THERE were a couple of pool tables in the back and a table full of drunks nearby. I was talking to a young man who'd just gotten fired from his job and he was happy about it, but bored with the evening and the thought of looking for work next week. He was also quite disturbed about his home situation and went into it at great length.
We talked for a while, both of us leaning up against a pinball machine. There was a game of pool going on in the back. A little black Lesbian with a bull cut to her was playing pool with an old Italian, a sort of working type. Maybe he worked with vegetables or he was something else. The Lesbian was a seaman. They were locked in their game.
One of the drunks at the table spilled his drink all over the table and all over himself.
"Get a bar rag," another drunk said.
The spiller got up unevenly and went over to the bar and asked the bartender for a rag. The bartender leaned over the bar and said something to him that we couldn't hear.
The drunk came back and sat down. He did not have a bar rag.
"Where's the rag?" the other drunk said.
"He said I owe him forty-five dollars and sixty cents. My tab..."
"Well, I don't owe him forty-five dollars and sixty cents. I'll go over and get a bar rag. This table is a mess," and gets up to prove that he doesn't owe the bartender forty-five dollars and sixty cents.
The table was returned to normal. They started talking about something that I know about.
Finally my friend said, "What a God-damn boring night. I think I'll watch that dike play pool."
"I think I'll stay here and listen to these drunks for a while," I said.
He walked over and watched the black Lesbian play pool with the old Italian. I stood there leaning up against the pinball machine, listening to the drunks talk about lost cities.
The View from the Dog Tower
"... three German shepherd puppies wandered away from their home up near the County line."
—North County Journal
Serving Northern Santa Cruz County
I have been thinking about this little item that I read in the North County Journal for a couple of months now. It contains the boundaries of a small tragedy. I know we are surrounded by so much blossoming horror in the world (Vietnam, starvation, rioting, living in hopeless fear, etc.) that three puppies wandering off isn't very much, but I worry about it and see this simple event as the possible telescope for a larger agony.
"... three German shepherd puppies wandered away from their home up near the County line." It sounds like something from a Bob Dylan song.
Perhaps they vanished playing, barking and chasing each other, into the woods where lost they are to this very day, cringing around like scraps of dogs, looking for any small thing to eat, intellectually unable to comprehend what has happened to them because their brains are welded to their stomachs.
Their voices are used now only to cry out in fear and hunger, and all their playing days are over, those days of careless pleasure that led them into the terrible woods.
I fear that these poor lost dogs may be the shadow of a future journey if we don't watch out.
Greyhound Tragedy
SHE wanted her life to be a movie magazine tragedy like the death of a young star with long lines of people weeping and a corpse more beautiful than a great painting, but she was never able to leave the small Oregon town that she was born and raised in and go to Hollywood and die.
Though it was the Depression, her life was comfortable and untouched because her father was the manager of the local Penney's and financially compassionate to his family.
Movies were the religion of her life and she attended every service with a bag of popcorn. Movie magazines were her Bible that she studied with the zealousness of a doctor of divinity. She probably knew more about movies than the Pope.
The years passed like the subscriptions to her magazines: 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, until September 2, 1938.
Finally it was time to make her move if she were ever going to go to Hollywood. There was a young man who wanted to marry her. Her parents were very enthusiastic about his prospects. They approved of him because he was a Ford salesman. "It's a company with a fine tradition," her father said. Things did not look good for her.
She spent months building up the courage to go down to the bus station to find out how much the fare to Hollywood cost. Sometimes she spent whole days thinking about the bus station. A few times she even got dizzy and had to sit down. It never dawned on her that she could have called on the telephone.
She made it a point during those nervous months never to go by the bus station. Thinking about it all the time was one thing but actually seeing it was another.
Once she was driving downtown with her mother and her mother turned onto the street where the bus station was located and she asked her mother to please turn down another street because she wanted to buy something at a store on that street.
Some shoes.
Her mother thought nothing of it and made the turn. She didn't think to ask her daughter why her face was red but that was not unusual because she seldom thought to ask her anything.
One morning she was going to talk to her about all the movie magazines that came in the mail. Some days they would jam up the mailbox, so that she would have to use a screwdriver to get the mail out. But her mother had forgotten about it by noon. Her mother's memory had never been able to last until twelve. It usually pooped out around 11:30, but she was a good cook if the recipes were simple.
Time was running out like the popcorn at a Clark Gable picture. Her father had been dropping a lot of "hints" lately about her being out of high school for three years and perhaps it was time for her to think about doing something with her life.
He was not the local manager of Penney's for nothing. Recently, actually about a year ago, he had become tired of watching his daughter sit around the house all the time reading movie magazines with her eyes wide as saucers. He had begun to think of her as a bump on a log.
