Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Chiefly, it was alcohol, with cocaine thrown in whenever he chanced to run into Mad Michael Menninger, which was often that summer. Alcohol would screen off the reality of the marshaled forces signaling that a change was in the air—the growing reactionary sentiment of people, the atomization of what still called itself The Movement, and the latter’s lack of a coherent response to this newly emerging exclusiveness and, instead, their growing co-optiveness by it. It was factionalism and fragmentation, a house divided against itself, as Ram saw it, with drugs and rock-and-roll the only annealing signs of membership left of the forces that nearly changed the world order in 1968. In his sober moments, Ram pondered this sea change that not many of his peers even admitted existed. He was making a mountain of a molehill, they said. He was just being paranoid, they sniffed. Ram remembered he was also dismissed in this fashion almost a decade before, during the early days of the Nixon presidency when he used to speculate that his phones were tapped or that certain “friends” were agent provocateurs. His friends then mocked him as a paranoid projector, all the way until the end when the Cointelpro program came to light during Watergate. The reality of Cointelpro and its phone taps and spies and agents provocateurs and all the rest of that hugger-mugger voodoo vastly exceeded Ram’s active and perceptive imaginings. Now, it was worse, Ram felt; a new thing was being triggered, and the scope of the newly forming picture in Ram’s mind was so Grand Guignol that alcohol became almost a medication for him. The fun he derived from it in the Endymion days, its joy as a celebratory sacrament of communion was gone now. Instead, he suffered it now, and he suffered daily from the damage the alcohol was causing his brain and body.

  When he went out drinking, which was almost nightly from May through early July, he’d start at the bottom of Meridian, moving northwards from The Asti to The Teacup, stopping at The Lotus, sometimes at The Avenue or The Oak Room, sometimes by himself, other times with Michael or Tomas or both, which sometimes got dangerous given Mad Michael’s predilection for bar fights. By the end of June, the three of them had been 86’d from four bars on Meridian Avenue.

  Sitting in those Refugio bars with their echoing din of coos and shrieks and bellows, and whispers in corridors that proceeded trips to the parking lot to trade cash for cocaine or engage in anonymous sex, Ram would sit at the table with an Anchor Steam in front of him until the pile-driving sounds of pleasure would fall away at the most unexpected moments. He’d be studying the ring trace that his glass had left on the table and suddenly tumble Alice-like into an aleph where all his family ghosts—Ram the First, and Fran the First—would shimmer into focus to wink and nod and toast and drink with the shit-faced and dislocated Ram. Then a barmaid would break the spell: “Another Steam, Ram?” The ghosts would dissolve and their echoed conversations with Ram would be supplanted by conversations he heard from nearby girls plotting romantic possibilities.

  “I mean if the fucking is really boss, then it’s really hard to shine the guy on, even if he doesn’t have all his shit together,” he overheard once, which seemed particularly emblematic of the times. In the mornings, with a hangover that was a sadistic clapper inside his cracked bell, Ram sometimes wondered why he bothered with this barroom constitutional.

  Besides the fact that his growing claque now expected it of him and Ram wanted to show his gratitude by pleasing them with a performance that didn’t require much from him, mostly he did it for the now all too infrequent occasions when life became larger than life again, which was perhaps only an illusion, only Ram’s delusion, even though he firmly believed it and felt it to be so. Sometimes, when he was so lucky, it was because of the immediacy he felt during those moments when it seemed the whole world was crowded into one crystalline image or symbol and could be experienced simultaneously, a feeling Ram first had that long-ago day in Vancouver when he and Jonas and Shaughn and Donnie drove hell-bent to the top of Mount Seymour, and then, afterward, tried to consume and be and feel… all that they saw from the mountain crest… all of it, all of it simultaneously. It was rare now when that happened. Sometimes, it would be with Tomas or Mad Michael when they’d meet in town and, tiring of the bar scene ritual, head out to Bracero where they’d shoot nine ball or cutthroat all night, drinking beer and whiskey, dissecting literature, film, or politics, or women, nights where they would congratulate each other’s brilliance and insight, their compression and comprehension. Sometimes, the cocaine fueled these flights of ideation. Ram told Vera of one such conversation they’d all had, carefully reconstructing the argument he made as best he could. Vera listened, then said, “Ram, you’re a brilliant poet, but sometimes you’re such a child. If you took the best parts of that lunacy and put it in a poem, you might make something out of it. But as words to live by, that is absolutely the most putrid bullshit that I’ve ever heard.” It shut Ram up for the rest of the night and he soon abandoned his barroom stations-of-the-cross routine, settling into an isolation that kept him home at night except for Fridays.

