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Warren Hinkle's Brautigan obituary
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The Big Sky Fell In on Brautigan

by Warren Hinckle?

Richard Brautigan's life was divided into three parts: Tokyo, North Beach and the Big Sky Country of Montana. A friend believes the third part helped kill him.

Brautigan owned a back forty in a jet-set colony in a place called Paradise Valley on the edge of Yellowstone National Park in the high country of Montana.

This was his refuge when he got tired of Japan, where he went often, possibly because his books were more popular there than in California.

And when he felt the need to take a hike from North Beach locals such as Specs' and Enrico's where he took his daily potions of Meyer's Rum, when they had run out of Calvados, which Brautigan dearly fancied.

"He'd call me on the phone and say to come up to Montana and bring a couple of bottles of Calvados with me," said Ken Kelley?, the writer and Playboy interviewer who became Brautigan's friend in the last decade of the writer's life.

Kelley's visits to Brautigan's ranch-style log cabin came as a shock to the journalist who was used to madness as a way of life. He thought Brautigan was killing himself.

"The house was full of bullet holes. There were bullet holes in the clock, in the kitchen and bullets in the living room floor and bullets in the ceiling," Kelley said yesterday when I visited him in his Oakland home.

"Richard liked to get drunk and shoot things," he said.

Kelley had just hung up the phone from Montana. He had been talking to actor Peter Fonda? and his wife Becky?, Brautigan's Big Sky neighbors. "Everybody up there is short on details," Kelley said of Brautigan's apparent suicide in Bolinas.

Brautigan was a celebrity in San Francisco, but being a celeb here is lazy man's work. You just have to stand at the bar and accept the compliments. Unlike L.A. and New York, there is little celeb competing to do here; the really famous people live elsewhere, which is the way a lot of us locals like it.

But Brautigan, said Kelley, was caught up in a better-than-thou syndrome that manifested itself at its violent worst in the jet-set enclave in the wilds of Montana.

"Up there you had a bunch of artistic weirdoes living in rancher country. And the artists seemed compelled to compete in macho terms against the cowboys, and then tried to out-macho each other," Kelley said.

"Every night seemed to be the boys' night out. You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy.

"It was all so competitive and so incestuous. Everybody knew everybody else and was sleeping with everybody else, et cetera," Kelley was saying, pacing furiously around his Oakland deck.

"When Margot Kidder? hit town, Tom McGuane?, who was married to Becky at the time, took off with her and so Becky took up with Warren Oates?, and then Margot Kidder married Tom McGuane for a while and then Peter Fonda married Becky and meanwhile Elizabeth Ashley was running all around, dating everybody.

"Part of Richard's way of competing was that he really got kinky up there — into bondage and stuff. There were always stories about women fleeing his house on Saturday morning, seeking sanctuary at a neighbor's."

"I mean it was really something up there."

"It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard," Kelley said. "The books he wrote up there, like "Hawkline Monster," were full of violence — nothing like in the earlier hippie novels."

"He would really get whacko up there. One moment he resented anybody who could write, and then the next moment he'd be down on the floor playing with little kids and as gentle as could be, and then that night he'd be shooting guns through the ceiling."

Brautigan is not the first writer bedeviled by a macho sense of competition. "You cannot do something someone else has done, though you might have done it if they hadn't," Hemingway?, another writer in love with guns, once said.

Kelly yesterday was sipping Jack Daniel's and attempting to deal with the contradictions that led to his friend's apparent lonely death by his own hand.

Although Brautigan's most famous novels were part of the '60s counterculture, Brautigan himself did not do drugs, Kelley said.

"He called drugs cowardness."

"Yet he took the ultimate drug — he shot himself in the head."


San Francisco Chronicle?
October 27, 1984: 4



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