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You had to get drunk and get your gun and shoot off more bullets than the other guy. It was all so competitive and so incestuous. Everybody knew everybody else and was sleeping with everybody else, et cetera.”
    Hinckle, after the easy score, made no effort to follow up or check on other sources. Ken Kelley found himself caught in the crossfire when the story broke. Two weeks later, he published more reflective feelings (“That’s the way I am right now. Richard is dead, and I just feel rotten.”) in a piece for Express , a free weekly newspaper serving the East Bay. By then it was too late.
    Seymour Lawrence, Russell Chatham, and Terry McDonell (assistant managing editor) of Newsweek wrote letters to the Chronicle , denouncing Hinckle’s column. Chatham called Warren Hinckle “a piece of festering tripe,” and denounced Kelley. The painter suggested that “The word macho should be sculpted out of used razorblades and rudely rammed up the ass of every insensitive moron like yourself, who misunderstands and misapplies it every time they are called upon to discuss art or artists who are not domesticated or properly shelved and labeled.” In a note to Ken Kelley, Hinckle called these letters “Hit mail from the Brautigan Mafia.” The Chronicle never printed any of their angry words.
    The most astonishing Brautigan news story to break on that late October Saturday originated in Tacoma, Washington, the city of the writer’s birth. Having seen a report of Richard’s presumed death on television in San Francisco the night before, his half brother, David Folston, telephoned their mother, Mary Lou Folston, at her home in Eugene, Oregon, to deliver the sad news. She told the press they had “corresponded frequently,” but in truth, Mary Lou had not seen or heard from her first-born son in over twenty-eight years. Still, she proudly followed his career and growing fame since he burst onto the national scene in 1969.
    After the call from her surviving son, Mary Lou phoned her sister, Eveline Fjetland, in Tacoma, to share the bad tidings and ask for a favor. This involved making contact with her first husband, a seventy-six-year-old retired laborer named Bernard Brautigan, who still lived in the area. When she left him, five decades earlier, Mary Lou neglected to mention she was pregnant. Now, she wanted him to know the truth. When Eveline phoned the elder Brautigan and told
him Richard had been found dead in Bolinas, he replied, “Who’s Richard? I don’t know nothing about him.”
    Confused, Bernard Brautigan made a long-distance call from Tacoma. He had not spoken with his ex-wife in fifty years. Their conversation was brief and unpleasant. When Brautigan asked Mary Lou for an explanation, she snapped, “You know I was pregnant when you left.”
    â€œThe hell I did!” he said and hung up.
    Denying ever having had a son to the press, Bernard said, “If I had anything to do with it, how come she waited fifty years to tell me?” In her own telephone interview, Mary Lou was also evasive. “He asked me if Richard was his son, and I said no. I told him I found Richard in the gutter. I just packed my things in a bag and left. Richard never questioned who his father was and never was interested in it.” In her opinion, there was no need to dwell further on the matter. “It’s a dead issue,” she said.
    The next day, Sunday, October 28, Richard Brautigan’s remains were cremated at the Pleasant Hills crematory in Sebastopol, California. There was no formal service. Mary Lou Folston had not been informed of the funeral plans. Like some perverted metaphor, the writer’s hands and his jaws remained sealed in evidence bags, awaiting further tests. What became of them is not known. Brautigan’s ashes were placed in a Japanese ceramic funeral urn. When he departed Montana for Europe and Japan the year before, Richard left the