Not Your Ordinary Housewife: How the man I loved led me into a world I had never imagined by Nikki Stern Page B

promenade, but Richard was steadfast in his determination to find himself a Japanese prostitute. Richard had a thing about them and lived part-time in Japan. By the early hours of the morning, he was running out of luck and I was getting blisters on my feet from hours of walking. Many of the red lights were already off, but Paul would ask at each brothel whether there were any women of Asian appearance. Finally, after hobbling along the now-empty cobblestone streets, we found Richard a half-Chinese hooker.
    ‘That’s as good as you’re gonna get at four in the morning, I’m afraid,’ said Paul. ‘I’m gonna leave you here and we’re going home.’
    ‘Give me your number,’ said Richard, as we left him at the entrance. ‘We’ll do something tomorrow.’
    It had been a most unusual evening: I not only met my hero, Richard Brautigan, but went out whoring with him. His charm and wit were undeniable, but he seemed a broken man. I sensed I was not seeing him at his best.
    Sure enough, he called the next day and asked Paul to come to his hotel. They were going out for a ‘night on the town’, as Richard described it. I elected to stay home. I didn’t want a repeat of the previous night, and I had some letters I needed to write. I would have to tell my mother about how I’d met Richard, although omitting the whoring episode. Egon had admired his books and I knew that Dory would be familiar with his work.
    Much later, Paul returned after his evening out: ‘Jeez, that was an experience. He put out a contract on me—back in the States—in case he went missing.’ They’d gone to all the classy brothels downtown, still looking for Japanese women.
    Apparently, they drank a lot—it seemed like Richard was a chronic alcoholic. Paul told me: ‘He had vodka dripping off his moustache again. Not a pretty sight. And he kept calling me a nineteen-year-old genius—he’s really taken a shine to me.’
    I said I’d been totally put off his books. I didn’t know if I could ever read any of them again after meeting him. He was an incredible womaniser. ‘I don’t think he likes me much,’ I concluded.
    ‘But he told me he did,’ said Paul. ‘It’s just that he knows he can’t fuck you, so he doesn’t try too hard . . . I’d like to invite him to our wedding.’ I really wasn’t sure that I’d want him there.
    Richard had actually given Paul one of his latest books, The Tokyo-Montana Express , as a galley proof, which he’d autographed. And he’d written him a poem, which he seemed to just make up on the spot. ‘We were sitting at a bar and he asked the bartender for some paper. Then he dictated this poem to me—I wrote it down and then the barman’s name as a witness, and I dated it: 25 October 1983 . Then, on another sheet, he drew these child-like drawings: very primitive stuff, almost stick figures—two fish and what I think is a self-portrait: him on a horse with a cowboy hat. He’s signed that too.’
    Paul showed me the two sheets of paper with the hotel restaurant letterhead on them. There on the first sheet was Richard’s poem in Paul’s writing.

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    Paul was keen to get married. He talked of little else and gleefully told everyone how in love with me he was. Under Dutch law, a nineteen-year-old required parental consent to marry. Given that this was impossible we decided to elope to London, where Paul could use his Canadian passport.
    Our main problem was what to do with the rat: I wanted to leave Chaimie in Holland, but Paul insisted we take him with us on the ferry to England.
    ‘You can’t—it’ll be illegal. It’s like . . . vermin,’ I said. I knew there were very strict laws about that.
    Paul called me a worry-wart, saying he’d just put Chaimie in his coat pocket. ‘After all the stuff I’ve smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, this’ll be a piece of cake.’
    I knew that Paul liked to smuggle things, but this was crazy; he was refusing to see reason. I was nervous after he showed