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A man we know writes: My friend Richard Brautigan, the writer, who recently died, had a penchant for absurdity akin to the jolly-serious outrages cooked up by the young Dadaists of Paris in the early nineteen-twenties. He was a tall, baroquely mustachioed man with a strangely swanlike gait, whose celebrity, odd hats, and denim foppery kept him a focus of street attention in San Francisco's North Beach, his urban habitat.
At Enrico's sidewalk café? there, after a long, vinous lunch, he was staring at something with such gravity that I thought it must be an extraordinary woman. When I checked, it was a chocolate cake on the dessert cart.
"Let's get out of here," said Richard, as if he smelled smoke.
"What's the matter?" I inquired as he rose into a loping stride.
He pointed an accusatory finger at the cake. "Thought you'd get me, didn't you!" he shouted at the pastry. His enunciation was very careful as he admonished the cake, as if he knew that cakes had no more intelligence than small children or beasts.
Another day, at my small digs in Pixley Alley, Richard, his handsome Japanese wife at the time, Akiko, and I were having a spaghetti dinner on big white plates that Akiko admired. Blaring and giggling from wine again, Richard fell into a bet with me. I was sure, and so was he. He pulled out a hundred dollars. I didn't have any money. What could I put up? He pointed to the plates. I lost. After dinner, Richard rose with Akiko and stacked the spaghetti-smirched dinner plates and left carrying them. Maybe it was that scalloping walk of his, or maybe his giraffelike height, compared with Akiko's, or maybe just the pair of them, he in his deer-hunting hat and denim, she in something from Paris, carrying stacks of dirty dishes through the throngs of pedestrians on a public street, that made me laugh so very hard.
Food figures in stories of people risen from poverty. Insecurity defies financial security. Fame scares selfhood. At a party in a mansion, Richard tapped me on the shoulder and gestured toward a back stairway. I walked over with him. Some kind of joke was up. He grabbed my arm, not allowing out the laughter welling in him, and pointed up the dark staircase.
"Hear it?" he asked.
"What?" I said.
"Hear it? Listen, it's just starting. It's for you this time. It's going to come down those stairs — Jesus, it's so big we better be careful we're not hurt."
"Hear what?"
"Money," he said, now unable to keep from laughing. "All the money in the world, and fame, and everything! It's coming down those stairs and it's going to bury you!"
New Yorker
December 3, 1984: 39
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