  Fridays were still reserved for Vera and he alone, still at The Courtyard and now sometimes at the Bay View Hotel. It was still gardenia for her, Armas de Casa for him, and post-closing time feasts of pancakes and sausage at Flaps on Ocean Street. Their love was stronger now than it had been at any time since the beginning.

  Ram would stay home watching television when he wasn’t reading. Vera subscribed them to one of the new cable hookups so they could watch classic movies. The TV now picked up stations in San Francisco, San Jose, and Sagrada. Late one weeknight, Ram sat watching a movie on the San Jose station waiting for a Bertolucci film to come on that Peach had recommended. The film he was watching while waiting for it bored him, prompting Ram to change stations, going up and down the dial of the remote control until he came to a talk show. The hostess was interviewing a comic who Ram remembered; a personality from the fifties whose time had come and gone. He now served on talk shows as a respite between British actors and Southern grand dames of belles lettres. The comic had ridden the comet of his youth to a crest that was already a fallen arch a decade ago. He was answering questions from the hostess, herself a comic from the sixties whose star had likewise fallen.

  Perhaps it was the comic guest’s manner, like a bystander being quizzed by police at the scene of an accident, that endeared him to Ram; perhaps it was his lack of glibness and guile, the traits he was known for when his career was at its peak. Ram could see the comic knew the audience regarded him as a museum piece, and Ram could also tell that he was grateful to be asked on as a guest and tell his tales of Groucho Marx and Oscar Levant and George Gershwin to people who didn’t have a clue who they were and were probably, at that time, using his appearance as just cause to ignore the program and make a phone call or pay bills. The comic was a commodity that didn’t sell anymore, and it depressed Ram to watch it. He went back to the movie channel, waiting for the Bertolucci film. It was getting started when Vera walked in

  “What are you watching?” she asked.

  “It’s called Before the Revolution. George said it’s great. Come over and watch it with me. I’ll make us some popcorn.”

  Vera slipped her shoes off, then stockings and dress, and put on the terrycloth robe she’d stolen from The Miyako the night she and Ram stayed there. Ram stood at the stove shaking the seeds and asking her how work had been. Vera answered in monosyllables and Ram turned to look at her. The film had totally bewitched her, and as Ram regarded it more closely, it bewitched him too, making him burn the popcorn. He left it on the stove and slid in under the comforter close to Vera. She ignored him until the film was over, then leaned over and kissed him.

  “I’ve seen that one once before,” she said. “There’s one thing that old guy said that reminded me of you.”

  “What old guy?”

  “The aristocrat; the hunter with the big estate, the baron of the manor, just like your tarot cards say you’re going to be.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was something about the nostalgia
for the moment. It reminded me of that thing you told me that night at The Teacup when you were out with Tomas and Mad Michael.”

  “I remember now,” said Ram.

  Vera stretched and smiled sweetly.

  “Are you coming to bed with me, baby?”

  “For a while,” Ram said grinning. “Then I’m going to stay up and write. Something just snapped. Let me make a brief note then I’ll come to bed.”

  Three hours later, as dawn was breaking, Ram finished the poem he’d premier at the festival. It was called Nostalgia. When he got into bed, Vera yawned and asked him, “Did you finish it, baby?”

  “I sure did,” Ram whispered, “and it’s fucking good.”

  After the Fourth of July, which Ram and Vera spent with George and Marcia Rogers camping in Big Sur, Vera and Marcia collecting seashells and starfish, Ram and Peach talking literature and politics, the preparations for the third annual Refugio Poetry Festival began in earnest. The phone was ringing constantly. Fellow poets, festival officials, editors of periodicals, and friends from out of town, sometimes long forgotten, sometimes hardly remembered, called to ask Ram for tickets, or his opinions on certain poets, or for contributions to various causes, or to cadge spare beds to sleep on. When Rogers called with the arrangements for Ram’s appearance at the festival and the talk show, Ram told Vera that he had to get away for a day or two to clear his mind and get back inside his own skin.

  He got in the Roacho and drove north through San Francisco, then headed through Gualala into Mendocino County, stopping at a funky hotel in Casper where he stayed for two nights, wandering the headlands during the day and looking out onto the Pacific. He didn’t drink, he thought, and what he thought about was the course his life had taken since his commencement of exile to Vancouver almost a decade ago. Almost everyone from that time, except Jaime, was still alive: Shaughn and Jonas and Earl and Fran and Tor, but outside of Tor, whose ethos remained essentially the same, the only one whose operative vision still held seemed to be Ram’s. Whether the others regarded these attitudes as the folly of youth or dismissed them as drug-induced pipedreams, wasn’t certain to Ram, because whenever he tried to approach the subject with them, they’d ignore him or turn the conversation to something mundane like home mortgages or business; as though that part of themselves, that core belief system that they all shared then, was a fantasy that only Ram believed in, an old joke whose punchline was in a slang that was out of fashion, understood only by those who still remembered what the slang words meant. Ram remembered Jonas’ warning in Vancouver, that we’d better watch it, those of us who really felt it, or else the whole thing would become a fashion that Madison Avenue would expropriate and market. And it was becoming so now, more increasingly so, Ram saw, and soon, a new fashion would supplant it: the pendulum would swing, the tables would turn, one movement would be supplanted by another directly antithetical to the tenets of the first, the times were changing, and it would be felt first in California.

  There was a responsibility in enunciating this which Ram felt was ineluctably, almost fatalistically his. He felt somehow chosen as the weathervane that would mark this new change in wind direction, though to what purpose, he couldn’t yet say. As he wandered the Casper headlands with these thoughts ricocheting inside him, Ram wasn’t sure that he liked where it was taking him. At the same time, he couldn’t turn away from it either. It was in his old Californio blood and in that long-ago vision that he revealed to Vera, back in the beginning, to do so. He often hoped another voice would emerge who’d enunciate the things he felt must be told, but one had not yet, leaving Ram holding a bag whose contents were heavy.

  …And then, just as quickly as the weight was felt, the load would lessen, like it did now, lifting as he walked the headlands. Here, all was as it always was and would always be: the light-green, sweet-tasting grasses, the wind-sculpted trees, the sea-carved stones, and the delicate wildflowers that defied all the elements. This world was outside the world of man and his headlined doings, and though man was the most formidable force on the planet, a force whose powers were now far more powerful than those of wind and sea, Ram felt it was all a sideshow to the abiding earth and its world, a world that superseded man and would likely survive him, if man didn’t take her along with him in his march to the cliff. When Ram ran with that projection, he felt better, because he believed that, in the end, all he was at best was a messenger, and probably a minor one at that, whose message wasn’t intrinsically different from those who preceded him or those still likely to follow.

  Ram felt at peace again by the end of that day and spent the remaining hours of the afternoon sitting on the headlands, making final revisions to the three poems he’d read at the festival. He wasn’t looking to find critical approval with these pieces, he just sought to tell the truth and find peace, a peace like the peace he now felt in the balanced world he witnessed from the Casper headlands. His part in the whole affair might be important to Ram, or to the academic world of literature, or, maybe, as a political litmus test for what might come, but from a cosmological perspective, it was of little consequence. Vanity of vanities, Ram told himself. All is vanity and a chase after wind.

