"Let me help you," I say.
I reach into my pocket.
She steps toward me, instantly relieved as if a miracle has happened.
I give her a dollar, having totally lost somewhere the thread of making a pass at her, which I had planned on doing.
She can't believe it's a dollar and throws her arms around me and kisses me on the cheek. Her body is warm, friendly and giving.
We could make a nice scene together. I could say the words that would cause it to be, but I don't say anything because I've lost the thread of making a pass at her and don't know where it's gone, and she departs beautifully toward all the people that she will ever meet, at best I will turn out to be a phantom memory, and all the lives that she will live.
We've finished living this one together.
She's gone.
A Short History of Religion in California
THERE'S only one way to get into it: We saw the deer in the meadow. The deer turned in a slow circle and then broke the circle and went toward some trees.
There were three deer in the meadow and we were three people. I, a friend and my daughter 3½ years old. "See the deer," I said, pointing the way to the deer.
"Look the deer! There! There!" she said and surged against me as I held her in the front seat. A little jolt of electricity had come to her from the deer. Three little gray dams went away into the trees, celebrating a TVA of hoofs.
She talked about the deer as we drove back to our camp in Yosemite. "Those deer are really something," she said. "I'd like to be a deer."
When we turned into our campground there were three deer standing at the entrance, looking at us. They were the same deer or they were three different ones.
"Look the deer!" and the same electrical surge against me, enough perhaps to light a couple of Christmas tree lights or make a fan turn for a minute or toast half a slice of bread.
The deer followed close behind the car as we drove at deer speed into the camp. When we got out of the car, the deer were there. My daughter took out after them. Wow! The deer!
I slowed her down. "Wait," I said. "Let Daddy take your hand." I didn't want her to scare them or get hurt by them either, in case they should panic and run over her, a next to impossible thing.
We followed after the deer, a little ways behind and then stopped to watch them cross the river. The river was shallow and the deer stopped in the middle and looked in three different directions.
She stared at them, not saying anything for a while. How quiet and beautiful they looked and then she said, "Daddy, take off the deer's head and put it on my head. Take off the deer's feet, put them on my feet. And I'll be the deer."
The deer stopped looking in three different directions. They all looked in one direction toward the trees on the other side of the river and moved off into those trees.
So the next morning there was a band of Christians camping beside us because it was Sunday. There were about twenty or thirty of them seated at a long wooden table. They were singing hymns while we were taking down our tent.
My daughter watched them very carefully and then walked over to peek out at them from behind a tree as they sang on. There was a man leading them. He waved his hands in the air. Probably their minister.
My daughter watched them very carefully and then moved out from behind the tree and slowly advanced until she was right behind their minister, looking up at him. He was standing out there alone and she was standing out there alone with him.
I pulled the metal tent stakes out of the ground and put them together in a neat pile, and I folded the tent and put it beside the tent stakes.
Then one of the Christian women got up from the long table and walked over to my daughter. I was watching this. She gave her a piece of cake and asked her if she wanted to sit down and listen to the singing. They were busy singing something about Jesus doing something good for them.
My daughter nodded her head and sat down on the ground. She held the piece of cake in her lap. She sat there for five minutes. She did not take a bite out of the piece of cake.
They were now singing about Mary and Joseph doing something. In the song it was winter and cold and there was straw in the barn. It smelled good.
She listened for about five minutes and then she got up, waved good-bye in the middle of "We Three Kings of Orient Are" and came back with the piece of cake.
"Well, how was that?" I said.
"Singing," she said, pointing they are singing.
"How's the cake?" I said.
"I don't know," she said and threw it on the ground. "I've already had breakfast." It lay there.
I thought about the three deer and the Christians singing. I looked at the piece of cake and to the river where the deer had been gone for a day.
The cake was very small on the ground. The water flowed over the rocks. A bird or an animal would eat the cake later on and then go down to the river for a drink of water.
A little thing came to my mind and having no other choice: it pleased me, so I hugged my arms around a tree and my cheek sailed to the sweet bark and floated there for a few gentle moments in the calm.
April in God-damn
THIS early April in God-damn God-damn begins with a note on the front door, left by a young lady. I read the note and wonder what the hell's up.
I'm too old for this kind of stuff. I can't keep track of everything, and so I go pick up my daughter and do the best I can on that front: take her to play in the park.
I really don't want to get out of bed, but I have to go to the toilet. Returning from the toilet, I see something a note or something fastened to the glass window on the front door. It leaves a shadow on the glass.
