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Peter Berg, one of the original Diggers. The artist Bruce Conner was in attendance, as were film directors Frances Ford Coppola and Phil Kaufman. Many of the more colorful members on the local scene were present, including restaurateur Magnolia Thunderpussy and Margo St. James, founder of COYOTE, the prostitutes’ union. Marcia Clay wandered through, feeling that, had such an assembly occurred while Richard was still alive, she “would have been at his side, a closest companion, a mate to his soul as we were once.”
    The mood was very low-key. Enrico Banducci found it “grim.” When someone asked Don Allen, who had first published Trout Fishing in America in the sixties, if he expected a suicide, Allen replied, “I wasn’t surprised.” Many of Brautigan’s friends agreed. While Enrico thought Richard’s death might have been a drunken accident (“he played Russian roulette with life”), Keith Abbott felt Brautigan “planned his suicide.” David Fechheimer was of a like mind. “I think he’d decided to do it [at least a year before],” the detective said. “He was more at peace during the summer, like he’d passed a hurdle.”
    Everybody sat around, quietly talking, smoking, drinking to Brautigan. Glasses of Calvados, Richard’s favorite drink, were raised. He used to call it “jet fuel.” Enrico stocked this exotic French apple brandy especially for him. No one else ever ordered it, and when what was left behind the bar was gone, Banducci knew he would not carry it anymore.
    Enrico told a story about the time Brautigan poured half a bottle of Calvados into his boot. “I said, ‘What are you doing? Killing the bugs in your boot?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m going to drink it.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay, go ahead.’ And he took the boot and drank it. It was running down his face.” Every so often, someone else tried to tell another funny story about Brautigan, but nobody laughed. It was grim.
    Jimmy Sakata did not attend the wake at Enrico’s. He worried about how Brautigan’s daughter and friends might react to his presence. Curt Gentry observed that Jim “was very concerned at how
[Ianthe] might feel.” After the gathering dwindled, Curt and Tony Dingman took Ianthe down to Cho-Cho. “Jim was nervous about talking to her,” Gentry said. Sakata acted with wonderful grace, telling stories, showing them drawings and Richard’s letters from Japan. Ianthe, at her loveliest, “wanted to reassure him that she didn’t blame him for anything.”
    At one point, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. When Ianthe was out of earshot, Sakata leaned over the bar and asked, “I don’t suppose this is the time to ask when I can get my gun back?”
    On November 2, 1984, Dr. Laverine filed his final Dental Reporting Form with the coroner’s office in Marin County. He officially identified John Doe number 9 as the author Richard Brautigan. In the days and weeks that followed, newspaper and magazine stories appeared sporadically. The “Transition” section of Time carried the news of Brautigan’s death on November 5. William Hamilton, the New Yorker cartoonist known for deftly skewering the fatuous small-talk of the filthy rich, had an unsigned lead piece in “The Talk of the Town,” saying that his late friend Richard “had a penchant for absurdity akin to the jolly-serious outrages cooked up by the young Dadaists of Paris in the early nineteen-twenties.” Even People ran a remarkably balanced and sensitive article, wishing Brautigan “So long, sensei. Arigato , pardner.”
    Seymour Lawrence issued “An American Original, an official statement,” in which he said, “Richard was a joy to publish.” Sam concluded: “Richard was a consummate craftsman not only in his use of language but in his choice of typography, design,