I walk across the hot road towards the town, I’m going to buy a new pair of shoes—First I comb my hair in a gas station and come out and there’s a goodlooking woman busy at her work on the sidewalk (arranging cans) and her pet raccoon comes up to me at’s squattin there rolling a cigarette a minute, brings long strange delicate nose to my fingertips and wants to eat—
Then I start off—across the curving road is a factory plant, a guy on duty in there keeps watching me with great interest—“Look at that guy with a rucksack on his back thumbin down the road, where the hell’s he goin? where’s he comin from?” He looks at me so much I keep moving, t’duck into bushes for a quick leak, and out across tarns and oil-meadow ditches between superhighway macadams, and come out and lope with the big nail-split cracking shoes into Sedro-Woolley proper—My first stop will be the bank, there’s a bank, a few people stare as I burden by—Yeah, the career of Jack the Great Walking Saint is only begun, holily he goes into banks and cashes government checks into traveler’s checks—
I choose a pretty schoolmarm redhead delicate girl with blue believing eyes and tell her I want trav-checks and where I’m going and where I’ve been and she evinces interest, so much so when I say “I gotta get a haircut” (meaning all summer mountains) she says “You dont look like you need a haircut” and appraises me, and I know she loves me, and I love her, and I know tonight I can walk hand in hand with her to the starlit banks of the Skagit and she wont care what I do, sweet—she’ll let me violate her everywhichway, that’s what she wants, the women of America need mates and lovers, they stand in marble banks all day and deal with paper and paper they’re served at the Drive-In after Paper Movies, they want kissing lips and rivers and grass, as of old—I get so engrossed in her pretty body and sweet eyes and gentle brow under gentle red bangs, and little freckles, and gentle wrists, I dont notice that behind me a line of six people has amassed, old angry jealous women and young guys in a hurry, I pull out fast, with my checks, pick up my bag and sling out—Take one look back, she’s busy with next customer—
Here’s the time anyway for my first beer in ten weeks.
There’s the saloon … next door.
It’s hot afternoon.
63
I get a beer at the big shiny bar and sit at a table, back to the bar, and roll a smoke, and here comes an old doddering man of 80 with a cane, sits at table next to me and waits with bleary eyes—O Gauguin! O Proust! had I been your kind of painter or writer, I’d give a description of that eaten and mungy face, prophecy of all men’s sorrow, no rivers no lips no starlit cunts for that sweet old loser, and all is ephemeral, all is lost anyway—Takes him five minutes to dig out his little dollar—Holds it trembling—Still staring at the bar—The bartender is busy—“Why doesnt he get up and go get his beer?”—Aw, it’s a prideful story in the afternoon in the bar in Sedro-Woolley in northwest Washington in the world in the void that’s desolation upsidedown—Finally he starts to rattle his cane and knock for service—I drink my beer, get another—I think of getting his beer for him—Why interfere? Black Jack’s liable to walk in with all guns blazing and I’ll be famous throughout the West for shooting Slade Hickox in the back? The Chihuahua Kid, I say nothing—
The two beers dont hit me right, I realize there’s no need for alcohol whatever in your soul—
I go out to buy my shoes—
Main Street, stores, sporting goods, basketballs, footballs for coming Autumn—Elmer the happy kid’s about to swim in the air above the football field and eat big steaks at school banquets and get his letter, I know—I go in a store and clomp to the back and take off the clod-hoppers and the kid gives me blue canvas shoes with thick soft soles, I put em on and stroll, it’s like walking in heaven—I buy em, leave the old shoes there, and walk out—
Squat against a wall and light a cigarette and dig the little afternoon city, there’s the hay and grain feed silo outside town, the railroad, the lumberyard, just like in Mark Twain, that’s where Sam Grant got a million of em for the graves of the Civil War—this sleepy atmosphere’s what gave birth to the fire in Stonewall Jackson’s Virginian soul, whittle—
Okay, I cut off—back down to the highway, over the tracks, and out on the bend getting traffic three ways—
Wait about fifteen minutes.
