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I Four
Thousand Dollars
When I first started teaching at Montana State University in 1975, I had
heard rumors about Richard's presence in Paradise Valley, around 35 miles
from Bozeman, but he was just sort of a larger than life fog in my mind,
blown in from San Francisco where I used to stand stupidly pensive in
front of the public library from which I figured he got a lot of ideas
like The Abortion. It wasn't until I found out where his house was that I
actually began to sense a tangible presence. Once I drove by his big blue
mail box then ran back and stuck a note in the outside latch asking if he
ever might want to come and read in Bozeman. But no response.
In 1977, Gary Snyder came to Bozeman for a week-long residency. While he
was there, Marge, the English Department secretary said that Richard had
called and wanted Gary to come out and visit him. Before going, Gary told
me a little about Richard. He said they were friends, that Richard used to
be a Tokay alcoholic when he was a teenager, that he (like Gary) had
married a Japanese woman, and that he (Gary) was going to try to convince
Richard to get more involved with the Montana community (since Gary was
and still is very much interested in community relationships).
When Gary returned he said that Richard drank a whole lot of whisky, and
at a party, he had passed around a mouse trap and people took turns
sticking their fingers in it and trying to pull them back before it
snapped. Snyder has a way with understatement. It wasn't until about a
year after this that I got another note from the secretary. This time,
Richard had invited me out to his place along with two students from the
M.S.U. Student Programs Board. Community involvement moves in mysterious
ways. As I read "bring wine" at the bottom of the note, I didn't know the
magnitude of the tradition that I was to enter. Richard wanted a residency
at M.S.U.
So there the three of us were, standing on Richard's porch, holding a
bottle of Almaden Chablis and shivering in November snow. Richard welcomed
us in, sporting a torn work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. I glanced
down at my blue jeans, cowboy boots and torn work shirt and had a slight
premonition. (At one point in our friendship, I called a stray cat on his
place a doppleganger and Richard asked me what that meant.) Akiko, his
wife was beautiful and appropriately inscrutable. As the evening
progressed, Richard called Flaubert a sack of shit, and William Stafford
(one of my favorite people and poets) a cunt (because he had told Richard
that his children enjoyed his books). And after a while, he picked up
their long-haired Siamese cat and threw it at my face. I must have
responded with appropriate gullible naivete because he calmed down after a
while, probably realizing that I didn't fit his preconception of an
English prof. (Richard never trusted academic types.) He was very gracious
to the students and made them both feel a little embarrassed when they
tried to start talking business. "Let's not worry about that stuff yet;
you're in the country now. Relax." So we all relaxed and ate some very
good spaghetti which he had fixed. Aki let us know that she was interested
in finding Japanese friends in Bozeman and maybe even in going to school a
little. Late that night, when the students were about to drift off,
Richard finally said, "Welp, let's have a ball park figure." The students
looked at each other and one of them mumbled "Four...." "Four thousand it
is" said Richard. The two students gulped and that was that. Richard would
come in April of 79 for a week-long residency. When we left, Richard
insisted that we take the Trail Creek road home. (We had come via the
interstate to Livingston and the two-lane blacktop down Paradise Valley.)
Trail Creek is a short-cut that goes up over a dip in the mountains
between his house and the Bozeman Pass. Depending on the season, it is
gravel, mud, snow, ice, or oiled. Fortunately, the snow hadn't done much
and the road was still gravel at that time. Richard and Aki accompanied us
to where Trail Creek converged with the two-lane and we bid our first
farewell. Richard liked those backroads. In Paradise Valley, he liked the
East River Road which was the old highway on the other side of the
Yellowstone River from the newer two-lane. But, as I found out later, the
Trail Creek road was Richard's favorite. In the following summers, I would
see why as I came up over the pass on that road and saw the bluing
Absoroka Mountains with vast foothills, the winding Yellowstone, and in
the exact middle of the panorama, Richard's bright red barn. It has now
been eighteen years since he shot himself, and I still have lots of
trouble with my emotions when I drive down into Paradise Valley off of
Trail Creek.
A week later, my wife, Judy, and I had the two students, Richard and Aki
over for dinner. Richard leaned back in our cheap wicker K-Mart loveseat
and fell over backwards. As he drank more and more, he started talking in
a small Oriental sounding voice and getting very serious. I would later
start calling this late night voice the Imperial Mode. At the time, I
thought it was a funny voice, a silly pretentious voice. But I was to find
that it was a very sad voice.
Aki laid some toothpicks on our coffee table in the shape of a
stick-figure dog with a pointed face. Richard said they wanted to find out
how our left brains worked then put a bottle behind the dog and called it
the moon. "Make the dog look at the moon," said Aki. Richard nodded
puckishly. After several embarrassing minutes of feeling like red-socked,
hushpuppied, right-brain scientist nerds, we gave up, and Richard tilted
the two toothpicks forming the pointed head perpendicular to the table and
said "See, now he can see the moon." Soon the conversation turned to
fishing and Richard said that the winter fishing was coming soon and did I
know about the tiny black nymphs that the cutthroat behind his place on
the Yellowstone went crazy over when there was slush in the water? I said
I didn't but showed him my favorite wet fly. He said, "That's it...with a
minor change," and he took some fingernail scissors and cut the hackle off
of it. "There you have it," he said imperially. Later I found out he had
caught so many trout with that nymph, he sent Aki trudging through the
snow with armloads of fish to give to their neighbors, Gatz and Marion
Hjortsberg.
Around midnight, Richard said, "Any more liquor." I had already rustled up
odds and ends of Vodka, Gin, and Canadian whisky (after finishing the wine
and bourbon). Now everything was all gone. "Time to go," said Rilchard.
Judy wasn't amused, and Akiko didn't seem too thrilled about the exit, but
the students were almost asleep and Aki had to drive Richard all the way
home. (Richard never drove.)
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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