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XXV Me and Mr. Death
if readers of his fiction think Richard himself may have been
preoccupied with death, they’re right. He was a great admirer of
Hemingway, and in some of his gloomier moments, he would read aloud the
bleak, concise descriptions of death between the the short stories of In
Our Time. He knew when, how, why, and with what kind of weapon Hemingway
killed himself. He knew battles and carnage of the Civil war by heart. He
quoted Picket’s comment about Lee: “That damned old man killed all of my
men.” When I would drive him home down the East River Road, he would point
to the crosses marking accidents and tell stories about how they happened.
Near the Deep Creek Bridge he would talk about an accident that was so
brutal a young woman’s panties were left hanging in the high branches of a
tree. With his usual morbid humor, when we passed the place he would
sometimes mutter, “Ah, Panty Tree Bridge.” When we drove by a little
cemetery, he told a story about how the proprietor had run out of space
and was caught stashing corpses in a shed. Sometimes he would call me in
loneliness and desperation to come out and drink with him because the
ghosts of old lovers were haunting him and all he had to combat them was
the “hollow clomping of his feet” as he roamed the house.
The summer before he left the area, he and Marion had a falling out
because a horse had died on the land behind her house. Instead of having
it buried, she wanted to let nature take care of the animal. This
horrified Richard, and he made a huge drunken scene about it. I wasn’t
there, but I think he was actually going to stumble down the brushy
boulder-strewn hill drunk that night and try to bury it himself.
Because he had been involved in a project with the Beatles, he knew and
liked John Lennon. I think that he felt that they had a lot in common, and
when Lennon was murdered, he felt that he had been moved a little closer
to death--on a grand scale. When his Chinese-American friend Nikki died,
it devastated him.
Sometimes, when I would need a break from the alcohol and the death talk,
I would leave Richard to stew on his own--and later feel awful about it
because, if he didn’t find other companions, he’d spiral into a physical
and psychological oblivion. During his teaching stint at M.S.U., he’d
hobble drunk with his cane and broken leg from bar to bar around the
freezing icy streets of Bozeman, getting a lift back to his room bouncing
around in the back of some cowboy’s pick up, though when I’d take him up
to campus for his class the next day, he’d rub snow on his face and
undergo a sort of miraculous transformation into lucidity.
In 1983, after a long flight to Japan on Korean Air Lines, (one of whose
jets had just been shot down by the Russians), he wrote me this letter. I
thinks it’s typical of his Mr. Death attitude, both grim and humorous:
Dear Greg,
Tokyo,
April 23, 1983
Well, I'm Here. It was a long trip and I'm still getting over the jet lag.
In two days I flew 10,079 miles into the sun. After a while I was no
longer human. I was just meat flying 600 miles an hour. My childhood
vanished into hamburger and all the memories of my life were just chunks
hanging from a flying hook.
I think I want to stay on the ground for a while.
Love,
Richard
He told me that during a visit to Amsterdam in 1984, for a conference on
that Orwellian year, he had met a woman in a grocery store and accompanied
her to Spain where she grew tired of his antics and abandoned him. I think
he said it was in Barcelona where he found himself lying in an alley
behind a bodega, sleeping among dogs. After he somehow made it to Tokyo,
he sent me a death-warmed-over photo-booth snapshot of himself and this
letter.
Dear Greg,
Tokyo,
Feb. 14, 1984
You have probably looked at the photograph of me taken just before my
birthday. Yes, Europe has been good to me.
Love,
Richard
PS Send T-Shirts Airmail.
And tell Brad where I'm at
and to send T Shirts
I’m not sure whether he consciously admired the archetype of the dark,
perishing, misunderstood Romantic hero or whether it was just in his
genes. He once told me about seeing Jack Kerouac in Big Sur. Richard was
in a bar (of course) and noticed a drunk passed out under the urinal. He
asked his friend, “Who’s that?” and his friend said, “That’s Jack
Kerouac.” When he told me this story, he seemed to light up--as if passing
out under a urinal was, in a sense, one of the top things a guy could do.
Here’s a tiny screen-play that condenses much of the Captain’s Mr. Death
persona into a single episode, (even though Richard, like Truman Capote,
believed that screenplays are just “typing.”
Scene opens with a steady-cam shot from a car traveling at night up the
East River Road. It is one in the morning in mid-January and huge snakes
of fog are trailing down in front of the Absoroka Mountains into the
snow-covered valley, all illuminated by a full moon.
Mr. Death: Where’s my go-cup?
Greg: I think you put it on the floor and knocked it over. Can’t you smell
it?
Mr. Death: To me, everything smells like whisky. I think I have some old
Jim Beam left at home, from when those F.M. Tokyo boys were visiting.
Greg: More Whisky?
Mr. Death: More whisky.
Greg: Richard Hugo died last week.
Mr. Death: Yes, I know. He was a good poet. Did you say he stopped
drinking for a couple years before he died?
Greg: Sort of.
Mr. Death: Up there (he points above the Absorokas), that cloud looks like
a huge vulture!
Cut to interior of Mr. Death’s house where he and Greg are sitting at the
kitchen table with tumblers of whisky.
Greg: Now that Hugo is dead, everyone will be scrambling to publish his
work, his letters--like feeding vultures. (He makes his hand into a
vulture and circles it in the air in front of him making vulture noises.)
Ree, ree, ree!
Mr. Death: That’s what they do all right. When you’re alive, they see you
as a perpetual language pump. Your words are a dime a dozen. But when you
die, you are meat--and here they come, ree, ree, ree!
Greg: Ree, ree, ree!
Mr. Death: When I’m alive, the call my work “pet rock fiction.” They
dismiss my work as that of a washed up hippy. My home turf, The San
Francisco Chronicle, hires a hatchet woman to trivialize my life. But when
I die, it will be ree, ree, ree!
Greg: Ree, ree, ree!
Mr. Death: But I would never end my own life to make my work into valuable
carrion.
Greg: No?
Mr. Death: No, I wouldn’t want friends to have to clean up the actual
mess.
Greg: But no matter how you die, the vultures will be there to clean up on
your work. Ree, ree, ree.
Mr. Death: (standing up and frowning at Greg) It appears that you think
this matter is funny.
Greg: No, I just....
Mr. Death: It appears that you find death humorous. (He points up at a
kitchen clock that’s peppered with bullet holes.) My friend and I shot
that clock full of holes. It seemed appropriate at the time.
Greg: Why?
Mr. Death: Because time is not funny, just like death is not funny.
Greg: I think I’d better be going.
Mr. Death: You will betray me, just as they all betray me.
Greg: Do I have a choice in the matter?
Mr. Death: No.
Exit Greg. Lights dim on Mr. Death sitting alone at the table with his
tumbler of whisky.
Gorgo's Brautigan Stories Index
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