My friend turned and asked me about two books of my poetry. I'm a minor poet, even so, people sometimes ask me questions like that.
He said he used to have the books but he didn't have them any more. They were gone. I said that one of the books was out of print and copies of the other book were down at City Lights Bookstore.
He took a look down at his wife. She was laughing at something the other man had said, who was then quite pleased with himself, and so it goes.
"I have a confession to make," my friend said. "Remember that night I came home from work and found you and my wife drunk together on sweet vermouth in the kitchen?"
I remembered the evening, though nothing had happened. We were just sitting there in the kitchen, listening to the phonograph and drunk on sweet vermouth. There were probably thousands like us all across America.
"Well, when you left I went and got those two books of poetry out of the bookcase and tore them up and threw the pieces on the floor. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't have put those books of poetry back together again."
"Win a few, lose a few," I said.
"What?" he said.
He was a little drunk. There were three empty beer bottles in front of him on the bar. Their labels had been carefully scratched off.
"I just write the poetry," I said. "I'm not a shepherd of the pages. I can't look after them forever. It wouldn't make sense."
I was also a little drunk.
"Anyway," my friend said. "I would like to have those books again. Where can I get them?"
"One of them has been out of print for five years. The other one you can get at City Lights," I said, busy putting together and filming in my mind what went on after I left the kitchen and went home, glowing like a lantern in sweet vermouth.
What he said to her before he went and got the books of poetry and tore them up. What she said, what he said, which book went first, the way he tore it. Oh, a lovely act of healthy outrage and what was taken care of after that.
2
I was at City Lights a year ago and saw somebody looking at one of my books of poetry. He was pleased with the book, but there was a reluctance to his pleasure.
He looked at the cover again and turned the pages again. He stopped the pages as if they were the hands of a clock and he was pleased at what time it was. He read a poem at seven o'clock in the book. Then the reluctance came again and clouded up the time.
He put the book back on the shelf, then he took it off the shelf. His reluctance had become a form of nervous energy.
Finally he reached in his pocket and took out a penny. He placed the book in the crook of his arm. The book was now a nest and the poems were eggs. He threw the penny up in the air, caught it and slapped it on the back of his hand. He took his other hand away.
He put the book of poetry back on the shelf and left the bookstore. As he walked out he looked very relaxed. I walked over and found his reluctance lying there on the floor.
It was like clay but nervous and fidgeting. I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this, having nothing better to do with my time.
Banners of My Own Choosing
DRUNK laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, it makes no difference. I return to this story as one who has been away but one who was always destined to return and perhaps that's for the best.
I found no statues nor bouquets of flowers, no beloved to say: "Now we will fly new banners from the castle, and they will be of your own choosing," and to hold my hand again, to take my hand in yours.
None of that stuff for me.
My typewriter is fast enough as if it were a horse that's just escaped from the ether, plunging through silence, and the words gallop in order while outside the sun is shining.
Perhaps the words remember me.
It is the fourth day of March 1964. The birds are singing on the back porch, a bunch of them in an aviary, and I try to sing with them: Drunk laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, I'm back in town.
Fame in California/1964
1
IT'S really something to have fame put its feathery crowbar under your rock and then upward to the light release you, along with seven grubs and a sow bug.
I'll show you what happens, then. A friend of mine came up to me a few months ago and said, "You're a character in the novel I just finished."
It really set me up when he said that. I had an immediate vision of myself as the romantic lead or the villain: "He put his hand on her breast and his hot breath fogged up her glasses," or "He laughed as she cried, then he kicked her down the stairs like a sack of dirty laundry."
"What do I do in your novel?" I said, waiting to hear great words.
"You open a door," he said.
"What else do I do?"
"That's all."
"Oh," I said, my fame diminishing. "Couldn't I have done something else? Maybe opened two doors? Kissed somebody?"
"That one door was enough," he said. "You were perfect."
"Did I say anything when I opened the door?" still hoping a little.
"No."
2
I met a photographer friend of mine last week. We were making the rounds of the bars. He took some photographs. He is a careful young photographer and conceals his camera under his coat like a pistol.
He doesn't want people to know what he is doing. Wants to capture them in real life poses. Doesn't want to make them nervous and begin acting like movie stars.
Then he whips out his camera like the bank robber that got away: that simple Indiana boy that's now living in Switzerland among royalty and big business and who has cultivated a foreign accent.
Yesterday I met the young photographer and he had some large prints of the photographs he had taken that night.
"I took a picture of you," he said. "I'll show it to you."
He showed me through a dozen or so prints and then he turned to the next one and said, "See!" It was the photograph of an old woman drinking a rather silly martini.
"There you are," he said.
