Desolation Angels (16 page)

But O Sarina come with me to my bed of woes, let me love you gently in the night, long time, we got all night, till dawn, till Juliet's rising sun and Romeo's vial sink, till I have slaked my thirst of Samsara at your portal rosy petal lips and left saviour juice in your rosy flesh garden to melt and dry and ululate another baby for the void, come sweet Sarina in my naughty arms, be dirty in my clean milk, and I'll detest the defecate I leave in your milky empowered cyst-and-vulva chamber, your cloacan clara file-hool through which slowly drool the hallgyzm, to castles in your hassel flesh and I'll protect your trembling thighs against my heart and kiss your lips and cheeks and Lair and love you everywhere and that'll be that—

At the drape she parts her bra and shows the naughty teats and vanishes inside and show's over—lights come on—everybody leaves—I sit there sipping my last possible shot, dizzy and crazy.

It dont make no sense, the world is too magical, I better go back to my rock.

In the toilet I yell at a Filipino cook, “Aint those beautiful girls, hey? Aint they?” and he loath to admit it admits it to the yelling bum at the urinal—I go back, upstairs, to sit out the movie for the next show, maybe next time Sarina'll fly everything off and we'll see and feel the infinite love—But my God the movies they show! Sawmills, dust, smoke, gray pictures of logs splashing in water, men with tin hats wandering in a gray rainy void and the announcer: “The proud tradition of the Northwest—” then followed by color pictures of water skiers, I cant make it, I leave the show by the side left exit, drunk—

Just as I hit the outside night air of Seattle, on a hill, by redbrick neons of the stagedoor, here come Abe and Slim and the colored tapdancer hurrying and sweating up the street for the next show, even on an ordinary street the tapdancer cant make it without puffing—I realize he has asthma or some serious heart defect, shouldnt be dancing and hustling—Slim looks strange and ordinary on the street and I realize it's not him's making it with Sarina, it's some producer in the box, some sugar candy—Poor Slim—And Abe the Clown of Eternity Drapes, there he is talking as ever and yakking with big interested face in the actual streets of life, and I see all three of them as
troupers,
vaudevillians, sad, sad—Around the corner for a quick drink or maybe gulp a meal and hurry back for the next show—Making a living—Just like my father, your father, all fathers, working and making a living in the dark sad earth—

I look up, there are the stars, just the same, desolation, and the angels below who dont know they're angels—

And Sarina will die—

And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

69

In a Chinese restaurant in a booth I order pan fried chow mein and dig the Chinese waitress and the younger beautifuller Filipino waitress and they watch me and I watch them but I lose myself in my chow mein and pay the bill and leave, dizzy—No possible way in the world for me to get a girl tonight, the hotel wouldnt let her in and she wouldnt come anyway, I realize I'm just an old fuck of 34 and nobody wants to go to bed with me anyway, a Skid Row bum with wine on his teeth and jeans and dirty old clothes, who cares? Everywhere up and down the street other characters like me—But as I go in my hotel here comes a neat crippled man with a woman, they go up the elevator, and an hour later after I've had my hot bath and rested and got ready to sleep I hear them creak the bed in the next room in real sexual ecstasy—“It must all depend on the way,” I think, and go to sleep girl-less with girls dancing in my dreams—Ah Paradise! bring me a wife!

And already in my life I've had two wives and sent one away and ran away from the other, and hundreds of lover-girls everyone of em betrayed or screwed in some way by me, when I was young and open-faced and not ashamed to ask—Now I look at my mirror face scowl and it's disgusting—We have sex in our loins and wander beneath the stars on hard sidewalks, pavement and broken glass cant receive our gentle thrust, our gentle thrust—Everywhere bleak faces, homeless, loveless, around the world, sordid, alleys of night, masturbation (the old man of 60 I once saw masturbating for two hours straight in his cell in the Mills Hotel in New York)—(Nothing was there but paper—and pain—)

Ah, I think, but somewhere ahead in the night waits a sweet beauty for me, who will come up and take my hand, maybe Tuesday—and I'll sing to her and be pure again and be like young arrow-slinging Gotama vying for her prize—Too late! All my friends growing old and ugly and fat, and me too, and nothing there but expectations that dont pan out—and the Void'll Have Its Way.

