bitter and out of his head because of this but strangely and magnificently he's become quieter, more radiant, more patient, manly, more friendly even -- And tho the wild frenzies of his old road days with me have banked down he still has the same taut eager face and supple muscles and looks like he's ready to go anytime -- But actually loves his home (paid for by railroad insurance when he broke his leg trying to stop a boxcar from crashing), loves his wife in a way tho they fight some, loves his kids and especially his little son Timmy John partly named after me -- Poor old, good old Cody sitting there with his chess set, wants immediately to challenge somebody to a chess game but only has an hour to talk to us before he goes to work supporting the family by rushing out and pushing his Nash Rambler down the quiet Los Gatos suburb street, jumping in, starting the motor, in fact his only complaint is that the Nash wont start without a push -- No bitter complaints about society whatever from this grand and ideal man who really loves me moreover as if I deserved it, but I'm bursting to explain everything to him, not even Big Sur but the past several years, but there's no chance with everybody yakking -- And in fact I can see in Cody's eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel that recently we haven't had chances to talk whatever, like we used to do driving across America and back in the old road days, too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories, we've been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered -- The circle's closed in on the old heroes of the night -- But he says "However you guys, come on down round "bout one when the boss leaves and watch me work and keep me company awhile before you go back to the City" -- I can see Dave Wain really loves him at once, and Stanley Popovich too who's come along on this trip just to meet the fabled "Dean Moriarty" -- The name I give Cody in "On the Road" -- But O, it breaks my heart to see he's lost his beloved job on the railroad and after all the seniority he'd piled up since 1948 and now is reduced to tire recapping and dreary parole visits -- All for two stick of wild loco weed that grows by itself in Texas because God wanted it -- And there over the bookshelf is the old photo of me and Cody arm in arm in the early days on a sunny street -- I rush to explain to Cody what happened the year before when his religious advisor at the prison had invited me to come to San Quentin to lecture the religious class -- Dave Wain was supposed to drive me and wait outside the prison walls as I'd go in there alone, probably with a pepup nip bottle hidden in my coat (I hoped) and I'd be led by big guards to the lecture room of the prison and there would be sitting a hundred or so cons including Cody probably all proud in the front row -- And I would begin by telling them I had been in jail myself once and that I had no right nevertheless to lecture them on religion -- But they're all lonely prisoners and dont care what I talk about -- The whole thing arranged, in any case, and on the big morning I wake up instead dead drunk on a floor, it's already noon and too late, Dave Wain is on the floor also, Willie's parked outside to take us to Quentin for the lecture but it's too late -- But now Cody says "It's alright old buddy I understand" -- Altho our friend Irwin had done it, lectured there, but Irwin can do all sorta things like that being more social than I am and capable of going in there as he did and reading his wildest poems which set the prison yard humming with excitement tho I think he shouldna done it after all because I say just to show up for any reason except visiting inside a prison is still SIGNIFYING -- And I tell this to Cody who ponders a chess problem and says "Drinkin again, hey? " (if there's anything he hates is to see me drink). We help him push his Nash down the street, then drink awhile and talk with Evelyn a beautiful blonde woman that young Ron Blake wants and even Dave Wain wants but she's got her mind on other things and taking care of the children who have to go to school and dancing classes in the morning and hardly gets a word in edgewise anyway as we all yak and yell like fools to impress her tho all she really wants is to be alone with me to talk about Cody and his latest soul. Which includes the fact of Billie Dabney his mistress who has threatened to take Cody away completely from Evelyn, as I'll show later. So we do go out to the San Jose highway to watch Cody recap tires -- There he is wearing goggles working like Vulcan at his forge, throwing tires all over the place with fantastic strength, the good ones high up on a pile, "This one's no good" down on another, bing, bang, talking all the time a long fantastic lecture on tire recapping which has Dave Wain marvel with amazement -- ('My God he can do all that and even explain while he's doing it') -- But I just mention in connection with the fact that Dave Wain now realizes why I've always loved Cody... Expecting to see a bitter ex con he sees instead a martyr of the American Night in goggles in some dreary tire shop at 2 A. M. making fellows laugh with joy with his funny explanations yet at the same time to a T performing every bit of the work he's being paid for -- Rushing up and ripping tires off car wheels with a jicklo, clang, throwing it on the machine, starting up big roaring steams but yelling explanations over that, darting, bending, flinging, flaying, till Dave Wain said he thought he was going to die laughing or cry right there on the spot. So we drive back to town and go to the mad boarding-house to drink some more and I pass out dead drunk on the floor as usual in that house, waking up in the morning groaning far from my clean cot on the porch in Big Sur No bluejays yakking for me to wake up any more, no gurgling creek, I'm back in the grooky city and I'm trapped. 14 Instead there's the sound of bottles crashing in the living-room where poor Lex Pascal is holding forth yelling, it reminds of the time a year ago when Jarry Wagner's future wife got sore at Lex and threw a half gallonfull of tokay across the room and hooked him right across the eye, thereupon sailing to Japan to marry Jarry in a big Zen ceremony that made coast to coast papers but all old Lex's got is a cut which I try to fix in the bathroom upstairs saying "Hey, that cut's already stopped bleeding, you'll be alright Lex" -- "I'm French Canadian too" he says proudly and when Dave and I and George Baso get ready to drive back to New York he gives me a St Christopher medal as a goingaway gift -- Lex the kind of guy shouldnt really be living in this wild beat boardinghouse, should hide on a ranch somewhere, powerful, goodlooking, full of crazy desire for women and booze and never enough of either -- So as the bottles crash again and the Hi Fi's playing Beethoven's Solemn Mass I fall asleep on the floor. Waking up the next morning groaning of course, but this is the big day when we're going to go visit poor George Baso at the TB hospital in the Valley -- Dave perks me up right away bringing coffee or wine optional... I'm on Ben Fagan's floor somehow, apparently I've harangued him till dawn about Buddhism some Buddhist. Complicated already but now suddenly appears Joey Rosenberg a strange young kid from Oregon with a full beard and his hair growing right down to his neck like Raul Castro, once the California High School high jump champ who was only about five foot six but had made the incredible leap of six foot nine over the bar! and shows his highjump ability too by the way he dances around on light feet -- A strange athlete who's suddenly decided instead to become some sort of beat Jesus and in fact you see perfect purity and sincerity in his young blue eyes -- In fact his eyes are so pure you don't notice the crazy hair and beard, and also he's wearing ragged but strangely elegant clothing ('One of the first of the new Beat Dandies, " McLear told me a few days later, "did you hear about that? there's a new strange underground group of beatniks or whatever who wear special smooth dandy clothes even tho it may just be a jean jacket with shino slacks they'll always have strange beautiful shoes or shirts, or turn around and wear fancy pants unpressed acourse but with torn sneakers') -- Joey is wearing something like brown soft garments like a tunic or something and his shoes look like Las Vegas sports shoes -- The moment he sees my battered blue little sneakers that I'd used at Big Sur when my feet go sore, that is in case my feet got sore on a rocky hike, he wants them for himself, he wants to swap the snazzy Las Vegas sports shoes (pale leather, untooled) for my silly little tightfitting tho perfect sneakers that in fact I was wearing because the Monterey hike blisters were still hurting me -- So we swap -- And I ask Dave Wain about him: Dave says: "He's one of the really strangest sweetest guys I've ever known, showed up about a week ago I hear tell, they asked him what he wanted to do and never answers, just smiles -- He just sorta wants to dig everything and just watch and enjoy and say nothing particular about it... If someone's to ask him "Let's drive to New York" he'd jump right for it without a word -- On a sort of a pilgrimage, see, with all that youth, us old fucks oughta take a lesson from him, in faith too, he has faith, I can see it in his eyes, he has faith in any direction he may take with anyone just like Christ I guess. " It's strange that in a later revery I imagined myself walking across a field to find the strange gang of pilgrims in Arkansas and Dave Wain was sitting there saying "Shhh, He's sleeping, " "He" being Joey and all the disciples are following him on a march to New York after which they expect to keep going walking on water to the other shore -- But of course (in my revery even) I scoff and don't believe it (a kind of story daydreaming I often do) but in the morning when I look into Joey Rosenberg's eyes I instantly realize it IS Him, Jesus, because anyone (according to the rules of my revery) who looks into those eyes is instantly convinced and converted -- So the revery continues into a long farfetched story ending with thinking IBM machines trying to destroy this "Second Coming" etc. (but also, in reality, a few months later I threw away his shoes in the ashcan back home because I felt they had brought me bad luck and wishing I'd kept my blue sneakers with the little holes in the toes! ) So anyway we get Joey and Ron Blake who's always following Dave and go off to see Monsanto at the store, our usual ritual, then across the corner to Mike's Place where we start off the 10 A. M. with food, drink and a few games of pool at the tables along the bar -- Joey winning the game and a stranger poolshark you never saw with his long Biblical hair bending to slide the cue stick smoothly through completely professionally competent fingerstance and smashing home long straight drives, like seeing Jesus shoot pool of course -- And meanwhile all the food these poor starved kids all three of them do pack in and eat! -- It's not every day they're with a drunken novelist with hundreds of dollars to splurge on them, they order everything, spaghetti, follow that up with Jumbo Hamburgers, follow that up with ice cream and pie and puddings, Dave Wain has a huge appetite anyway but adds Manhattans and Martinis to the side of his plate -- I'm just wailing away on my old fatal double bourbons and gingerale and I'll be sorry in a few days. Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in -- Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death)... well, there's more of that up later. About noon which is now the peak of a golden blurry new day for me we pick up Dave's girl Romana Swartz a big Rumanian monster beauty of some kind (I mean with big purple eyes and very tall and big but Mae West big), Dave whispers in my ear "You oughta see her walking around that Zen-East House in those purple panties of hers, nothing else on, there's one married guy lives there who goes crazy every time she goes down the hall tho I dont blame him, would you? she's not trying to entice him or anybody she's just a nudist, she believe in nudism and bygod she's going to practice it! " (the Zen-East house being another sort of boardinghouse but this one for all kinds of married people and single and some small bohemian type families all races studying Subud or something, I never was there) -- She's a big beautiful brunette anyway in the line of taste you might attribute to every slaky hungry sex slave in the world but also intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything, is in fact just simply a big healthy Rumanian Jewess who wants to marry a good hardy man and go live on a farm in the valley, that's it... The TB hospital is about two hours away through Trac and down the San Joaquin Valley, Dave drives beautiful with Romana between us and me holding the bottle again, it's bright beautiful California sunshine and prune orchards out there zipping by... It's always fun to have a good driver and a bottle and dark glasses on a fine sunny afternoon going somewhere interesting, and all the good conversation as I said -- Ron and Joey are on the back mattress sitting crosslegged just like poor George Baso had sat on that trip last year from Frisco to New York. But the main thing I'd liked at once about that Japanese kid was what he told me the first night I met him in that crazy kitchen of the Buchanan Street house: from midnight to 6 A. M. in his slow methodical voice he gave me his own tremendous version of the Life of Buddha beginning with infancy and right down to the end... George's theory (he has many theories and has actually run meditation classes with bells, just really a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done) is that Buddha did not reject amorous love life with his wife and with his harem girls because he was sexually disinterested but on the contrary had been taught in the highest arts of lovemaking and eroticism possible in the India of that time, when great tomes like the Kama Sutra were in the process of being developed, tomes that give you instructions on every act, facet, approach, moment, trick, lick, lock, bing and bang and slurp of how to make love with another human being "male or female" insisted George: "He knew everything there is to know about all kinds of sex so that when he abandoned the world of pleasure to go be an ascetic in the forest everybody of course knew that he wasn't putting it all down out of ignorance... It served to make people of those times feel a marvelous respect for all his words -- And he was just no simple Casanova with a few frigid affairs across the years, man he went all the way, he had ministers and special eunuchs and special women who taught him love, special virgins were brought to him, he was acquainted with every aspect of perversity and non perversity and as you know he was also a great archer, horseman, he was just completely trained in all the arts of living by his father's orders because his father wanted to make sure he'd NEVER leave the palace -- They used every trick in the books to entice him to a life of pleasure and as you know they even had him happily married to a beautiful girl called Yasodhara and he had a son with her Rahula and he also had his harem which included dancing boys and everything in the books" then George would go into every detail of this knowledge, like "He knew that the phallus is held with the hand and moved inside the vagina with a rotary movement, but this was only the first of several variations where there is also the lowering down of the gal's hips so that the vulva you see recedes and the phallus is introduced with a fast quick movement like stinging of a wasp, or else the vulva is protruded by means of lifting up the hips high so that the member is buried with a sudden rush right to the basis, or then he can withdraw real teasing like, or concentrate on right or left side -- And then he knew all the gestures, words, expressions, what to do with a flower, what not to do with a flower, how to drink the lip in all kinds of kissing or how to crush kiss or soft kiss, man he was a genius in the beginning'... and so on, George went all the way telling me this till 6 A. M. it being one of the most fantastic Buddha Charitas I'd ever heard ending with George's own perfect enunciation of the law of the Twelve Nirdanas whereby Buddha just logically disconnected all creation and laid it bare for what it was, under the Bo Tree, a chain of illusions -- And on the trip to New York with Dave and me up front talking all the way poor George just sat there on the mattress for the most part very quiet and told us he was taking this trip to find out if HE was traveling to New York or just the CAR (Willie the Jeep) was traveling to New York or was it just the WHEELS were colling, or the tires, or what -- A Zen problem of some kind -- So that when we'd see grain elevators on the Plains of Oklahoma George would say quietly "Well it seems to me that grain elevator is sorta waitin for the road to approach it" or he'd say suddenly "While you guys was talkin just then about how to mix a good Pernod Martini I just saw a white horse standing in an abandoned storefront" -- In Las Vegas we'd taken a good motel room and gone out to play a little roulette, in St Louis we'd gone to see the great bellies of the East St Louis hootchy kootchy joints where three of the most marvelous young girls performed smiling directly at us as tho they knew all about George and his theories about erogenous Buddha (there sits the monarch observing the donzinggerls) and as tho they knew anyway all about Dave Wain who whenever he see a beautiful girl says licking his lips "Yum Yum'... But now George has TB and they tell me he may even die... Which adds to that darkness in my mind, all these DEATH things piling up suddenly -- But I cant believe old Zen Master George is going to allow his body to die just now tho it looks like it when we pass through the lawn and come to a ward of beds and see him sitting dejected on the edge of his bed with his hair hanging over his brow where before it was always combed back -- He's in a bathrobe and looks up at us almost displeased (but everybody is displeased by unexpected visits from friends or relatives in a hospital) -- Nobody wants to be surprised on their hospital bed -- He sighs and comes out to the warm lawn with us and the expression on his face says "Well ah so you've come to see me because I'm sick but what do you really want? " as tho all the old humorous courage of the year before has now given away to a profoundly deep 15 Japanese skepticism like that of a Samurai warrior in a fit of suicidal depression (surprising me by its abject gloomy fearful frown). 15 I mean it was like my first frightened realization of what to be Japanese really meant -- To be Japanese and not to believe in life any more and to be gloomy like Beethoven yet to be Japanese in gloom, the gloom of Basho behind it all, the huge thunderous scowl of Issa or of Shiki, kneeling in the frost with the bowed head like the bowed-head-oblivion of all the old horses of Japan long dust. He sits there on the lawn bench looking down and when Dave asks him "Well you gonna be alright soon George" he says simply "I don't know" -- He really means "I dont care" -- And always warm and courteous with me he now hardly pays any attention to me -- He's a little nervous because the other patients, GI vets, will see that he's received a visit from a bunch of ragged beatniks including Joey Rosenberg who is bouncing around the lawn looking at flowers with that bemused sincere smile -- But little neat George, just five feet five and a few pounds over that and so clean, with his soft feathery hair like the hair of a child, his delicate hands, he just stares at the ground -- His answers come like an old man's (he's only 30) -- "I guess all the Dharma talk about everything is nothing is just sorta sinking in my bones, " he concedes, which makes me shudder -- (On the way Dave's been telling us to be ready because George's changed so) -- But I try to keep things going, "Do you remember those dancing girls in St Louis? " -- "Yen, whore candy" (he's referring to a piece of perfumed cotton one of the girls threw at us in her dance, which we tacked up later to a highway accident cross we'd yanked out of the ground one blood red sunset in Arizona, tacking this perfumed beautiful cotton right where the head of Christ was so that when we brought the cross to New York naturally we had everybody smelling it but George pointed out how beautiful we'd done all this subconsciously because the net result was that all the hepcats of Greenwich Village who came in to see us were picking up the cross and putting their heads [noses] to it) -- But George doesn't care any more -- And anyway it's time to leave. But ah, as we're leaving and waving back at him and he's turned around tentatively to go into the hospital I linger behind the others and turn around several times to wave again -- Finally I start to make a joke of it by ducking around a corner and peeking out and waving again... He ducks behind a bush and waves back I dart to a bush and peek out... Suddenly we're two crazy hopeless sages goofing on a lawn -- Finally as we part further and further and he comes closer to the door we are making elaborate gestures and down to the most infinitesimal like when he steps inside the door I wait till I see him sticking a finger out -- So from around my corner I stick out a shoe -- So from his door he sticks out an eye -- So from my corner I stick out nothing but just yell "Wu! " -- So from his door he sticks out nothing and says nothing -- So I hide in the corner and do nothing -- But suddenly I burst out and there HE is bursting out and we start waving gyrations and duck back to our hiding places -- Then I pull a big one by simply walking away rapidly but suddenly I turn and wave again -- He walking backwards and waving back -- The further I go now also walking backwards the more I wave -- Finally we're so far apart by about a hundred yards the game is almost impossible but we continue somehow -- Finally I see a distant sad little Zen wave of hand -- I jump up into the air and gyrate both arms -- He does the same -- He goes into the hospital but a moment later he's peeking out this time from the ward window! -- I'm behind a tree trunk thumbing my nose at him -- There's no end to it, in fact -- The other kids are all back at the car wondering what's keeping me -- What's keeping me is that I know George will get better and live and teach the joyful truth and George knows I know this, that's why he's playing the game with me, the magic game of glad freedom which is what Zen or for that matter the Japanese soul ultimately means I say, "And someday I will go to Japan with George" I tell myself after we've made our last little wave because I've heard the supper bell ring and seen the other patients rush for the chow line and knowing George's fantastic appetite wrapped in that little frail body I don't wanta hang him up tho he nevertheless does one last trick: He throws a glass of water out the window in a big froosh of water and I don't see him any more. "Wotze mean by that? " I'm scratching my head going back to the car. 16 To complete this crazy day at 3 o'clock in the morning here I am sitting in a car being driven 100 miles an hour around the sleeping streets and hills and waterfronts of San Francisco, Dave's gone off to sleep with Romana and the others are passed out and this crazy nextdoor neighbor of the roominghouse (himself a Bohemian but also a laborer, a housepainter who comes home with big muddy boots and has his little boy living with him the wife has died) -- I've been in his pad listening to booming loud Stan Getz jazz on his Hi Fi and happened to mention I thought Dave Wain and Cody Pomeray were the two greatest drivers in the world -- "What? " he yells, a big blond husky kid with a strange fixed smile, "man I used to drive the getaway car! come on down I'll show ya! " -- So almost dawn and here we are cuttin down Buchanan and around the corner on screeching wheels and he opens her up, goes zipping towards a red light so takes a sudden screeching left and goes up a hill fullblast, when we come to the top of the hill I figger he'll pause awhile to see what's over the top but he goes even faster and practically flies off the hill and we head down one of those incredibly steep San Fran streets with our snout pointed to the waters of the Bay and he steps on the gas! we go sailing down a hundred m. p. h. to the bottom of the hill where there's an intersection luckily with the light on green and thru that we blast with just one little bump where the road crosses and another bump where the street is dipping downhill again -- We come down to the waterfront and screech right In a minute we're soaring over the ramps around the Bridge entrance and before I can gulp up a shot or two from my last late bottle we're already parked back outside the pad on Buchanan -- The greatest driver in the world whoever he was and I never saw him again -- Bruce something or other -- What a getaway. 