John F. Barber's prologue to Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography
English
by John F. Barber?
I met Richard Brautigan in the spring of 1982. I was a student in his creative writing course at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. We became friends and started meeting at the Eagles Club downtown after class. The Eagles Club was the VFW outpost in Bozeman. It was dark and cool inside, a welcome relief from the hot streets. Chrome and vinyl tables and chairs ringed the bar which stood alone like an island in a pool of alcoholic light that filtered through the various bottles above. Beyond the tables and chairs and the bar was a small dance floor where, on weekend nights, a three-piece country western band sawed out the favorites.
The Eagles Club was frequented by shadowy figures drinking to forget the past, or to build fortitude to deal with the present. Richard thought it was the best bar in Montana and we spent a lot of time there drinking together. We joked about our time in the Eagles Club as searching for "The Great American Good Time." We joked about it but Richard was quite serious. Richard often said that life was horrible and cruel and that people often suffered and lamented. But that didn't have to happen because all that mattered was having fun. I never knew, until much later, and even then not completely, how desperately lonely Richard was, how unhappy he was, how unsatisfied and unfulfilled he was, and how much he needed and wanted the attention and notoriety that holding court at the Eagles Club brought him.
The search for "The Great American Good Time" was a diversion, an escape from the specter of meaninglessness that Richard felt in and around his life. If he didn't find it at the Eagles Club he went to another bar, or another, all night, drinking heavily and looking for people or conversational fisticuffs.
He never quit until all the bars were closed and every last opportunity for serious drinking was exhausted. Richard often bought a bottle of George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey from the last bar and took it back to his motel room. He stayed at the Alpine Motel, a low rent place just on the eastern outskirts of Bozeman, unless he met a woman who took him home for the night. Wherever he ended up for the night, and no matter how much George Dickel he had consumed, first thing the next morning Richard would call and say, "Meet me for breakfast. I'll buy and then you can give me a ride home."
He had a house he called "Rancho Brautigan" in Paradise Valley, about 50 miles southeast of Bozeman. Richard liked to go there after finishing his weekly creative writing class at the university and work on his own writing projects. That summer he told me he wrote two novels, but never told me anything about them. He also published So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away.
Richard and I enjoyed each other's company but there was also an understood mutual usage of one another. Richard never learned to drive and never, until that summer, owned a car. He bought an old car and parked it in his barn, intending to learn how to drive. We discussed my teaching him. In the meantime he used me for rides back and forth between Rancho Brautigan and Bozeman and for non-threatening companionship while in search of "The Great American Good Time." I used him as a possible outlet for my writing. He was complimentary of a manuscript I was working on and promised to show it to his literary agent when I completed it. I thought that was fair enough compensation for the one hundred mile shuttle whenever Richard wanted a ride.
And there were special times that only friendship that has taken the time to earn the trust can provide.
"My friend just died," Richard said from the other end of the telephone. "Why don't you come over. Bring a bottle of whiskey." He had mentioned his "friend" several times that summer, saying she was dying of cancer in Japan. He had been waiting for the final telephone call.
I arrived about an hour later. Richard was sitting in the small guest house off to the side of the main ranch house. It was the first time I had ever seen that little house opened up. He was in good spirits and with a sweep of his hand showed me the one room of the little house. "This used to be a smokehouse," he said, "and one time, when I had some money, I hired a master carpenter to do the remodeling work you see here. Some day I want to put in a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a hot tub with a roof which slides back exposing the sky. Think what it would be like to soak in a hot tub during a rain storm, or while it is snowing!"
The remodeling already done included a redwood floor, redwood trim around the room, and a triangular, free-standing closet in one corner. A painting hung on one wall. It was a painting of the view once seen out a window filled in during the remodeling. A wood cook stove stood in the middle of the room, its chimney bottom boxed in with wood painted a rich shade of raspberry. It served as an effective dividing point between the sitting and sleeping portions of the room.
Most of the sleeping area was taken by an old swayback brass bed. Behind the bed, a large window looked out to the decaying chicken coops. Richard was proud of the shade he had installed on the window. It was a full-length roll-down plastic shade with a silvery, metallic coating on one side that allowed one to see out but prevented anyone on the outside from seeing in.
"You can lie here in bed with people all around in the backyard and make love," he said. "No one can see in, no one knows what you are doing."
A mound of sheets and blankets lay on the bed. I thought of his friend. Who was she? They had been lovers. Had she shared this room with him?
We left the smokehouse love-nest and walked around the main ranch house, onto the back porch. I sat at the green table in a spindly wooden lawn chair. Richard sat on the porch railing, leaning against a pillar. For a long time neither of us said anything. Lost in our own thoughts, we watched the pods on the cottonwood trees explode and release their feathery seeds. They snowed down around us and gathered on the porch floor where gentle puffs of air rolled them into balls and swirled them into the corners.
We watched mosquitoes land on our arms and then take off later, burdened with blood. We watched storms, trailing lightning and veils of rain, boil up over the mountains. As twilight lengthened we watched lithe brown ghost deer jump the fences of the old corral and float into the backyard. One whitetail buck stood for several minutes silhouetted on the side of the hill by the barn watching us watch him
Richard broke the silence. "She's gone now. It's all done."
It was the first time he had mentioned the death of his friend since our telephone conversation. That had been hours ago. I didn't know what to say in return. I said, "She's gone, but not forgotten," and immediately felt stupid for having said it.
"I have no pictures of her, none of her letters, nothing. She's gone."
"But you have memories and you can write them down and preserve them," I retorted.
