Flash player not available.
by Brad Donovan?
He liked Bozeman, so returning from Japan in the spring of '83 he taught a writing class at the agriversity and drank at the Eagle's Club bar on Main Street. He was the only non-member allowed to run a tab, thanks to his friendship with the manager, an expert on guns. "The best bar in Montana" (but he was free with praise), the bar area is narrow, high-ceilinged with a false ceiling over the horseshoe bar proper where sit a stunning variety of drunks. The room is wider towards the alley, accommodates long wooden tables, folding chairs, cheap burgers on Friday nights, and a small frantic dance floor presided over by a band that can wring, bar-rag fashion, four songs from one tune. He drank with precision and enormous capacity, and was usually polite to the gaggle of students, reporters, rednecks, would-be bohemians and curious regulars. Drinks were purchased by the round until midnight or so, when they all stumbled out feeling flash burnt by a goofy UFO.
One evening, a college student came in wearing a baseball cap that sported a plastic Toucan's bill protruding over the visor.
"You're Richard Brautigan, aren't you?" the kid said and gave Richard the hat. A while later, Richard is in the can at the trough. In walks crew cut Lou, one of the regulars, boozily blinking in the fluorescent glare.
"I don't know about this place anymore," Lou says to me, meaning, Who let the college kids in?
Then Lou sidles up to the trough, looks up at the big guy next to him, dressed all in denim, with stringy blonde hair and a damned yellow and range beak growing out of his head. Lou is unshaken. "I don't believe you either."
Critical disbelief, and some jealousy, characterized Brautigan's reception over the past ten years. He once said, "San Francisco will forgive a writer anything, except success. You can screw the mayor's wife on the courthouse steps and nobody cares. But if you're successful, they get mad."
Placed in a hippified niche, then, he turned in his work to an investigation of genres, trying to recombine old forms into new ones. The Hawkline Monster combines gothic and western novels. Willard and His Bowling Trophies, a Sadean diary, depicts Violence overwhelming Love in our time. Dreaming of Babylon is a study in film noir. Sombrero Fallout, The Tokyo-Montana Express and his last, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, reflect his long interest in the Japanese "I novel" where the author's mind is admitted as a character in the text. The mind that was Troutfishing in America grew wiser, more amused, and often sad. On the surface, the books became more clear, until in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away — his best, he said — narrative Time and Space blend with cinematic ease and sixty-word sentences are easy to read. The French, those dogged America-watchers, are treating his later work with critical respect. Last November, Richard went to Paris where Editions Chretiens was bringing out three novels and a "postmodern structuralist" accounting. Then to a poetry festival in Amsterdam, a radio drama and concurrent release of two books in Munich, back to Amsterdam until February when he flew east to Japan. Once again the promoters had given this "simple guy" a free ride around the world.
Signing books after a lecture in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard was approached by a young woman with a copy of the latest novel, and asked him to dedicate it to a friend.
"Sure. What's your friend's name?"
"Beef. It's his nickname."
"Let's hope so."
As the book-signing wore on, seven different people brought books belonging to Beef.
"Where's this Beef person?"
"He had to work."
A few months pass and a fan letter from Beef arrives at Richard's Pine Creek, Montana, home. Beef thanks Richard profusely for the autographed books, includes a phone number. It's a slow night on TV. Fantasy Island is over, so Richard calls. Turns out, literary folks in Lincoln are having a party at Beef's apartment. Beef thinks it's a practical joke but is finally convinced that Richard's voice is the genuine article, and asks Richard to talk to others at the party, which he does for an hour on his own dime, portraying Beef as an old friend, Genius, and all round Great Guy.
On another occasion, after the Livingston bars closed, Richard got a ride the fifteen miles back to his house from the local cabbie, who looks like a wino Santa Claus. It's three in the morning, so Richard fixes the old man breakfast.
"Whadya do for a living?"
"I write books," and Richard gives the driver a copy of Tokyo-Montana.
Next time they meet, the driver says, "Ya know, I showed that book to the fellas down at the shop. Ya gotta dozen more of em maybe? I think we can make some money."
The gunplay and whiskey served as recreation, after the work, the writing. One afternoon at the Livingston Bar and Grill following an intense session inventing dumb jokes for our screenplay, Trailer, the feeling was of giddy enthusiasm, like in a Tin Pan Alley movie. Richard was surrounded by eight people he'd just met, treating the table to drinks and stewed mussels. The tab came, written in imaginary numbers. One of us signed the check. The bartender was laughing too hard when he said, "Drive carefully."
Richard sipped from a "go cup" (carryout booze by the drink has a mysterious legal status here). I drove, puking over the door. Back at the ranch, Richard handed me a porcelain bowl the size of a football helmet, and I went to the upstairs bedroom and commenced filling it up. Meanwhile, Richard was on the back porch firing his 30-30 Winchester into the darkness and hoary trees. The bowl was nearly full when Richard ran out of bullets. Through a cold air return, a grill in the floor, I could look downstairs and see him pacing back and forth, like Godzilla reading the National Enquirer.
Rolling Stock 9
1985: 4, 6.
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}