17 I end up groaning drunk on the floor this time beside Dave's floor mattress forgetting that he's not even there. But a strange thing happened that morning I remember now: before Cody's call from downvalley: I'm feeling hopelessly idiotically depressed again groaning to remember Tyke's dead and remembering that sinking beach but at the side of the radiator in the toilet lies a copy of Boswell's Johnson which we'd been discussing so happy in the car: I open to any page then one more page and start reading from the top left and suddenly I'm in an entirely perfect world again: old Doc Johnson and Boswell are visiting a castle in Scotland belonging to a deceased friend called Rorie More, they're drinking sherry by the great fireplace looking at the picture of Rorie on the wall, the widow of Rorie is there, Johnson suddenly says "Sir, here's what I would do to deal with the sword of Rorie More" (the portrait shows old Rorie with his Highlands flinger) "I'd get inside him with a dirk and stab him to my pleasure like an animal" and bleary with hangover I realize that if there was any way for Johnson to express his sorrow to the widow of Rorie More on the unfortunate circumstance of his death, this was the way -- So pitiful, irrational, yet perfect -- I rush down to the kitchen where Dave Wain and some others are already eating breakfast of sorts and start reading the whole thing to the lot of them -- Jonesy looks at me askance over his pipe for being so literary so early in the morning but I'm not being literary at all -- Again I see death, the death of Rorie More, but Johnson's response to death is ideal and so ideal I only wish old Johnson be sitting in the kitchen now -- (Help! I'm thinking). The call comes from Cody in Los Gatos that he lost his job tire recapping -- "Because we were there last night? " -- 'No no something entirely different, he's gotta lay off some men because his mortgage is bleeding him and all that and some girl is tryna sue him for forging a check and all that, so man I've got to find another job but I have to pay the rent and everything's all fucked up down here, Oh old buddy how about, cant you, I plead or I don't plead, or honestly, Jack, ah, lend me a hundred dollars willya? " -- 'By God Cody I'll be right down and GIVE you a hundred dollars'... "You mean you'll really do that, listen just to lend to me is enough but if you insist, hm" (fluttering his eyelashes over the phone because he knows I mean it) "you old loverboy you, how you gonna get down here there and give me that money there son and make my old heart glad" -- "I'll have Dave drive me down" -- "Okay I'll pay the rent with it right away and because it's now Friday, why, Thursday or whatever, that's right Thursday, why I dont have to be lookin for a new job till next Monday so you can stay here and we'll have a long weekend just goofin and talkin boy like we used to do, I can demolish you at chess or we can watch a baseball game" and in a whisper "and we can sneak into the City see and see my purty baby" -- So I ask Dave Wain and yes he's ready to go anytime, he's just following me like I often follow people myself, and so off we go again. And on the way we drop in on Monsanto at the bookstore and the idea suddenly comes to me for Dave and me and Cody to go to the cabin and spend a big quiet crazy weekend (how? ) but when Monsanto hears this idea he'll come too, in fact he'll bring his little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma and we'll catch McLear at Santa Cruz and go visit Henry Miller and suddenly another big huge ball is begun. So there's Willie waiting down on the street, I go to the store, buy the bottle, Dave wheels Willie around, Ron Blake and now Ben Fagan are on the back mattress, I'm sitting in my front seat rocking chair as now in broad afternoon we go blattin again down that Bay Shore highway to see old Cody and Monsanto's in back of us in his jeep with Arthur Ma, two jeeps now, and about to be two more as I'll show -- Coming to Cody's in mid afternoon, his own house already filled with visitors (local Los Gatos literaries and all kinds of people the phone there ringing continually too) and Cody says to Evelyn "I'll just spend a couple days with Jack and the gang like the old days and look for a job Monday" -- "Okay" -- So we all go to a wonderful pizza restaurant in Los Gatos where the pizzas are piled an inch high with mushrooms and meat and anchovies or anything you want, I cash a travelers check at the supermarket, Cody takes the 100 in cash, gives it to Evelyn in the restaurant, and later that day the two jeeps resume down to Monterey and down that blasted road I walked on blistered feet back to the frightful bridge at Raton Canyon And I'd thought I'd never see the place again. But now I was coming back loaded with observers. The sight of the canyon down there as we renegotiated the mountain road made me bite my lip with marvel and sadness. 18 It's as familiar as an old face in an old photograph as tho I'm gone a million years from all that sun shaded brush on rocks and that heartless blue of the sea washing white on yellow sand, those rills of yellow arroyo running down mighty cliff shoulders, those distant blue meadows, that whole ponderous groaning upheaval so strange to see after the last several days of just looking at little faces and mouths of people As tho nature had a Gargantuan leprous face of its own with broad nostrils and huge bags under its eyes and a mouth big enough to swallow five thousand jeepster stationwagons and ten thousand Dave Wains and Cody Pomerays without a sigh of reminiscence or regret -- There it is, every sad contour of my valley, the gaps, the Mien Mo captop mountain again, the dreaming woods below our high shelved road, suddenly indeed the sight of poor Alf again far way grazing in the mid afternoon by the corral fence -- And there's the creek bouncing along as tho nothing had ever happened elsewhere and even in the daytime somehow dark and hungry looking in its deeper tangled grass. Cody's never seen this country before altho he's an old Californian by now, I can see he's very impressed and even glad he's come out on a little jaunt with the boys and with me and is seeing a grand sight -- He's like a little boy again now for the first time in years because he's like let out of school, no job, the bills paid, nothing to do but gratefully amuse me, his eyes are shining -- In fact ever since he's come out of San Quentin there's been something hauntedly boyish about him as tho prison walls had taken all the adult dark tenseness out of him -- In fact every evening after supper in the cell he shared with the quiet gunman he'd bent his serious head to a daily letter or at least every-other-day letter full of philosophical and religious musings to his mistress Billie... And when you're in bed in jail after lights out and you're not sleepy there's ample time to just remember the world and indeed savor its sweetness if any (altho it's always sweet to remember it in jail tho harder in prison, as Genet shows) with the result that he'd not only come to a chastisement of his bashing bitternesses (and of course it's always good to get away from alcohol and excessive smoking for two years) (and all that regular sleep) he was just like a kid again, but as I say that haunting kidlikeness I think all ex cons seem to have when they've just come out -- In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise -- "Well I'll be damned" he keeps saying as he sees those bluffs and cliffs and hanging vines and dead trees, "you mean to tell me you ben alone here for three weeks, why I wouldn't dare that... must be awful at night ... looka that old mule down there... man, dig the redwood country way back in... reminds me of old Colorady b'god when I used to steal a car every day and drive out to hills like this with a fresh little high school sumptin" -- "Yum Yum, " says Dave Wain emphatically turning that big goofy look to us from his driving wheel with his big mad feverish shining eyes full of yumyum and yabyum too -- "S'matter with you boys not making extensive plans to bring a bevy of schoolgirls down there to wile away our conversation pieces thar" says Cody real relaxed and talking sadly. Behind us the Monsanto jeepster follows doggedly -- Passing thru Monterey Monsanto has already called PatMcLear, staying for the summer with wife and kid in Santa Cruz, McLear with his own jeepster is following us a few miles down the highway -- It's a big Big Sur day. We wheel downhill to cross the creek and at the corral fence I proudly get out to officially open the gate and let the cars through We go bumping down the two-rutted lane to the cabin and park My heart sinks to see the cabin. To see the cabin so sad and almost human waiting there for me as if forever, to hear my little neat gurgling creek resuming its song just for me, to see the very same bluejays still waiting in the tree for me and maybe mad at me now they see I'm back because I havent been there to lay out their Cherios along the porch rail every blessed morning- And in fact first thing I do is rush inside and get them some food and lay it out -- But so many people around now they're afraid to try it. Monsanto all decked out in his old clothes and looking forward to a wine and talkfest weekend in his pleasant cabin takes the big sweet axe down from the wall nails and goes out and starts hammering at a huge log -- In fact it's really a half of a tree that fell there years ago and's been hammered at intermittently but now he's bound he's going to crack it in half and again in half so we can then start splitting it down the middle for huge bonfire type logs -- Meanwhile little Arthur Ma who never goes anywhere without his drawing paper and his Yellowjack felt tip pencils is already seated in my chair on the porch (wearing my hat now too) drawing one of his interminable pictures, he'll do twenty-five a day and twenty-five the next day too -- He'll talk and go on drawing -- He has felt tips of all colors, red, blue, yellow, green, black, he draws marvelous subconscious glurbs and can also do excellent objective scenes or anything he wants on to cartoons... Dave is taking my rucksack and his rucksack out of Willie and throwing them into the cabin, Ben Fagan is wandering around near the creek puffing on his pipe with a happy bhikku smile, Ron Blake is unpacking the steaks we bought enroute in Monterey and I'm already flicking the plastics off the top of bottles with that expert twitch and twist you only get to learn after years of winoing in alleys east and west. Still the same, the fog is blowing over the walls of the canyon obscuring the sun but the sun keeps