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20 Ode to
Melancholy
I suppose, even though he spent much of his time denying or ridiculing the
fact, Richard was an incurable romantic. I read somewhere that Ginsberg
or Ferlinghetti dubbed him Bunthorn after the ethereal, languishing
character in Gilbert and Sullivan. Richard himself was merciless when it
came to poking fun at romantic characters, but at heart, he was among
their ranks.
When we used to drink at the Robin (back then, the only watering hole
in Bozeman approximating a fern bar), we would occasionally see a solitary
young man, dressed in black, hunched in a dark corner with coffee,
earnestly scribbling away on a note pad, and Richard would say, “Look, a
melancholic!”
“A what?”
“You know, a melancholic. A Bozeman melancholic.”
“You mean like in Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy?
“No, I mean like yonder earnest young man, gloomily scrawling away in
his little pad.”
“You mean Bill, the guy in the black coat--there in the corner?
“No, his name is not Bill. His name is Lord Byron. His name is Percy
Shelly. His name is Faust. Notice the way his collar is turned up, the
way he glances abstractly out the window.”
“Maybe he’s bored.”
“No, no! How could you mistake true angst, the full weight of
this ‘I-fall-on-the-thorns-of-life-I-bleed’ world for boredom!”
“Maybe his girl dumped him.”
“Yes, yes, there you have it. He has been jilted in love and he
must record the pain for posterity. It has driven him to abstraction. He
must WRITE! Look at him grit his little teeth. Look at the furious
movement of his little pen.”
“I think I need another drink.”
Though I had no doubts that the Captain was using a sardonic tone in
his praise of melancholics, I also had no doubt that he had been just such
a young man and, deep down, probably still was, for up to his death,
Richard was always a fool for love.
Before I met him, Judy had seen him walking down Bozeman’s Main
Street with Aki. She was wearing a plaid mini skirt, a green sweater, and
cowboy boots. Judy knew immediately that the couple must be the
Brautigans because Richard looked like--well--Richard, and Aki looked like
she had just stepped out of his novel, Sombrero Fall-Out. He was always
crazy about her. When I saw him in Bolinas, a couple of weeks before his
death, he said he had seen her in San Francisco, walking down the street.
He was obviously torn up about it.
After their divorce, he lived the rest of his life with a huge
hole in his chest. He tried to fill the hole with whisky, writing,
friends, other women, and frantic trips between Montana, Bolinas, and
Tokyo, but it never went away until he put a smaller hole in his head.
That’s not to say his life was over when the marriage ended. He
managed to squeeze in a few interesting years and get what was left of his
heart broken at least once more before his death.
Even in the months after she left, Richard managed to maintain his
twisted sense of humor. In several phone calls from the apartment in San
Francisco, he’d recount surreal tales of sudden bachelorhood. Around
three one morning, he awoke in front of his television in time to hear
Gabby Hays yell, “Why, she’s got Californy fever!” To Richard, this
seemed like the ultimate existential commentary on what had happened with
Aki.
Another time he called to tell me that there was a derelict smashing a
trash can lid against his head in the alley next to him, and he compared
him to the club-footed man Madam Bovary heard outside of her house before
she poisoned herself. After that, he called to tell me that a guy with a
ring through his nipple had sat down next to him on a bus coming over the
Golden Gate, and he had then decided that he’d better get back to
Montana, fast. He also said that he had gotten one of his brawnier
friends to promise to break his leg if he ever got married again. When
Richard arrived here, his leg was broken, but it had been an accident. I
believe he said he had tripped over some furniture while attempting to
turn off his television, but the injury was definitely a cosmic
warning.
When a beautiful young Japanese woman, Masako came back with him
from a his summer residency in Boulder, I and several other friends shook
our heads in disbelief. She was just a kid in her early twenties. She
seemed like such an obvious attempt to replace Akiko. But the more I was
around her, the more I realized that she was her own person and she and
Richard really liked eachother--and she certainly had a good head on her
shoulders. She had come out West from Hofstra University where she had
been comparing Yeats’ work to Japanese no drama . I remember two
particular occasions when I accompanied them on jaunts in the Livingston
area. They both involved fishing.
