On the fourth day I didn't take the truck back but instead walked the half dozen or so miles into San Jose. I stopped at a store on the outskirts of town and bought three grapefruit which I ate on the way. There was a continuous rustling in the ditch which would stop when I stopped. I spotted the small lizards that were making the noise and threw a few stones. No one would pick me up and a car full of teenagers having fun threw a firecracker, narrowly missing my head. I looked at the car closely thinking that I might meet them in San Jose and get the chance to kick the shit out of somebody. The grapefruit were delicious, the juices soaking my shirt front, my best white shirt which had hung on a fencepost all day while I picked barebacked. There was to be a dance that night and I wanted to look good. I felt flush with a twenty-dollar bill in my right sock and a few bucks in my pocket. A diesel truck passed me so closely that I teetered in the wind. Pigfucker might have aimed. I felt a great empathy then with all the cocoa-colored people in America. Work hard and try to play hard. Scorned if you don't save the meager wages and live like they do in Middletown, U. S. A. I thought of one of my uncles who lived back in the woods preferring the company of his redbone and bluetick hounds to people. His lovely wife, my aunt, died of cancer and his oldest son fatally injured in a car wreck. No marks on his body, the neck broken neatly and invisibly. At the funeral I looked at him closely and decided he wasn't dead. When his mother died, though, there was no mistaking it—she had dropped from a hundred thirty to seventy pounds, dying at home on the couch while her children played pinochle next to her. They were able to kiss her goodbye.
I got a very cheap hotel room after being turned down at two places for unknown reasons. I took a bath and looked at myself in the mirror. Color of coffee and the grapefruit stains dry. I walked over to a park and sat on a bench beneath a palm tree with a copy of Life. A family I picked with waved to me and I felt good about it. I know somebody out here in the golden West. The magazine made me feel that I was missing opportunities—a special on this year's crop of starlets, one of them beautiful indeed. She has since dropped out of sight. Where do all the starlets go that drop out of sight? To Vegas and Manhattan where they command fees of five hundred dollars a night for perverse gymnastics involving electrical apparatus and hundreds of yards of mauve velvet. When I'm chairman of some kind of board I'll meet a has-been starlet, twenty-seven years old, and propose something truly infamous, an act so imaginative that her eyes will pop out like Satchmo's. Have to involve pushing a dead cow off a skyscraper roof. A gray-haired gentleman with jism splotches all over his cotton trousers sat down beside me. Go away or I'll call the vice squad, I said. Wonder how much movies have directed my affections, heartsick with love for screen stars; chronologically, Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr (in Quo Vadis when she is almost gored by the bull), Ava Gardner, Lee Remick, Carol Lynley, and years later, Lauren Hutton who is a model and comparative unknown. If they only knew how pleasant my company would be. Uta Hagen, Shelley Winters and Jeanne Moreau scare me. Catherine Deneuve is too aggressively depraved in that Bunuel movie.
The next day I got up about noon with an incredible hangover. The dance had been a relative flop; the girl I had spotted in the field and so carefully nurtured with polite talk had a boy friend. The Mexican music was too melancholy and I spent most of my time and money in a bar next door to the dance hall. I drank tequila and played country music on the jukebox and talked mostly to a drunk Filipino picker who claimed the Chicanos were against him. Then I ate a huge combination plate at a Mexican restaurant and had difficulty finding the hotel. When I flipped on the light switch exactly ten thousand cockroaches dove for cover. Lucky I'm not shy of bugs, even spiders. Before I fell asleep I heard the ticking sound they made when they dropped off the ceiling onto the bed. I yelled “shoo” but it didn't disturb them. I took a bus back to the city, deftly seating myself next to a pretty girl who refused to speak to me. Yes my little one I am a psychotic and rapist and thimble freak. Back in my Gough Street room I watched the taxis and trucks pass and the lordly messengers on their high monkey-bar motorcycles. My bedroll was intact in the closet and I was a week ahead on the rent with seven dollars again to blow on the delights of the city. Early next morning I bought a city map and started walking.
