“Sir. Sir.” It was Louise coming at him with a clipboard like a P.E. coach. “Sir. What’s your name again?”
“Wittman Ah Sing.”
“Right. You’re supposed to be hanging up the bicycles. Not those bicycles. Bring up the new ones from the stockroom, will you? I could bring them up myself. They’re not heavy, just unwieldy.” Give a man credit for muscles, why don’t you?
“I’ll get them,” said co-operative Wittman, glad to get off the floor. Take his own sweet time.
Down in the stockroom, through his own cigarette smoke came fuming the smell of somebody smoking dope. As I live and breathe. Wittman took off his glasses to see. You know, by the time your brain recognizes the smell of reefer, you’re high already. On the way, far out, gone. No innocent passersby. He followed the redolence and the loosening—or are they tightening?—vibes through the mazes of merchandise and came upon a fellow reading at a coffee table, at home as he could be. The radio was on the classical station. The man did not jump to his feet and start working; Wittman must not look boss. Crates had been stacked to block off a private room, and there were extension cords leading to a percolator and reading lamp, all new and belonging to the store. “Come in if you like,” invited this man, who seemed to have it made.
Wittman entered through an opening in the barricade. “You live here?” he asked.
“No, I work here, like you. I’m stockboy.” He seemed too old to be stockboy, his forehead high because balding. An ancient Chinese would have tonsured his head to get such baldness. “Have a seat,” he said, passing Wittman a roach in a paper-match holder.
“No, thanks. I’ll have some coffee, though.” The stockboy unpacked a new cup, blew the wood shavings out of it, and poured coffee. Wittman sat down across from him. “I used to dope, I don’t dope anymore. I’ve seen all there is to see on dope; the trips have been repeating themselves, looping like Dead of Night. I liked dope; I learned a lot. I felt religious. I felt communal. I believed in all sorts of things: the possibility of getting so far out that we pop through to another reality. Change one’s head, change the universe. The paranoia was driving me nuts, however. Too ripped. I don’t like getting wasted anymore. Nice hideout you’ve got here.”
“Yes, I keep out of the way.” He was one of those older guys, hip to the underworld, an ex-con maybe, or a Beatnik who will never sell out. “Work some, hide out some. Make accordion time.” He was giving Wittman valuable, true orders.
“I’m hip,” said Wittman. “I’m hip to accordion time.” Like collecting garbage fast before the sun comes up, and free by morning for the day. Be a garbageman; be a mailman. This stock guy wasn’t a jailhead, then, but wise to jobs, how to work from the inside. “What do you do down here with your extra time?”
“Handle consciousness.”
“Hey, I do too. Me too. I want to do that too, man. How do you do it? Have you found some good ways? Lay low, right?”
“One way—I sit, I hang on to my seat.” He demonstrated—looking straight ahead, arms straight down stiff, shoulders up, hands pulling up on the stool, butt pushing down. “Sit tight,” he said.
“Is it better to keep your eyes open like that? Or is it better to shut them?”
“Open if no horror is … transpiring in the very room. Shut if they’re torturing your family in front of you. Open if your mind goes places. Use your good sense. Slow the centrifugal-force machine down. However, the stopped trip is also dangerous. ‘I. Can’t. Take. My. Eyes. Off. Of. That. Spot. Spot. Spot. Spot.’ The groove-rut is a killer.” He stared at the daisy on the percolator. If he were actually stopped, his facial bones would slam into his skin, not a mind trip but an observable phenomenon. “The hell of whatever’s going on goes on forever.”
“Yeah. Like a short loop of film. ‘When is this trip going to change?’ Though the speed trip is no good either. Eschew speed.”
“There’s nothing to do under either circumstance but wait until you are let go. I would say, as a rule, open eyes is better, don’t get so lost. Find a locus and a focus in this room, for instance, though it becomes crowded with … becomes crowded. I say open—and hang on to your seat.”