Her father's hints happened to coincide with the young Ford salesman's fourth proposal of marriage. She had turned down the other three saying that she needed time to think it over which really meant that she was trying to build up enough courage to go down to the bus station and find out what the fare to Hollywood cost.
At last the pressure of her own longings and her father's "hints" made her leave the house early one warm twilight, after getting out of doing the dinner dishes, and walk slowly down to the bus station. From March 10, 1938 until the evening of September 2, 1938, she had been wondering what a bus ticket to Hollywood cost.
The bus station was stark, unromantic and very distant from the silver screen. Two old people were sitting there on a bench waiting for a bus. The old people were tired. They wanted to be now at wherever they were going. Their suitcase was like a burned-out light bulb.
The man who sold the tickets looked as if he could have sold anything. He could just as well be selling washing machines or lawn furniture as tickets to other places.
She was red-faced and nervous. Her heart felt out of place in the bus station. She tried to act as if she were waiting for somebody to come in on the next bus, an aunt, as she worked desperately to build up enough courage to go ask how much it cost to go to Hollywood but it didn't make any difference to anybody else what games she pretended.
Nobody looked at her, though she could have rented herself out as an earthquake beet. They simply didn't care. It was a stupid night in September and she just didn't have enough nerve to find out how much the fare to Hollywood cost.
She cried all the way home through the warm gentle Oregon night, wanting to die every time her feet touched the ground. There was no wind and all the shadows were comforting. They were like cousins to her, so she married the young Ford salesman and drove a new car every year except for the Second World War.
She had two children that she named Jean and Rudolph and tried to let her beautiful movie star death go at that, but
now, thirty-one years later, she still blushes when she passes the bus station.
Crazy Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today
For Marcia Pacaud
THERE is one of them sitting behind me right now. She is wearing an old hat that's got plastic fruit on it, and her eyes dart back and forth across her face like fruit flies.
The man sitting next to her is pretending that he is dead.
The crazy old woman talks to him in one continuous audio breath that passes out of her mouth like a vision of angry bowling alleys on Saturday night with millions of pins crashing off her teeth.
The man sitting next to her is an old, very little Chinese man and he's wearing the clothes of a teen-ager. His coat, pants, shoes and cap belong to a fifteen-year-old boy. I've seen a lot of old Chinese men wearing teen-age clothes. It must be strange when they go to the store and buy them.
The Chinese man has scrunched himself up next to the window, and you can't even tell he's breathing. She doesn't care if he's dead or alive.
He was alive before she sat down beside him and started telling him about her children that came to no good and her husband who is an alcoholic and the leak in the God-damn car roof that he won't fix because he's always drunk, the son-of-a-bitch, and she's too tired to do anything because she works all the time at a cafe, I must be the oldest waitress in the world, and her feet can't take it any more and her son's in the penitentiary and her daughter is living with an alcoholic truck driver and they've got three little bastards running around the house and she wishes she had a television because she can't listen to the radio any more.
She stopped listening to the radio ten years ago because she couldn't find any programs on it. All there is is music and news now and I don't like the music and I can't understand the news and she doesn't care if this fucking Chinaman is alive or dead.
She ate some Chinese food twenty-three years ago in Sacramento and crapped for five days afterwards and all she can see is one ear facing her mouth.
The ear looks like a little yellow dead horn.
The Correct Time
I'LL do a bubble the best I can and perhaps a few more. Not that they are overly important and would change things, except for the one that got hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus. That's another story.
My girlfriend was late, so I went to the park alone. I got tired of waiting, of standing there in a bookstore reading a novel about people who make love all the time in wealthy surroundings. She was good-looking, but I was also growing older, jaded.
It was one of those typical summer afternoons that we do not get in San Francisco until the autumn. The park was as usual: Children were playing these-are-the-days-of-my-youth, and old people were sunning now what the grave would darken soon enough and the beatniks were lying here and there like stale rugs on the grass, waiting for the great hip rug merchant to come along.
I walked all around the park before I sat down: a long slow circle gathered gently to its end. Then I sat down but before I could examine the territory of where I was at, an old man asked me what time it was.
"A quarter of three," I said, though I did not know what time it was. I just wanted to be helpful.
"Thank you," he said, and flashed an antique smile of relief.
A quarter of three was the correct time for that old man for that was the time he wanted, the time that pleased him the most. I felt pretty good.
I sat there for a few moments and saw nothing else to remember and nothing to forget. I got up and went away, leaving a happy old man behind.
The Boy Scouts of America taught me all I know, and I had done my good deed for the day, and all I needed now so that I could dwell in perfection would be to find an enfeebled fire engine and help it across the street.
"Thank you, son," with its arthritic red paint smelling of old age, and its ladder covered with white hair, and a slight cataract over its siren.
There were children playing a game with bubbles at the place I had chosen to leave the park. They had a jar of magic bubble stuff and little rods with metal rings to cast the bubbles away with, to join them with the air.
