Desolation Angels (51 page)

“What now?” sighs poor Memère. “Jacky drag me all the way from my daughter's house in Florida with no plans, no money.”

“There's lots of nice apartments around here for fifty dollars a month,” I say, “and besides Ben can show us where to get a room tonight.” Smoking and smiling and carrying most of our bags good old Ben leads us to a hotel five blocks away on University and Shattuck where we hire two rooms and go to sleep. That is, while Memère sleeps I walk back to the cottage with Ben to rehash old times. For us it was a strange quiet time between the era of our Zen Lunatic days of 1955 when we read our new poems to big audiences in San Francisco (tho I never read, just conducted sort of with a jug of wine) and the upcoming era of the paper and critics writing about it and calling it the “San Francisco Beat Generation Poetry Renaissance”—So Ben sat crosslegged sighing and said: “Oh nothing much happening around here. Think I'll go back to Oregon pretty soon.” Ben is a big pink fellow with glasses and great calm blue eyes like the eyes of a Moon Professor or really of a Nun. (Or of Pat O'Brien, but he almost killed me when I asked him if he was an Irishman the first time I met him.) Nothing ever surprises him not even my strange arrival in the night with my mother; the moon'll shine on the water anyway and chickens'll lay more eggs and nobody'll know the origin of the limitless chicken without the egg. “What were you
smiling
about when I saw you in the window?” He goes into the tiny kitchen and brews a pot of tea. “I hate to disturb your hermitage.”

“I was probably smiling because a butterfly got caught in the pages. When I extricated it, the black cat and the white cat both chased it.”

“And a flower chased the cats?”

“No, Jack Duluoz arrived with a long face worrying about something, at 2
A.M.
not even carrying a candle.”

“You'll like my mother, she's a
real
Bodhisattva.”

“I like her already. I like the way she puts up with you, you and your crazy three-thousand-mile ideas.”

“She'll take care of everything …”

Funny thing about Ben, the first night me and Irwin had met him he cried all night face down on the floor, nothing we could do to console him. Finally he ended up never crying ever since. He had just come down from a summer on a mountain (Sourdough Mountain) just like me later, and had a whole book of new poems he hated, and cried: “Poetry is a lotta bunk. Who wants to bother with all that mental discrimination in a world already dead, already gone to the other shore? There's just nothin to do.” But now he felt better, with that
smile,
saying: “It doesnt matter any more. I dreamed I was a Tathagata twelve feet long with gold toes and I didnt even care any more.” There he sits crosslegged, leaning slightly to the left, flying softly thru the night with a Mount Malaya smile. He appears as blue mist in the huts of poets five thousand miles away. He's a strange mystic living alone smiling over books, my mother says next morning in the hotel “What kind of fella is that Benny? No wife, no family, nothing to do? Does he have a job?”

“He has a part time job inspecting eggs in the university laboratory up the hill. He earns just enough for his beans and wine. He's a
Buddhist!
”

“You and your Buddhists! Why dont you stick to your own religion?” But we go forth at nine in the morning and immediately miraculously find a fine apartment, groundfloor with a flowery yard, and pay a month's rent in advance and move our suitcases in. At 1943 Berkeley Way right near all the stores and from my bedroom window I can actually see the Golden Gate Bridge over the waters beyond the rooftops ten miles away. There's even a fireplace. When Ben gets home from work I go get him at his cottage and we go buy a whole frying chicken, a quart of whiskey, cheese and bread and accessories, and that night by firelight as we all get drunk in the new apartment I fry the chicken in the rucksack cookpots right on the logs and we have a great feast. Ben has already bought me a present, a tamper to tamp down the tobacco in my pipe, and we sit smoking by the fire with Memère.

But too much whiskey and we all get woozy and pass out. There are already two beds in the apartment and in the middle of the night I wake up to hear Memère's groan from the whiskey and somehow I realize our new home is already cursed thereby.