Because our Wittman had not been brought up in a religion, he admired this man’s ability to know that something starts us up and stops us and lets us move again, and that there were holy ghosts or something all around. Too much. Far out of sight, as Spenser exclaimed, ripped with amazement in The Faerie Queene. Two intelligent conversations in two days. Oh, yes: “Trippers and askers surround me.” Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop. Wotta Bishop.
“You have a good trip for me?” asked brave Wittman, butt-sitting. “Any good trips?” Be careful what you hear. You set yourself up. You get imprinted with a bad trip, you’re fucked for life. The words don’t come true now, they come true later in some real-life form.
“When I have friends, I take them for a ride on the coast train to Santa Cruz. We carry archery equipment into the redwood mountains. We each shoot an arrow straight up overhead. The red nock feathers look like a space bird blasting off between the evergreens, going up and up clear past the tallest Kings Canyon sequoia into the nothing sky, and hangs there and hangs there. Then the steel tip dips, flashing—it has stabbed the sun and is bringing a piece of it down to us on Earth. The arrow turns and falls. I stand my ground. If it’s going to hit me, it hits me. Last time, it went into the ground between my toes. The friends also shoot all together—a flock of space birds—and run when the arrows rain down. If the weather turns to rain, we put out buckets and cans upside down among the trees, and listen to God’s rhythms.”
Wittman wanted to be one of the friends to do interesting things like that. The eidolons were dancing around the man’s head and cakewalking over to Wittman’s head. Contact high one more time. Their inhalations and exhalations stoked the ions in their halos a-hopping and a-changing. The +’s and -’s a-winking and a-blinking like cartoon eyes.
“I had a pretty good time in the Santa Cruz Mountains myself,” Wittman said, returning good trip for good trip. “I was on my way to the Monterey Jazz Festival, but ended up in those woods too. I saw two kinds of leprechauns, one tall like a tree and the other round like a boulder, kneeling with its gnomish back toward me. When I tried to study them, they went transparent. Their clothes and bearing reminded me of friends of mine. They didn’t say anything.” He had not, once back in cities, asked those friends if they had dreamed or thought of being in a redwood forest at that hour. This new amigo was understanding him and the anti-scientific nature of those woods. Nobody here but us empiricals. The knucklebone maniac of the Santa Cruz Mountains had been on the loose—a cannibal arrested with his pockets full of hikers’ knucklebones—and had skipped them.
The stockman licked two rolling papers together and pushed some grass into line with an eight of hearts. (Another way to handle consciousness is to play solitaire like George in Of Mice and Men.) A neat and graceful roller, he made himself a tight, dry joint, not offering his guest a hit this time.
“Where you from?” Wittman asked, something out-of-state in the way the fellow said “the coast.”
“Back East.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if he were laboring in the sun. “There was a year when I was the Yale Younger Poet.”
“No shit,” said Wittman. “What are you doing here?” Why end up at the same place as me? Where’s the glory? There ought to be ongoing glory. A Yale Younger Poet should be swirling his cape and plumes at the Mandrake and the Blind Lemon, dueling with pretender poets at Mike’s Pool Hall, riding with Jim Young, and Bob Younger, Cole Younger, and the James brothers, Vaughan Williams conducting “Seventeen Come Summer” on the sound track.
“I like my job.”
But what’s there to like being an old stockboy? Was this a poet humbled but not from anything major like war, just the daily shit—job, friends, girlfriends, relatives, food, cleaning up—the ordinary middle-size life stuff that we’re all supposed to handle, and he’s gon
e under?
Even Wittman isn’t so down that he likes his job. There’s a poet’s career, get your ass in gear. First, do a reading in North Beach, non-invitational, get to your feet at The Coffee Gallery or Nepenthe or The Forum, make ass. Find the open mikes, and sing. Stand in doorways of auditoriums where known poets are on platform, and hand-deliver dittos of your own outcast poetry; Richard Brautigan did that. And Bob Kaufman on megaphone in front of the St. Francis Hotel. Bring the poems back to the East Bay to read to Jack Spicer at Robbie’s, the F.O.B. cafeteria men acting like they don’t notice you. Then, single poems published around the country. Yale publishes the first collection. Wittman Ah Sing—the Yale Younger Poet of 1967 or 1968 or 1969. Nineteen seventy at the outermost shot. The Lamont people publish the second collection. And so on. Until you get to be Robert Frost inaugurating the President. And here’s this Yale Younger stock guy getting older and going nowhere, ending up a minor poet, Wittman’s never heard of him. (How is a minority poet a minor poet? You might make a joke on that.)
