by Jim Dodge
If it sounds like I was having a good time, a life of high spirit and the pedal pretty much to the metal, I was indeed. Maybe too much so. Because when you’re running with a remarkable woman and large-hearted friends, bathing in the fountain of fresh possibilities, pulling forty hours a week gets tremendously boring, even when it’s work you like. There just wasn’t that much left to learn about tow-truck driving, and nothing’s more heartless than mastery without challenge. When you start losing satisfaction with your work, that’s the first sign of slippage at the center.
Despite the outlaw thrill, wrecking the occasional car for Scumball was also becoming routine. Maybe, if there’d been one or two jobs a month instead of one every three months, I might’ve hung it up at Cravetti’s. Granted, coming up with new ways to wreck cars without establishing a pattern stretched the imagination. But the fact is, it doesn’t take much to total a car for insurance purposes – only has to be more expensive to repair than the car is worth. Your granny could do it in an easy two minutes with an eight-ounce hammer and a handful of sand.
Anyway, this was boring enough that Big Red and I started getting fancy in our destructions. He found a place up on Mount Tam where there was a loose boulder above the road, and after we got everything lined up good we used a couple of pry bars to roll that stone straight down on a new ’61 Impala, bullseye. We torched a Chrysler out by Stinson Beach, but the most fun we had destroying a car was probably this Olds 88 we took way the hell and gone up Fort Ross Road, pretending we were deranged service-station attendants. Big Red had bought a couple of red stars at the five-and-dime to give us that official look. We pinned them on and got right to it, humming ‘You can trust your car, to the man that sports a star,’ as we bent to the task.
‘Fill it up this evening, sir? Would you like mortar mix or regular cement?’
‘I’ll get that windshield, George,’ Big Red called cheerfully, putting an eight-pound sledge right through it. ‘Clean, huh? Just like the glass wasn’t there.’ Red liked this so much he was damn near babbling with enthusiasm.
‘Hey, Red! While I’m checking things out here under the hood, why don’t you grab that pair of sidecutters and snip off them valve stems and make sure air comes out of those tires. Look overinflated to me.’
‘You got it, Chief. How’s it look under the hood?’
‘No damn good: bad oil leak from the valve cover. Toss me that number-eight sledge and I’ll see if I can get that gasket flat. Maybe reseat the valves a little deeper while I’m at it.’
By that time I was really enjoying the gig – and remember, I was a long-time faithful at the altar of internal combustion. Another sign that things were coming apart. Of course, I didn’t see it then, or not clearly. But what difference does it make to understand you’re hungry when there is nothing to eat?
I might not have known the cause, but I could feel something was wrong. I had a good woman, honest work, fine friends, and some illicit thrills to keep me sharp, but I wasn’t happy. Had no idea why, and I’m still not dead certain. John’s diagnosis was a severe case of late-adolescent spiritual edema, the strange disease of drowning in your own juices. His prescription was to let the affliction run its torpid course, hopefully washing away the more negligible parts of the psyche in the purging process.
Big Red Loco thought it was the air. He didn’t elaborate except to add, upon my harshest questioning, ‘You know, man: the air.’ He even provided a visual aid by sweeping his hand vaguely above his head.
And Kacy, sweet Kacy, I never found out what she thought, because she was suddenly gone, off to Mexico and eventually South America with two gay Jungian psychologists, brothers named Orville and Lydell Wight. The purpose of the trip was to investigate first-hand the shamanistic use of various drugs employed by native tribes. They had a new Chevy van, some independent financing, and no time limit, although Kacy was talking about at least two years, or about twenty-two months longer than I had in mind.
But what I wanted was at odds with what I knew was going to be. This was an adventure she couldn’t pass up and remain true to herself, so against my true sadness and wounded sulking I mustered the dubious grace to let go of what I couldn’t hold anyway.
Our last night together is committed to cellular memory. I don’t think I’ve ever held anyone as tightly. In the morning, wishing her off, I had no regrets. None at all. But that didn’t stop it from tearing me up.
A month later, the same day I received Kacy’s first letter, I heard that Scumball had gotten busted. Young Cravetti let me know it had nothing to do with me, that the arrest was for loan-sharking and conspiracy to commit assault. Evidently Scumball had employed some agents from the Contusion Collection Service, a company of goons who stood completely behind their motto, ‘Pay or Hurt.’ The wife of a damaged debtor had gone to the cops, who probably would’ve filed it in the wastebasket if she and the Police Commissioner’s wife hadn’t been cheerleaders together in high school. I was out a steady chunk of fun money, but felt worse for Big Red. He’d come to depend on this income, and now had to go back to work for Mort Abberman who, when he was sober enough to pour the molds, had a little cottage industry making latex dildoes in his basement.
According to Kacy’s letter they were in Mexico, near Tepic, going to a language school for a crash course in both Spanish and Indian dialects. Orville and Lydell were great company, loose and intelligent and serious scholars, and once they had enough language to proceed, they planned to stop in Mexico City for research before leaving for Peru. She missed me, she said, and thought of me often and fondly, but even as I read the letter I felt her slipping away.
North Beach itself was no longer a consolation. Grey Line had scheduled tours to look at the Beatniks, even though the germinal core were long gone to other parts, leaving young and awkward heirs who seemed more enchanted by the style than the substance, and leaving behind as well the low-life despoilers and cut-and-suck criminals who seem to thrive on exploiting freedoms they’re incapable of creating. Jazz clubs closed to become topless joints, silicon tits swinging on the same stages that had once featured music so amazingly real you didn’t want it ever to stop. Now you just wanted to leave.
When Scumball finally came to trial in late September, leaving seemed like a good idea – just in case he was more nervous than I was and started talking deals with the DA, I decided to take a month’s vacation, maybe wander down Mexico way. There was no hassle with work; I had plenty of vacation time coming. Old man Cravetti understood my anxiety, but he assured me not to burden my trip with worry since Scumball, though not without his faults, was a stand-up guy, and moved in circles where snitches were often sent on long walks off short piers, usually in cement shoes. Since I’d been introduced to Scumball through the Cravettis, where I usually picked up my delivery money, I understood the garage was involved – maybe some of the mechanics did ID changes – but I’d never asked, figuring it was wiser not to know. If they weren’t worried, maybe I was overdoing it, though a month in Mexico City was still an attractive idea.
I hardly remember the vacation, most of which I spent pretending I wasn’t looking for Kacy. No regrets, like I said, but many, many second thoughts, most of them washed down with tequila. On Gary Snyder’s sage advice that it was the most likely place to find the face I sought, and that there was much else of interest and beauty to look at in case she didn’t show, I haunted the Museum of Anthropology, maybe the best in the world. I saw wonder upon wonder, but the only glimpse I got of Kacy was in the lines of a gold jaguar, Mayan, seventh century. A letter from Kacy, postmarked Oaxaca, was waiting when I returned to San Francisco, explaining they’d decided to skip Mexico City and head straight for Peru.
A week later, Kennedy was assassinated. I was cleaning up a fender-bender on Gough when a cop came over and said in that stunned, vacant voice you heard all day, ‘They shot the President. They fucking shot the goddamn President.’ The immediate understanding that it was a conspiracy even if Oswald had acted al
one joined the forces of shock, chaos, pain, and grief in that single moment of national violation.
A lot has been made of Kennedy’s assassination as some turning point in the 60’s, the beginning of a profound disillusionment. And it was, in the sense that it cracked some illusions, but in a strange way. You’ve got to remember that we were the most privileged children in history, and probably among the most brainwashed. We had been taught history as the inevitable triumph of American ideals: those wonderful, powerful ideals of equality, freedom, justice, and dedication to the God-fearing truth. We believed. And we knew, because we were endlessly told so from kindergarten through high school, that to achieve those ideals required the unstinting application of celebrated American virtues like hard work, gumption, enterprise, courage, sacrifice, and faith. Our teachers pointed to postwar America, the mightiest, most affluent nation on the planet, as inarguable proof of the pudding.