fighting back -- The inside of the cabin with the fire finally going is still the dear lovable abode now as sharp in my mind as I look at it as an unusually well focused snapshot -- The sprig of ferns still stands in a glass of water, the books are there, the neat groceries ranged along the wall shelves -- I feel excited to be with the gang but there's a hidden sadness too and which is expressed later by Monsanto when he says "This is the kind of place where a person should really be alone, you know? When you bring a big gang here it somehow desecrates it not that I'm referring to us or anybody in particular? there's such a sad sweetness to those trees as tho yells shouldnt insult them or conversation only" -- Which is just the way I feel too. In a gang we all go down the path towards the sea, passing underneath "That sonofabitch bridge" Cody calls it looking up with horror... "That thing's enough to scare anybody away" -- But worst of all for an old driver like Cody, and Dave too, is to see that upended old chassis in the sand, they spend a half hour poking around the wreckage and shaking their heads -- We kick around the beach awhile and decide to come back at night with bottles and flashlights and build a huge bonfire, now it's time to get back to the cabin and cook those steaks and have a ball, and there's McLear's jeep already arrived and parked and there's McLear himself and that beautiful blonde wife of his in her tight blue jeans that makes Dave say "Yum yum" and Cody just say "Yes, that's right, yes, that's right, ah hum honey, yes. " 19 A roaring drinking bout begins deep in the canyon -- Fog nightfall sends cold seeping into the windows so all these softies demand that the wood windows be closed so we all sit there in the glow of the one lamp coughing in the smoke but they dont care -- They think it's just the steaks smoking over the fire -- I have one of the jugs in my hand and I won't let go -- McLear is the handsome young poet who's just written the" most fantastic poem in America, called "Dark Brown', which is every detail of his and his wife's body described in ecstatic union and communion and inside out and everywhichaway and not only that he insists on reading it to us -- But I wanta read my "Sea" poem too -- But Cody and Dave Wain are talking about something else and that silly kid Ron Blake is singing like Chet Baker -- Arthur Ma is drawing in the corner, and it sorta goes like this generally: "That's what old men do, Cody, they drive slowly backwards in Safeway Supermarket parking lots" -- "Yes that's right, I was tellin you about that bicycle of mine but that's what they do yes you see that's because while the old woman is shoppin in that store they figure they'll park a little closer to the entrance and so they spend a half hour to think their big move out and they back in out slowly from their slot, can hardly turn around to see what's in back, usually nothin there, then they wheel real slow and trembly to that slot they picked but all of a sudden some cat jumps in it with his pickup and them old men is scratchin their heads saying and whining "Owww, these young fellers nowadays" and all that obvious, ah, yes, but that BICYCLE of mine in Denver I tell you I had it twisted and that wheel used to wobble so by necissity I had to invent a new way to maneuver them handlebars see... " -- 'Hey Cody have a drink, " I'm yelling in his ear and meanwhile McLear is reading: "Kiss my thighs in darkness the pit of fire" and Monsanto is chuckling saying to Fagan: "So this crazy character comes down stairs and asking for a copy of Aleister Crowley and I didnt know "bout that till you told me the other day, then on the way out I see him sneak a book off the shelf but he puts another one in its place that he got out of his pocket, and the book is a novel by somebody called Denton Welch all about this young kid in China wanderin around the streets like real romantic young Truman Capote only it's China" and Arthur Ma suddenly yells: "Hold still you buncha bastards, I got a hole in my eye" and generally the way parties go, and so on, ending with the steak dinner (I dont even touch a bite but just drink on), then the big bonfire on the beach to which we march all in one armswinging gang, I've gotten the idea in my head I'm the leader of a guerilla warfare unit and I'm marching ahead the lieutenant giving orders, with all our flashlights and yells we come swarming down the narrow path going "Hup one two three" and challenging the enemy to come out of hiding, some guerillas. Monsanto that old woodsman starts a huge bonfire on the beach that can be seen flaring from miles away, cars passing across the bridge way up there can see there's a party goin on in the hole of night, in fact the bonfire lights up the eerie weird beams and staunches of the bridge almost all the way up, giant shadows dance on the rocks -- The sea swirls up but seems subdued -- It's not like being alone down in the vast hell writing the sounds of the sea. The night ending with everybody passing out exhausted on cots, in sleepingbags outside (McLear goes home with wife) but Arthur Ma and I by the late fire keep up yelling spontaneous questions and answers right till dawn like "Who told you you had a hat on your head? " -- "My head never questions hats" -- "What's the matter with your liver training? " -- 'My liver training got involved in kidney work" -- (and here again another great gigantic little Oriental friend for me, an eastcoaster who's never known Chinese or Japanese kids, on the West coast it's quite common but for an eastcoaster like me it's amazing and what with all my earlier studies in Zen and Chan and Tao) -- (And Arthur also being a gentle small soft-haired seemingly soft little Oriental goofnik) And we come to great chanted statements, taking turns, without a pause to think, just one then the other, bing and bang, the beauty of them being that while one guy is yelling like (me):... "Tonight the full apogee August moon will out, early with a jaundiced tint, and pop angels all over my rooftop along with Devas sprinkling flowers" (any kind of nonsense being the rule) the other guy has time not only to figure the next statement but can take off from the subconscious arousement of an idea from "angels all over my rooftop" and so can yell without thinking an answer the stupider or rather the more unexpectedly insaner sillier brighter it is the better 'Pilgrims dropping turds and sweet nemacular nameless railroad trains from heaven with omnipotent youths bearing monkey women that will stomp through the stage waiting for the moment when by pinching myself I prove that a thought is like a touch" -- But this is only the beginning because now we know the routine and get better and better till at dawn I seem to recall we were so fantastically brilliant (while everyone snored) the skies must have shook to hear it and not just foil: let's see if I can recreate at least the style of this game: ARTHUR: "When are you going to become the Eighth Patriarch? " ME: "As soon as you give me that old motheaten sweater" -- (Much better than that, forget this for now, because I want to talk first about Arthur Ma and try again to duplicate our feat). 20 As I say my first little Chinese friend, I keep saying "little" George and "little" Arthur but the fact is they were both small anyway -- Altho George talked slowly and was a little absent from everything in the way of a Zen Master actually who realizes that everything is indifferent anyway, Arthur was friendlier, warmer in a way, curious and always asking questions, more active than George with his constant draw-ng, and of course Chinese instead of Japanese -- He wanted me to meet his father the following weeks -- He was Mon-santo's best friend at the time and they made an extremely strange pair going down the street together, the big ruddy happy man with the crewcut and corduroy jacket and sometimes pipe in mouth, and the little childlike Chinese boy who looked so young most bartenders wouldn't serve him tho he was actually 30 years old -- Nevertheless the son of a famous Chinatown family and Chinatown is right back there behind the fabled beatnik streets of Frisco -- Also Arthur was a tremendous little loverboy who had fabulously beautiful girls on the line and however'd just separated from his wife, a girl I never saw but Monsanto told me she was the most beautiful Negro girl in the world -- Arthur came from a large family but as a painter and a Bohemian his family disapproved of him now so he lived alone in a comfortable old hotel on North Beach tho sometimes he went around the corner into Chinatown to visit his father who sat in the back of his Chinese general store brooding among his countless poems written swiftly in Chinese stroke on pieces of beautiful colored paper which he then hanged from the ceiling of his little cubicle -- There he sat, clean, neat, almost shiney, wondering about what poem to write next but his keen little eyes always jumping to the street door to see who's going by and if someone came into the shop itself he knew at once who it was and for what -- He was in fact the best friend and trusted adviser of Chiang Kai Shek in America, true and no lie -- But Arthur himself was in favor of the Red Chinese which was a family matter and a Chinese matter I had nothing to say about and didnt interest me except insofar as it gave a dramatic picture of father and son in an old culture -- The point of the matter anyway being that he was goofing with me just like George had done and making me happy somehow like George had done -- Something anciently familiar about his loyal presence made me wonder if I'd ever lived before in some other lifetime in China or if he'd been an Occidental himself in a previous lifetime of his own involved with mine somewhere else than China -- The pity of it is that I have no record of what we were yelling and announcing back and forth as the birds woke up outside but it went generally like this: -- ME: "Unless someone sticks a hot iron in my heart or heaps up Evil Karma like tit and tat the pile of that and pulls my mother out her bed to slay her before my damning human eyes... " ARTHUR: "And I break my hand on heads... " M E: "Everytime you throw a rock at a cat from your glass house you heap upon yourself the automatic Stanley Gould winter so dark of death after death, and growing old ARTHUR: "Because lady those ashcans'll bite you back and be cold too... " ME: "And your son will never rest in the imperturbable knowledge that what he thinks he thinks as well as what he does he thinks as well as what he feels he thinks as well as future that... " ARTHUR: "Future that my damn old sword cutter Paisan Pasha lost the Preakness again... " ME: "Tonight the moon shall witness angels trooping at the baby's window where inside he gurgles in his pewk looking with mewling eyes for babyside waterfall lambikin hillside the day the little Arab shepherd boy hugged the babylamb to heart while the mother bleeted at his bay heel... " ARTHUR: "And so Joe the sillicks killit no not... " ME: "Shhhhoww graaa... " ARTHUR: "Wind and carstart... " ME: "The angels Devas monsters Asuras Devadattas Ved-antas McLaughlins Stones will hue and hurl in hell if they dont love the lamb the lamb the lamb of hell lambchop... " ARTHUR: "Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook? " ME: "Such a marvelous notebook... " ARTHUR: "Komi donera ness pata sutyamp anda wanda vesnoki shadakiroo paryoumemga sikarem nora sarkadium baron roy kellegiam myorki ayastuna haidanseetzel ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya bonneavance koroom cemanda versel... " ME: "The a6th Annual concert of the Armenian Convention? " 21 Incidentally I forgot to mention that during the three weeks alone the stars had not come out at all, not even for one minute on any night, it was the foggy season, except the very last night when I was getting ready to leave -- Now the stars were out every night, the sun shone