The first was a trip to the Livingston Clinic. I was taking
Richard and her to see our friend Dr. Dennis Noteboom for some reason that
the Captain wouldn’t disclose to me. At first, I was afraid that they
were having a problem with herpes, but the whole trip seemed a little too
upbeat for that. Later Richard let slip that they had been in to get her
a prescription for birth control pills. But whatever the mission, my main
memory is of fishing near the clinic. The Yellowstone River runs directly
behind the building, so while Richard and Masako were at their
clandestined rendezvous with Dennis, I was fishing out back with some
Woolly Buggers I had just tied.
Bye some fluke, I caught a really nice brown trout while they
watched me out the window. This in itself might not have been worthy of
recalling, but our dialogue when they emerged from the clinic was.
“Did you kill it, big guy?”
“Kill what?”
“Big fish,” she said. “Did you kill big fish?”
“How did you know I caught one?”
“ We watch you through window.”
“Besides,” said the Captain, “Your Death Bag is bulging.” He
pointed to Judy’s old brown suede L.L. Bean purse which I had long
since converted to a creel. It was wet and sagging with the recent catch.
“It was badly hooked,” I lied. “I had to keep it.”
“Hmmm, funny how they always get ‘badly’ hooked when YOU catch
them. How shall we punish this large man, my pretty?”
“We eat the fish, O.K.?”
On another another trip, the three of us piled in my tiny station
wagon and headed east from Livingston up to Mission Creek where it runs
near John Fryer’s cabin toward the Yellowstone. (John runs Sax and
Fryer’s Book Store in Livingston, and Richard used to have a letter from
John on his wall regarding the publication of his work. I think John’s
small town store was Richard’s ideal of how his books should be sold.) It
was late summer and the creek was low and clear, so the fish were spooky.
When Richard and I donned our large clown-pants chest waders, Masako
couldn’t stop laughing.
“Do you find something humorous?” said Richard.
“Large water pants. Small water,” said Masako.
“Come sit on my large water pants lap, and we will watch this large
Oklahoman try to fish.”
So I proceeded to stumble up and down the little stream in front of
them, losing a couple #12 Hank Roberts Specials in the surrounding
willows, getting my hair tangled in rose hip bushes, falling and banging
my shin on a rock, swearing, etc. Eventually I lurched back to the
outcropping where Masako was attempting to make bunny ears out of
Richard’s hair.
“Your turn, Captain Bunny,” I said.
“Do you think there is a fish within a mile of this spot that isn’t
hiding in horror?” said Richard.
“Probably not.”
“My bunny is hungry,” said Masako.
So we went back to the house and made spaghetti.
For all that he had been through with his divorce, Richard seemed very
happy when he was around Masako, but, just by looking at the two of them
together, I could see doom. He was so big and old and American and she
was so tiny and young and Japanese. So, sure enough, soon I was driving
over the pass at odd hours to hear him lurch about his house in despair.
“Her parents are very traditional.”
“Yes, I know.”
“They are against us.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She will obey them.”
“Yes.”
“ She is back in Japan.”
“Yes, she lives there.”
“I won’t see her again.”
“Probably not.”
“Why do these things happen to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll get us some whisky.”
“O.K.”
Eunice was another woman Richard really liked during the time I knew
him. She is a Japanese American who grew up in Hawaii on Maui where, the
last I heard, her mother ran a Benihanna’s Restaurant. The captain loved
Eunice as a friend and sometimes almost as a sister. Of all Richard’s
female companions, I found Eunice the easiest to get along with.
Perhaps Richard did too because he flew to Hawaii and spent several months
with her in Honolulu one winter. He sent me a photograph from there of
himself holding a fighting cock and wearing a tee shirt with a chicken in
an army tank on it. I think the caption was something like “fighting
chickens.” I don’t know for sure because a friend took the picture, moved
away and never gave it back to me. I do know that in the Captain’s
posthumous novel, An Unfortunate Woman, that picture plays a pivotal
role.
At any rate, Richard might have cashed ‘em in much sooner if it hadn’t
been for Eunice. She was so kind and considerate, Lord knows what she
must have gone through during the Captain’s late night “the horror, the
horror” sessions. After Richard was gone, both she and Masako sent me
pictures of themselves and letters. I think they missed him so much they
had to keep communicating with a big dopy blond guy in Montana--even if he
wasn’t the real thing.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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