Words …
The stars are words …
Who succeeded? Who failed?
16
Ah yair, and when
I gets to Third and
Townsend,
I’ll ketch me
the Midnight Ghost—
We’ll roll right down
to San Jose
As quick as you can boast—
—Ah ha, Midnight,
midnight ghost,
Ole Zipper rollin
down the line—
Ah ha, Midnight,
midnight ghost,
Rollin
down
the
line
We’ll come a blazing
To Watson-ville,
And whang on through
the line—
Salinas Valley
in the night,
On down to Apaline—
Whoo Whoo
Whoo ee
Midnight Ghost
Clear t’Obispo Bump
—Take on a helper
and make that mountain,
and come on down the town,
—We’ll rail on through
to Surf and Tangair
and on down by the sea—
The moon she shines
the midnight ocean
goin down the line—
Gavioty, Gavioty,
O Gavi-oty,
Singin and drinkin wine—
Camarilla, Camarilla,
Where Charley Parker
went mad
We’ll roll on to L.A.
—O Midnight
midnight,
midnight ghost,
rollin down the line.
Sainte Teresa
Sainte Teresa, dont you worry,
We’ll make it on time,
down that midnight
line
And that’s how I figure I’ll make San Francisco to L.A. in 12 hours, ridin the Midnight Ghost, under a lashed truck, the First-class Zipper freight train, zooam, zom, right down, sleepingbag and wine—a daydream in the form of a song.
17
Getting tired of looking at all the angles of my lookout, as for instance, looking at my sleeping-bag in the morning from the point of view of opening it again at night, or at my stove with high supper heat of midafternoon from the point of view of midnight when the mouse’ll be scratching in it cold, I turn my thoughts to Frisco and I see it like a movie what’ll be there when I get there, I see myself in my new (to-be-bought-in-Seattle-I-plan) black large-sized leather jacket that hangs and ties over my waist low (mebbe hangs over my hands) and my new gray Chino pants and new wool sports shirt (orange and yellow and blue!) and my new haircut, there I go bleakfaced Decembering the steps of my Skid Row Chinatown hotel; or else I’m at Simon Darlovsky’s pad at 5 Turner Terrace in the crazy Negro housing project at Third & 22nd where you see the giant gastanks of eternity and a whole vista of the smoky industrial Frisco including the bay and the railroad mainline and factories—I see myself, rucksack on one shoulder, coming in the ever-unlocked backdoor to Lazarus’ bedroom (Lazarus is Simon’s strange 15½ year old mystic brother who never says anything but “D’ja have any dreams?”) (last night in your sleep?) (he means), I come in, it’s October, they’re at school, I go out and buy ice cream, beer, canned peaches, steaks and milk and stock the icebox and when they come home at late afternoon and in the courtyard the little kids have started screaming for Fall Dusk Joy, I’ve been at that kitchen table all day drinking wine and reading the papers, Simon with his bony hawk nose and crazy glittering green eyes and glasses looks at me and says through his ever-sinus nostrils “Jack! You! When’d you get here, hnf!” as he sniffs (horribly the torment of his sniff, I hear it now, cant tell how he breathes)—“Just today—look, the icebox is full of food—Mind if I stay here a few days?”—“Plenty room”—Lazarus is behind him, wearing his new suit and all combed to make the junior highschool lovelies, he just nods and smiles and then we’re having a big feast and Lazarus finally says “Where dja sleep last night?” and I say “In a yard in Berkeley” so he says “Djav any dreams?”—So tell him a long dream. And at midnight when Simon and I have gone out walking all the way up Third Street drinking wine and talking about girls and talking to the spade whores across from the Cameo Hotel and going to North Beach to look for Cody and the gang, Lazarus all alone in the kitchen fries himself three steaks for a midnight snack, he’s a big goodlooking crazy kid, one of many Darlovsky brothers, in the madhouse most of them, for some reason, and Simon hitch hiked all the way to New York to rescue Laz and brought him back to live with him, on relief, two Russian brothers, in the city, in the void, Irwin’s protégés, Simon a Kafka writer—Lazarus a mystic who stares at pictures of monsters on weird magazines, for hours, and wanders around the city zombie like, and when he was 15 claimed he would weigh 300 pounds before the year was out and also had set himself a deadline to make a million dollars by New Year’s Eve—to this crazy pad Cody ofttimes goes in his shabby blue brakeman’s uniform and sits at the kitchen table then leaps out and jumps in his car yelling “Short on time!” and races off to North Beach to look for the gang or to work to catch his train, and girls everywhere in the streets and in our bars and the whole Frisco scene one insane movie—I see myself arriving on the scene, across that screen, looking around, all done with desolation—White masts of ships at the foot of streets.