"Where?" I said. "I'm not an old woman."
"Of course not," he said. "That's your hand on the table."
I looked very carefully into the photograph and sure enough, but now I wonder what happened to the seven grubs and the sow bug.
I hope they made out a little better than I did after that feathery crowbar lifted us to the light. Perhaps they have their own television show and are coming out with an LP and are having their novels published by Viking, and Time will ask them about themselves, "Just tell us how you got started. In your own words."
Memory of a Girl
I cannot look at the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company building without thinking of her breasts. The building is at Presidio and California Streets in San Francisco. It is a red brick, blue and glass building that looks like a minor philosophy plopped right down on the site of what was once one of California's most famous cemeteries:
Laurel Hill Cemetery
1854–1946
Eleven United States Senators were buried there.
They, and everybody else were moved out years ago, but there are still some tall cypress trees standing beside the insurance company.
These trees once cast their shadows over graves. They were a part of daytime weeping and mourning, and nighttime silence except for the wind.
I wonder if they ask themselves questions like: Where did everybody go who was dead? Where did they take them? And where are those who came here to visit them? Why were we left behind?
Perhaps these questions are too poetic. Maybe it would be best just to say: There are four trees standing beside an insurance company out in California.
September California
SEPTEMBER 22 means that she is lying on the beach in a black bathing suit and she is very carefully taking her own temperature.
She is beautiful: long and white and obviously a secretary from Montgomery Street who went to San Jose State College for three years and
this is not the first time that she has taken her own temperature in a black bathing suit at the beach.
She seems to be enjoying herself and I cannot take my eyes off her. Beyond the thermometer is a ship passing out of San Francisco Bay, bound for cities on the other side of the world, those places.
Her hair is the same color as the ship. I can almost see the captain. He is saying something to one of the crew.
Now she takes the thermometer out of her mouth, looks at it, smiles, everything is all right, and puts it away in a little lilac carrying case.
The sailor does not understand what the captain said, so the captain has to repeat it.
A Study in California Flowers
OH, suddenly it's nothing to see on the way and it's nothing when I get there, and I'm in a coffeehouse, listening to a woman talk who's wearing more clothes than I have money in the world.
She is adorned in yellow and jewelry and a language that I cannot understand. She is talking about something that is of no importance, insisting on it. I can tell all this because the man who is with her will buy none of it, and stares absent-mindedly at the universe.
The man has not spoken a word since they sat down here with cups of espresso coffee accompanying them like small black dogs. Perhaps he does not care to speak any more. I think he is her husband.
Suddenly she breaks into English. She says, "He should know. They're his flowers," in the only language I understand and there's no reply echoing all the way back to the beginning where nothing could ever have been any different.
I was born forever to chronicle this: I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers.
The Betrayed Kingdom
THIS love story took place during the last spring of the Beat Generation. She must be in her middle thirties and I wonder what she's doing now and if she still goes to parties.
Her name slips my memory. It has joined all the other names that I have forgotten that swirl through my head like a tide pool of discontinued faces and invisible syllables.
She lived in Berkeley and I saw her often at the parties I attended that spring.
She'd come to a party all sexied up and really move it around and drink wine and flirt until midnight came and then she'd lay her scene on whomever was trying to get into her pants, which happened to be a lot of my friends who had cars. One after another they answered the fate that she had waiting for them.
"Is anyone driving to Berkeley? I need a ride to Berkeley," she would always announce erotically. She wore a little gold watch to keep track of the midnight.
One of my friends would always say yes behind too much wine and drive her to Berkeley and she'd let them into her little apartment and then tell them that she wouldn't go to bed with them, that she didn't sleep with anybody, but if they wanted to, they could sleep on her floor. She had an extra wool blanket.
My friends would always be too drunk to drive back to San Francisco, so they would sleep on her floor, curled around that green army blanket and wake up in the morning, stiff and grouchy as a coyote with rheumatism. Neither coffee nor breakfast was ever offered and she had gotten another ride to Berkeley.
A few weeks later you'd see her at another party and come the midnight she'd sing her little song, "Is anybody driving to Berkeley? I need a ride to Berkeley." And some poor son-of-a-bitch, always one of my friends, would fall for it and keep an appointment with that blanket on her floor.
Obviously, I was never able to understand the attraction that existed for her because she did nothing to me. Of course, I didn't have a car. That was probably it. You had to have a car to understand her charms.
I remember one evening when everybody was drinking wine and having a good time, listening to music. Oh, those Beat Generation days! talking, wine and jazz!
Miss Berkeley Floor was drifting through the place spreading joy wherever she went, except among those friends of mine who had already availed themselves of her hospitality.