There is a constant urge to re-order memory—all events falling between joy and absolute disgust are discarded. Some even favor leaving out disgust. I think often though of rather ordinary kindnesses, a waitress letting me sleep on a table in the back room of a restaurant outside of Heber, Utah. Or sitting with a rancher's children in the back of a pickup on hay bales and the way he passed back a bottle, driving full tilt through the Uinta and Wasatch mountains. Or an old high school friend sending me fifty dollars because if “you go into art you can have a bad time of it.” The friend had recently seen a film biography of Vincent van Gogh. Or a woman I met near Sather Gate at Berkeley when I was roaming around and fearfully trying to use the university library. No one asked questions though. She was an assistant librarian and spent hours digging up material on Provencal poets for me. I wasn't interested but it seemed like a good idea. During a noon hour I talked to her walking around through a garden near the library and offered to take her to dinner. We sat on the grass and she finally said no, that I probably couldn't afford to take anyone to dinner. I said I was saving money by living in an abandoned apartment house off Green Street with eight or nine other bums, mostly young and rootless tea heads. She was a trifle homely but very pleasant. After work we went to her apartment and I took an hour-long shower and put on her husband's pajamas, while she washed my clothes. They were separated and getting a divorce. She was about thirty-five and a little bit plump for my taste but strangely the best lover I've ever had. Very straightforward with none of the oblique difficulties of young girls. When I left after a week I felt no particular loss because I had never really been attracted to her—very adult with a nice kiss of farewell and the bus back across the bay, at least seven pounds heavier from decent food and soapy smelling from daily showers. Sated.
Odd about older women, I mean between thirty-five and fifty or sixty. It's nice to be appreciated and not practice hours of beggary to get near the snuffbox. There's no condescension here at all, only an observation arrived at at age twenty-one. None of those long agonizing sessions of petting and waddling home with the ache of the malady known as lover's nuts. Swollen with no release. Probably less of this nowadays with the mink culture going full tilt. I remembered standing in a bookstore and reading the entirety of Lolita in two hours, then walking out onto the street with glazed eyes, a full-fledged ravenous nympholeptic. The power of literature. Or what did Earwicker say in Finnegan—"I learned all the rules of the gamest of games from my old Norse Ada.” We all know firm young tanned or pink unblemished bodies are sweet, peach melba or crepes suzette. But they involve a Don Juanish career that wastes a lot of time and there's something suspicious about always wanting to poke the unpoken. Bob said I was first I was first I was first as if a country or a vaccine had been discovered. An archeologic instinct I suppose. An urge to squeeze rather than plunge in; and how can you be less than adequate if you're among the first to tup the heifer. I remembered the year before coming up from Barstow by bus after midnight through the invisible greenery of the San Joaquin Valley, sitting next to a girl fresh out of Vegas and a semi-pro with white satin dress and glass high heels. Long brown legs. I don't know why I do this, she said after an hour's prattle and we began necking. I burned my fingers holding a marvelous french kiss all the way through a cigarette. Couldn't drop it on her dress. Difficult to operate on a bus seat, finally impossible for more than her deft palm. Disgruntled senior citizens surrounding us in the dark. Three of my fingers were wet, salving the burn—a revolutionary medicine, healed by dawn.
I got back to the Hanging Gardens and found that my bedroll had been stolen. Went down to Broadway and Columbus with a friend from Albuquerque and we panhandled enough money for some food, a matchbox, and a gallon of wine. A week
before we had stolen a gallon of wine from a grocer but that involved a ten-block full-blast run through Chinatown and my friend lost one of his sandals. We stashed the food except for a package of sweet rolls, the grass and wine and climbed up to Coit Tower for a little picnic in the shrubbery. We got awesomely high and drunk at the same time watching a huge Matson Line ship back out of the dock far below. Someday this will all be yourn May Lou. All of it. Two police coming toward us in the shrubbery and Walter swallowed the last roach. What are you guys doing? Looking at the beauty of the city, officer. It sure is a lovely view up here. Best to be coquettish with the police—it often flusters them. They might be former marines but they remember the playfulness in the tents back in their Boy Scout days. Walter handles them beautifully—they move on in search of actual criminals which we are when Walter offers to recite a poem he has spontaneously written called “The Men in Blue.” They tell us to get out of here or we might get mugged. Golly it's dangerous in this city, I said.