We believed so deeply that Kennedy’s death, rather than shattering our ideals served, as only a martyrdom can, to refresh them. We believed those ideals because they were beautiful, spirited, and true. If the realities didn’t always agree, realities could be changed – were made to be changed – both by the collective will of the people and a single heroic leader with grit and stick-to-itiveness. If Negroes were being denied the right to vote – the right – we would go register them. If people in India were starving, we would sustain them with our surplus while we taught them how to farm. If the wretched rose up in a desperate rage of dignity and took arms against their oppressors, they could count on our freedom-loving support. And the more we tried to bring those ideals to reality, the more we understood how deeply the corruption reached. We believed so profoundly that even when we finally realized what hopeless, deluding, bullshit rhetoric those ideals had become, what a seething of maggots they masked, we still believed.
Once the shock of Kennedy’s assassination was absorbed, you could feel a new energy on the street, a strangely exhilarated seriousness, like that first pull of the current before you hear the whitewater roaring downriver. This quickening seemed most apparent in people my age and younger, the war babies, victims more of the victory than the pain of the effort. The older generation seemed to take Kennedy’s death as a defeat, a shocked return to the vulnerability and chaos World War II and Korea were supposed to end. They seemed tired with the knowledge that bad times weren’t going to end. But not my generation, reared on the notion that you had to dare to dream, and dream large. But we were never truthfully warned that dreams die hard.
I say ‘we,’ my generation, but I don’t know how much I can honestly include myself. As things quickened, I was beginning a slow fade into myself. I’d lost some essential connection. I logged my forty a week driving tow, which still retained some pleasure, but no sustaining joy. Nights and weekends I hit the streets, hungry for that old excitement, but for me it was gone.
My friends were sweet and understanding. John Seasons pronounced it a classical case of ennui and recommended a change of life as soon as I could gather my forces. Until then, he suggested strong drink and great poetry, offering to buy me one and lend me the other.
Big Red Loco just shook his head. He was feeling it too, as it turned out, finding less and less that moved him to pick up his horn. Spiders were nesting in the bell, he said, and I knew what he meant. They were nesting in my head. When I finally started boring myself, I went on a brain-cracking rampage. Got shit-faced crazy drunk every night for about a month straight and abused enough drugs to singlehandedly raise the standard of living in Guadalajara. I screwed everything that moved, or at least those who held still for it. The binge ended when I made a desperate play for John, who shocked me with the cold anger of his refusal: ‘I don’t want anything to do with you. You’re just thrashing around, and you don’t have enough forgiveness in your soul to expiate me if I take advantage of it. This would destroy the true feelings we have for each other, and I won’t risk that. Slow down for once, George.’ I ended up crying on his shoulder right beside the Golden Rocket pinball machine in Gino and Carlo’s.
In response to John’s admonition and the obvious fact that I was stuck in the mud right up to my frame, I changed my ways – perhaps the most decisively conscious change I’d ever made. I became austere. Not monkish, mind you, but seriously determined to eliminate the reckless waste. No booze, no drugs, no heartless sex. If I was mired in my own mud, there was no reason to blow up the engine in frustration.
Austerity is a good way to fight those bad blues, the ones that turn your soul into sewage. For one thing, you assume control, though it is, in all likelihood, sheer delusion. But if nothing else, it helps minimize the damage, if not so much to yourself, at least to others.
In a way, I actually enjoyed myself. I spent a lot of time reading, mainly poetry (taking John’s advice) and history, a subject that hadn’t much interested me before. I also took long walks around the city, looking at it without the insulation of a moving vehicle. Besides opening my eyes to a wealth of cultural diversity, the sheer exercise helped burn off that free-floating energy that comes of restless boredom. I did my job at Cravetti’s diligently, alertly, with a new eye to the fine details. That’s yet another benefit of the strict approach: you’re forced outside into the whip and welter, which in turn forces you to take refuge in the moment, which is perhaps the only refuge anyway.
Once in a while I went out just to keep in touch with friends, John and Big Red in particular. John, who claimed I’d inspired him, had cleaned up his own act and was doing more writing than drinking. Big Red, however, had all but quit playing horn, and that depressed him.