Then midnight came! and, "Is anybody driving to Berkeley." She always used the same words. I guess because they worked so well: perfectly.
A friend of mine who had told me of his adventures with her looked at me and smiled as another friend, a virgin to the experience and quite aroused behind an evening's wine, took the hook.
"I'll give you a ride home," he said.
"Wonderful," she said with a sexy smile.
"I hope he enjoys sleeping on the floor," my friend half-whispered to me, loud enough for her to hear but not quite loud enough for him to hear because he was kismeted to make an acquaintance with a Berkeley floor.
In other words, this girl's scene had become a very in-joke among the stung and they were always amused to see somebody else take that carnival ride to Berkeley.
She went and got her coat and out they traipsed but she had drunk a little too much wine herself and she got sick when they got to his car and she puked all over his front fender.
After she had emptied her stomach and was feeling a little better, my friend drove her to Berkeley and she made him sleep on the floor wrapped up in that God-damn blanket.
He came back to San Francisco the next morning: stiff, hung over and so fucking mad at her that he never washed her puke off that fender. He drove around San Francisco for months with that stuff residing there like a betrayed kingdom until it wore itself away.
This might have been a funny story if it weren't for the fact that people need a little loving and, God, sometimes it's sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.
Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning
IT'S really a very beautiful exchange of values when women put their clothes on in the morning and she is brand-new and you've never seen her put her clothes on before.
You've been lovers and you've slept together and there's nothing more you can do about that, so it's time for her to put her clothes on.
Maybe you've already had breakfast and she's slipped her sweater on to cook a nice bare-assed breakfast for you, padding in sweet flesh around the kitchen, and you both discussed in length the poetry of Rilke which she knew a great deal about, surprising you.
But now it's time for her to put her clothes on because you've both had so much coffee that you can't drink any more and it's time for her to go home and it's time for her to go to work and you want to stay there alone because you've got some things to do around the house and you're going outside together for a nice walk and it's time for you to go home and it's time for you to go to work and she's got some things that she wants to do around the house.
Or ... maybe it's even love.
But anyway: It's time for her to put her clothes on and it's so beautiful when she does it. Her body slowly disappears and comes out quite nicely all in clothes. There's a virginal quality to it. She's got her clothes on, and the beginning is over.
Halloween in Denver
SHE didn't think that she would get any trick or treaters, so she didn't buy anything for them. That seems simple enough, doesn't it? Well, let's see what can happen with that. It might be interesting.
We'll start off with me reacting to her diagnosis of the situation by saying, "Hell, get something for the kids. After all, you're living on Telegraph Hill and there are a lot of kids in the neighborhood and some of them are certain to stop here."
I said it in such a way that she went down to the store and came back a few minutes later with a carton of gum. The gum was in little boxes called Chiclets and there were a lot of them in the carton.
"Satisfied?" she said.
She's an Aries.
"Yes," I said.
I'm an Aquarius.
We also had two pumpkins: both Scorpios.
So I sat there at the kitchen table and carved a pumpkin. It was the first pumpkin that I had carved in many years. It was kind of fun. My pumpkin had one round eye and one triangular eye and a not-very-bright witchy smile.
She cooked a wonderful dinner of sweet red cabbage and sausages and had some apples baking in the
oven.
Then she carved her pumpkin while dinner was cooking beautifully away. Her pumpkin looked very modernistic when she was through. It looked more like an appliance than a jack-o'-lantern.
All the time that we were carving pumpkins the door bell did not ring once. It was completely empty of trick or treaters, but I did not panic, though there were an awful lot of Chiclets waiting anxiously in a large bowl.
We had dinner at 7:30 and it was so good. Then the meal was eaten and there were still no trick or treaters and it was after eight and things were starting to look bad. I was getting nervous.
I began to think that it was every day except Halloween.
She of course looked beatifically down upon the scene with an aura of Buddhistic innocence and carefully did not mention the fact that no trick or treaters had darkened the door.
That did not make things any better.
At nine o'clock we went in and lay down upon her bed and we were talking about this and that and I was in a kind of outrage because we had been forsaken by all trick or treaters, and I said something like, "Where are those little bastards?"
I had moved the bowl of Chiclets into the bedroom, so I could get to the trick or treaters faster when the door bell rang. The bowl sat there despondently on a table beside the bed. It was a very lonely sight.
At 9:30 we started fucking.
About fifty-four seconds later we heard a band of kids come running up the stairs accompanied by a cyclone of Halloween shrieking and mad door bell ringing.
I looked down at her and she looked up at me and our eyes met in laughter, but it wasn't too loud because suddenly we weren't at home.
We were in Denver, holding hands at a street corner, waiting for the light to change.
Atlantisburg
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 9
