Jubilee Hitchhiker (193 page)

Brautigan did no new writing during his final weeks in Montana. He and Brad Donovan compiled a formal “working draft” of their screenplay “Trailer
,”
a process closer to the mechanical than the creative. Once again they divided up the scenes, separately typing the handwritten pages. Three different typewriters (possibly more) were used in this procedure. The typefaces and formatting styles vary considerably. All the finished pages (a total of sixty-six) were hand numbered as the completed screenplay was assembled. Seven scenes near the end existed only as brief outlines. Richard and Brad planned further work on the script and needed a clean copy from which to coordinate their efforts. They dated this draft “10/83.”

Richard used the rest of the time he spent alone trying to plan for what little future he had left. Brautigan made notes and drafted business letters. One was to Joe Swindlehurst. “To save money on long distance calls,” he wrote, “have secretary say if you are in, ‘Mr. Swindlehurst has gone fishing and will call me back.' If you are not in have secretary tell operator when you will be in.” Richard mentioned that he'd give the attorney a German address in Europe and will stay at “the Keio Plaza Hotel for at least a month while I am in Japan. And then take a small apartment. Future plans for Montana: Rent an apartment or buy a house in town in Bozeman.”

Brautigan outlined a letter to Lee Schultz, his new accountant in San Francisco, an itemized wish list for possible salvation. “I could make some money this year by selling book to Sam,” began item one. “I have tons of deductions.” Richard continued, “I could make a lot of money next year, can I transfer losses of this year to next year?” The third item on his list of impossible dreams stated, “I'm going to sell the ranch, asking $500,000, may take a long time to get it but will need structure. I'll let you know when it happens.” Brautigan wondered about making quarterly tax payments. “Too late this year.” He ended with a mix of pipe dreams and desperation. “Will get $25,000 upon starting a film, maybe in January. What about quarterly payments? Do I have to make any next year because my income was so low this year? I'm borrowing $50,000. Hodge got it. $10,500 for interest.”

Compiling such a dismal tally would put anyone in a bad mood. Brautigan stormed over to the Hjortsberg place, drunkenly invaded Marian's kitchen, raving about the “millenniums of civilization involved” and how burying the decaying pony was the “civilized thing to do.” He left
Marian and the children in tears. She phoned Tim Cahill in town, asking him to “come out and please, please keep Richard away from the kids.” Tim's wife, Maureen, a good friend of Marian's, dispatched Cahill to Pine Creek. She went with him as they had an invitation to the McGuanes' later that evening.

When Tim and Maureen arrived at Richard's place, not a word was said about King. They found Scoop, Schreiber, and “two or three others” hanging out and having a good time shooting handguns off the back porch. Everybody had another drink. Brautigan did not shoot. Being most sober, Cahill shot the best and “got lots of pats on the back” as he actually hit the target, unlike the others in the crowd.

That evening, Tom and Laurie McGuane hosted a large gathering for singer-songwriter Warren Zevon (“Excitable Boy,” “Carmalita,” “Werewolves of London”), with whom Tom had been collaborating on song lyrics. Zevon flew in from L.A. with mystery writer Jim Crumley (
The Last Good Kiss
). Zevon and Crumley put a new spin on the concept of the “mile-high club,” getting stoned out of their gourds in the airliner's restroom. They met up at the Livingston Bar and Grill with a couple other Missoula writers, Bill Kittredge, who at this stage of his career had published only a single volume of short stories (
The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories
), and Mike Köepf, whose first novel (
Save the Whale
) had come out in 1978. After a couple drinks, they headed up the valley to the McGuanes' spread.

Gatz Hjortsberg had first encountered Crumley, a burly affable Texan, the previous April at a Los Angeles book-signing party for
Dancing Bear
, Crumley's most recent Milo Milodragovich mystery. Gatz wasn't around for the Warren Zevon festivities, exiled by remarriage in Billings, where he worked on the final revisions for
The Hawkline Monster
script, a project on which Brautigan pinned much of his dwindling capacity for hope.