Praise Lord, if you can't have fun turn to religion.

Till they re-establish paradise on earth, the Days of Perfect Nature, and we'll wander around naked and kissing in gardens, and attend dedicatory ceremonies to the Love God at the Great Love Meeting Park, at the World Shrine of Love—Until then, bums—

Bums—

Nothing but bums—

I fall asleep, and it's not the sleep in the mountaintop shack, it's in a room, traffic's outside, the crazy silly city, dawn, Saturday morning comes in gray and desolate—I wake up and wash and go out to eat.

The streets are empty, I go down the wrong way, among warehouses, nobody works on Saturdays, a few dismal Filipinos walk in the street pass me—Where is my breakfast?

And I realize too that my blisters (from the mountain) have grown so bad now I cant hitch hike, I cant take that pack on my back and walk two miles out—south—I decide to take a bus to San Francisco and git it over with.

Maybe a lover there for me.

I have plenty of money and money is only money.

And what will
Cody
be doing when I get to Frisco? And Irwin and Simon and Lazarus and Kevin? And the girls? No more summer daydreams, I'll go see what “reality” has in store for “me”—

“To hell with Skid Row.” I go up the hill and out and immediately find a splendid serve-yourself restaurant where you pour your own coffee as many time's you want and pay that on an honor basis and get your bacon and eggs at the counter and eat at tables, where stray newspapers feed me the news—

The man at the counter is so kind! “How you want your eggs, sir?”

“Sunny side up”

“Yes
sir,
coming right up,” and all his stuff and griddles and spatulas as clean as a pin, here's a real believing man who wont let the night discourage him—the awful brokenbottle sexless gut night—but'll awake in the morning and sing and go to his job and prepare food for people and honor them with the title “sir” to boot—And exquisite and delicate come out the eggs and the little shoe-string potatoes, and the toast crisp and well buttered with melted butter and a brush, Ah, I sit and eat and drink coffee by the big plateglass windows, looking out on an empty bleak street—Empty but for one man in a nice tweed coat and nice shoes going somewhere, “Ah, there's a happy man, he dresses well, goes believingly down the morning street—”

I take my little paper cup of grape jelly and spread it on my toast, squeezing it out, and drink another cup of hot coffee—Everything'll be all right, desolation is desolation everywhere and desolation is all we got and desolation aint so bad—

In the papers I see where Mickey Mantle aint gonna beat Babe Ruth's homerun record, O well, Willie Mays'll do it next year.

And I read about Eisenhower waving from trains on campaign speeches, and Adlai Stevenson so elegant so snide so proud—I read about riots in Egypt, riots in North Africa, riots in Hong Kong, riots in prisons, riots in hell everywhere, riots in desolation—Angels rioting against nothing.

Eat your eggs

and

Shut up

70

Everything is so keen when you come down from solitude, I notice all Seattle with every step I take—I'm going down the sunny main drag now with pack on back and room rent paid and lotsa pretty girls eating ice cream cones and shopping in the 5 & 10—On one corner I see an eccentric paperseller with a wagon-bike loaded with ancient issues of magazines and bits of string and thread, an oldtime Seattle character—“The
Reader's Digest
should write about him,” I think, and go to the bus station and buy my ticket to Frisco.

The station is loaded with people, I stash my rucksack in the baggage room and wander around unencumbered looking everywhere, I sit in the station and roll a cigarette and smoke, I go down the street for hot chocolate at a soda fountain.

A pretty blonde woman is running the fountain, I come in there and order a thick milkshake first, move down to the end of the counter and drink it there—Soon the counter begins to fill up and I see she's overworked—She cant keep up with all the orders—I even order hot chocolate myself finally and she does a little “Hmf O my”—Two teenage hepcats come in and order hamburgers and catsup, she cant find the catsup, has to go in the backroom and look while even then fresh further people sit at the counter hungry, I look around to see if anybody'll help her, the drug clerk is a completely unconcerned type with glasses who in fact comes over and sits and orders something himself, free, a
steak sandwich
—