considerably longer but a sinister wind accompanied the Autumn in Big Sur: it seemed like the whole Pacific Ocean was blowing with all its might right into Raton Canyon and also over the high gap from another end causing all the trees to shudder as the big groaning howl came newsing and noising from downcanyon, when it hit there was raised a roar of noise I didn't like -- It seemed ill omened to me somewhere... It was much better to have fog and silence and quiet trees -- Now the whole canyon by one blast could be led screaming and waving in all directions in such a confused mass that even the fellows with me were a little surprised to see it -- It was too big a wind for such a little canyon. This development also prevented the constant hearing of the reassuring creek. One good thing was that when jet planes broke the sound barrier overhead the wind dispersed the clap of empty thunder they caused, because during the foggy season the noise would come down into the canyon, concentrate there, and rock the house like an explosion making me think the first time (alone) that somebody'd set off a blast of dynamite nearby. While I woke up groaning and sick there was plenty of wine right there to start me off with the hounds of hair, so okay, but Monsanto had retired early and typically sensibly to sleep by the creek and now he was awake singing swooshing his whole head into the creek and going Brrrrr and rubbing his hands for a new day -- Dave Wain made breakfast with his usual lecture "Now the real way to fry eggs is to put a cover over them so that they can have that neat basted white look on the yellows, soon's I get this pancake batter ready we'll start on them" -- My list of groceries was so all inclusive in the beginning it was now feeding guerilla troops. A big axe chopping contest began after breakfast, some of us sitting watching on the porch and the performers down below hacking away at the tree trunk which was over a foot thick'- They were chopping off two foot chunks, no easy job -- I realized you can always study the character of a man by the way he chops wood -- Monsanto an old lumberman up in Maine as I say now showed us how he conducted his whole life in fact by the way he took neat little short handled chops from both left and right angles getting his work done in reasonably short time without too much sweat -- But his strokes were rapid -- Whereas old Fagan pipe-in-mouth slogged away I guess the way he learned in Oregon and in the Northwest fire schools, also getting his job done, silently, not a word -- But Cody's fantastic fiery character showed in the way he went at the log with horrible force, when he brought down the axe with all his might and holding it far at the end you could hear the whole treetrunk groaning the whole length inside, runk, sometimes you could hear a lengthwise cracking going on, he is really very strong and he brought that axe down so hard his feet left the earth when it hit -- He chopped off his log with the fury of a Greek god -- nevertheless it took him longer and much more sweat than Monsanto -- "Used to do this in a workgang in southern Arizony" he said, whopping one down that made the whole treetrunk dance off the ground -- But it was like an example of vast but senseless strength, a picture of poor Cody's life and in a sense my own -- I too chopped with all my might and got madder and went faster and raked the log but took more time than Monsanto who watched us smiling -- Little Arthur thereupon tried his luck but gave up after five strokes... The axe was like to carry him away anyway... Then Dave Wain demonstrated with big easy strokes and in no time we had five huge logs to use -- But now it was time to get in the cars (McLear had re-arrived) and go driving south down the coast highway to a hot springs bath house down there, which sounded good to me at first. But the new Big Sur Autumn was now all winey sparkling blue which made the terribleness and giantness of the coast all the more clear to see in all its gruesome splendor, miles and miles of it snaking away south, our three jeeps twisting and turning the increasing curves, sheer drops at our sides, further ghostly high bridges to cross with smashings below -- Tho all the boys are wowing to see it -- To me it's just an inhospitable madhouse of the earth, I've seen it enough and even swallowed it in that deep breath -- The boys reassure me the hot springs bath will do me good (they see I'm gloomy now hungover for good) but when we arrive my heart sinks again as McLear points out to sea from the balcony of the outdoor pools: "Look out there floating in the sea weeds, a dead otter! " -- And sure enough it is a dead otter I guess, a big brown pale lump floating up and down mournfully with the swells and ghastly weeds, my otter, my dear otter, my dear otter I'd written poems about -- "Why did he die? " I ask myself in despair -- "Why do they do that? " -- "What's the sense of all this? " -- All the fellows are shading their eyes to get a better look at the big peaceful tortured hunk of seacow out there as tho it's something of passing interest while tome it's a blow across the eyes and down into my heart -- The hot water pools are steaming, Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks, they're all naked, but there's a gang of fairies also there naked all standing around in various bath house postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off just on general principles -- In fact Cody doesnt even bother to do anything but lie down with his clothes on in the sun, on the balcony table, and just smoke -- But I borrow McLear's yellow bathingsuit and get in -- "What ya wearing a bathingsuit in a hot springs pool for boy? " says Fagan chuckling -- With horror I realize there's spermatazoa floating in the hot water... I look and I see the other men (the fairies) all taking good long looks at Ron Blake who stands there facing the sea with his arse for all to behold, not to mention McLear and Dave Wain too -- But it's very typical of me and Cody that we wont undress in this situation (we were both raised Catholics? ) -- Supposedly the big sex heroes of our generation, in fact -- You might think -- But the combination of the strange silent watching fairy-men, and the dead otter out there, and the spermatazoa in the pools makes me sick, not to mention that when somebody informs me this bath house is owned by the young writer Kevin Cudahy whom I knew very well in New York and I ask one of the younger strangers where's Kevin Cudahy he doesnt even deign to reply -- Thinking he hasnt heard me I ask again, no reply, no notice, I ask a third time, this time he gets up and stalks out angrily to the locker rooms -- It all adds up to the confusion that's beginning to pile up in my battered drinking brain anyway, the constant reminders of death not the least of which was the death of my peaceful love of Raton Canyon now suddenly becoming a horror. From the baths we go to Nepenthe which is a beautiful cliff top restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food, excellent waiters and management, good drinks, chess tables, chairs and tables to just sit in the sun and look at the grand coast -- Here we all sit at various tables and Cody starts playing chess with everybody will join while he's chomping away at those marvelous hamburgers called Heavenburgers (huge with all the side works) -- Cody doesn't like to just sit around and lightly chat away, he's the kind of guy if he's going to talk he has to do all the talking himself for hours till everything is exhaustedly explained, sans that he just wants to bend over a chessboard and say "He he heh, old Scrooge is saving up a pawn hey? cak! I got ya! " -- But while I'm sitting there discussing literature with McLear and Monsanto suddenly a strange couple of gentlemen nearby strike up an acquaintance -- One of them is a youngster who says he is a lieutenant in the Army -- I instantly (drunk on fifth Manhattan by now) go into my theory of guerilla warfare based on my observations the night before when it did seriously occur to me that if Monsanto, Arthur, Cody, Dave, Ben, Ron Blake and I were all members of one fighting unit (and all carrying canteens of booze on our belts) it would be very difficult for the enemy to hurt any of us because we'd be, as dear friends, watching so desperately closely over one another, which I tell the first lieutenant, which attracts the interest of the older man who admits that he's a GENERAL in the Army -- There are also some further homosexuals at a separate table which prompts Dave Wain to look up from the chess game at one quiet drowsy point and announce in his dry twang "Under redwood beams, people talking about homosexuality and war... call it my Nepenthe Haiku" -- "Yass" says Cody checkmating him "see what you can ku about that m'boy and get out of there and I'll noose you with my queen, dear. " I mention the general only because there is also some-thing sinister about the fact that during this long binge I came across him and another general, two strange generals, and I'd never met any generals in my life -- This first general was strange because he seemed too polite and yet there was something sinister about his steely eyes behind goof darkglasses -- Something sinister too about the first lieutenant who guessed who we were (the San Francisco poets, a major nucleus of them indeed) and didn't seem at all pleased tho the general seemed amused -- Nevertheless in a sinister way the general seemed to take great interest in my theory about buddy units for guerilla warfare and when President Kennedy about a year later ordered just such a new scheme for part of our armed forces I wondered (still crazy even then but for new reasons) if the general had got an idea from me... The second general, even stranger, coming up, occurred when I was even more far gone. Manhattans and more Manhattans and finally when we got back to the cabin in late afternoon I was feeling good but realized I was going to be finished tomorrow -- But poor young Ron Blake asked me if he could stay with me in the cabin, the others were all going back to the city in the three cars, I couldn't think of any way to reject his request in a harmless way so said yes... So when they all left suddenly I was alone with this mad beatnik kid singing me songs and all I wanta do is sleep -- But I've got to make the best of it and not disappoint his believing heart. Because after all the poor kid actually believes that there's something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I'm supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I'm sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I'll jump up and down and say yes yes that's right, which I cant do any more -- My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing -- Like those pathetic live highschool kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said "Dharma Bums" on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father -- But no, hep swinging young jazzy Ron wants to dig everything, go to the beach, run and romp and sing, talk, write tunes, write stories, climb mountains, go hiking, see everything, do everything with everybody But having one last quart of port with me I agree to follow him to the beach. We go down the old sad path of the bhikku and suddenly I see a dead mouse in the grass -- "A wee dead mousie" I say cleverly poetically but suddenly I realize and remember now for the first time how I've left the cover off the rat poison in Monsanto's shelf and so this is my mouse -- It's lying there dead -- Like the otter in the sea -- It's my own personal mouse that I've carefully fed chocolate and cheese all summer but once again I've unconsciously sabotaged all these great plans of mine to be kind to living beings even bugs, once again I've murdered a mouse one way or the other -- And on top of that when we come to the place where the garter snake usually lie; sunning itself, and I bring it to Ron's attention, he