  That night, he called Vera and told her how much he loved her and that he was rested and ready. He went to bed early, read Shelley’s Ozymandias, and slept like a baby until the next morning. He felt good driving home and took it as a good sign when he was crossing the Golden Gate and the radio played Dylan’s Desolation Row. He was all synched up and ready to go.

  On the night of his reading, Ram and Vera and Peach went to dinner at a place called Burma Joe’s, an organic Asian restaurant that Vera was fond of, mostly because the restaurant owner, a New Jersey Italian called Burma Joe (Who knew why? Was there a Burma in Jersey?) was fond of her. Joe escorted the trio to the table and left them mostly in peace, admiring Vera from afar in his place behind the bar. He wasn’t subtle about it. Ram shot him a hard look and Burma Joe retreated into the kitchen. “Not tonight, Vera. I’m in no mood for it tonight,” said Ram. Rogers chose to ignore what he’d noticed, inducing Vera into a conversation of what was good on the menu, settling finally on tandoori chicken while Ram and Vera shared two plates, one, a lamb curry, the other, a chef’s choice of organic vegetables, predominantly artichoke hearts and asparagus spears. They all drank bottled water. The main idea was to keep Ram sober until he finished reading. After that, it was open game.

  At the auditorium, it was a madhouse. Festival officials scurried about between the poets and their factotums, agents, wives or husbands or, the new term, “significant others.” Femme fatales flitted about, many of them congregating around the Kesey bunch whose bus outside the backstage door reverberated with Grateful Dead music. Kesey was resplendent in a long, tan camel hair coat with the hide of an angus cow draped over his shoulders, crowned with a buffalo skin hat with horns, the ensemble calling to mind, to Ram’s mind at least, a sort of buffoonish Aleister Crowley of the Far West. Kesey was red-faced, talking animatedly with Lawrence Ferlinghetti when Rogers introduced Ram to him. He reeked of bourbon. He and Ram paid each other compliments and shook hands. Ram shook Ferlinghetti’s hand and retreated into a corner, observing the backstage goings-on: arrangements for romantic assignations, arguments about politics, dope deals, poetic pontifications, and occasional small talk. Vera and Rogers stood off in a corner with Vera’s friend Margaret, whose escort, arranged by Vera, was Mad Michael. Vera didn’t like what she was seeing.

  “Michael, go talk to Ram,” she said. “He’s starting to worry me. He’s got that look.”

  Michael sauntered over to where Ram sat in the corner at a small table. “Hey, boyo,” he said. “Was machen sie? Wie gehts?”

  Ram looked up glumly, then shook his head from side to side. “I’m machen nothing, Michael, but it gehts good enough, I guess. What do you make of this scene?”

  Michael looked about the room. A knot of lesbians in leather jackets stood in one corner and clouds of marijuana smo
ke rose from the corner occupied by the Kesey clan. Norvold and Callisto were surrounded by the prettiest women, and the hard chemical crowd were in the other corner with Jim Carroll and the two Burroughs’s, père and fils.

  “Well, me boy,” said Michael, “I’d say we seem to have a representative Refugio sampling here. I would say a resplendent evening is sartainly in store, aargh.”

  At that moment, Tomas Gutierrez approached and Ram was seized by inspiration. He waited until Vera’s attention was diverted. When he was sure it was, he jumped up quickly, motioning for Tomas and Michael to follow him. They bluffed their way onto the Kesey bus, asking the sentry posted there for a private corner, explaining that Ram and Tomas were poets, both of them fishing out their crumpled backstage passes which proved that they were. Ensconced in a private cubicle screened with tie-dyed drapes, Ram asked Michael if he was holding. Michael reached in his pocket and produced a vial, then removed a small silver implement from his Swiss Army knife and handed it to Ram who took four large toots then passed the kit to Tomas. “I know you’ve got a notepad, Tomas,” said Ram. “I need it.”