75

And besides Memère is already saying that the mountains of Berkeley are going to topple over on us in an earthquake—Also she cant stand the morning fog—When she goes to the fine supermarkets down the street she hasnt got enough money anyway to buy anything she really wants—I rush out and buy a twelve-dollar radio and all the newspapers to make her feel good but she just doesnt like it—She says “California is sinister. I wanta spend my social security checks in Florida.” (We're living on my $100 a month and her $84 a month.) I begin to see that she will never be able to live anywhere but near my sister, who is her great pal, or around New York City, which was her great dream once. Memère liked me too but I dont woman-chatter with her, spend most of my time reading and writing. Good old Ben comes over once in a while to cheer us up somehow tho he just depresses her. (“He's like an old Grandpaw! Where did you meet people like that? He's just a good old Grandpaw he's not a young man!”) With my supply of Moroccan pep pills I write and write by candlelight in my room, the ravings of old angel midnight, nothing else to do, or I walk around the leafy streets noticing the difference between the yellow streetlamps and the white moon and coming home and painting it with house paint on cheap paper, drinking cheap wine meanwhile. Memère has nothing to do. Our furniture will come soon from Florida, that harried mass I told about. I therefore realize that I am an imbecile poet trapped in America with a dissatisfied mother in poverty and shame. It makes me mad I'm not a renowned man of letters living in a Vermont farmhouse with lobsters to broil and a wife to go downy with, or even my own woods to meditate in. I write and write absurdities as poor Memère mends my old pants in the other room. Ben Fagan sees the sadness of it all and puts his arm around my shoulders chuckling.

76

And one night in fact, I go to the nearby movie and lose myself for three hours in tragic stories about other people (Jack Carson, Jeff Chandler) and just as I step out of the theater at midnight I look down the street towards San Francisco Bay completely forgetting where I am and I see the Golden Gate Bridge shining in the night, and I
shudder with horror.
The bottom drops out of my soul. Something about that bridge, something
sinister
like Ma says, something like the forgotten details of a vague secanol nightmare. Come three thousand miles to shudder—and back home Memère is hiding in her shawl wondering what to do. It's really too much to believe. And like for instance we have a swell little bathroom but with slanted eaves but when I take joyous bubble baths every night, of hot water and Joy liquid soap, Memère complains she's afraid of that bathtub! She wont take a bath because she'll fall, she says. She's writing letters back to my sister and our furniture hasnt even arrived from Florida!

God! Who asked to be born anyway? What do with the bleak faces of pedestrians? What do with Ben Fagan's smoking pipe?

77

But here on a foggy morning comes crazy old Alex Fairbrother in Bermuda shorts of all things and carrying a
bookcase
to leave with me, and not even really a bookcase but boards and redbricks—Old Alex Fairbrother who climbed the Mountain with me and Jarry when we were Dharma Bums who didnt care about anything—Time has caught up with us—Also he wants to pay me a day's wages to help him clean out a house in Buena Vista he owns—Instead of smiling at Memère and saying hello he starts right in talking to me the way he did in 1955, completely ignoring her even when she brings him a cup of coffee: “Well Duluoz, I see you've made your way back to the West Coast. Speaking of Virginia gentry did you know that they do go back to England—Fox trips—The mayor of London entertained about fifty at the time of the 350th anniversary celebration and Elizabeth II let them have Elizabeth the First's wig (I think) to exhibit and lots of things never lent out of the tower of London before. You see I had a Virginia girl once … What kind of Indians are Mescaleros? Library is closed today …” and Memère's in the kitchen saying to herself that all my friends are
insane.
But actually I needed to earn that day's wages from Alex. I'd already been down to a factory where I thought of getting a job but just one glimpse of two kids pushing a bunch of boxes around to the orders of a dull looking foreman who probably questioned them about their private lives during lunch hour, and I left—I'd even walked into the employment office and right out again like a Dostoevsky character. When you're young you work because you think you need the money: when you're old you already know you dont need anything but death, so why work? And besides, “work” always means somebody else's work, you push another man's boxes around wondering “Why doesnt he push his own boxes around?” And in Russia probably the worker thinks, “Why doesnt the Peoples' Republic push their own goddam boxes around?” At least, by working for Fairbrother, I was working for a friend: he would have me saw bushes so I could at least think “Well I'm sawing a bush for old Alex Fairbrother who's very funny and climbed a mountain with me two years ago.” But anyway we set off for work next morning on foot and just as we were crossing a small side street a cop came over and gave us two tickets fining us $3 each for jaywalking, which was half my day's wages already. I stared at the bleak California face of the cop in amazement. “We were talking, we didnt notice no red light,” I said, “besides it's eight o'clock in the morning there's no traffic!” and on top of that he could see we had shovels on our shoulders and were going to work someplace.