Ask him what he’s got against the life I want. “Like Einstein said, ‘It is the duty of the scientist to remain obscure.’ You think it’s the duty of the poet to remain obscure?”
“Einstein was feeling bad about the Bomb,” said the Yale Younger Poet. “The Bomb was the penultimate. Einstein died without telling us the last thing he knew.”
“What’s that? Do you have a suspicion what it is?”
“It’s either Nothing, or it’s the malevolence of ultimate reality.”
Were the two of them to sit quietly thinking, they might feel the presence on high of an evil thing that roams the sky. Mention of it brings it closing in. It is hovering over the rooftop. It’s the size of Mt. Diablo. There are probably more than one. Good thing they were in the basement.
“Have you heard the one about spacemen who flew to the end of the universe?” said Wittman, trying to regale the down poet. “In the last wall was a metered telescope. They dropped a dime to see what they could see. ‘Oh, wow. Will you look at that?’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Nothing.’ ”
The Yale Younger guy nodded, smiled.
“This gig leaves your head free for poems, right?” asked Wittman.
“I quit poetry. I don’t write poems anymore.”
“Can you do that? You don’t write it down, but you’re still a poet, huh? You be a poet. You don’t have to do poetry. You be a poet, everything that you do is poetry, right? You don’t need to actually scribe. You have human feelings, you’re a poet regardless of words, which, as you know, especially on dope, are very, very far removed from Things. I had Mark Schorer for Twentieth Century British and American Lit. His face sad and blue like Humphrey Bogart’s, he said that Being beats Doing. He quoted George Sand, ‘He who draws noble delight from poetry is a true poet though he has never written a line in all his life.’ You draw noble delight, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t read poetry much.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for Being yet,” said Wittman. “I’m going to start a theater company. I’m naming it The Pear Garden Players of America. The Pear Garden was the cradle of civilization, where theater began on Earth. Out among the trees, ordinary people made fools of themselves acting like kings and queens. As playwright and producer and director, I’m casting blind. That means the actors can be any race. Each member of the Tyrone family or the Lomans can be a different color. I’m including everything that is being left out, and everybody who has no place. My idea for the Civil Rights Movement is that we integrate jobs, schools, buses, housing, lunch counters, yes, and we also integrate theater and parties. The dressing up. The dancing. The loving. The playing. Have you ever acted? Why don’t you join my theater company? I’ll make a part for you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d have to work for no pay. You might need to chip in for costumes and props.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You don’t mind if I come down here and visit once in a while, and let you know how the play is coming along?”
“Do that.”
Yes, he would. This Yale Younger guy was a real poet, all right. Amazing the creativity that came pouring out in his presence. Now that the Pear Garden in the West had been confided—and promised, twice—it will have to be made to come about.
Wittman rolled two bicycles into the freight elevator. One of these days, he’d have to go to the library and look up the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and see if his new friend looked like any face on a dustjacket. He wasn’t James Agee, he knew that. Agee’s vision of the malevolence of ultimate reality was that we’re cattle grazing green pastures, believing that those who are rounded up go somewhere even more wonderful. A young bull escapes from Chicago and tries to warn the herd about cattle cars and stockyards and mallet guns and meathooks. Agee, another Yale Younger Poet.