I see myself wandering among the wholesale markets—down past the deserted MCS union hall where I’d tried so hard to get a ship, for years—There I go, chewing on a Mister Goodbar—
I wander by Gump’s department store and look in the art-frame shop where Psyche, who always wears jeans and turtle-neck sweater with a little white collar falling over, works, whose pants I would like to remove and just leave the turtle-neck sweater and the little collar and the rest is all for me and all too sweet for me—I stand in the street staring in at her—I sneak by our bar several times (The Place) and peek in—
18
I wake up and I’m on desolation peak and the firs are motionless in the blue morning—Two butterflies comport, with worlds of mountains as their backdrop—My clock ticks the slow day—While I slept and traveled in dreams all night, the mountains didnt move at all and I doubt they dreamed—
I go out to fetch a pail of snow to put in my old tin washtub that reminds me of my grandfather’s in Nashua and I find that my shovel has disappeared from the snowbank on the precipice, I look down and figure it will be a long climb down and up but I can’t see it—Then I do see it, right in the mud at the foot of the snow, on a ledge, I go down very carefully, slipping in the mud, for fun yank out a big boulder from the mud and kick it down, it goes booming and crashes on a rock and splits in two and thunders 1500 feet down to where I see the final rock of it rolling in long snowfields and coming to rest against boulders with a knock that I only hear 2 seconds later—Silence, the beautiful gorge shows no sign of animal life, just firs and alpine heather and rocks, the snow beside me blinds whitely in the sun, I loose down at the cerulean neutral lake a look of woe, little pink or almost brown clouds hover in its mirror, I look up and there’s mighty Hozomeen redbrown pinnacles high in the sky—I get the shovel and come up carefully in the mud, slipping—fill the pail with clean snow, cover the stash of carrots and cabbage in a new deep snowhole, and go back, dumping the lump in the tin tub and splashing water over the sides onto my dusty floor—Then I get an old pail and like the old Japanese woman go down among beautiful heather meadows and gather sticks for my stove. It’s Saturday afternoon all over the world.
19
“If I were in frisco now,” I think in my chair in the late aftersolitudes, “I’d buy a great big quart of Christian Brothers Port or some other excellent special brand and go up to my Chinatown room and empty half its contents in an empty pint, stick that in my pocket, and take off, around the little streets of Chinatown watching the children, the little Chinese children so h
appy with their little hands in their parents’ wrapt, I’d look in grocery stores and see the noncommittal Zen butchers cutting the necks of chickens, I’d gaze water mouthed at the beautiful glazed cured roasted ducks in the window, I’d wander around, stand on the corner of Italian Broadway too, to get the feel of life, blue skies and white clouds above, I’d go back and into the Chinese movie with my pint and sit there drinking it (from now, 5 P.M.) three hours digging the weird scenes and unheard-of dialogs and developments and maybe some of the Chinese would see me drink-a-pint and they’d think “Ah, a drunken white man in the Chinese movie”—at 8 I’d come out to a blue dusk with sparkling lights of San Francisco on all the magic hills around, now I’d refill my pint in the hotel room and really take off for a long hike around the city, to work up an appetite for my midnight feast in a booth in Sun Heung Hung’s marvelous old restaurant—I’d strike over the hill, over Telegraph, and right down to the rail spur where I know a place in a narrow alley where I can sit and drink and wallgaze a vast black cliff that has magic vibratory properties that send back messages of swarming holy light in the night, I know I tried it—then, drinking, sipping, re-capping the bottle, I walk the lonely way along the Embarcadero through Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant areas where the seals break my heart with their coughing cries of love, I go, past shrimp counters, out, past the masts of the last docked ships, and then up Van Ness and over and down into the Tenderloin—the winking marquees and bars with cocktail cherrysticks, the sallow characters the old alcoholic blondes stumbling to the liquor store in slacks—then I go (wine almost gone and me high and glad) down main arterial Market Street and the honkytonk of sailors, movies, and sodafountains, across the alley and into Skid Row (finishing my wine there, among scabrous old doorways chalked and be-pissed and glass-crashed by a hundred thousand grieving souls in Goodwill rags) (the same old boys who roam the