“In hitch hiking,” I think now, to steadfast up my soul, “you get good Karma and bad Karma, the good makes up for the bad, somewhere down that road” (I look and there it is, haze-ends, hopeless no-name nothing of us) “is the guy who’ll take you clear to Seattle for your newspapers and wine tonight, be kind and wait”—
Who does stop is a blond kid with ulcers who cant play on the Sedro-Woolley High football team because of that, but was a rising star (my hunch is, he was the best), but’s allowed to wrestle on the wrestling team, he has big thighs and arms, 17, I was a wrestler too (Blackmask Champeen of the block) so we talk about wrestling—“That’s official wrestling where you get on all fours, and the guy behind you, and go?”
“That’s right, none of this TV bullshit stuff—the real”
“How do they count points?”
That long complicated answer gets me clear to Mount Vernon but I suddenly feel sorry for him, that I cant stay wrestle with him, and even toss footballs, he’s really a lonely American kid, like the girl, looking for uncomplicated friendship, purity of angels, I shudder to think of the claques and cliques in high school tearing him apart and his parents and his doctor’s warnings and all he’s got is pie at night, no moon—We shake hands, and I get off, and here I am in the 4 P.M. hot sun with cars coming home from work in a steady stream, on a corner, in front of a gas station, everybody so concerned about wheeling the corner they cant examine me so I hang there almost an hour.
Funny, eerie, a man in a Cadillac is parked there waiting for someone, at first when he pulls off I thumb him, he smirks and does a U-turn and parks across the street, then he starts up and U-turns again and passes me again (by this time I’m mum) and parks again, harried nervous face, O America what have you done to your children machine! Yet the stores are full of the best food in the world, delicious goodies, the new peach crop, melons, all the butterfat fruit of the Skagit rich with slugs and damp earth—Then here comes an MG and my God it’s Red Coan driving it, with a girl, he said he’d be in Washington this summer, he does a violent U-turn in the garage driveway as I yell “Hey Red!” and just as I yell it I see it’s not Red and my the smirk of I-dont-know-you he puts on, not even a smirk, a snarl, snarling at his clutch and wheel, zip, around he goes and roars off farting fumes in my face, some Red Coan—and even then I’m not sure if it wasn’t really him, changed and mad—and mad at me—
Bleak.
Blook.
Void.
But here comes a 90- or 80-year-old octogenarian poctogenarian patriarchtirian aryan with white hair sitting low and old behind a high wheel, stops for me, I run up, ope the door, he winks. “Get in, young feller—I can take you some ways up the road.”
“How far?”
“Oh—few miles.”
It’ll be just like Kansas again (1952) when I was taken few miles up the road and ended up in the sunset on an open plains stretch everybody balls by at 80 aiming for Denver and nothing else—But I shrug, “Karma-karma,” and get in—
He talks a little bit, not much, I can see he’s real old, he’s funny too—He goes palootzing his old heap along, passes everybody, gets out on the straightaway and starts battin 80 miles an hour across the farmlands—“My God, what if he has a heart attack!”—“Nothing slow about you, is there?” I say, keeping my eye on him and the wheel—
“No sirree”
He goes even faster …
Now I’m being ferried to ole Hotsapho Buddhaland across the river of No-Rivers by a mad old Bodhisattva Saint—who’ll either get me there fast or not at all—There’s your Karma, ripe as peaches.