Karen Datko came over from Bozeman to Rancho Brautigan in the afternoon, joining Dirty Unc and several of his former MSU students, busy tying one on and blasting sixguns off the porch. The Cahills drove Richard to the party. Scoop followed, hauling the other uninvited drunks to the McGuanes' place on Barney Creek. Tom and Laurie's official guest list included Jeff and Sue Bridges, the Cahills, and the Fondas. McGuane was triply pissed when he saw Brautigan and his entourage arrive. “One, he brought uninvited guests. Two, he was already drunk. Three, he had a .357 magnum with him.”

Tim Cahill had no idea Richard was packing. Tom took the big pistol from Richard, saying, “You can come, and these other people, but the gun has to go.” McGuane put the magnum in his garage. “Not a good idea to have a drunk with a gun and kids in the house.”

Karen Datko made a fuss over the incident. “She insisted it was some kind of competitiveness or upstaging on my part,” Tom recalled. “Just because Richard was a great writer, I had no right to take it away from him. I didn't make it an issue. The gun thing is a motif in the life of Richard Brautigan.”

By the time Peter and Becky Fonda showed up with Toby Thompson, most of the guests slumping in the living room were stuporous with drink and drugs. On the wagon, Tom McGuane greeted the Fondas affably and led them toward the livelier kitchen crowd. “There're some people out there who're having trouble speaking English,” Tom said.

Jeff Bridges chatted with Warren Zevon in a far corner. Peter Fonda went downstairs to play
the piano with the McGuanes' three-year-old daughter, Annie. The music soon attracted Zevon, who took over at the keyboard, pounding out “The Overdraft,” a song he had cowritten with McGuane. About twenty people crowded in to sing along. “No one sleeps on the yellow line / No one's that alone.” Zevon was plastered, barely able to speak let alone play the piano, yet still going full blast. “That was his style,” Tom observed, “everything cranked up to ten.” At one point McGuane advised his friend, “Take off your hat and let your brain cool down.”

William Kittredge first ran into Richard Brautigan at the Washbag around 1980. He was at the bar, talking about Montana with Mike Köepf, when Richard came in with two little guys wearing dark suits and ties. Overhearing conversation about home, Brautigan gravitated toward the other writers. “Hey, Richard,” one of the suits called out, “we're going to dinner now.”

“Good idea,” Brautigan replied, having no intention of joining them.

Richard remained atypically demure throughout the Zevon party. He sat on the living room floor, “curled up” in front of the coffee table. “He was like a little old lady that night,” Thompson observed. “Just an exhausted, drunk, little old woman.” This didn't prevent him from getting into an altercation with Jim Crumley, a former oil field roustabout. “You could probably beat me in fighting,” Brautigan declared, “but I might be able to kill you.”

Toby thought things looked bad. “I had to get over there through the haze of drugs,” Thompson recalled, “to keep Richard from getting the crap pounded out of him by a bunch of writers who weren't going to take him as a role model.”

The party broke up early. Almost everyone except Brautigan headed down to the bar at Chico Hot Springs, where Warren Zevon insisted on sitting in with Players, the band on deck that night. Unable to sing, play, or even remember the words to his own songs, Zevon nevertheless loudly demanded the management pay him $1,000 for his fifteen-minute “performance.” Later he was hauled to the Livingston hospital for stitches after cutting his hand when he snapped the neck off a beer bottle, attempting to uncap it without an opener.

Staggering back to her car outside the McGuanes' place after Brautigan retrieved his .357 Magnum from the garage, Scoop confessed to Richard that she was drunk on her ass. “Really shit faced.” Driving him back home was not even close to the realm of possibility. This turned out not to be a problem. Brautigan climbed in behind the wheel of her little manual transmission car, switched on the engine, shifted into gear, and drove the two miles or so to his house as if he'd been doing it all his life.

Karen Datko “felt honored.” She knew he never drove a car, insisting friends go out of their way to provide him with transportation. Richard told Scoop an involved story about the reason for his aversion to automobiles, swearing her to eternal secrecy. “I'll never tell,” Datko said. She never did. Scoop also kept mum about Unc's driving skills for as long as he lived.