"I don't write for therapy, or to eulogize. But, then again..."
Richard stood up, stretched, walked across the porch, and into the house. The cottonwood seed fluffs swirled in his wake. He returned with a poem written on a scrap of paper. He read the poem to me, and the deer, and the cottonwood seeds, and the rain storms over the mountains.
Rendezvous
Where you are now
I will join you.
"Come inside." Richard said, "Hunger has visited us. Let's eat." He left the poem on the green table, fluttering in the puffs of cottonwood air.
We prepared noodles with smoked oysters, green peas, and chopped fresh onion shoots gathered from the backyard. Richard taught me how to eat the noodles with chopsticks and how to suck the noodles into my mouth. He said that sucking the noodles into my mouth helped to cool them and make them taste better. He said that in Japan, it was quite acceptable to make a sound while sucking noodles into your mouth. He taught me to make the correct sound.
"Someday, if we are still friends, I will have Japanese friends over for dinner, make noodles, and invite you to join us. They will compliment you on your sound."
After dinner we talked of writing, mutual friends, and of other times spent together. The night grew older and the whiskey died a lingering death. We decided to make the forty-mile trip into town for another bottle.
We drove down the valley, following the moonlit meanderings of the Yellowstone River. The stars shone like points of radium on a cosmic clock and we both stared out the windows, neither of us talking. It wasn't that there was nothing to say, but rather that we couldn't think of a way to say it. It was a long, quiet, thoughtful trip for a bottle of whiskey.
Back at the ranch, bottle of whiskey half consumed during the return trip, Richard said, "My friend was Japanese. She was a Buddhist. The Buddhists believe that one can send things to the dead by burning them. I have two books of hers and the poem. I will burn them and you can help if you don't think it's too heavy."
We gathered the books, some matches, and lighter fluid. Passing through the kitchen Richard said, "She loved white wine." He poured some white wine into a delicate tulip-shaped wine glass. "She loved white wine and she loved to drink it from a glass like this. We will burn this also."
We waded through the waist high grass in the backyard guided by the brief flare of matches. On a pile of rocks we placed the two books, the poem, and the delicate tulip glass of white wine. Richard gathered a handful of white and yellow columbine and placed them on top of the books and the poem.
I soaked the shrine with lighter fluid and lit a match. As the flames erupted Richard said, "She always had great style."
We stood with our arms around each other, watching until the books, the poem, and the wildflowers were only ashes. The wine glass broke apart and lay atop the remains.
"She's gone," he said. "Its done."
"Yes," I answered.
Outside these moments, our friendship was an uneasy one. I noticed an undercurrent in Richard, a violent one, seemingly waiting to explode. He often talked of being able to kill someone very quickly, so quickly that they wouldn't be able to do anything to prevent him from culminating their life in some dark and dirty manner. I was always afraid that this undercurrent would burst out. I was afraid that he wasn't talking idly, but that he was instead telling the truth, and that he would indeed live up to his boast. I was afraid that he would go for me sometime after the heavy drinking and the philosophical meanderings over the cups that our evenings together often were. I was afraid that indeed I wouldn't be able to do anything to stop him. Only later did I realize that by talking about how quickly he could end my life, Richard was actually talking about the desire to end his. He said that he felt like he had seen and done everything. He kept looking for meanings in his life and could find none.
He was, I believe, fatally disappointed over the lack of acclaim for his books, especially his most recent, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away. He said that novel had been in his head for 17 years and that he had worked very hard to write it. When it was not accepted and acclaimed by the critics or the reading public he felt misunderstood and alienated.
Richard impressed me as a very lonely man. He seemed incapable of upholding an enduring relationship with anyone. He deplored the breakdown of the American family but was twice divorced and barely on speaking terms with his daughter Ianthe. He had "boycotted" her marriage because he didn't like her husband, and said that he would like her second husband "a helluva" lot better. He said that he didn't like children.
Although he never said it directly, I often surmised that Richard didn't like people who got too close to him. Toward the end of summer, we had a disagreement and Richard told me to go away and never speak to him again. I saw him on the street shortly afterwards and asked if we couldn't talk the disagreement through. I told him that I was sorry, and asked if we couldn't save our friendship. He said, "I don't know. We'll see. I'll let you know."
In 1983 I moved away from Bozeman and never saw Richard again. The following year I wrote him, apologizing again for my part in the disagreement. He wrote back from Japan. "Forget the past. It ain't worth it," he said. He wrote that he didn't know when he would be in Montana again, but when he was, he would like to see me. "I'd like that," he said.
I never heard from him again. With a strange sort of premonition though I expected to hear about his death and watched the obituaries for the announcement. Richard often said that the obituaries were his favorite part of the paper. He said that an obituary was what was left of a person after they died, a summation of their life. He enjoyed reading the obituaries and wondered what his would say.
When I saw the article about Richard's death in October of 1984 it was an expected shock; I had waited for it. And then it seemed like relief; I wouldn't have to watch for his obituary anymore. In his last novel, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, Brautigan wrote:
"If ever I got pneumonia, I wanted whoever was there to tie a very long string on my finger and fasten the other end of the string to their finger and when they left the room, if I felt like I was dying, I could pull the string and they'd come back. I wouldn't die if there was a long piece of string between us" (52-53).
In the end there was no long piece of string between Brautigan and the world and he died alone, vulnerable, lonely, and disconnected in his house north of San Francisco, not of pneumonia, but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He lived a troubled and weary life and felt that proper fame and notoriety had eluded him. In the end, like Ernest Hemingway, to whom he was so often compared, he took his own life.
Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography
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