—How about a ride?
—Got any gas money?
—Sure.
Finally highballing it across Nevada in a decrepit Dodge with an unemployed musician. Didn't feel comfortable until we got past the Great Salt Lake and through Wendover and into Nevada which runs Texas a close second as the most hostile place in the nation. By the time we reached Elko and stopped for something to eat we had talked about jazz for four hours and were absolutely stoned on what he called Yucatan Gold. In another twenty-four hours we would cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, assuming the car held up in the hundred-degree Nevada heat.
When I left my blind of ferns I estimated it to be about mid-afternoon, the sun warm and hazy and a slight breeze controlling the mosquitoes. The lake was rippling now and the water pushed by the wind cast small waves on the far shore. I felt exhilarated for no particular reason—for all it mattered on earth the forest I was standing in could have been a far province of China four thousand years ago. Not even a jet contrail to befoul the sky, the birds in their afternoon silence and a single turkey buzzard so high that it was scarcely visible. Maybe I'll talk in Chinese to myself and see if the FBI has infiltrated the swamps. I thought of continuing on around the lake to look at new territory but dropped the idea in favor of fishing at the creek mouth or in the beaver pond. I wanted enough fish to glut myself for dinner, then sleep would come easily without fantasies of whiskey.
The water near the creek mouth turned out to be fairly rough, lacking the pellucid clarity of the morning. Writers for “outdoor” magazines are always referring to “gin clear” water. Switch that to vodka clear for my own taste. But then the great majority of these writers are lame brains with no real knowledge of the prey they speak of except how to catch or kill it. I moved on up to the beaver pond slowly, cautiously avoiding noise. I heard the warning “flap” before the pond was visible. Dad beaver on the lookout and now they're down in their lodge wondering who's interfered with their privacy. Sounds like slapping the water with the side of an oar. Row quietly, my father said, or you'll scare the bass. The heat lightning scared me and I forgot. His favorite curse came, used only in male company, “Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-flatcar.” I've used it to blank stares. I began swearing at five and applications of soap and disapprobation never discouraged me. A girl said, My dad never uses that word. I'm not your dad or I wouldn't be humping here in a Buick Dynaflow. Or she said in the Russian Tea Room, Sex can be so boring. In an old-age home or with colon carcinoma. I dug around a stump looking for a worm or grub or centipede. I don't like to handle centipedes or hellgrammites but they make good bait if your hook is small enough. Deceit to eat. I'll trick the fish and eat its body. Sit in the swamp until a partridge trotted out then shoot off its head, spear the bird with a green willow stick after plucking it, then the roasting. We always ended up eating them half raw out of impatience. Tearing at the blackened skin in the way we imagined savages once did where we sat. An odd sensation when you find an arrowhead in a plowed field or in a gulley or ravine where the ground has been eroded. If you're young you consider all of the woods a “hunting ground” and the evidence of the arrowhead and the presence of earlier hunters stuns you. There's almost a curse now to have read in prepuberty Seton, Curwood, Jack London, all of Zane Grey, Kenneth Roberts, Walter Edmonds. And I'm not even a conservationist. My father gave his life over to the land and got little joy for his efforts. My pitifully radical sensibilities run to dynamite or plastic explosives. But I've no urge to hurt people, the idea repels me. And there's more implicit drama here than I deserve: I mean if I could blow up Dow or Wyandotte Chemical I might if no one were to be hurt or go jobless. Beneath the Christmas tree there are no presents, some creep has blown up Daddy's factory and there's no money. A-dinner of food surplus lard and navy beans. Complexions turn sallow. Or on the way to the factories I'd stop at a tavern and have a few doubles and listen to Buck Owens sing, “It's crying time again, you're going to leave me,” lump in the throat music for me; still can't listen to Stravinsky's Petrouchka, my sister's favorite record. Before I first left for New York City we would burn a red candle and listen to the record together. And read Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. I was eighteen and she was thirteen. But if you've read all those Zane Grey novels and others I've mentioned at a vulnerable age you simply can't get along in the present. Where's the far field? Neither can you march even as a radical to protect your ancient turf or bring peace to earth. I've never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp or in the woods. I don't propose this as a virtue but as a matter of rude fact. A liberal magazine once used the word “spiv” to describe this state of being. I thought I liked Kropotkin for a while. My ancestors, inasmuch as they were literate, were Populists. There's no romance in being alone.
