Richard Brautigan visits DeKalb, Illinois, a year before his suicide. It’s 1983, fifteen or sixteen years before I move there, so I miss the chance to see him; besides, I’m born in 1987. From William Hjortsberg’s long and pitilessly detailed biography, I know Brautigan stays on Lincoln Highway, “in a kind of student ghetto,” and visits the Joseph Glidden House. (The Glidden House is a large white Victorian building with an oval porch next to a florist shop. In the windows of Glidden Florists, lilies are displayed; inside the Glidden House, barbed wire is invented in the late nineteenth century.) In the “kind of student ghetto,” in the apartment where Brautigan sleeps, a cuckoo clock sounds every fifteen minutes from the apartment below, but not when I live there.
Brautigan, according to Hjortsberg, has been invited by the English department to read from his poetry. Each night, he goes to a dive bar filled with hockey equipment. (This is not in Hjortsberg, who provides the sums of bar tabs and hotel bills from Brautigan’s visits to Tokyo, Amsterdam, and other such places, but gives no comparable account of his DeKalb expenses in the page and a half devoted to that visit.) He carves his name into one of the greasy tables, as will many others, as will I, as will very possibly Hjortsberg (such is his devotion to exactitude, replication).
Brautigan is in a strange mood. (He often is nowadays, according to Hjortsberg.) It’s a strange world, and cold. He has come to this northern Illinois town in February. He sits on a table by the lectern of the classroom where he reads and declares that he would like to shoot his critics dead, discharging his fingertips into the crowd of students and professors. Some, possibly, mime death back to him. Perhaps even slide out of their squeaking classroom desks. Perhaps writhe.
(Hjortsberg, in another chapter, states that Brautigan has grown fond of shooting the ground when drunk; a year later he will shoot himself.)
The classroom is in Du Sable Hall, a cinderblock and porcelain tile building, airless, with the feel of a urinal. (In warm weather, when windows are cracked, wasps drift inside; a large nest is forming in the ductwork.) Because it’s February, the wind is howling in the gaps between campus buildings. When Brautigan forms guns with his fingers, the windows are black-blue and milky with rime.
Nothing is different when I take classes there. The desks are the same, they still squeak. It is still hard to breathe in the classrooms. In February, the wind still blows between the buildings and the pavements are still covered in ice. When I leave Du Sable, the wind blows me into the snow; I catch myself on the hand of a classmate, a young woman who has followed me out. She leads me back inside so we can test my ankle. I have five quarters in my backpack, so I try to make her a hot chocolate from a machine that comes, surely, from Brautigan’s time.
(A Styrofoam cup is inserted into a cup-shaped slot and a button is held until a stream of black water shoots into it, upsetting the cup and burbling into a grille that runs below the slot. The same black water may well be shot at numerous other unsteady cups and returned to the machine through a circumlocutory canal of loops and tunnels with its ingress at the grille.)
The young woman, whose face I sometimes recognize, eerily, in photos of Billie Holiday, invites me to her apartment, not on Lincoln, but on a street parallel. She lights incense, packs a bowl.
She reads to me from two books of poetry. The first poem is by Sara Teasdale. The narrator is alone but for a pine forest that surrounds her, “spicy and still.” Then she reads from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, by Richard Brautigan. High, she explains the symbols on money. When we have sex, her twin sister, who shares the apartment, enters the room, sees us together, and screams, perhaps seeing herself in a dream, a different time, or another person’s imagination. Afterward, the young woman draws me as I am, naked, in a sketchbook that surely no longer exists, or has been forgotten, or relieved of a page, by her or by someone else.