suddenly yells "LOOKOUT! you never can tell what kind of snake it is! " which really scares me, my heart pounds with horroi -- My little friend the garter snake turns therefore with my head from a living being with a long green body into the evil serpent of Big Sur. On top of that, at the surf, where long streamers o: hollow sea weed always lie around drying in the sun some of them huge, like living bodies with skin, pieces of living material that always made me sad somehow, here's the young hepcat lifting them up and dancing a dervish around the beach with them, turning my Sur into something sea-change -- Something brainchange. All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the "final horrors" again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping down here, it's all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining "Why does God torture me? " -- But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility -- The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for "life', you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness -- You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you cant move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's on your face an expression of incalculable repining like a constipated angel on a cloud -- In fact it's actually a cancerous look you throw on the world, through browngray wool fuds over your eyes -- Your tongue is white and disgusting, your teeth are stained, your hair seems to have dried out overnight, there are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your mouth: in short that very disgusting and well-known hideousness everybody knows who's walked past a city street drunk in the Boweries of the world... But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off -- The poor drunkard is crying... He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help -- He tries to pull himself together by moving one shoe nearer to his foot and he cant even do that properly, he'll drop the shoe, or knock something over, he'll do something invariably that'll start him crying again -- He'll want to bury his face in his hands and moan for mercy and he knows there is none -- Not only because he doesn't deserve it but there's no such thing anyway -- Because he looks up at the blue sky and there's nothing there but empty space making a big face at him He looks at the world, it's sticking its tongue out at him and once that mask is removed it's looking at him with hollow big red eyes like his own eyes -- He may see the earth move but there's no significance of any particular kind to attach to that -- One little unexpected noise behind him will make him snarl in rage -- He'll pull and tug at his poor stained shirt -- He feels like rubbing his face into something that isn't. His socks are thick tired moisty slimes -- The beard on his cheeks itches the running sweats and annoys the tortured mouth -- There's a twisted feeling of no-more, never-again, agh... What was beautiful and clean yesterday has irrationally and unaccountably changed into a big dreary crock of shit... The hairs on his fingers stare at him like tomb hairs -- The shirt and trousers have become glued to his person as tho he was to be drunk forever -- The ache of remorse sinks in as tho somebody was pushing it in from above -- The pretty white clouds in the sky hurt his eyes only -- The only thing to do is turn over and lie face down and weep -- The mouth is so blasted there's not even a chance to gnash the teeth -- There's not even strength to tear the hair. And here comes Ron Blake starting off his new day singing at the top of his voice -- I go down by the creek and throw myself in the sand and lie looking with sad eyes at the water which no longer friends me but sorta wants me to Go away -- There isnt a drop to drink left in the cabin, all the goddamn jeeps are gone with all its healthy cargo of people and I'm alone with an enthusiastic kid on a lark -- The little bugs I'd saved from drowning just because I was bemused and alone and glad, now drown unnoticed within my reach anyway -- The spider is still minding his own business in the outhouse -- Alf lows mournfully in the valley far away to express just the way I feel... The bluejays yak around me as tho because I'm too tired and helpless to feed them any more they're figuring on trying me if they can, "They're friggin vultures anyway" I moan with my mouth in the sand -- The once pleasant thumpthump gurgle slap of the creek is now an endless jabbering of blind nature which doesn't understand anything in the first place -- My old thoughts about the silt of a billion years covering all this and all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought, "Only a silly sober fool could think it, imagine gloating over such nonsense" (because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess') -- But in this condition you can only say "Wisdom is just another way to make people sick" -- "I'm SICK" I yell emphatically to the trees, to the woods around, to the hills above, looking around desperately, nobody cares... I can even hear Ron singing at his lunch inside. What's even more horrible he tries to show compunction and wants to help me. "Anything I can do" -- Later he goes for a lone walk so I go in the cabin and lie on the cot and spend about two hours groaning out a lament: "O mon Dieux, pourquoi Tu m'laisse faire malade comme fa -- Papa Papa aide mue -- Aw j'ai mal au coeur -- J'envie Owaowaowao-" (I go into a long "awaowaowao" that I guess lasted a whole minute) -- I toss over and find new reasons to groan -- I think I'm alone and I'm letting it all go a whole lot like I'd heard my father do when he was dying of cancer in the night in the bed next to mine... When I do manage to stagger up and go lean on the door I realize with double upon double horror that Ron Blake has been sitting there all this time listening to everything over a book -- (I wonder now what he told people about this later, it must have sounded horrible) (Idiotic too, cretinous even, maybe only French Canadian who knows? ) ... "Ron I'm sorry you had to hear all that, I'm sick" -- "I know, man, it's okay, lie down and try to sleep" -- "I can't sleep! " I yell in a rage -- I feel like yelling "Fuck yourself you little idiot what do you know what Im going through! " but then I realize how oldman disgusting and hopeless all that is, and here he is enjoying his big weekend with the big writer he was supposed to tell all his friends what a great swinging ball it was and what I did and said But methinks and mayhap he took away a lesson in temperance, or a lesson in beatness really -- Because the only time I've ever been sicker and madder was a week later when Dave and I came back with the two girls leading to the final horrible night. 22 But look at this: in the afternoon restless youngster Ron wants to go hitch hiking to Monterey of all things to go see McLear and I say "Okay go ahead" -- "Ain't you coming with me? " he asks surprised to see the champion on-the-roader wont even hitch hike any more, "No I'll stay here and get better -- I gotta be alone, " which is true, because as soon as he's gone and has yelled one final hoot from the canyon road directly above and gone on, and I've sat in the sun alone on the porch, fed my birds finally again, washed my socks and shirt and pants and hung them up to dry on bushes, slurped up tons of water kneeling at the creek race, stared silently at the trees, soon as the sun goes down I swear on my arm I'm as well as I ever was: just like that suddenly. "Can it be that Ron and all these other guys, Dave and McLear or somebody, the other guys earlier are all a big bunch of witches out to make me go mad? " I seriously consider this... Remembering that childhood revery I always had, which I used to ponder seriously as I walked home from St Joseph's Parochial School or sat in the parlor of my home, that everybody in the world is making fun of mooney me and I dont know it because everytime I turn around to see who's behind me they snap back into place with regular expressions, but soon's I look away again they dart up to my nape of neck and all whisper there giggling and plotting evil, silently, you can't hear them, and when I turn quickly to catch them they've already snapped back perfectly in place and are saying "Now the proper way to cook eggs is" or they're singing Chet Baker songs looking the other way or they're saying "Did I ever tell you about Jim that time? " -- But my childhood revery also included the fact that everybody in the world was making this fun of me because they were all members of an eternal secret society or Heaven society that knew the secret of the world and were seriously fooling me so I'd wake up and see the light (i. e., become enlightened, in fact) -- So that I, "Ti Jean', was the LAST Ti Jean left in the world, the last poor holy fool, those people at my neck were the devils of the earth among whom God had cast me, an angel baby, as tho I was the last Jesus in fact! and all these people were waiting for me to realize it and wake up and catch them peeking and we'd all laugh in Heaven suddenly -- But animals werent doing that behind my back, my cats were always adornments licking their paws sadly, and Jesus, he was a sad witness to this, somewhat like the animals -- He wasn't peeking down my neck -- There lies the root of my belief in Jesus -- So that actually the only reality in the world was Jesus and the lambs (the animals) and my brother Gerard who had instructed me -- Meanwhile some of the peekers were kindly and sad, like my father, but had to go along with everybody else in the same boat -- But my waking up would take place and then everything would vanish except Heaven, which is God -- And that was why later in life after these rather strange you must admit childhood reveries, after I had that fainting vision of the Golden Eternity and others before and after it including Samadhis during Buddhist meditations in the woods, I conceived of myself as a special solitary angel sent down as a messenger from Heaven to tell everybody or show everybody by example that their peeking society was actually the Satanic Society and they were all on the wrong track. With all this in my background, now at the point of adulthood disaster of the soul, through excessive drinking, all this was easily converted into a fantasy that everybody in the world was witching me to madness: and I must have è believed it subconsciously because as I say as soon as Ron Blake left I was well again and in fact content. In fact very contented -- I rose that following morning with more joy and health and purpose than ever, and there was me old Big Sur Valley all mine again, here came good old Alf and I gave him food and patted his big rough neck with its various cocotte's manes, there was the mountain of Mien Mo in the distance just a dismal old hill with funny bushes around the sides and a peaceful farm on top, and nothing to do all day but amuse myself undisturbed by witches and booze -- And I'm singing ditties again "My soul ain't snow, wouldn't you know, the color of my soul, is interpole" and such silly stuff -- And I yell "If Arthur Ma is a witch he sure is a funny witch! har har! "... And there's the bluejay idiot with one foot on the bar of soap on the porch rail, pecking at the soap and eating it, leaving the cereal unattended, and when I laugh and yell at him he looks up cute with an expression that seems to say "What's the matter? wotti do wong? " -- "Wo wo, got the wong place, " said another bluejay landing nearby and suddenly leaving again... And everything of my life seems beautiful again, I even start remembering the nutty things of the binge and go back even farther and remember nutty things all through my life, it's just amazing now inside our own souls we can lift out so much strength I think it would be enough strength to move mountains at that, to lift our boots up again and go clomping along happy out of