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XXIII Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll
For the bard of the flower children, Richard didn't exactly fit the
stereotype of a hippy. As for music, the themes from spaghetti westerns
were about the wildest sounds I ever heard coming from the dusty old turntable in his living room. I have several images of Richard lurching
around looking for documentation for his income tax forms, worrying about
water rights or waiting for a guest, all with the whistling,
jingling and pum pumming of A Fist Full of Dollars playing in the
background. And I have a vague feeling Richard hadn't even bought those
records but that they were left over from the Aki days. Sometimes we'd
drive into Livingston and go to a bar where rock, country or swing was
playing, but while couples madly two-stepped and jitterbugged in front of
us, we'd just stand there like a couple of aliens studying puzzling bugs.
Richard might get interested if a pretty woman were singing with the band
or doing a particularly lurid dance,
but for the most part he stood there like a big effigy of mud. As for
drugs, alcohol was Richard's depressant of choice. If anyone dared to
bring out a joint in his presence, a dialogue like the following was bound
to ensue:
Ah, I see you are planning to turn on .
Er, yeah--want a hit?
I assume that you realize you're indulging in an illegal activity.
Ya think?
Perhaps you may not view the subject as being so humorous from behind bars
with a baby face and an ass hole three inches wide.
Perhaps if you want to break the law you should do it out of my presence
so that the legal system won't include me in your act of hooliganism.
Well, what the hell then, let's go get us a big fawkin drink. Now
you're speaking my language, big fella. Not only is alcohol legal, but it's very predictable. You always know where it's coming from, and, for the
most part, you always know where it will take you.
And maybe it was true. Maybe Richard did know where alcohol would take
him, even, perhaps to that eventual rendezvous with a .357 magnum
sandwich, but when I would follow him on the trail of that jingling
golden-brown beast, I sure as hell had no idea where we were going. Here's
sort of an amalgam of our bar-hopping sorties:
We walk into the Livingston Bar and Grille after several drinks at the
Hyatt House , The Guest House, and The Yellowstone Inn. I see a friend,
Tandy Riddle, who says, Hi Greg, how are your classes going over at the U.
Shut up, ass hole, says Richard. I'm here with my friend to have a few
drinks, and no one asked for you to butt in.
Jesus, says Tandy, Can't I say hi to a friend.
MY friend doesn't talk to ASS HOLES. MY friend is here to talk to ME.
It's O.K., I say. I know Tandy from way back. (Oddly enough, when Richard
met Tandy at a more sober moment, they became good friends, and she still
speaks fondly of the compassion and humor that lurked under
Richard's abrasiveness.)
Then I apologize to Tandy and I steer Richard over to the bar where we sit
on stools and he promptly reaches around and taps the cowboy on the other
side of me on the shoulder.
Hey, partner, my buddy here wants to fight you.
Huh--wha..., says the cowboy.
You heard me, pard.
He's drunk, I say. He doesn't mean it, I say.
God, says the cowboy, That's all I need--more dental bills.
Tell me about it, I say.
I think these two love birds need a drink, says Richard.
What's your poison, says the bar tender.
etc.
Or perhaps we'll be sitting in the Eagles Bar in Bozeman and a dance will
be in progress upstairs--say the annual ball for older Eagles members and
their wives. While the bottle of Dickel gets lighter and lighter, the
sixty to ninety-year-old women get more and more attractive to us as
they wander up and down the stairs to take a breather or get a drink in
their sparkling colorful gowns and dresses.
Look at the one in green, says Richard. I'll bet, in her day, her daddy
had to drive em away with a ten gauge.
But hey, I say, she's nothing compared to that one at the bar with a
Grasshopper. I mean she's in pretty damned good shape the way she is.
An hour passes.
Sweet bleeding Jesus, I gotta talk to that one. I think I m in love.
I think I can take her husband, if he'd lose the cane.
Hold it there buster, I saw her first.
Then in a moment of crystal clarity, through the smoke, alcohol, and
buzzing fruit flies, Richard says, Hey, why don t we just skip all the
banter, go into the Ladies Room and hang our tongues over the toilet paper
roller.
Because sex, along with alcohol, probably destroyed Richard in the end, it's only logical that, in his more lucid moments he should make it the
subject of his darkest laments and sharpest humor. He frequently made
fun of his own sexuality with comments like, I sure would like to give HER
a good time. If I only had a couple of rubber bands and a Popsicle stick
for a splint! Or There were two lovely women at my Notre Dame reading who
were ready to go. If it weren't for these damned herpes we could have done
a tricycle! Once in the Baxter (Robin) Bar in Bozeman, he took a spoon,
put it's concaved side down where he'd penned in a black spot between his
index and middle finger, gyrated his hand so that the reflection in the
spoon looked obscene and said, Look, a North Dakota skin flick!
Sometimes, to relieve the boredom of an afternoon, Richard would recount
odd sexual exploits. I was never sure if he was making them up or not, but
because the stories were so quirky, I ultimately believed them. One
of the oddest involved a woman I knew who was a local actress. In an
effort to help her career, Richard had invited several people from the
M.S.U. theater arts department over to his house for dinner. Before they
arrived he asked the woman to put a remote controlled sexual device in
herself (to which she happily obliged), and during key moments throughout
the dinner and following drinks and conversation, he would activate the
device at key moments.
In another story, he told me how he once had rather noisy anal sex with a
woman and tape recorded the whole episode. Afterward, while she bathed, he
put the tape recorder next to the tub so that she could listen to what had
just transpired, and she became so aroused that she got out of the tub and
they continued where they had left off.