“I'm just doing my job,” he says, “just like you're doing.” I promised myself I'd never do another day's “work” at a “job” in America ever again come hell or high water. But of course it wasn't as easy as that with Memère to protect somehow—All the way from sleepy Tangiers of blue romance to the empty blue eyes of an American traffic cop somewhat sentimental like the eyes of Junior High School superintendents, rather, somewhat
un
sentimental like the eyes of Salvation Army mistresses beating tambourines on Christmas Eve. “It's my job to see that the laws are obeyed,” he says absently: they never say anything about keeping law and order any more, there are so many silly laws including the ultimate imminent law against flatulating it's all too confused to even be called “order” anymore. While giving us this sermon some nut is holding up a warehouse two blocks away wearing a Halloween mask, or, worse, some councilman is tabling a new law in the legislature demanding stiffer penalties for “Jaywalking”—I can see George Washington crossing against the light, bareheaded and bemused, wondering about Republics like Lazarus, bumping into a cop at Market and Polk—

Anyway Alex Fairbrother knows about all this and is a big analytical satirist of the whole scene, laughs at it in his strange humorless way, and we actually have fun the rest of the day altho I cheat a little when he tells me to dispose of some piled underbrush I just dump it over the stone wall into the next lot, knowing he cant see me because he's on his hands and knees in the mud in the cellar taking it out by the handfuls and having me bring the buckets out. He's a very strange nut who's always moving furniture around and re-fixing things and houses: if he rents a small house on a Mill Valley hill he'll spend all his time building a small terrace by hand, but then move out suddenly, to another place, where he'll tear out the wallpaper. It is not at all surprising to see him suddenly coming down the street carrying two piano stools, or four empty art frames, or a dozen books on ferns, in fact I dont understand him but I like him. He once sent me a box of Boy Scout cookies that came all crumbled in the mail from three thousand miles away. In fact there's something crumbly about
him.
He moves around the U.S.A. crumbling from job to job as a librarian where he apparently confuses the women librarians. He's very learned but it's on so many different and unconnected subjects nobody understands. He's very sad, actually. He wipes his glasses and sighs and says “It's disconcerting to see the population explosion is going to weaken American aid—maybe we should send them vaginal jelly in Shell Oil barrels? It would be a new kind of Tide Gamble made in America.” (Here he actually refers to what is printed on cartons of Tide soap sent overseas, so he knows what he's talking about, it's only that no one else can connect why he said it.) Hard enough, even, in this vague world to know why anybody
exists
let alone
come on
like they do. Like Bull Hubbard has always said, I guess, life is “insufferably dull.” “Fairbrother I'm bored!” I finally say—

Removing his glasses, sighing, “Try Suave. The Aztecs used Eagle oil. Had some long name starting with a ‘Q' and ended with ‘oil.' Quetzlacoatl. Then they could always wipe the extra goo off with a feathered serpent. Maybe they even tickled your heart before they tore it out. You cant always tell from the American Press, they have such long mustaches in the Pen & Pencil Set.”

I suddenly realized he was just a crazy lonely poet speaking out an endless muttering monologue of poems to himself or anyone who listened day or night.

“Hey Alex, you mispronounced Quetzalcoatl: it goes Kwet-
sa
-kwatay. Like coyotl goes co-
yo
-tay, and peotl goes pey-
o
-tay, and Popocatepetl the volcano goes Popo-ca-
tep
-atay.”

“Well you spit your pits out at the walking wounded there, I'm just giving it the old Mount Sinai Observation pronunciation … Like after all, how do you pronounce D.O.M. when you live in a cave?”