Upstairs, Wittman propped one bicycle against the wall and the other on its kickstand. He rolled the ladder under the empty space on the pegboard. He picked up a bicycle by the crossbar and climbed up, but at the top saw that there were no fasteners. With its front tire turned against the board, the bike fit on the shelf okay. Leaving it balanced up there just so, he looked for hooks, which did not seem to be under the cash-register counter either. From that coign of vantage, he saw another shopper leaving her kids. No more Mr. Nice Guy. “Hey. Hey, you. Do I look like a babysitter, huh? This is not a nursery. I am not a babysitter. Don’t you leave your kids here. Take those kids with you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It won’t happen again.” She wasn’t sorry; she’s on her way out of here without kids. Don’t let her get away. Escalate. “Wait a minute. I want to talk to you. You can’t walk off easy.” This minding so much about justice must have to do with being Chinese. “You’re in the big city, ma’am.” Yeah, let her have it. “I’m taking you in to see the manager.” Not meaning that. Never call the cops—a Berkeley rule.
“How come these other children get to stay here?” the woman said. “My children are well behaved. I’m coming right back. I was just going out to put my packages in the car. I’m coming back for them. It’s dangerous to take children across the parking lot without holding them by the hand. Look. Look at how much money I’ve spent in your store.” Her arms were full of bags and boxes with the store’s logo. “I buy here. I buy here, and you can help a customer out for once.” “Backward I see in my own days,” Walt Whitman said, “where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders.”
The bicycle at the top of the ladder was rolling, and when Wittman rushed up to halt it, the mother escaped. And those two pulling out boxes of model cars from the bottom of a stack were hers. Her get. “If you leave those kids here,” he ought to have said, “I’m going to nail their feet to the floor. One foot each. I’m going to teach your vampire kids how to pivot.” The next one, then. He would deal effectively with the next abandoning mother. It was a good thing that photographing babies for a Penny-a-Pound was a concessional job, and he would not be rotated to it.
The hooks were in the drawer with the charge slips. He climbed up with them, but now the bicycle was in the way of places for the hooks. He tried moving it aside farther along the shelf. The wheels turned, carrying his hand along, and it caught under a fender, cutting the skin, bunching a flap up. He pulled the bike the other way, and the gear sprockets and chain chewed into his tie and did not let go. A customer was nagging, “Isn’t anybody around here going to wait on me?” Not me. “You. I’m talking to you.” He lifted the bike connected to his tie, and carried it down the ladder without strangling himself.
His nose to the bicycle seat, good thing nobody’s butt has yet sat upon it, he cut the tie with the dull scissors on a string tied to the counter. The Steppenwolf gnaws his leg free from the trap of steel, he thought.
He wrestled the bicycle up the ladder again, saw that the hooks were still not in place, and brought it down again.
Up again. Insert hooks in pegboard. Down again. Up
one more time with the bike. The hooks did not meet the frame; if part of the bicycle fit on one hook, the rest of it did not fit on any of the others. Down. I have not found right livelihood; this is not my calling. Oh, what a waste of my one and only human life and now-time.
“It’s time for the presentation,” Louise was saying to him, the bicycle again on the verge of the shelf, maybe to topple on a customer or her. “Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.” Though nobody else seems to be taking charge of the floor, the two of them are about to leave? He acted as if he knew exactly what she was talking about. The way to hang on to a job is to pretend you understand whatever’s going on. Figure it out as you go along.
Louise, clutching a long clutch purse under an arm, handed him her wrap for him to help her into it. “Hold my shrug, please?” she said. It’s probably called a shrug because it would fall off if she shrugged. She wiped her hands on her skirt. Sausage skin. She led the way to the street level and out the main entrance, letting him hold the door open, like they were on a date.
How dark it was already. Day was gone, and he had just gotten up. The fog was dropping a veiling—a star-filter—over the streetlights and headlights, already on. Five o’clock, and most people were rushing home. They had commuted here before daylight, which shone on them on their too few days off. How fucked up they must be. Like veals that spend their lives in the dark.
“Get us a taxi. The store’s paying for a taxi,” Louise was saying, straddling the curb, finger in the air. She must be from New York. Don’t you order a cab by phoning for it? A cab with no passenger came out of the fog; his hand shot up like in the movies, and—surprise—it pulled that obedient cab right over. (His being so cheaply surprised—this being new at almost every dumb thing—must also have to do with being Chinese, or will it go away with age?)