The letters from Kacy began tapering off. In nine months I heard from her four times: a postcard from Guatemala, a long letter from Lima saying they were about to head into the mountains to live with an Indian tribe, then two more from Lima. The first reported that they’d all come down with hepatitis and were thinking of returning to the States, but in the last letter, two months later, they had recovered and decided to go on. Kacy sounded weary but determined. She missed me, she said, and hoped I was keeping myself pure for her return. Though she was only teasing, this struck me as being uncomfortably close to what I was doing, and perhaps it was her distant tweak that provided the first crack in my regimen.
The trouble with disciplined austerity is that it requires deep resolve, and I’m prone to back-sliding at the slightest nudge. I’d hung tough for almost nine months, damn good for a beginner. What got me really rolling downhill was a seventeen-year-old folksinger named Sharon Cross – emerald eyed, red of mane, and a body that made you sit back on your haunches and howl. She was young, innocent, and warmhearted, three attributes that taken separately are charming, but in Sharon combined to produce the one thing I didn’t like about her: she was relentlessly, painfully liberal. But she was also lots of fun and sweet company, just what I needed to wean myself from austerity.
I tried to put some heart into the relationship. Sharon did too, of course – there’s hardly a woman who doesn’t. But we were both aware it wasn’t love. I think she was lightly enchanted by my hip working-class cachet while I was enamored of sipping some nectar from the bud. Sharon intuitively understood she had a whole lot of life ahead of her, rich with possibilities, and I was only a place to start. For my part, I felt a lot of my life chasing me, the possibilities dwindling. We were smart enough to keep it easy and not live together.
About the same time I was getting close to Sharon, late June of ’64, the Fourth Wiseman appeared in front of City Lights bookstore. He looked old, maybe in his fifties, but was so burned out on speed you couldn’t be sure. He might’ve been a hard thirty. He always wore the same clothes, a brown sport coat with matching slacks, grubby but not tattered, and a white shirt yellowed with speed-sweats, frayed at the cuffs and collar but always neatly tucked in. The Fourth Wiseman stood in front of City Lights from 10:00 A.M. sharp till exactly 5:00 P.M. every day, twirling a green yo-yo and endlessly repeating the one t
hing that had survived the amphetamine holocaust in his brain, the one ember his breath kept alive. It was a short poem, or mantra, that he mumbled to himself about once a minute: ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’ The whole time pacing restlessly back and forth on the sidewalk, snapping the yo-yo down, letting it hang spinning for a couple of heartbeats, retrieving it with a flick of his wrist – no tricks, no variations, none of that baby-in-the-cradle or walking-the-dog. Just spinning at the end of the string. An austerity of sorts. He ignored any efforts to engage him in conversation or otherwise distract him from his work.
‘Delivered his gift and slipped away.’ That phrase, and the idea of a phantom Fourth Wiseman, haunted me. Or perhaps, in combination with the spinning yo-yo – a brilliant blue-green, the color of wet algae – I’d been literally hypnotized. I’d drive by almost every day to see how he was doing, and he was always doing the same. Early on I tried to slip him a sawbuck. He was so startled he took it, but when he saw what it was he shook his head as if I’d completely misunderstood and flipped the bill out into the street. A ’57 Ford coupe ran over the bill, which fluttered along in its wake, riding the draft. A wino darted out and snagged it about half a block down. The Fourth Wiseman didn’t notice any of this, having already returned to his work, yo-yo singing on the waxed twine as he recited his spare testament.
The Fourth Wiseman disturbed Sharon. One of the troubles with the liberal mind is it can’t deal with things too far gone to cure with good intentions. She thought he was sad and tragic, a victim, and she wanted to do something about it. She thought a benefit for him – a hootenany – would be wonderful, something for a real suffering human being in the community rather than some abstract cause. I thought it was presumptuous, pretentious, and perhaps a little bit precious to assume he was suffering when, in fact, he seemed satisfied with his mission, or witness, or whatever it was, and that my offer of money had only seemed to confuse and offend him. I told her so. We argued, but that was nothing new.