I hang on—After all he aint drunk, like the fat guy in Georgia (1955) who did 80 in soft sh
oulders and kept looking at me not the road and was reeking with moonshine, from him I got off ahead of my schedule and took a bus to Birmingham I was so shook up—
No, it’s Pappy deposits me all right at a farm gate in the open, there’s his tree-elm porch, his pigs, we shake hand and he goes off to supper—
I’m out there with cars flying by, I know I’m stuck for a time—Getting late too—
But equipment truck slurs up and slows down and plows balloons of dust for me in the shoulder, I run and jump on—Fancy your Heroes! This is a big Two-Tone Butch Champeen I.W.W. bigfist tarp of a sailorman aint afraid of no man and more than that can talk and more than that builds bridges and behind him’s his bridge building concretes and crowbars and tools—And when I tell him I’m going to Mexico he says: “Yeah, Mexico, me and the wife put the kids in the trailer and took off—went all the way to Central America—Slept and ate in the trailer—I let my wife do the Spanish talkin—I had me a few tequilas in bars here and there—Good education for the kids—Just come back last week from a smaller trip around Montana and down to East Texas and back”—And I can picture any banditos trying to get tough with him, he’s 230 pounds of proud bone and muscle—what he could do with a wrench or a crowbar I’d hate to Orozco in spaghetti-sauce paint—He drives me to Everett, and lets me off in the hot late sun of a dismal semi-Main Drag with suddenly a dismal redbrick fire-house and clock and I feel awful—The vibrations in Everett are low—Angry workers stream by in cars stinking exhaust—Nobody deigns to look at me but to sneer—It’s awful, it’s hell—I begin to realize I should be back in my mountain sack on a cold moonlit night. (The Everett Massacre!)
But no! The adventure parade goes Karma-ing down—I’m in it to the end, dead—I’ll have to wash my teeth and spend money until the ends of time, until at least that day I’m the last old woman on the earth gnawing on the last bone in the final cave and I cackle my last prayer on the last night before I dont wake up no more—Then it’ll be bartering with the angels in heaven but with that special astral speed and ecstasy so maybe we wont mind at all then, seems—But O Everett! Tall stacks of sawmill yards and distant bridges, and heat no-hope in the pavement—
In desperation after a half hour I go in a luncheonette and order a hamburger and milkshake—for while hitch hiking I allow my food budget to go up—The girl in there is so studiedly cold I fall even deeper in despair, she’s well shaped and neat but bleak and has feelingless blue eyes and in fact she’s all interested in some middleaged guy in there who’s just then taking off for Las Vegas to gamble, his car’s parked outside, and when he leaves she calls “Take me for a ride in your car sometime” and he’s so sure of himself it amazes and enrages me, “O I’ll think about it,” or some such airy reply, and I look at him and he’s got a crew cut and glasses and looks mean—He gets in his car and drives off to Las Vegas through all that—I can barely eat—I pay the bill and hurry out—Go across the road with fullpack—ugh, oy—I’ve finally hit bottom (of the mountain).
64
I’m standing there in the sun and dont notice the football scrimmage going on in the sun-glare behind me to the west, until a hitch hiking sailor walks by and says “Signals, hip hip” and I look and see him and the game of kids simultaneously and even then simultaneously a car driven by an interested face stops, and I run to get on, looking my last look at the football game where just then a kid is carrying the ball through tackle and is smothered—
I jump in the car and see it’s some kind of secret fag, which means good hearted anyway, so I speak up for the sailor, “He’s hitch hiking too,” and we pick him up too, and three in the front seat light fresh cigarettes and drive to Seattle, just like that.
Desultory talk about the Navy—how dreary, “I was stationed at Bremerton and I used to come over on Sadday nights but it was much better when I was transferred to—” and I close my eyes—Evincing some interest in the driver’s school, Washington U., he offers to drop me off on the campus, I bring it up myself, so we drop the sailor on the way (lackadaisical dont-care sailor hitch hiking with his girl’s underwear in a paper bag which I thought was full of peaches, he shows me the silk slip on top)—
The University of Washington campus is all right and pretty Eternal with big new million-windowed dorms and long late walks leading from traffic frenzies and O the whole college-in-the-city scene, it’s like Chinaman to me, I cant make it out, my pack’s too heavy anyway, I take the first bus into downtown Seattle and soon as we’re flying by old slips of sea water with ancient scows in em, and red sun sinks behind the masts and shedrooves, that’s better, I understand that, it’s old Seattle of the fog, old Seattle the City in the shroud, old Seattle I’d read about as a kid in phantom detective books and I’d read about in Blue Books for Men all about the old days a hundred men breaking into the embalmer’s cellar and drinking embalming fluid and all dying, and all being Shanghaied to China that way, and mud flats—Little shacks with seagulls.