I don't give a damn. Let somebody else handle these complicated things in early April. It's enough for me to have gone to the toilet. I go back to bed.
I dream that somebody I don't like is walking their dog. The dream takes hours. The person is singing to their dog but I can't make out what the song is and I have to listen too hard and never get it, anyway.
I wake up totally bored. What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I'm twenty-nine. I get the note off the door and go back to bed.
I read it with the sheet pulled up over my head. The light is not very good but it is better than anything else I've come across today. It's from a girl. She came by so quietly this morning and left it on my door.
The note is an apology for a bad scene she made the other night. It is in the form of a riddle. I can't figure it out. I never cared for riddles, anyway. Fuck her.
I go get my daughter and take her to the playground at Portsmouth Square. I have been watching her for the last hour. From time to time I have paused to write this down.
I wonder if my daughter will ever leave a note on some man's door in early April God-damn God-damn and he'll read it in bed with the sheet pulled up over his head and then take his daughter to the park and look up as I just did to see her playing with a blue bucket in the sand.
One Afternoon in 1939
THIS is a constant story that I keep telling my daughter who is four years old. She gets something from it and wants to hear it again and again.
When it's time for her to go to bed, she says, "Daddy, tell me about when you were a kid and climbed inside that rock."
"OK."
She cuddles the covers about her as if they were controllable clouds and puts her thumb in her mouth and looks at me with listening blue eyes.
"Once when I was a little kid, just your age, my mother and father took me on a picnic to Mount Rainier. We drove up there in an old car and saw a deer standing in the middle of the road.
"We came to a meadow where there was snow in the shadows of the trees and snow in the places where the sun didn't shine.
"There were wild flowers growing in the meadow and they looked beautiful. In the middle of the meadow there was a huge round rock and Daddy walked over to the rock and found a hole in the center of it and looked inside. The rock was hollow like
a small room.
"Daddy crawled inside the rock and sat there staring out at the blue sky and the wild flowers. Daddy really liked that rock and pretended that it was a house and he played inside the rock all afternoon.
"He got some smaller rocks and took them inside the big rock. He pretended that the smaller rocks were a stove and furniture and things and he cooked a meal, using wild flowers for food."
That's the end of the story.
Then she looks up at me with her deep blue eyes and sees me as a child playing inside a rock, pretending that wild flowers are hamburgers and cooking them on a small stove-like rock.
She can never get enough of this story. She has heard it thirty or forty times and always wants to hear it again.
It's very important to her.
I think she uses this story as a kind of Christopher Columbus door to the discovery of her father when he was a child and her contemporary.
Corporal
ONCE I had visions of being a general. This was in Tacoma during the early years of World War II when I was a child going to grade school. They had a huge paper drive that was brilliantly put together like a military career.
It was very exciting and went something like this: If you brought in fifty pounds of paper you became a private and seventy-five pounds of paper were worth a corporal's stripes and a hundred pounds to be a sergeant, then spiralling pounds of paper leading upward until finally you arrived at being a general.
I think it took a ton of paper to be a general or maybe it was only a thousand pounds. I can't remember the exact amount but in the beginning it seemed so simple to gather enough paper to be a general.
I started out by gathering all the loose paper that was lying innocently around the house. That added up to three or four pounds. I'll have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I don't know where I got the idea that the house was just filled with paper. I actually thought there was paper all over the place. It's an interesting surprise that paper can be deceptive.
I didn't let it throw me, though. I marshalled my energies and went out and started going door to door asking people if they had any newspapers or magazines lying around that could be donated to the paper drive, so that we could win the war and destroy evil forever.
An old woman listened patiently to my spiel and then she gave me a copy of Life magazine that she had just finished reading. She closed the door while I was still standing there staring dumbfoundedly at the magazine in my hands. The magazine was warm.
At the next house, there wasn't any paper, not even a used envelope because another kid had already beaten me to it.
At the next house, nobody was home.
That's how it went for a week, door after door, house after house, block after block until finally I got enough paper together to become a private.
I took my God-damn little private's stripe home in the absolute bottom of my pocket. There were already some paper officers, lieutenants and captains, on the block. I didn't even bother to have the stripe sewed on my coat. I just threw it in a drawer and covered it up with some socks.
I spent the next few days cynically looking for paper and lucked into a medium pile of Collier's from somebody's basement which was enough to get my corporal's stripes that immediately joined my private's stripe under the socks.
The kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had known where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. They strutted military airs around the playground and on their way home from school.
Shortly after that, like the next day, I brought a halt to my glorious military career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them.
Lint
I'M haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.
A Complete History of Germany and Japan
A few years ago (World War II) I lived in a motel next to a Swift packing plant which is a nice way of saying slaughterhouse.
They killed pigs there, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month until spring became summer and summer became fall, by cutting their throats after which would follow a squealing lament equal to an opera being run through a garbage disposal.
Somehow I thought that killing all those pigs had something to do with winning the war. I guess that was because everything else did.
For the first week or two that we lived in the motel it really bothered me. All that screaming was hard to take, but then I grew used to it and it became like any other sound: a bird singing in a tree or the noon whistle or the radio or trucks driving by or human voices or being called for dinner, etc.
"You can play after dinner.'"
Whenever the pigs weren't screaming, the silence sounded as if a machine had broken down.
The Auction
IT was a rainy Pacific Northwest auction with kids running all over the place getting into things and farm women interested in buying boxes of used fruit jars, secondhand dresses, and perhaps some furniture for the house while the men were interested in saddles and farm equipment and livestock.
The auction was in a kind of old warehousebarn-like building with used excitement everywhere on Saturday afternoon. It smelled like the complete history of America.
The auctioneer was selling things so fast that it was possible to buy stuff that wouldn't be for sale until next year. He had false teeth that sounded like crickets jumping up and down inside the jaws of a skeleton.
Whenever there was a box of old toys put up for auction, the kids would bother the hell out of their folks until they were threatened with the strap if they didn't shut up, "Stop pestering me or you won't be able to sit down for a week."
There were always cows and sheep, horses and rabbits waiting to get new owners or a farmer somberly contemplating some chickens while blowing his nose.
It was great on a rainy winter afternoon because the auction had a tin roof and there was a beautiful wet closeness to everything inside.
An ancient case made out of dusty glass and long yellow wood like a pioneer's mustache contained boxes of stale candy bars. They were fifty cents a box and really stale but for some kid reason I liked to gnaw away on them and would work up a quarter and find somebody to go in with me on a box and I'd end up with twelve stale candy bars in 1947.
The Armored Car
For Janice
I lived in a room that had a bed and a telephone. That was all. One morning I was lying in bed and the telephone rang. The window shades were pulled down and it was raining hard outside. It was still dark.
"Hello," I said.
"Who invented the revolver?" a man asked.
Before I could hang the telephone up my own voice escaped me like an anarchist and said, "Samuel Colt."
"You just won a cord of wood," the man said.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"This is a contest," he said. "You just won a cord of wood."
"I don't have a stove," I said. "I live in a rented room. There's no heat."
"Is there anything else you would want besides a cord of wood?" he said.
"Yeah, a fountain pen."
"Good, we'll send you one. What's the address there?"
I gave him my address and then I asked him who was sponsoring the contest.
"Never mind," he said. "The pen will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Oh, yes, is there any particular color you like? I almost forgot."
"Blue would be fine."
"We're all out of blue. Any other color? Green? We have a lot of green pens."
"All right, green, then."
"It'll be in
the mail tomorrow morning," he said.
It wasn't. It never came.
The only thing I ever won in my life and actually received was an armored car. When I was a child I had a paper route that went for miles along the rough edge of town.
I would have to ride my bicycle down a hill, following a road that had fields of grass on both sides and an old plum orchard at the end of the road. They had chopped down part of the trees and built four new houses there.
Parked in front of one house was an armored car. It was a small town and every day after work the driver took the armored car home with him. He parked it out in front of his house.
I would pass there before six o'clock in the morning and everybody would be asleep in the houses. When there was light in the morning I could see the armored car from a quarter of a mile or so.
I liked the armored car and would get off my bicycle and walk over and take a look at it, knock on the heavy metal, look in the bulletproof windows, kick the tires.
Because everybody was asleep in the morning and I alone out there, after a while I considered the armored car to be mine and treated it as such.
One morning I got into the armored car and delivered the rest of my papers from it. It looked kind of strange to see a kid delivering newspapers from an armored car.
I rather enjoyed it and started doing it regularly.
"Here comes that kid in the armored car delivering papers," the early risers said. "Yeah, he's a nut."
That was the only thing I ever won.
The Literary Life in California/1964
1
I was sitting in a bar last night talking to a friend who was from time to time looking down the bar at his wife. They had been separated for two years: no hope.
She was palling it up with another man. They looked as if they were having a lot of fun.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 8
