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XIV
Professor Brautigan
The first time I really saw Richard teach a class first hand was when he
took over my evening class in Contemporary Poetry in the spring of 1981.
He was great. The acting head of our department, Duayne Hoynes, sat in on
the class too (and loved it even though he was a died in the wool
Reaganite Republican. Richard listed several minutes worth of influences
on his work, talked about how he saw various movements in American writing
and scanned the class for attractive women. The class hung on every word.
I never came close to holding their attention like that.
That next winter he was living in Hawaii with his friend Eunice Kittigawa,
a very kind Japanese-American woman who loved Richard so much she would
call sometimes when he was out of the country trying to find and comfort
him. I always did my best to relay his address and forward the tee shirts
she sent on to Richard. One night he called at about one a.m. from her
house in Hawaii and asked if there were any possibility of his teaching at
Montana State that spring. Since we had a young, brand new, optimistic,
Italian-American American department head, I figured that his chances were
better than average. After several more late-night strategy sessions,
Richard finally called the head, Paul Ferlazzo. Of course, he called him
at home at two a.m. Paul likes Richard's work and was really enthusiastic
about getting him here, so at 2 a.m. one winter night in Bozeman, MT the
wheels started turning. Thanks to a sympathetic academic vice president,
Stuart Knapp, Richard was at work here in the spring of 1982. Richard's
students were picked from English majors by English faculty which might
not have been fair, but because of time and number limitations was
expeditious. I picked a student who had been good but a problem for me. In
my own creative writing class, this student had done the following for his
class project: he came into the room, put bags over all the students'
heads, handcuffed a dictionary to me and put a beer in my hand. He then
went to the podium and proceeded to mock my teaching style. In spite of
this, I thought his poetry was somewhat like Richard's and he was very
bright. As Richard's class got into swing, he would sometimes ask me to
read over the students' papers. Once he said, "Read this," and handed me a
paper by the student I had chosen. It was a wild, self-indulgent,
semi-surreal poem, and I recognized the style immediately. "Not bad," I
said. "Not bad," said Richard with awe on his face. "This fucking stinks.
This is a fucking pile of pig shit. Who put this ass hole in my class?" "Er,
I guess it was me," I said, preparing to be the immediate subject of a
long tracking session. "You think this is good?" he said, waving the paper
in my face. As it turned out, the student's first comments in Richard's
class had been something like, "I don't like your work," and "You call
this teaching." But over all, Richard's class liked him and he liked them.
He did play favorites, but that was based on whether he liked their work
or not. At the end of the quarter, he invited his favorites out to his
ranch for dinner.
There was also a girl in the class who started it out with "I don't like
your work." Richard went to Paul Ferlazzo for help with her since he
didn't want to mess things up. Paul gave him some really good advice, the
girl wound up liking the class a lot, and Richard admired Ferlazzo from
then on. When Richard departed Bozeman for the last time, he left a whole
set of her papers with his comments on them with me since, somehow, she
had graduated from the class without them. So, Susy Roesgen, if you're out
there somewhere, I have your stories with Richard's comments on them.
One thing that I thought was particularly poignant to come out of
Richard's reactions to the teaching experience was his horror at finding
out that students actually evaluate the teachers at the end of the
quarter. He couldn't believe it. He tried to imagine Zen students grading
their masters. "When did this happen?" he said, as if referring to a World
War that he hadn't heard about before. I said it was sometime between when
I stopped being a student and started being a teacher. As it turned out,
Paul was perfectly willing to let Richard skip class evaluations since,
for him, it was a one shot deal.
Outside of class, Richard and I managed to keep our lives as unacademic as
possible. As usual, we hatched great goofy plans which never came to
fruition. My favorite was his idea of buying a large bucket of Colonel
Sanders chicken and wandering around among the spring bathing beauties on
campus until we found a true winner. Then we would award her the bucket of
chicken and she would fall madly in love with Richard.
We usually went to the Eagles Bar before Richard's class for lunch but no
booze. That always came after class. Once when I was up ordering Richard's
and my burgers at the bar, a local artist, John Buck (husband of Deborah
Butterfield, the horse sculptor) shouted from his table, "Hey, star
sucker, do you always wait on him like that. John has always had a way of
insulting me in public, so I was accustomed to it, but it made Richard
furious. "Who does that fucker think he is?" So when our orders were
ready, Richard went up, got them, and brought me my burger on his knees,
saying, "Lawzy Massah, here's you boiger."
Buck got huffy and left the bar.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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