We walked down the hill and over to title Co-existence Bagel Shop where an English reporter bought us beer and macaroni salad for the real lowdown on the recently vaunted San Francisco Renaissance. Walter claimed that the true Renaissance was in Kansas City and that he should catch the next plane before it disappeared. I had another quick order of the macaroni salad before the patron disappeared. A man sitting at the next table in a business suit hid behind a newspaper. We told the reporter that he was a federal narcotics agent and that as an Englishman he could be deported for carrying a full kilo in his briefcase. We left and stood around on the corner in front of the shop for hours talking to unnamed acquaintances. The most interesting of them was Billy the Pimp who often bought us meals for companionship. He had a common-law wife who worked the conventions for fifty-dollar tricks. A few times he gave me a twenty with a reminder that some hard work was behind the money. Billy also had two college girls “turned out” in secret whorehouses in Chinatown where he said they would be held for at least two years. By then he could depend on them since he was the only white man they ever saw. He claimed he usually grossed five hundred a day which I believed, in that his heroin bit cost him at least a hundred and he was always beautifully dressed. I had dinner with him and his wife one evening and we talked most of the night popping bennies. Billy maintained that as long as his wife balled for money it was OK but that if she ever went to bed with anyone for free it would be adultery and need punishing. The whole idea boggled my Protestant mind. Truly depraved people and I'm sitting in the room talking to them. She laughed and told stories about the “Johns,” how most of the paunchy conventioneers never even got hard-ons but wanted their friends to think they were cocksmen. Easy work, she said, and they always begged her not to tell on them. Who would she tell? she wondered aloud. I left when I got angry about the college girls who were trapped. Billy said they got used to it and looked forward to his weekly visits but if they somehow got away he would “cut” them—this meant a slash with a knife or razor along the nose and through the upper and lower lip. Difficult for a doctor to mend neatly and Billy said this was the usual treatment for extremely recalcitrant whores. I was repelled I think more than I had ever been before. Poor girls with a line of Chinese. Snow pea breath. I avoided Billy after that evening.
We leaned against a car and talked about the St. Anthony's Mission where a free lunch was served at noon every day. Some of the bums brought jars to take home the food their rotting stomachs couldn't receive. I had eaten there several times with Walter and other malcontents from North Beach and enjoyed talking to the monks. You got a vitamin pill with the meal and often a dish of ice cream. But the life of the streets had begun to pall after a few months. At a party in Fillmore that had lasted three days I had witnessed an unsavory gang bang. The girl was too young and completely out of her head though very lovely. Bongo drums and gin and the whole bag. I looked into the bedroom where her blond hair was spread out damply on a pillow and her eyes squeezed shut in apparent pain. There were five or six still to be served. I left at about three A.M. in order to catch the labor bus and earn some honest money to rent a room of my own again, Maybe go back to Berkeley and try to start up with the librarian. Or earn a small stake and hitch back to Michigan.
I worked four loathsome days with a group of Okies who lacked the Chicanos’ grace and good humor. They were living in Oakland and hadn't lived in California long enough to collect welfare. I remembered going through Atlanta in a bus late at night and seeing them with their pale faces and long sideburns and thin lips. The oldest Americans. Standing in front of a honky-tonk smoking, the musicians in string ties taking their break. But I like the music and if you could fold over the country horizontally in the middle you would find that northern rural people mirror their southern counterparts. Poor. Often vicious to outsiders. Contempt for the law. The mainstay for some is alcohol, for the others, that “old time” fundamentalist religion. I liked a few of them though, a vague sort of recognition when we talked about hunting and fishing at noon. They were quick to admit they hated Oakland but there was no work back home. So they came west. That Big Eight-Wheeler Running Down the Tracks. As the Joads had come thirty years before and had adapted to chrome and neon instead of gutted cotton land. Ignorance only gradually accrues, builds up—as sediment collects at a river's mouth. The poor are instinctively suspicious but then so are the rich, and the middle-class more suspicious than either.