San Francisco. Now here is my golden city I hope. Look at the people bustle at noon on Geary Street. They're wearing wool like the guidebook instructs and very elegant. Probably not my part of town. The musician told me when he dropped me off that he had a “gig” promised at the Blackhawk and to drop by. Not likely on my funds. One necktie strangled into a rope in the bedroll which I stuffed into a locker at the bus station. If you lose the key you're out seventeen dollars’ worth of gear. Pretty girls everywhere and I'm going to get me one I hope. Up Polk, over Sacramento, up Grant with its yellow threat to Green near the beach. Crossing Columbus, nearly hit by cab. Knocking on the door where a former friend should be and where I can lay my head. Man with girlish hair answers with suspicion. Seems my friend went to Vancouver a month ago. What will I do now? Nothing but buy a paper and look for a room.
I walked until I wanted to throw away my boots. I could feel blisters leaking into my socks. These boots are made for riding horses and nothing else. I finally found a room two or three blocks from the Opera House under a highway over-pass on Gough Street. It was cheap even considering the cars and trucks roaring overhead. I retrieved my bedroll, paid two weeks in advance, which left me seven dollars to live on forever. I drank with long gulps from a bottle of sauterne, my sleeping pill, and got into bed. When I awoke about midnight my billfold was gone from the dresser and the door was slightly ajar. How dumb. Probably someone with a small celluloid ruler slipped the lock. Sixty-six cents in change and no papers to say who I am.
I caught a mess of brook trout from the beaver pond and regretted not having my fly rod. Where are the parents of these little fish? I packed them in grass and ferns in my pouch and started the hike back to the camp. If I were a crow I could get there in a minute or two.
Something had been pawing around the tent but all was intact, the small cache of food hanging beyond any animal's reach or intelligence. A monkey would have figured out the rope. Be nice to import some Japanese snow monkeys and let them run amok up here. I stuck my head in the creek and drank, then washed myself. I fried all of the fish long enough to brown them and ate them with salt and honey and bread. I checked the rifle, wiping the moisture from the barrel with my bandana, and working the action quickly to watch the shells pop out. Eat lead death Commie, I said, aiming at my smoldering fire. Let's control guns and stop shooting heroes. Let only police and soldiers have guns, then they can shoot who they want at will. Cavalry shooting with Springfields at Indians armed with hatchets, bows and arrows. Shot a Sharps buffalo gun once. Adequate for rhino with a shell as heavy as a doorknob. I'm not going to shoot any presidents or leaders may I keep my guns. Outlaw all pistols though. Creep machines. Everyone in Detroit carries one now after the riots. May they shoot off their toes. They aren't any good anyway unless you have had considerable practice. It's been ten years since I shot at a mammal. I thought of bow hunting but even that seemed unfair. An expert archer can kill anything, even an elephant—a liver shot with a weighted arrow. So many deer in an unnatural balance with all predators dead so that they have to be hunted. When you hang up a deer and strip its hide it looks a bit too human for my taste; in the hanging position
the front feet appear to be atrophied human arms with the skin peeled back, striated with muscle, tendons, ligaments and a little yellow fat. The heart is large and warm. When you reach up into the cavity you've slit in the belly and cut the esophagus you rip downwards and all the guts come tumbling out. Then you carefully cut around the anus avoiding the bladder and colon and then you have a, deer ready for butchering. The guts always vanish by the next day, a nice meal for a fox or two. The liver is especially tasty if the deer is young but my favorite meal is when you strip the loins and broil them. I've eaten fried heart but its resemblance to my own took some of the pleasure from the meal. I imagine that there would be more vegetarians if everyone slaughtered their own meat. The English and French eat horse meat but when you talk to them it is subtly self-explanatory. A friend of mine in Montana lost a horse he had hobbled near a stream bank; the horse tripped in the night, stumbling down the bank and breaking its neck against the rocks in the stream. It was a beautiful horse and my friend was sad for weeks. When he came back the day after the horse was killed it was gone. A grizzly had dragged the horse a quarter of a mile or so up the creek through the brush and had eaten everything but the rumen. A feat of strength and appetite. Paw marks of two cubs too but a second-year cub weighs several hundred pounds. This may sound pointlessly sentimental but I would rather shoot a human than a grizzly or a wolf. Of course I would never shoot any of the three unless attacked and wolves never attack humans despite the falsities spread about them. Grizzlies have been known to attack humans and of course humans attack humans with considerable regularity. I don't mean during wars but in the daily life of the street. The executive bares his teeth and bites down on his partner's neck. The secretary says, Mr. Bob you've got blood on your Countess Mara tie. Fist fights. Holdups. Gang fights. Birmingham. Detroit. Chicago. Bar fights. Crestfallen wife slaps husband. Husband punches wife in snotlocker. The habit of child beating widespread.