Girls’ footprints
in the sand
—Old mossy pile
The Seattle of ships—ramps—docks—totem poles—old locomotives switching on the waterfront—steam, smoke—Skid Row, bars—Indians—the Seattle of my boyhood vision I see there in the rusted old junkyard with old non color fence leaning in a general maze—
Wooden house
raw gray—
Pink light in the window
I tell the busdriver to let me off downtown, I jump off and go klomping past City Halls and pigeons down to the general direction of the water where I know I’ll find a good clean Skid Row room with bed and hot bath down the hall—
I go all the way down to First Avenue and turn left, leaving the shoppers and the Seattleites behind, and lo! here’s all humanity hep and weird wandering on the evening sidewalk amazing me outa my eyeballs—Indian girls in slacks, with Indian boys with Tony Curtis haircuts—twisted—arm in arm—families of old Okie fame just parked their car in the lot, going down to the market for bread and meat—Drunks—The doors of bars I fly by incredible with crowded sad waiting humanity, fingering drinks and looking up at the Johnny Saxton-Carmen Basilio fight on TV—And bang! I realize it’s Friday Night all over America, in New York it’s just ten o’clock and the fight’s started in the Garden and longshoremen in North River bars are all watching the fight and drinking 20 beers apiece, and Sams are sitting in the front row of the fight betting, you can see them on the screen, handpainted neckties from Miami—In fact all over America it’s Friday Fight Night and it’s a Big Fight—Even in Arkansas they’re watching it in the poolhall and out in the cotton patch house on TV—everywhere—Chicago—Denver—cigar smoke all over—and Ah the sad faces, now I’d forgotten and I see and remember, while I spent all summer pacing and praying in mountaintops, of rock and snow, of lost birds and bears, these people’ve been sucking on cigarettes and drinks and pacing and praying in their souls too, in their own way—And it’s all writ on the scars of their faces—I must go in that bar.
I turn back and go in.
Throw my pack on the floor, get a beer at the crowded bar, sit down at a table, occupied by another old man facing the other way out the street, and I roll a joint and watch the fight and the faces—It’s warm, humanity is warm, and it’s got potential love in it, I can see it—I’m a pure fresh daisy, I know—I could deliver them a speech and remind them and reawake them—Even then I see in their faces the boredom of “Oh we know, we’ve heard all that, and we’ve been down here all this time waitin and prayin and watching the fights on Friday nights—and drinkin”—My God they ben drinkin! Every one is a lush, I can see it—Seattle!
I have nothing to offer them but my stupid face, which I avert anyway—The bartender’s busy and has to step over my pack, I move it aside, he says “Thanks”—Meanwhile Basilio’s not hurt by Saxton’s light punches, he steps in and wallops him all over—it’s guts against brains and guts’ll win—Everybody in the bar is Basilio guts, I’m just brains—I have to hurry out of
there—At midnight they’ll put on a fight of their own, the young toughs in the booth—You gotta be a nutty wild masochistic Johnny O New York to go to Seattle and take up fist-fighting in bars! You gotta have scars! Backgrounds of pain! Suddenly I’m writing like Céline—
I get out of there and go get my Skid Row hotel room for the night.
A night in Seattle.
Tomorrow, the road to Frisco.
65
Hotel Stevens is an old clean hotel, you look in the big windows and see a clean tile floor and spittoons and old leather chairs and a clock talkin and a silver-rimmed clerk in the cage—$1.75 for one night, steep for Skid Row, but no bed bugs, that’s important—I buy my room and go up in the elevator with the gent, second floor, and get my room—Throw my pack in the rocking chair, lay on the bed—Soft bed, clean sheets, reprieve and retreat till 1 P.M. checkout time tomorrow—