Shortly before Richard's suicide, when I visited him in Bolinas, he said
that he had been hitch hiking on the local highways, hoping that someone
would pick him up as road meat.
In the time that I knew him, even though it was just before the AIDS scare
took hold, Richard was very careful about having sex (when he could have
it) because of his herpes. His own case horrified him and he would go to
extremes to keep from spreading it. He told me sad stories about a
Japanese woman he knew who had herpes so bad she had to crawl around her
apartment because she couldn't walk.
Once while he was teaching, he wrote a sample story for his class about an
alien race of sores on another planet who had to trudge to a dark gloomy
place called The Grotto to be drained. Little did the class know that
Richard was writing about his own raging herpes and that he had just been
in a tiny park on campus called The Grotto where he had been sitting on a
little bench in front of a sun dial examining his herpes (though the DID
know that the Grotto was situated between the campus CHAPEL and the campus
DAY CARE center.)
Sometimes his outbreaks would get so bad that he would go to extremes. One
Sunday when I was away at an academic conference, he dared to come to our
house to beg the dreaded JUDY for a little corn starch since all
the stores dispensed dispensed talcum powder in the vicinity were closed.
Another time he sat Georgia Donovan's young sister, Mary, down at a table
at the Eagles and gave her a long lecture on herpes.
Never, ever have sex with a man unless you examine him first, said the
Captain.
Eeeww, said Mary.
No, I mean it, said Richard. Get right down on your hands and knees
and have a good close look at it. If you see so much as a red spot or a
bump, drop the guy like a hot potato. It's not worth it.
Sometimes the Captain caused me to wonder a bit about his own sexual
preferences, but I imagine this was to make me ill at ease, a state which
he took great pains to nurture in me. For example, once in the Eagles Bar
on Friday burger night when the place was full of blue-collar rowdies,
ranchers, and carousing art students, Richard grabbed me and planted a big
kiss right on my mouth. I sputtered and ptooied to the best of my
abilities, but the damage was done. The proletariat hoards were staring at
us in dumbstruck horror, and I'd swear, the regulars
never looked at me the same way after that.
Another unnerving episode took place at what was once the M.S.U. English
Club's annual Elizabethan Dinner. The students had cajoled us professors
into playing parts in Shakespeare's play within a play, Pyramus and
Thisbee, and I had the ultimate privilege of playing Thisbee. Decked out
in one of Judy's diaphanous peasant dresses, a flimsy shawl and a giant
pair of galoshes, I falsettoed my way through the part, winding up prone
on the stage, feebly kicking the huge galoshes in the air. After the
applause had died down, I thought Richard was going to bust open he seemed
so overjoyed. He came lumbering toward the stage, flush-faced, arms
spread, squealing and grinning and gave me a big hug and kiss--right there
in front of all our English majors. I m sure he would have given me a
dozen red roses had they been available. Over her eye-rolling and
foot-tapping, Judy said something like, Shall we break out the condoms?
Richard told her that there was no need, but that the dress and galoshes
had made me approximate the woman of his dreams.
Another more sinister
night that I still hold in question as I look back took place at the
Murray Hotel in Livingston shortly before Richard left Montana for the
last time. He had been hugely depressed and alone at his house, so he had
rented a room at the Murray where he could drink in town and stumble to a
bed. I had come over to keep him company; so after some drinks then a meal
at the China Doll (which has since disappeared in a kitchen fire), some
more drinks and a movie, The Clash of the Titans (which Richard called the
Clash of the Lips because of Harry Hamlin'shuge horrid lips) then some
more drinks, after which the Captain said, We need to stop by my room. So
we climbed the old stairs of the Murray, both of us slamming our heads
into the low ceiling above the first flight and swearing all the way to
his room. As soon as we got there, Richard turned on a little black and
white T.V. full of fuzz and static, sat down on the bed and patted the
spot next to him. I sat down and stared at the fuzzy little screen for a
while but started to feel ill at ease. When I looked over at Richard, he
was staring at me like he might stare at a cheeseburger. He said, Welp,
big guy? and I said Welp? and got up, and he got up, and we stumbled
downstairs, hitting our heads again near the landing, and proceeded on for
a few more drinks. I have no idea what was up with that. Probably nothing.
But a couple of years earlier, in a fit of paranoia before he and Aki
split, he accused me of wanting to fuck her. I had never harbored any
such intention, but he continued on.
You want to fuck her, and I ll tell you why you want to fuck her. Because
you want to fuck me. I am a star, a famous writer, and you want to fuck
me, but you are afraid of such things, so you want to fuck my
wife instead.
Later I was talking to a Sean Garrity, a young friend of Richard's who
helped him out at his place and, for a while, went out with Ianthe. He
told me that the Captain had accused him of the same thing and that he had
come that close (he held up a little space between his thumb and index
finger) to decking him. It never really occurred to me that I might deck
him, but I wondered what he must have been through to get such things in
his head.
Perhaps part of the reason that Richard occasionally attacked his lesser
known friends, or at least felt compelled to keep us ill at ease, was that
he felt we should pay for his company. He wanted to dash any possibility
that we were hanging out with him because of his celebrity. As sort
of a parting gesture of sexual ambiguity, to make me hesitate any
time I thought of him, Richard gave me a picture of himself bearing his
bottom in some sylvan setting in Bolinas. Next to him is some unknown
comic who looks like he's giving directions to a heavy equipment
operator. Something to remember me by, is what he said, handing me the
picture as I took him to the airport and his final departure from Montana.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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