountains, sitting on the hood of one of Brautigan's junker cars parked in front of his barn, the windshield providing a convenient backrest. The “pink clouds running all over the sky” amazed Masako. When electrical storms rumbled into the valley, they took refuge in the house, watching the thunder and lightning from the upstairs bedroom window. At every fiery strike, Brautigan made a sound like “Oooh . . . Oooh!” Storms like this never happened in Tokyo.

Late summer provided her introduction to bondage. Richard was very coy about broaching the subject. Brautigan had prepared a separate bedroom downstairs for Masako. Sometimes he wanted to sleep alone in his little house outside, he explained, and she needed a private space of her own. Their lovemaking was a moveable feast, often in this room, other times upstairs or outdoors or in Brautigan's tiny private sleeping building. After sweeping it clean, Richard decorated Kano's little chamber with a “very nice Indian couch” and a basin of flowers.

One morning Masako found a letter in Japanese strategically placed on the table (“a funny thing”). It was the note Akiko's aunt had written two years before, offering reassurance about her husband's sexual proclivities. Kano remembered reading about “tying up things. Some men have some tastes, so don't worry about so much.” She thought “the physical condition of the letter seemed to suggest it had been read many times,” and she was certain Brautigan placed it deliberately in her room.

This was Masako's first love. She trusted Richard. She thought, “That's the way. This is just how things are done in the West.” Brautigan had already taught her that you could be married and still have “a summertime love with anybody.” In “observing everything,” Kano made the connection with “the young geisha girl, tying only the hands.” Richard explained that by binding her, making her wait without any touching, her “body would be more open and expecting.”

One rainy day, Richard had just tied Masako in the upstairs bedroom when the telephone rang. He excused himself and went down to answer the call. Brautigan became totally involved in the conversation. After a while, Masako fell asleep. When she awoke, she was still bound and Richard wasn't there. “I was so afraid,” she remembered. “He just forgot me.” Masako started shouting, “Richard, please come back!” This became a funny story, Kano admitted, after Brautigan returned to untie her before his game playing turned into a nightmare.

Toby Thompson and Deirdre stopped by Pine Creek one afternoon to visit Brautigan and encountered Brad and Georgia Donovan just up from Colorado. Toby assumed they were Bozeman people. Thompson thought Richard was moving away from the Livingston gang and spending more time with Bozeman friends. Greg Keeler planned a party later in the evening to welcome the Donovans to Montana. First Brautigan wanted to go fishing.

Richard invited Toby to join them, both on the stream and over at Keeler's. Georgia and Deirdre said they'd take Masako into Livingston and teach her to shoot pool. Thompson “could tell [Brautigan] was a little queasy about this.” The boys headed to Mill Creek to fish Richard's favorite water, the beaver ponds at the lower end of Arch and Peg Allen's ranch.

Brautigan positioned Brad and Toby on a pair of promising riffles and headed through the willows to his secret spot. Richard loved fishing these beaver dams, their shallow pools filled
with eager little brookies. “I remember him trotting back with this huge plastic bag full of fish,” Thompson recalled. Brautigan kept more than twenty small brook trout for a fish fry scheduled on the next day.

It was late when they got back to Pine Creek. The women hadn't returned from town. Brautigan grew agitated. The big sky darkened. They would be late for Keeler's party. Masako remembered, “Richard got very upset” when she came back from town with Georgia and Deirdre. Brautigan knew Deirdre least well, so he blamed it all on her, determining never to see her again. “He just shut the door,” Masako observed.

Brad Donovan recalled “a real fast ride” over Trail Creek Road with Toby, trying to get to the Keelers' and finding Thompson “a little bit standoffish.” At the party, Masako observed a lot of MSU faculty members among the gathering. Richard got very drunk. He took Toby aside and told him, “I believe a man should be able to control his woman.” Later, Thompson's profession came up in conversation with Donovan. Brautigan warned, “Whatever you do, don't call yourself a journalist. Journalists piss in the water we have to drink.”

Toby and Deirdre went to Richard's fish fry the next night, and he treated them cordially. They were around the area for another couple weeks. Brautigan “refused to get together at all,” Thompson complained. “He practically would not take my phone calls.” Richard and Masako had a big Labor Day party at Pine Creek, for which he cooked Swedish meatballs. Greg Keeler brought a bunch of smoked whitefish. Marian Hjortsberg tossed a large green salad from her garden. Jeff and Sue Bridges came. Cindy Olson was among those shooting guns off the back porch. Toby and Deirdre were not invited.

At summer's end, Ianthe came out to Montana from San Francisco where she'd been part of the ACT therafter program. Three years younger than Masako, Ianthe believed they were both the same age. To Greg Keeler they looked like “international sisters.” They liked each other right from the start, although Ianthe kept her distance at first. When Masako noticed her holding back, she “asked her directly what is wrong.” Ianthe spoke honestly, telling Masako she'd had a “traumatic relationship,” giving her love to another Japanese woman. When her father married Akiko, she became Ianthe's de facto mother. When they split, she felt “really hurt.” Along the way, “she suffered from Aki and Richard's fighting.” Once it was all out in the open, Ianthe and Masako became good friends.

Masako was particularly impressed by the easy rapport between Ianthe and Richard. She recalled sitting on the couch one afternoon after they'd all been drinking, listening to a conversation she couldn't completely follow. Brautigan and his daughter talked about Montana summers gone by, laughing together as they remembered one time in 1978 when they were “crawling under the table.” Kano found their close connection “a wonderful thing,” a father and daughter relating as friends.

When one of Masako's wisdom teeth became impacted, Richard took her to see Dr. Jim Smith, his dentist in Livingston. She needed to have it extracted. Brautigan was writing on the day Masako's surgery had been scheduled, so Ianthe drove her into town. When she first arrived in Montana, Richard told his girlfriend she must learn to drive, but that was as far as it went. After the operation, Dr. Smith wrote out a prescription and instructed Masako to “tell your father . . .” Having known Akiko, Smith assumed Kano was her child. Brautigan found it very funny when he heard the story. Afterward, from time to time Richard teased Masako, calling her “my daughter.”

Masako spent a couple days recovering, mostly napping in bed. While asleep, she bled from her mouth and the blood stained the pillowcases. A year later, when Kano was back in Japan and Brautigan believed their romance had ended forever, he slept on the blood-stained pillows, “possessed by the artifacts of our affair.”

As if to turn her from him, Brautigan told Masako, “I'm not beautiful.” At first she found it funny. “You need a young beautiful boy,” he went on. “Maybe you should make love with a young beautiful boy.” This hurt her feelings. At times, being so much younger she “felt more like Richard's exotic pet than a real girlfriend.”

“I was so much in love,” Masako confessed, not understanding why Brautigan would say such a thing to her. Deeply troubled, she talked it over with Ianthe. The real daughter reassured her honorary sibling, “He didn't mean that.”

Another emotional moment came when Masako found Richard weeping on the couch after a phone conversation with Akiko. She didn't know what to do. “It's really disgraceful,” Richard said. Masako felt he suffered from “losing of face.” She was very worried. Not knowing what to say to her lover, she called Don Carpenter in California. Masako had spoken with Don before when he phoned from Mill Valley and Richard put her on the line with him. Carpenter had been drinking then. He told her about serving with the U.S. Air Force in Japan and a beautiful girl he'd met there. Masako felt a connection. This time she asked him what to do about Richard. “Maybe you can talk to him?” Don had again been drinking. He instructed Masako not to tell Brautigan she'd phoned him but to say he just happened to call before she handed the phone to Richard.