I sat there on the bed feeling very stupid, distraught, near panic: I wanted to be home in Michigan, upstairs in my own bed with my olive-colored World War Two wool blanket pulled up under my chin. But my father had said something pointed though humorous when I left: “You can stay until the piss-ants carry you out through the keyhole.” Country humor, local color. This city is probably full of thieves. Cutpurses they called them long ago, lucky I wasn't stabbed in the eye like Marlowe while I slept innocently. Hope he uses the seven dollars on wine then falls neatly under a cable car, his body sliced in three sections. An old woman in my home town had committed suicide by placing her neck over the railroad track, the head dribbling like a basketball down the tracks until it rested at a crossing a hundred yards from her body. A much discussed incident. The coroner discovered that her suicide note was written entirely in consonants and wondered if a code might be involved but decided she was merely insane. Earlier that morning when I first saw the Golden Gate Bridge I thought of all those pitiful creatures who had flung themselves over the rail. From that height water is as hard as cement and if you jump too close to a piling, it is cement. Broke, thinking of suicide and far from home, finishing my sauterne. The trouble is it would hurt. During a football practice I had gotten a compound fracture across the bridge of my nose—bones sticking through and the blood a geyser. Wore an odd T-shaped cast the rest of the season. Have to meet this whole problem head-on.
I left the rooming house and walked over toward Market Street where I intended to blow my monstrous sixty-six cents on pancakes, the cheapest way to fill an empty stomach. Starch. Manioc and pan bread, pinto beans, potatoes, pasta to swell the tummy for next to nothing. I want a whole smoked ham like Grandpa hung in his cellar to season. Slabs of bacon there too, potatoes and cabbages in the cooler, deeper, root cellar. Chop off the chicken's head and watch it trot uncackling in a parabola like a boomerang back to my feet and eat it fried a few hours later. Passing the Opera House and the square with beautiful flowers. I'll never be driven up in a limousine with Wanda the debutante to hear Lambasta's intricate Lo Pigro. Apply for a job. I'd yodel for free sir if you throw in the meals. At the cafeteria I ordered my pancakes, salivating as I watched them on the dirty griddle. Then a triple dose of syrup for energy, and a cup of thin coffee stoked with chicory. Must use the grounds over and over. Some Chicanos in the corner laughing. Pickers no doubt up for the evening. I finished my sickening meal and approached them. They fell silent as I asked where to get work. They stared at me until I was on the verge of walking away, then one of them smiled and told me that labor trucks left daily from Hosmer Street across from the church at four A.M. A farm labor office was there, compliments of the State of California. I walked over and cased the location three hours early, then walked down Market to kill time.
I've always liked the mad-dog atmosphere of cities after midnight: Times Square, Rush Street, Pershing Square, now Market Street. The maimed that come out only when the sun goes down. Cruisers cruise. Prostitutes look for marks—I'm only glanced at, it's obvious that I'm a poor prospect. Movie lets out and the good citizens rush to their cars to split the neighborhood. Don't blame them. If you take me home I'll mow your lawn. A faggot twitters hello cowpoke at me and I wish I had left this fucking stupid hat in my room but I might need it tomorrow. I want to marry adventure and this isn't it. I should be up in the Sierras standing on a mountain-top so that I can kiss dawn full on her lips. Fresh air and no blind accordionists playing “Dance, Ballerina, Dance.” Should tell him that's Vaughn Monroe's trademark as far as I'm concerned.