freights and cling to little bits of paper on which you always find some kind of prayer or philosophy)—Wine finished, I go singing and handclapping quietly to the beat of my feet all the way up Kearney back to Chinatown, almost midnight now, and I sit in the Chinatown park on a dark bench and take the air, drinking in the sight of the foody delicious neons of my restaurant blinking in the little street, occasionally crazy drunks go by in the dark looking for half finished bottles on the ground, or, butts, and across Kearney there you see the blue cops goin in and out of the big gray jailhouse—Then I go in my restaurant, order from the Chinese menu, and instantly they bring me smoked fish, curried chicken, fabulous duck cakes, unbelievably delicious and delicate silver platters (on stems) containing steaming marvels, that you raise the cover off and look and sniff—with tea pot, cup, ah I eat—and eat—till midnight—maybe then over tea write a letter to beloved Ma, telling her—then, done, I either go to bed or to our bar, The Place, to find the gang and get drunk …
20
On a soft august evening I scramble down the slope of the mountain and find a steep place to sit crosslegged near firs and blasted old tree stumps, facing the moon, the yellow halfmoon that’s sinking into the mountains to the southwest—In the western sky, warm rose—About 8:30—The wind over the mile-down lake is balmy and reminiscent of all the ideas you’ve ever had about enchanted lakes—I pray and ask Awakener Avalokitesvara to lay his diamond hand on my brow and give me the immortal understanding—He is the Hearer and Answerer of Prayer, I know that this business is self hallucination and crazy business but after all it is only the awakeners (the Buddhas) who have said they do not exist—In about twenty seconds comes this understanding to my mind and heart: “When a baby is born he falls asleep and dreams the dream of life, when he dies and is buried in his grave he wakes up again to the Eternal Ecstasy”—“And when all is said and done, it doesnt matter”—
Yea, Avalokitesvara did lay his diamond hand …
And then the question of why, why, it’s only the Power, the one mental nature exuding its infinite potentialities—What a strange feeling reading that in Vienna in February of 1922 (month before I was born) such and such was going on in the streets, how could there have been a Vienna, nay even the conception of a Vienna before I was born?!—It’s because the one mental nature goes on, has nothing to do with individual arrivers and departers that bear it and fare in it and that are fared in by it—So that 2500 years ago was Gotama Buddha, who thought up the greatest thought in Mankind, a drop in the bucket those years in that Mental Nature which is the Universal Mind—I see in my mountainside contentment that the Power delights and joys in both ignorance and enlightenment, else there wouldnt be ignorant existence alongside enlightened inexistence, why should the Power limit itself to one or the other—whether as the form of pain, or as impalpable ethers of formlessness and painlessness, what matters it?—And I see the yellow moon a-sinkin as the earth rolls away, I twist my neck around to see upsidedown and the mountains of the earth are just those same old hanging bubbles hanging into an unlimited sea of space—Ah, if there was another sight besides eye sight what atomic other levels wouldnt we see?—but here we see moons, mountains, lakes, trees and sentient beings only, with our eyesight—The Power delights in all of it—It is reminding itself that it is the Power, that’s why, for it, The Power, is really only ecstasy, and its manifestations dream, it is the Golden Eternity, ever peaceful, this bleary dream of existence is just a blear in its—I run out of words—The warm rose in the west becomes a hushed pastel park of gray, the soft evening sighs, little animals rustle in the heather and holes, I shift my cramped feet, the moon yellows and mellows and finally begins to hit the topmost crag and as always you see silhouetted in its magic charm some snag or stump that looks like the legendary Coyotl, God of the Indians, about to howl to the Power—
O what peace and content I feel, coming back to my shack knowing that the world is a babe’s dream and the ecstasy of the golden eternity is all we’re going back to, to the essence of the Power—and the Primordial Rapture, we all know it—I lie on my back in the dark, hands joined, glad, as the northern lights shine like a Hollywood premiere and at that too I look upside-down and see that it’s just big pieces of ice on earth reflecting the other-side sun in some far daylight, in fact, too, the curve of the earth silhouetted is also seen arching over and around—Northern lights, bright enough to light my room, like ice moons.