“I cant find the catsup!” she almost weeps—

He turns over a page of the newspaper, “Is that a fact”—

I study him—the cold neat white-collar nihilistic clerk who doesnt care about anything but does believe that women should wait on him!—She I study, a typical West Coast type, probable ex-showgirl, maybe even (sob) ex-burlesque dancer who didnt make it because she wasnt naughty enough, like O'Grady last night—But she lives in Frisco too, she always lives in the Tenderloin, she is completely respectable, very attractive, works very hard, very good hearted, but somehow something's wrong and life deals her a complete martyr deck I dont know why—something like my mother—Why some man doesnt come and latch on her I dont know—The blonde is 38, fulsome, beautiful Venus body, a beautiful and perfect cameo face, with big sad Italianized eyelids, and high cheekbones creamy soft and full, but nobody notices her, nobody wants her, her man hasnt come yet, her man will never come and she'll age with all that beauty in that selfsame rockingchair by the potted-flower window (O West Coast!)—and she'll complain, she'll say her story: “All my life I've tried to do the best I could”—But the two teenagers insist they want catsup and finally, when she has to admit she's out they get surly and start to eat—One, an ugly kid, takes his straw and to pop it out of its paper wrapper stabs viciously at the counter, as tho stabbing someone to death, a real hard fast death-stab that frightens me—His buddy is very beautiful but for some reason he likes this ugly murderer and they pal around together and probably stab old men at night—Meanwhile she's all fuddled in a dozen different orders, hot dogs, hamburgers (myself I want a hamburger now), coffee, milk, lime-ades for children, and cold clerk sits reading his paper and chewing his steak sandwich—He notices nothing—Her hair is falling over one eye, she's almost
weeping
—Nobody cares because nobody notices—And tonight she'll go to her little clean room with the kitchenette and feed the cat and go to bed with a sigh, as pretty a woman as you'll ever see—No Lochinvar at the door—An angel of a woman—And yet a bum like me, with no one to love her tonight—That's the way it goes, there's your world—Stab! Kill!—Dont care!—There's your Actual Void Face—exactly what this empty universe holds in store for us, the Blank—Blank Blank Blank!

When I leave I'm surprised that, instead of treating me contemptuously for watching her sweat a whole hour, she actually sympathetically counts up my change, with a little harried look from tender blue eyes—I picture myself in her room that night listening first to her list of legitimate complaints.

But my bus is going—

71

The bus pulls out of seattle and goes barreling south to Portland on swish-swish 99—I'm comfortable in the back seat with cigarettes and paper and near me is a young Indonesian-looking student of some intelligence who says he's from the Philippines and finally (learning I speak Spanish) confesses that white women are shit—

“
Las mujeres blancas son la mierda
”

I shudder to hear it, whole hordes of invading Mongolians shall overrun the Western world saying that and they're only talking about the poor little blonde woman in the drugstore who's doing her best—By God, if I were Sultan! I wouldnt allow it! I'd arrange for something better! But it's only a dream! Why fret?

The world wouldnt exist if it didnt have the power to liberate itself.

Suck! suck! suck at the teat of Heaven!

Dog is God spelled backwards.

72

And I had raged purely among rocks and snow, rocks to sit on and snow to drink, rocks to start avalankies with and snow to throw snowballs at my house—raged among gnats and dying male ants, raged at a mouse and killed it, raged at the hundred mile cyclorama of snow-capped mountains under the blue sky of day and the starry splendor of night—Raged and been a fool, when I shoulda loved and repented—

Now I'm
back
in that goddam movie of the world and
now
what do I do with it?

Sit in fool and be fool,

that's all—

The shades come, night falls, the bus roars downroad—People sleep, people read, people smoke—The busdriver's neck is stiff and alert—Soon we see the lights of Portland all bleak bluff and waters and soon the city alleys and drivearounds flash by—And after that the body of Oregon, the Valley of the Willamette—

At dawn I restless wake to see Mount Shasta and old Black Butte, mountains dont amaze me anymore—I dont even look out the window—It's too late, who cares?

Then the long hot sun of the Sacramento Valley in her Sunday afternoon, and bleak little stop-towns where I chew up popcorn and squat and wait—Bah!—Soon Vallejo, sights of the bay, the beginnings of something new on the cloudsplendrous horizon—San Francisco on her Bay!