nothing but the good source power in our own bones -- And when I visit the sea it doesn't scare me anymore, I just sing out "Seventy thousand schemers in the sea" and go back to my cabin and just quietly pour my coffee in the cup, afternoon, how pleasant! I make a wood run, axe and yank logs outa everywhicha-where and leave em by the side of the road to leisurely carry home -- I investigate a cabin down the creek that has 15 wood matches in it for my emergency -- Take a shot of sherry, hate it -- Find an old San Francis Chronicle with my name in it all over -- Hack a giant redwood log in half in the middle of the creek -- That kind of day, perfect, ending up sewing my holy sweater singing "There's no place like home" remembering my mother -- I even plunge into all the books and magazines around, I read up on "Pataphysics and yell contemptuously in the lamplight " "T'sa'n intellectual excuse for facetious joking, " throwing the magazine away, adding 'Peculiarly attractive to certain shallow types" -- Then I turn my rumbling attention to a couple of unknown Fin du Siecle poets called Theo Marzials and Henry Harland -- I take a nap after supper and dream of the US Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene, at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishing poles and a dog between them go make love quietly in the hills: the captain and everybody know they're queer and rather than being infuriated however they're all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love: you see a sailor peeking after them with binoculars from the poop: there's supposed to be a war but nothing happens, just laundry... I wake up from this silly but strangely pretty dream feeling exhilarated -- Besides now the stars come out every night and I go out on that porch and sit in the old canvas chair and turn my face up to all that mooching going on up there, starmooched firmament, all those stars crying with happy sadness, all that ream and cream of mocky ways with alleyways of lightyears old as Dame Mae Whitty and the hills... I go walking towards Mien Mo mountain in the moon illuminated August night, see gorgeous misty mountains rising the horizon and like saying to me "You don't have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking" so I sit in the sand and look inward and see those old roses of the unborn again Amazing, and in just a few hours this change -- And I have enough physical energy to walk back to the sea suddenly realizing what a beautiful oriental silk scroll painting this whole canyon would make, those scrolls you open slowly at one end and keep unrolling and unrolling as the valley unfolds towards sudden cliffs, sudden Bodhisattvas sitting alone in lamplit huts, sudden creeks, rocks, trees, then sudden white sand, sudden sea, out to sea and you've reached the end of the scroll And with all those misty rose darknesses of varying tint and tuckaway shades to express the actual ephemerality of night -- One long roll unfurling from the range fence among the misty hills, moon meadows, even the hay rick near the creek, down to the trail, the narrowing creek, then the mystery of the AW SEA -- So I investigate the scroll of the valley but I'm singing "Man is a busy little animal, a nice little animal, his thoughts about everything, dont amount to shit. " In fact back at the cabin to make my bedtime hot Oval-tine I even sing "Sweet Sixteen" like an angel (by God bettern Ron Blake) and all the old memories of Ma and Pa, the upright piano in old Massachusetts, the old sum-mernight sings -- That's how I go to sleep, under the stars on the porch, and at dawn I turn over with a blissful smile on my face because the owls are callin and answering from two different huge dead trunks across the valley, hoo hoo hoo. So maybe it's true what Milarepa says: "Though you youngsters of the new generation dwell in towns infested with deceitful fate, the link of truth still remains" (and said this in 890! ) -- "When you remain in solitude, do not think of the amusements in the town... You should turn your mind inwardly, and then you'll find your way... The wealth I found is the inexhaustible Holy Property... The companion I found is the bliss of perpetual Voidness... Here in the place of Yolmo Tag Pug Senge Dzon, the tigress howling with a pathetic trembling voice reminds me that her piteous cubs are playing lively... Like a madman I have no pretension and no hope... I am telling you the honest truth... These are the crazy words of mine... Oh you innumerable motherlike beings, by the force of imaginary destiny you see a myriad visions and experience endless emotions... I smile... To a Yogi, everything is fine and splendid!... In the goodly quiet of this Self-Benefiting sky Enclosure, the timely sounds I hear are all my fellows" sounds... At such a pleasant place, in solitude, I, Milarepa, happily remain, meditating upon the void-illuminating mind -- The more Ups and Downs the more Joy I feel -- The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel... " 23 But in the morning (and I'm no Milarepa who could also sit naked in the snow and was seen flying on one occasion) here comes Ron Blake back with Pat McLear and Pat's wife the beautiful one, and by God their little sweet five year old girl who is such a pleasant sight to see as she goes jongling and jiggling through the fields to look for flowers, everything to her is perfectly new beautiful primordial Garden of Eden morning here in this tortured human canyon -- And a rather beautiful morning develops -- There's fog so we close the blinds and light the fire and the lamp, me and Pat, and sit there drinking from the jug he brought talking about literature and poetry while his wife listens and occasionally gets up to heat more coffee and tea or goes out to play with Ron and the little girl -- Pat and I are in a serious talkative mood and I feel that lonely shiver in my chest which always warns me: you actually love people and you're glad Pat is here. Pat is one if not THE most handsome man I've ever seen -- Strange that he's announced in a preface to his poems that his heroes, his Triumvirate, are Jean Harlow, Rimbaud and Billy the Kid because he himself is handsome enough to play Billy the Kid in the movies, that same darkhaired handsome slightly sliteyed look you expect from the myth appearance of Billy the Kid (I suppose not the actual real life William Bonnie who's said to've been a pimply cretin monster). So we launch on a big discussion of everything in the comfortable gloom of the cabin by the warm red glow of the girly fire, I'm wearing dark glasses anyway for fun, Pat says "Well Jack I didnt have a chance to talk to you yesterday or even last year or even ten years ago when I first met you, I remember I was terrified of you and Pomeray when you ran up my steps one night with sticks of tea, you looked like a couple of car thieves or bank robbers -- And you know a lot of this sneery stuff they've written against us, against San Francisco or beat poetry and writers is because a lot of us don't LOOK like writers or intellectuals or anything, you and Pomeray I must say look awful in a way, I'm sure I dont fill the bill either" -- 'Man you oughta go to Hollywood and play Billy the Kid" -- "Man I'd rather go to Hollywood and play Rimbaud" -- 'Well you can't play Jean Harlow" -- "I'd really like to just get my "Dark Brown" published in Paris, do you know that when you think it's possible a word from you to Gallimard or Girodias would help" -- "I dunno" -- "Do you know that when I read your poems Mexico City Blues I immediately turned around and started writing a brand new way, you enlightened me with that book" -- "But it's nothing like what you do, in fact it's miles away, I am a language spinner and you're idea man" and so on we talk till about noon and Ron's been in and out, "s'made jaunts to the beach with the little ladies and Pat and I don't realize the sun has come out but still sit there deep in the cabin by now talking about Villon and Cervantes. Suddenly, boom, the door of the cabin is flung open with a loud crash and a burst of sunlight illuminates the room and I see an Angel standing arm outstretched in the door! -- It's Cody! all dressed in his Sunday best in a suit! beside him are ranged several graduating golden angels from Evelyn golden beautiful wife down to the most dazzling angel of them all little Timmy with the sun striking off his hair in beams! -- It's such an incredible sight and surprise that both Pat and I rise from our chairs involuntarily, like we've been lifted up in awe, or scared, tho I dont feel scared so much as ecstatically amazed as tho I've seen a vision... And the way Cody stands there not saying a word with his arm outstretched for some reason, struck a pose of some sort to surprise us or warn us, he's so much like St Michael at the moment it's unbelievable especially as I also suddenly realize what he's just actually done, he's had wife and kiddies sneak up ever so quiet up the porch steps (which are noisy and creaky), across the wood planks, easy and tiptoeing, stood there awhile while he prepared to fling the door open, all lined up and stood straight, then pow, he's opened the door and thrown the golden universe into the dazzled mystic eyes of big hip Pat McLear and big amazed grateful me -- It reminds me of the. "time I once saw a whole tiptoeing gang of couples sneaking into our back kitchen door on West Street in Lowell the leader telling me to shush as I stand there nine years old amazed, then all bursting in on my father innocently listening to the Primo Carnera-Ernie Schaaft fight on the old 1930s radio -- For a big roaring toot... But Cody's oldfashioned family tiptoe sneak carries that strange apocalyptic burst of gold he somehow always manages to produce, like I said elsewhere the time in Mexico he drove an old car over a rutted road very slowly as we were all high on tea and I saw golden Heaven, or the other times he's always seemed so golden like as I say in a davenport of some sort in Heaven in the golden top of Heaven. Not that he means to produce this effect: he's just standing there with innate dramatic mystery holding forth his arm as if to say Behold, the sun! and Behold, the angels! sorta pointing at all the golden heads of his family and Pat and I stand aghast. "Happy birthday Jack! " yells Cody or some such ordinary crazy inane greeting "I've come to you with good news! I've brought Evelyn and Emily and Gaby and Timmy because we're all so grateful and glad because everything has worked out absolutely dead perfect, or living perfect, boy, with that little old hunnerd dollars you gave me let me tell you the fantastic story of what happened" (to him it was utterly fantastic), "I went out and traded in my Nash that as you know wont even start but I have to have m'old buddies push it down the road for me, this guy had a perfect gem of a purple or what color is it Maw? magenty, slamelty, a jeepster station-wagon Jack but a perfect beauty mind you listen with a beautiful radio, a brand new set of backup lights, thisa and thata down to the perfect new tires and that wonderful shiney paint job, that color'll knock you out, that's what it is, Grape! " (as Evelyn murmurs the color) "Grape color for all the old grape wine jacks, so we've come here to not only thank you and see you again but to celebrate this, and on top of all that, occasion, goo me I'm all so gushy and girly, hee hee hee, yes that's right come on in children and then go out and get that gear in the car and get ready to sleep outdoors tonight and get that good open fresh air, Jack on top of all that and my heart is jess OVER flowin I got a NEW JOB!! along with that splissly little old beautiful new jeep! a new job right downtown in Los Gatos in fact I dont even have to drive to work any more, I can walk it, just half a mile, now Ma you come in here, meet old Pat McLear here, start up some eggs or some of that steak we brought, open up that vieen roossee wine