What content to know that when all is said and done it doesnt matter—Woes? the piteousnesses I feel when I think of my mother?—but it all has to be roused and remembered, it isnt there by itself, and that’s because the mental nature is by nature free of the dream and free of everything—It’s like those pipesmoking Deist philosophers who say “O mark the marvelous creation of God, the moon, the stars etc., would you trade it for anything?” not realizing they wouldnt be saying this at all if it wasnt for some primordial memory of when, of what, of how nothing was—“It’s only recent,” I realize, looking at the world, some recent cycle of creation by The Power to joy in its reminder to its selfless self that it is The Power—and all of it in its essence swarming tender mystery, that you can see by closing your eyes and letting the eternal silence in your ears—that blessedness and bliss surely to be believed, my dears—
The awakeners, if they choose, are born as babes—This is my first awakening—There are no awakeners and no awakening.
In my shack I lie, remembering the violets in our backyard on Phebe Avenue when I was eleven, on June nights, the blear dream of it, ephemeral, haunted, long gone, going further out, till it shall be all gone out.
21
I wake up in the middle of the night and remember Maggie Cassidy and how I might have married her and been old Finnegan to her Irish Lass Plurabelle, how I might have got a cottage, a little ramshackle Irish rose cottage among the reeds and old trees on the banks of the Concord and woulda worked as a grim bejacketed gloved and bebaseballhatted brakeman in the cold New England night, for her and her Irish ivory thighs, her and her marshmallow lips, her and her brogue and “God’s Green Earth” and her two daughters—How
I would of laid her across the bed at night all mine and laborious sought her rose, her mine of a thing, that emerald dark and hero thing I want—remember her silk thighs in tight jeans, the way she folded back one thigh under her hands and sighed as we watched Television together—in her mother’s parlor that last haunted 1954 trip I took to October Lowell—Ah, the rose vines, the river mud, the run of her, the eyes—A woman for old Duluoz? Unbelievable by my stove in desolation midnight that it should be true—Maggie Adventure—
The claws of black trees by moonlit rosy dusk mayhap and by chance hold me much love too, and I can always leave them and roam along—but when I’m old by my final stove, and the bird fritters on his branch of dust in O Lowell, what’ll I think, willow?—when winds creep inside my sack and give me bareback blues and I go bent about my meritorious duties in the sod-cover earth, what lovesongs then for old bedawdler bog bent foggy Jack O—?—no new poets will bring laurels like honey to my milk, sneers—Sneers of love woman were better I guess—I’d fall down ladders, brabac, and wash me river underwear—gossip me washlines—air me Mondays—fantasm me Africas of housewives—Lear me daughters—panhandle me marble heart—but it might have been better than what it may be, lonesome unkissed Duluoz lips surling in a tomb
22
Early sunday mornings I always remember home in Ma’s house in Long Island, recent years, when she’s reading the Sunday papers and I get up, shower, drink a cup of wine, read the scores and then eat the charming little breakfast she’ll lay out for me, just all I have to do is ask her, her special way of crisping bacon and the way she sunnysides the eggs—The TV not turned because there’s nothing much of note on Sunday mornings—I grieve to think that her hair is turning gray and she’s 62 and will be 70 when I’m in my owlish 40’s—soon it will be my “old mother”—in the bunk I try to think of how I’ll take care of her—
Then as day lengthens and Sunday drags and the mountains wear the pious dullish aspect Sabbathini I always begin to think instead of earlier days in Lowell when the redbrick mills were so haunted by the riverside about 4 in the afternoon, the kids coming home from the Sunday movies, but O the sad redbrick and everywhere in America you see it, in the reddening sun, and clouds beyond, and people in their best clothes in all that—We all stand on the sad earth throwing long shadows, breath cut with flesh.