Back at the labor office and still an hour early. A few people begin to arrive. Winos mostly. And then some black men and women with lunches packed. What will I eat—my fingers? The jobber's truck arrives, a canvas-covered flatrack. Then a rickety bus pulls up. There are at least fifty of us now murmuring in the half-light. The Catholic church across the street is pink stucco and the first pale light strikes the belfry where dozens of pigeons are cooing and chucking. The jobber is a mountainous black who tells me to get into the truck after making sure I'm not drunk. Three winos have been rejected and stand at a distance cursing. It is dark in the truck and I can only see the tips of lit cigarettes. The truck starts and we pull away. I watch the street recede and wonder where I'm going, what I'll be picking in what field. I ask the man next to me on the bench where we're headed and he says in a ghetto gibberish I can scarcely understand that you never know but you're always back in Frisco by dark.
I got up in the middle of the night and started a fire after hearing what I thought were footsteps in the brush. A dream I suppose. The fire burned quickly and with a roar, big chunks and strips of dry pine ripped easily off a stump. The tree cut how long ago? My mind was sinking into a small black ball. With no prospects how will I ever travel first class anywhere? I want to go to San Francisco again someday and stay at the Palace or Fairmont or Mark Hopkins or the St. Francis. Fuck steerage and the contempt of everyone. Held for vagrancy in Fraser, Colorado, once because I lacked two dollars of the needed amount to make one an ordinary citizen. And in a small town outside of Topeka questioned by a bored deputy in an old car with “Deputy Sheriff” hand painted on the door. He only wanted to talk. And the usual homosexual ride that begins with “Do you have a girl friend?” Yes of course and a ponderous cock and you can't have a single solitary bite. They're uniformly nice about the whole thing. Pun intended. One in Waltham with a St. Christopher statue on the dashboard. Should have a tiny blindfold so he doesn't have to watch blowjobs. Saints deserve some consideration. And an actual pass made by a war-torn veteran who had to speak through a battery-operated amplifier held against his throat. Sounded like a faulty growling tape recorder—the obscene question drawn out, a forty-five rpm played at thirty-three. Would have been more interesting if the machine accelerated the voice into insane chipmunk talk. My brain shrank perceptibly again. I felt a whirling sort of nausea, facing the fire in the darkness and wondering if I were meant to be one of those fragile individuals who shrink into dustballs from generalized pain and
are swept into asylums. No Heathcliff with ten hounds and vast moor. Where is a “she” to retrieve me, draw me out of the riddle that only leads to another. I have lost my faith I thought in “figuring things out,” the various tongues in my skull that spoke daily of alternatives, counterploys, divisions, instructions, directions. All the interior sensuosities of language and style. And I live the life of an animal and transmute my infancies, plural because I always repeat never conquer, a circle rather than a coil or spiral. I've talked myself into the woods up here and will there be a common language when I return? Or is there a need for one or was there ever such a language in any world at any time? I think so. Before the gibbet or guillotine the cheers take the same arc of sound and come from a single huge throat. No king to require a spokesman. Off in the dark there is a wolf who speaks his limited instincts to another. I imagine he knows that there are few of his own kind left. On Isle Royale they control their population without help. I'll talk to Villon or Marlowe tonight when the fire goes out. I've only floated.
My next few days revolved around trips to Stockton, Modesto, San Jose and their limitless hot string-bean fields. I picked very slowly, fatigued by the heat and scratching all the itches caused by the bean dust and pesticides. When I filled a basket full of thirty pounds of beans I would get either sixty cents cash on the line or have a ticket punched. The grower's man preferred the tickets to keep pickers around. The first day I brought four dollars and twenty cents back to Frisco with me. After that day and its initial boredom and exhaustion I averaged about seven dollars a day. Many of the Chicanos made fifteen dollars a day but they had the truly questionable benefit of years of experience. I was bullied by the jobber a great deal but only grinned like an idiot. Later when I became straw boss on a farm in Michigan I acted the same way, walking around swearing at the dawdlers. Picking apples is the only civilized form of such work—it is fall, the weather is cool and no stoop labor is involved. Cucumbers are lowest on the rung of preference.