we brought for drunk old Jack that good old boy while I personally private take him to walk with me back down the road where the jeep is parked, unlock that gate, you got the corral key Jack, okay, and we'll talk and walk just like old times and drive back real slow in my new slowboat to China. " So it's a whole new day, a whole new situation the way it is with Cody, in fact a whole new universe as suddenly we're alone again really for the first time in ages walking rapidly down the road to go get the car and he looks at me with that hand-rubbing wicked look like he's about to spring a surprise on me that's the top surprise of them all, "You guessed it old buddy I have here the LAST, the absolutely LAST yet most perfect of all blackhaired seeded packed tight superbomber joints in the world which you and I are now going to light up, "s'why I didnt want you to bring any of that wine right away, why boy we got time to drink wine and wine and dance" and here he is lighting up, says "Now dont walk too fast, it's time to stroll along like we used to do remember sometimes on our daysoff on the railroad, or walkin across that Third and Townsend tar like you said and the time we watched the sun go down so perfect holy purple over that Mission cross -- Yessir, slow and easy, lookin at this gone valley" so we start to puff the pot but as usual it creates doubtful paranoias in both our minds and we actually sort of fall silent on the way to the car which is a beautiful grape colour at that, a brand new shiney Jeepster with all the equipments, and the whole golden reunion deteriorates into Cody's matter-of-fact lecture on why the car is going to be such a honey (the technical details) and he even yells at me to hurry up with that corral gate, "Cant wait here all day, hor hor hor. " But that's not the point, about pot paranoia, yet maybe it is at that -- I've long given it up because it bugs me anyway -- But so we drive back slowly to the shack and Evelyn and Pat's wife have met and are having woman talk and McLear and I and Cody talk around the table planning excursions with the kids to the beach. And there's Evelyn and I havent had a chance to talk to her for years either, Oh the old days when we'd stay up late by the fireplace as I say discussing Cody's soul, Cody this and Cody that, you could hear the name Cody ringing under the roofs of America from coast to coast almost to hear his women talking about him, always pronouncing "Cody" with a kind of anguish yet there was girlish squealing pleasure in it, "Cody has to learn to control the enormous forces in him" and Cody "will always modify his little white lies so much that they turn into black ones', and according to Irwin Garden Cody's women were always having transcontinental telephone talks about his dong (which is possible). Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rushing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night, wow that madman you can at least write on his grave someday "He Lived, He Sweated" -- No halfway house is Cody's house -- Tho now as I say sorta sweetly chastised and a little bored at last with the world after the crummy injustice of his arrest and sentence he's sorta quieted down and where he'd launch into a tremendous explanation of every one of his thoughts for the benefit of everybody in the room as he's putting on his socks and arranging his papers to leave, now he just flips it aside and may make a stale shrug -- A Jesuit at work -- Tho I remember one crazy moment in the shack that was typically Cody-like: complicated and simultaneous with a million nuances as though the whole of creation suddenly exploded and imploded together in one moment: at the moment that Pat's pretty little angel daughter is coming in to hand me an extremely tiny flower ('It's for you, " she says direct to me) (for some reason the poor little thing thinks I need a flower, or else her mother instructed her for charming reasons, like adornment) Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim "Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing" and at that moment I'm trying to close my pafm around the incredibly small flower and it's so small I cant even do that, cant feel it, cant hardly see it, in fact such a small flower only that little girl could have found it, but I look up to Cody as he says that to Tim, and also to impress Evelyn who's watching me, I announced 'Never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing but this right hand cant even hold this flower" and Cody only looks up "Yass yass. " So what started as a big holy reunion and surprise party in Heaven deteriorates to a lot of showoff talk, actually, at least on my part, but when I get to drink the wine I feel lighter and we all go down to the beach -- I walk in front with Evelyn but when we get to the narrow path I walk in front like an Indian to show her what a big Indian I've been all summer -- I'm bursting to tell her everything -- "See that grove there, once in a while you'll be surprised out of your shoes to see the mule quietly standing there with locks of hair like Ruth's over his forehead, a big Biblical mule meditating, or over there, but up here, and look at that bridge, now what do you think of that? " -- All the kids are fascinated by the upsidedown car wreck... At one point I'm sitting in the sand as Cody walks up my way, I say to him imitating Wallace Beery and scratching my armpits "Cuss a man for dyin in Death Valley" (the last lines of that great movie Twenty Mule Team) and Cody says "That's right, if anybody can imitate old Wallace Beery that's the only way to do it, you had just the right timber there in the tone of your voice there, Cuss a man for dyin in Death Valley hee hee yes" but he rushes off to talk to McLear's wife. Strange sad desultory the way families and people sorta scatter around a beach and look vaguely at the sea, all disorganized and picnic sad -- At one point I'm telling Evelyn that a tidal wave from Hawaii could very easily come someday and we'd see it miles away a huge wall of awful water and "Boy it would take some doing to run back and climb up these cliffs, huh? " but Cody hears this and says, "What? " and I say "It would wash over us and take us all to Salinas I bet" and Cody says "What? that brand new jeep? I'm goin back and move it! " (an example of his strange humor). "How'd'st rain rule here? " says I to Evelyn to show her what a big poet I am -- She really loves me, used to love me in the old days like a husband, for awhile there she had two husbands Cody and me, we were a perfect family till Cody finally got jealous or maybe I got jealous, it was wild for awhile I'd be coming home from work on the railroad all dirty with my lamp and just as I came in for my Joy bubblebath old Cody was rushing off on a call so Evelyn had her new husband in the second shift then when Cody come home at dawn all dirty for his Joy bubblebath, ring, the phone's rung and the crew clerk's asked me out and I'm rushing off to work, both of us using the same old clunker car in shifts -- And Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she'd say "I'll get you. Jack, in another lifetime... And you'll be very happy" -- "What? " I'd yell to joke, "me running up the eternal halls of Karma tryina get away from you hey? " -- "It'll take you eternities to get rid of me, " she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I'll never get rid of her... I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her. "Ah Jack" she says putting her arm around me on the beach, "it's nice to see you again, Oh I wish we could be quiet again and just have our suppers of homemade pizza all together and watch TV together, you have so many friends and responsibilities now it's sad, and you get sick drinking and everything, why dont you just come stay with us awhile and rest" -- "I will" -- But Ron Blake is redhot for Evelyn and keeps coming over to dance with seaweeds and impress her, he's even asked me to ask Cody to let him spend some time alone with Evelyn, Cody's said "Go ahead man. " Having run out of liquor in fact Ron does get his opportunity to be alone with Evelyn as Cody and me and the kids in one car, and McLear and family in the other start for Monterey to stock up for the night and also more cigarettes -- Evelyn and Ron light a bonfire on the beach to wait for us... As we're driving along little Timmy says to Paw "We shoulda brought Mommy with us, her pants got wet in the beach" -- "By now they oughta be steamin, " says Cody matterof-factly in another one of his fantastic puns as he lockwallops that awful narrow dirt canyon road like a getaway car in the mountains in a movie, we leave poor McLear miles back -- When Cody comes to a narrow tight curve with all our death staring us in the face down that hole he just swerves the curve saying "The way to drive in the mountains is, boy, no fiddlin around, these roads dont move, you're the one that moves'... And we come out on the highway and go right battin up to Monterey in the Big Sur dusk where down there on the faint gloamy frothing rocks you can hear the seals cry. 24 McLear exhibits another strange facet of his handsome but faintly "decadent" Rimbaud-type personality at his summer camp by coming out in the livingroom with a goddamn HAWK on his shoulder -- It's his pet hawk, of all things, the hawk is black as night and sits there on his shoulder pecking nastily at a clunk of hamburg he holds up to it -- In fact the sight of that is so rarely poetic, McLear whose poetry is really like a black hawk, he's always writing about darkness, dark brown, dark bedrooms, moving curtains, chemical fire dark pillows, love in chemical fiery red darkness, and writes all that in beautiful long lines that go across the page irregularly and aptly somehow -- Handsome Hawk McLear, in fact I suddenly yell out "Now I know your real name! it's M'Lear! M'Lear the Scotch Highland moorhaunter with his hawk about to go mad and tear his white hair in a tempest" -- Or some such silly thing, feeling good again now we've got new wine -- Time to go back to the cabin and fly down that dark highway the way only Cody can fly (even bettern Dave Wain but you feel safer with Dave Wain tho the reason Cody gives you a sense of dooming boom as he pushes the night out the wheels is not because he'll lose perfect control of the car but you feel the car will take off suddenly up to Heaven or at least just up into what the Russians call the Dark Cosmos, there's a booming rushing sound out the window when Cody bats her down the white line at night, with Dave Wain it's all conversation and smooth sailing, with Cody it's a crisis about to get worse) -- And now he's saying to me "Not only today but the other day with the boys, that beautiful McLear woman there, wow, with her tight blue jeans, man I cried under a tree to see that poppin around so innocent like, whoo, so I tell you what we're gonna do old buddy: tomorrow we go back to Los Gatos the whole family and we've dropped Evelyn and the kids home after the hiss-the-villain play we're all gonna see at seven... " -- "The what? " -- "It's a play, " he says suddenly imitating the tired whiney voice of an old PTA Committee woman, "you go there and you sit down and out comes this old 1910 play about villains foreclosing the mortgage, mustaches, you know, calico tears, you can sit there you see and hiss the villain all you want even for all I know yell obscenities or something I dunno -- But it's Evelyn's world, you know, she's designing the sets and that's the work she's done while I was in the can so I cant begrudge her that, in fact I aint got a word in edgewise, when you're the father of a family you go along with the little woman acourse, and the kids enjoy it, after that plan and after you've hissed the villain we'll drop them home and then old buddy" zooming up the car even of all thinks, the hawk is black as night and sits there faster in lieu of rubbing his hands with zeal, so to say Zocm, "you an