That night around my fire I heard howling far to the west of me, perhaps several miles away. Sure as God a wolf. All my side trips had been east to the lake or southwest to the car. Tomorrow I would go up to the higher ground to the north and west of my campside. They figure Indians took copper out of this area four or five thousand years ago, before Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem for his last session of confrontation politics. Any radicalism in my head was got initially from the Bible. Coming to maturity in the full syrup of the Eisenhower lassitude fed the fire. A moonless hiatus when energies built in people to whom life was merely a succession of injustices. A false period of light and comparative quietude with the powers in the nation playing golf and collecting billions, Congress collectively picking its nose, oinking out grotesqueries and sloth. The nation continued shitting in its own sandbox and only recently has noticed it. And this long after obvious greed had been purged and was merely called business. The business of business is business. Sowing wind. Hard to understand how a nation conceived in rapine and expanded in slaughter could last anyway. But there's no sense of Old Testament doom—the doom is contemporary and earned daily. Pull off the face and you see the skull is Naugahyde. Cheyenne autumn. And the holds of ships with millions of slaves mentally rotting toward servitude. With a base this questionable, how can one conceive of a nation at peace? I saw a picture in the paper a week ago of the President and the Vice President at sport. They looked like barbers on a Sunday outing, tits sagging a bit in their golf shirts. And a supercharged cart behind them to carry the eminences from hole to hole. The world with wall to wall war, the ocean lidded with oil and most whales dead. Her prophets whine and play patty-cake patty-cake. M. L. King dead after seeing God's face, his eyes seeing the glory. The dead-end apocalypticism of the young fed by hard rock and amphetamines. And though I'm barely over thirty I come from the nineteenth century and a somnolent world with a top on it. I feel destined not to do anything about anything. Perhaps resuscitate a few animal skins stolen from coat racks and parlor floors. Pile them in a giant mound by the thousands until I sense that there are enough for a proper funeral. Douse with kerosene. Light it with a burning arrow of course and sit with my dogs and watch the conflagration and if I have had enough to drink I'll take off my clothes and dance around this monstrous fire, singing and howling with my dogs until the animals either come back to life or I watch their souls and ghosts float upwards in the plumes of smoke. I'll roll in the ashes and it will begin raining and never stop.
I looked at my tattered map and plotted the next day's trip, how far and
in what general directions I would walk and where I might find water or catch a few fish. Someday I intended to walk the circumference of Lake Superior. Maybe walk straight north to the pole, or walk into a cave and refuse to come out until the back wall of the cave reflected a livable earth, or the brilliant orange anti-shadow of the earth exploding.
I threw another log on my diminishing fire and went down to the creek to prepare for bed. First a long drink and a wash with the small sliver of soap I had left. I was giggling about my romanticism and wondering if my brain would ever be able to expand beyond all those oblique forms of mental narcissism I practiced daily. And did I feel deeply anything other than an urge to survive. Yes. Add eating, drinking and fucking, and a peopleless forest. With a weekly visit of a beautiful maiden who would float down the creek to me in gossamer on a raft made of rushes and bound together with human hair. She would look suspiciously like my mental image of Ophelia and we would make love until, naturally, we would bleed through the eyes and pores. Various animals would sit in a circle and watch—raccoons, opossums, coyotes, fox, deer, wolves, and many varieties of snakes and insects. When we finished making love we would bathe in the creek in the dawn light and she would lie back down on her raft and float downstream out of my field of vision. Then I would fill a huge golden bowl with milk from which all the above creatures would drink in harmony. If an inept viper or mouse fell in, a fox would gently lift it out. Then I would sleep for three days and three nights and roll the stone back up the hill until she arrived again.