Because of King, Brautigan's friendship with Marian Hjortsberg seemed irrevocably broken. Eventually a neighboring rancher offered to cart the horse away and bury it. Why waste a good stinking rotten carcass? King got hauled into the foothills and dumped as bear bait. The rancher shot a trophy black off him when the bear came to feed. Marian knew this but never told Richard. She saw no point in getting in the last word.

The day after the McGuanes' party, Brautigan phoned Sean Cassaday in Bozeman and said, “I'd like you to do me a favor.”

Sean thought, “Well, here it comes,” knowing Richard often made outrageous demands on his friends. “What is it?” he asked.

“I'd like you to come over and spend a couple days with me. I want to get some things packed up and get some things in order and pack my house,” Brautigan told him. “I want to make some plans when I leave, because I'm going to be gone for a while, and I want to get all this straightened out. I'd like you to come over and give me a hand doing that.”

“I'm not doing anything right now,” Cassaday said. “That would be fine.”

“And, I'll pay you for it,” Richard added.

“Well, great! Fine.” Sean would have done it for free. He liked Brautigan and thought spending time with him sounded like a lot of fun. Cassaday drove over to Pine Creek the next morning. “We had a great time those two days,” he recalled.

They started in Richard's one-room outside sleeping house, packing the personal items in boxes. If his property sold while he was away, Brautigan instructed Cassaday to make sure the Russell Chatham painting, originally commissioned to fill in a window and take the place of the view, was not included in the sale. Richard wanted to keep it, along with the weathered found-art tailgate he called the Harry Dean Stanton Coffee Table. He made Sean promise to guard them for him. After locking the little sleeping chamber, they headed inside the main house for a drink.

A lot of drinking fueled the conversation during Cassaday's stay. Their next task involved a trip into town. Along the way Richard pointed up Suce Creek canyon at a narrow gorge filled by an aspen grove with leaves turned gold by fall. “I wrote about that small grove of trees,” Brautigan said. “See how it looks almost like a waterfall of color among the evergreens?” He referred to “Kyoto, Montana,” a story in
The Tokyo–Montana Express
.

Their main destination in Livingston was Western Drug, where Richard filled a prescription for the sleeping medication he took to combat his insomnia. This was of vital importance for his upcoming trip. “Now, don't take these all at once,” the pharmacist quipped as he pushed several large pill bottles across the counter. Brautigan and Cassaday both got a kick out of this sort of deadpan cowboy humor. They repeated the druggist's remark throughout the day.

“Enjoying a small moment over and over was certainly something Richard did often,” Sean recalled. “It seldom mattered if it was a good or bad moment. Such moments would become part of his amazing memory for detail.” Ianthe once told her father that his mind was “like a stainless-steel spiderweb.”

Back at Rancho Brautigan, companionship, conversation, and continued drinking took precedence over the more physical demands of packing things up. Brautigan tracked on and on about Marian Hjortsberg's dead pony. He knew he'd made her children cry, realizing perhaps that he'd gone too far. Richard wanted to apologize but said he couldn't do it in person. He asked Sean to do it for him after he left. Cassaday was to approach Marian and tell her, “Richard says he's sorry he did that.” Brautigan felt concerned about tying up certain loose ends. His apology was one of the things he wanted taken care of.

Richard also had Sean make a couple phone calls. The first, to Jonathan Dolger in New York, was to inform the agent that Brautigan would be coming to town soon for a few days before leaving on an extended trip, several months at least, and would not be readily available while away in Europe and Japan. The second was an overseas call to the Netherlands. Richard's first European
stop was Amsterdam. He wanted Cassaday to ask the operator the correct local time. Brautigan had been given a pen with a little inset digital clock. Once Sean learned the correct Dutch time, Richard had him enter it into the pen. “Now I know what time it is in Amsterdam,” Brautigan said. “When I get there, I won't have to ask anyone. I'll have this thing.”

Later in the evening, Richard told Sean he was leaving because he could no longer write in Montana. Tokyo, on the other hand, proved conducive to writing well. Illustrating his point, Brautigan got out a recent Japanese notebook and read sections of “The Fate of a West German Model in Tokyo” to Cassaday. Sean remembered a section about “sitting in a restaurant and looking at a beautiful woman, and he was imagining how he might have had an affair with this woman.”