Instead of leaving the park, I stood and watched the bubbles leave the park. They had a very high mortality pulse. I saw them again and again suddenly die above the sidewalk and the street: their rainbow profiles ceasing to exist.
I wondered what was happening and then looked closer to see that they were colliding with insects in the air. What a lovely idea! and then one of the bubbles was hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus.
WHAM! like the collision between an inspired trumpet and a great concerto, and showed all those other bubbles how to go out in the grand style.
Holiday in Germany
LET'S put it up front right now: I'm not an expert on holidays. I just don't have that kind of money. You might even go so far as to say that I am poor. I don't mind because it's true.
I am thirty, and my average income has been around $1400 a year for the last ten years. America is a very wealthy country, so sometimes I feel anti-American. I mean, I feel as if I am letting America down because I'm not making enough money to justify my citizenship.
Anyway, it's hard to holiday on $1400 a year and yesterday I was taking the Greyhound bus to Monterey to stay for a couple of weeks as a kind of exile from San Francisco.
I won't go into the reasons why. I am afraid that too much humor would ruin this story because actually it has very little to do with me. I just went along for the ride.
It concerns the two German boys that were on the bus. They were in their early twenties and sitting in the seat in front of me. They were in America for a three-week vacation. It was almost over: too bad.
They were yakking it up in German and touristing away, pointing out this and that as the bus rolled toward Monterey.
The German boy sitting next to the window also had a deep interest in the contents of American automobiles, especially the female contents. Whenever he would spot a good-looking girl driving along, he would point her out to his friend as part of their itinerary in America.
They were healthy, normal sex fiends.
A Volkswagen sedan came by the German boy on the window and he immediately got his friend's attention by pointing out two good-looking young girls in the Volkswagen. The German boys really had their faces pressed against the window now.
The girl on the passenger side, she was right beneath us, had short blond hair and a gentle white neck. The Volkswagen and the bus were travelling at the same rate of speed.
As the German boys continued to stare down at her, she grew kind of nervous, self-conscious, but she did not know why this was happening because she couldn't see us. She was now playing with her hair as women are prone to do under such conditions, even if they don't know quite what's up.
The lane of traffic in front of the Volkswagen slowed down and our bus went roaring ahead of the car. We were gone from each other for about a minute when the Volkswagen came up on us again.
The German boys picked up on this instantly and their faces were pressed against the window, participating in the age-old Candy-Store-Sex-Window Syndrome.
This time the girl looked up and saw the German boys staring down, all big smiles and flirting. The girl returned a kind of ambiguous half-smile. She was a perfect freeway Mona Lisa.
We hit another scramble of traffic and the Volkswagen suffered from it and fell back, but a couple of minutes later it was up with us again. We were both moving about sixty miles an hour.
This time when she of the blond hair, the gentle white neck looked up and saw the German boys flirting away, she gave them a great big smile and waved enthusiastically. They had shattered her cool.
The German boys were waving like a convention of flags with mile-a-minute flirting and smiling. They were very happy: Ah, America!
The girl had a lovely smile. Her friend waved, too, driving the Volkswagen with one hand. She was also a good-looking girl: another blonde, but with long hair.
The Ge
rman boys were having a fine holiday in America. Too bad there was no way they could get out of that bus and into the Volkswagen to meet the girls, but things like that are impossible.
Soon the girls took an off ramp to Palo Alto and disappeared forever, not unless of course, they take a holiday next year in Germany and are driving along the autobahn in a bus.
Sand Castles
STRANGE fences grow on Point Reyes Peninsula which is fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast. Odd perspectives are constantly drifting out of sight or becoming too intimate in this place where white medieval Portuguese dairies suddenly appear cradled by cypress trees and then disappear as if they had never really been there at all.
Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches looking for correct protein wandering somewhere below to swoop down upon and devour chronologically.
It is not often that I journey to Point Reyes because, frankly, my mind is seldom in that place, but when I do go there I always enjoy myself. That is, if enjoy is the right word, driving down a road lined with fences that look like cemeteries lost in half-vague and half-mercuric spiritual density.
I usually end up going to a place called McClures Beach at the end of the peninsula. There's a parking lot where you leave your car and then it's a good hike down a gradual canyon to the beach, following a small creek.
Watercress grows luxuriously in the creek.
There are many peculiar flowers as step by step you disappear down into the turns of the canyon until at last you arrive at the Pacific Ocean and a dramatic beach like a photograph if they'd had cameras in the days when Christ lived, and now you are a part of the photograph, but sometimes you have to pinch yourself to make sure that you are really there.
I remember one afternoon many years ago I went with a friend to Point Reyes where my mind was exactly in that kind of place and stared at the fences as we drove deeper and deeper into the peninsula which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy constantly being circled by hawks.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 10
