Big Sur (5 page)

11

T
HE NEXT SIGN IS IN
F
RISCO ITSELF
where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says “We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited,” but there's something else in his expression—When we're alone he says “Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead.”

Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother—I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting—He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me—And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, “
Attends pour mué kitigingoo
”—But my mother said in the letter he had died the
NIGHT AFTER I LEFT
!—But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:-

“Sunday July 20, 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is
gone.
Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching T.V. a late movie. Just about 1:30 A.M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no
availe.
He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till ‘day
Break
' and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A.M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket—and at 7 A.M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling
Ma Wow.
I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of
em
flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest—that's something I'll never forget—I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow. . . I'm so sick not physically but heart sick. . . I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more—and that I wont be seeing him come through his little “Shanty” or Walking through the green grass. . . . P.S. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty—as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real “God”—Your old Mom X X X X XX.”

So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there
smiling
with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore—All the premonitions tying in together.

Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything)—He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin—Of course he cant know since I didnt tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk—The death of “little brother” Tyke indeed—Monsanto seeing me so downcast says “Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks—or are you just gonna get drunk again”—“I'm gonna get drunk yes”—Because anyway there are so many things brewing, everybody's waiting, I've been daydreaming a thousand wild parties in the woods—In fact it's fortunate I've heard of the death of Tyke in my favorite exciting city of San Francisco, if I had been home when he died I might have gone mad in a different way but tho I now ran out to get drunk with the boys and still once in a while that funny little smile of joy came back as I drank, and melted away again because now the smile itself was a reminder of death, the news made me go mad anyway at the end of the three week binge, creeping up on me finally on that terrible day of St. Carolyn By The Sea as I can also call it—All, all confusing till I explain.

Meanwhile anyway poor Monsanto a man of letters wants to enjoy big news swappings with me about writing and what everybody's doing, and then Fagan comes into the store (downstairs to Monsanto's old rolltop desk making me also feel chagrin because it always was the ambition of my youth to end up a kind of literary businessman with a rolltop desk, combining my father image with the image of myself as a writer, which Monsanto without even thinking about it has accomplished at the drop of a hat)—Monsanto with his husky shoulders, big blue eyes, twinkling rosy skin, that perpetual smile of his that earned him the name Smiler in college and a smile you often wondered “Is it real?” until you realized if Monsanto should ever stop using that smile how could the world go on anyway—It was that kind of smile too inseparable from him to be believably allowed to disappear—Words words words but he is a grand guy as I'll show and now with real manly sympathy he really felt I should not go on big binges if I felt so bad, “At any rate,” sez he, “you can go back a little later huh”—“Okay Lorry”—“Did you write anything?”—“I wrote the sounds of the sea, I'll tell you all about it—It was the most happy three weeks of my life dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke—You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico”—“Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there?”—“Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything” (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us)—I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there 3 thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).

But there's old Ben Fagan puffing and chuckling over his pipe so what the hell, why bother grownup men and poets at that with your own troubles—So Ben and I and his chum Jonesy also a chuckly pipesmoker go out to the bar (Mike's Place) and sip a few beers, at first I vow I'm not going to get drunk after all, we even go out to the park to have a long talk in the warm sun that always turns to delightful cool foggy dusk in that town of towns—We're sitting in the park of the big Italian white church watching kids play and people go by, for some reason I'm bemused by the sight of a blonde woman hurrying somewhere “Where's she going? does she have a secret sailor lover? is she only going to finish her typing afterhours in the office? what if we knew Ben what every one of these people goin by is headed for, some door, some restaurant, some secret romance”—“You sound like you stored up a lot of energy and innerest in life in those woods”—And Ben knows that for sure because he's been months in the wilderness too, alone—Old Ben, much thinner than he used to be in our madder Dharma Bum days of 5 years ago, a little gaunt in fact, but still the same old Ben who stays up late at night chuckling over the Lankavatara Scripture and writing poems about raindrops—And he knows me very well, he knows I'll get drunk tonight and for weeks on end just on general principles and that a day will come in a few weeks when I'll be so exhausted I wont be able to talk to anybody and he'll come and visit me and just silently at my side be puffing his pipe, as I sleep—The kind of guy he is—I trying to explain about Tyke to him but some people are cat lovers and some aint, tho Ben always has a little kitty around his pad—His pad usually has a straw rug on the floor, with a pillow 'pon which he sits crosslegged, by a smoking teapot, his bookshelves full of Stein and Pound and Wallace Stevens—A strange quiet poet who was only beginning to be recognized as a big rosy secret sage (one of his lines “When I leave town all my friends go back on the sauce”)—And I'm on my way to the sauce right now.

Because anyway old Dave Wain is back and Dave I can see him rubbing his hands in anticipation of another big wild binge with me like we had the year before when he drove me back to New York from the west coast, with George Baso the little Japanese Zen master hepcat sitting crosslegged on the back mattress of Dave's jeepster (Willie the Jeep), a terrific trip through Las Vegas, St. Louis, stopping off at expensive motels and drinking nothing but the best Scotch out of the bottle all the way—And what better way to go back to New York, I could have blown 190 dollars on an airplane—And Dave's never met the great Cody and will be looking forward to that—So me and Ben leave the park and slowly walk to the bar on Columbus Street and I order my first double bourbon and gingerale.

The lights are twinkling on outside in that fantastic toy street, I can feel the joy rise in my soul—I now remember Big Sur with a clear piercing love and agony and even the death of Tyke fits in with everything but I dont realize the enormity of what's yet to come—We call up Dave Wain who's back from Reno and he comes blattin down to the bar in his jeepster driving that marvelous way he does (once he was a cab-driver) talking all the time and never making a mistake, in fact as good a driver as Cody altho I cant imagine anybody being that good and asked Cody about it the next day—But old jealous drivers always point out faults and complain, “Ah well that Dave Wain of yours doesnt takes his curves right, he eases up and sometimes even pokes the brake a little instead of just ridin that old curve around on increased power, man you gotta
work
those curves”—Obvious at this time now, by the way and parenthetically, that there's so much to tell about the fateful following three weeks it's hardly possible to find anyplace to begin.

Like life, actually—And how multiple it all is!—“And what happened to little old George Baso, boy?”—“Little old George Baso is probably dyin of T.B. in a hospital outsida Tulare”—“Gee, Dave, we gotta go see him”—“Yessir, let's do that tomorrow”—As usual Dave has no money whatever but that doesnt bother me at all, I've got plenty, I go out the following day and cash 500 dollars worth of travelers checks just so's me and old Dave can really have a good time—Dave likes good food and drink and so do I—But he's got this young kid he brought back from Reno called Ron Blake who is a goodlooking teenager with blond hair who wants to be a sensational new Chet Baker singer and comes on with that tiresome hipster approach that was natural 5 or 10 and even 25 years ago but now in 1960 is a pose, in fact I dug him as a con man conning Dave (tho for what, I dont know)—But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate—For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too—As I'll show—It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticsm—Says Dave “People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles—Isnt that amazing? give me a little nip on that tit” he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, “The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasnt occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?”—The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one—In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip—Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, “Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?”—“Let's go tell him right now!”—“Why of course if we wait another minute . . . and besides do you know what it
does
to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!”—We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner.