Big Sur (6 page)

By now we're beginning to feel great—Fagan has retired saying typically “Okay you guys go ahead and get drunk, I'm goin home and spend a quiet evening in a hot bath with a book”—“Home” is also where Dave Wain and Ron Blake live—It's an old roominghouse of four stories on the edge of the Negro district of San Francisco where Dave, Ben, Jonesy, a painter called Lanny Meadows, a mad French Canadian drinker called Pascal and a Negro called Johnson all live in different rooms with their clutter of rucksacks and floor mattresses and books and gear, each one taking turns one day a week to go out and do all the shopping and come back and cook up a big communal dinner in the kitchen—All ten or twelve of them sharing the rent, and with that rotation of dinner, they end up living comfortable lives with wild parties and girls rushing in, people bringing bottles, all at about a minimum of seven dollars a week say—It's a wonderful place but at the same time a little maddening, in fact a whole lot maddening because the painter Lanny Meadows loves music and has installed his Hi Fi speaker in the kitchen altho he applies the records in a back room so the daily cook may be concentrating on his Mulligan stew and all of a sudden Stravinski's dinosaurs start dinning overhead—And at night there are bottlecrashing parties usually supervised by wild Pascal who is a sweet kid but crazy when he drinks—A regular nuthouse actually and just exactly the image of what the journalists want to say about the Beat Generation nevertheless a harmless and pleasant arrangement for young bachelors and a good idea in the long run—Because you can rush into any room and find the expert, like say Ben's room and ask “Hey what did Bodhidharma say to the Second Patriarch?”—“He said go fuck yourself, make your mind like a wall, dont pant after outside activities and dont bug me with your outside plans”—“So the guy goes out and stands on his head in the snow?”—“No that was Fubar”—Or you go runnin into Dave Wain's room and there he is sitting crosslegged on his mattress on the floor reading Jane Austen, you ask “What's the best way to make beef Stroganoff?”—“Beef Stroganoff is very simple, 't'aint nothin but a good well cooked beef and onion stew that you let cool afterwards then you throw in mushrooms and lotsa sour cream, I'll come down and show way soon's I finish this chapter in this marvelous novel, I wanta find out what happens next”—Or you go into the Negro's room and ask if you can borrow his tape recorder because right at the moment some funny things are being said in the kitchen by Duluoz and McLear and Monsanto and some newspaperman—Because the kitchen was also the main talking room where everybody sat in a clutter of dishes and ashtrays and all kinds of visitors came—The year before a beautiful 16 year old Japanese girl had come there just to interview me, for instance, but chaperoned by a Chinese painter—The phone rang consistently—Even wild Negro hepcats from around the corner came in with bottles (Edward Kool and several others)—There was Zen, jazz, booze, pot and all the works but it was somehow obviated (as a supposedly degenerate idea) by the sight of a ‘beatnik' carefully painting the wall of his room and clean white with nice little red borders around the door and windowframes—Or someone is sweeping out the livingroom. Itinerant visitors like me or Ron Blake always had an extra mattress to sleep on.

12

B
UT DAVE IS ANXIOUS AND SO AM
I to see great Cody who is always the major part of my reason for journeying to the west coast so we call him up at Los Gatos 50 miles away down the Santa Clara Valley and I hear his dear sad voice saying “Been waitin for ya old buddy, come on down right away, but I'll be goin to work at midnight so hurry up and you can visit me at work soon's the boss leaves round two and I'll show you my new job of tire recappin and see if you cant bring a little somethin like a girl or sumptin, just kiddin, come on down pal—”

So there's old Willie waiting for us down on the street parked across from the little pleasant Japanese liquor store where as usual, according to our ritual, I run and get Pernod or Scotch or anything good while Dave wheels around to pick me up at the store door, and I get in the front seat right at Dave's right where I belong all the time like old Honored Samuel Johnson while everybody else that wants to come along has to scramble back there on the mattress (a full mattress, the seats are out) and squat there or lie down there and also generally keep silent because when Dave's got the wheel of Willie in his hand and I've got the bottle in mine and we're off on a trip the talking all comes from the front seat—“By God” yells Dave all glad again “it's just like old times Jack, gee old Willie's been sad for ya, waitin for ya to come back—So now I'm gonna show ya how old Willie's even improved with age, had him reconditioned in Reno last month, here he goes, are you ready Willie?” and off we go and the beauty of it all this particular summer is that the front right seat is broken and just rocks back and forth gently to every one of Dave's driving moves—It's like sitting in a rocking chair on a porch only this is a moving porch and a porch to talk on at that—And insteada watching old men pitch horseshoes from this here talking porch it's all that fine white clean line in the middle of the road as we go flying like birds over the Harrison ramps and whatnot Dave always uses to sneak out of Frisco real fast and avoid all the traffic—Soon we're set straight and pointed head on down beautiful fourlane Bayshore Highway to that lovely Santa Clara Valley—But I'm amazed that after only a few years the damn thing no longer has prune fields and vast beet fields like at Lawrence when I was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and even after, it's one long row of houses right down the line 50 miles to San Jose like a great monstrous Los Angeles beginning to grow south of Frisco.

At first it's beautiful to just watch that white line reel in to Willie's snout but when I start looking around out the window there's just endless housing tracts and new blue factories everywhere—Sez Dave “Yes that's right, the population explosion is gonna cover every bit of backyard dirt in America someday in fact they'll even have to start piling up friggin levels of houses and others over that like your cityCityCITY till the houses reach a hundred miles in the air in all directions of the map and people looking at the earth from another planet with super telescopes will see a prickly ball hangin in space—It's like real horrible when you come to think of it, even us with all our fancy talks, shit man it's all millions of people and events piling up almost unimaginable now, like raving babboons we'll all be piled on top of each other or one another or whatever you're sposed to say—Hundreds of millions of hungry mouths raving for more more more—And the sadness of it all is that the world hasnt any chance to produce say a writer whose life could really actually touch all this life in every detail like you always say, some writer who could bring you sobbing thru the bed fuckin bedcribs of the moon to see it all even unto the goddamned last gory detail of some dismal robbery of the heart at dawn when no one cares like Sinatra sings” (“When no one cares,” he sings in his low baritone but resumes):—“Some strict sweeper sweeping it all up, I mean the incredible helplessness I felt Jack when Céline ended his Journey To The End Of The Night by pissing in the Seine River at dawn there I am thinkin my God there's probably somebody pissing in the Trenton River at dawn right now, the Danube, the Ganges, the frozen Obi, the Yellow, the Paraña, the Willamette, the Merrimac in Missouri too, the Missouri itself, the Yuma, the Amazon, the Thames, the Po, the so and so, it's so friggin endless it's like poems endless everywhere and no one knows any bettern old Buddha you know where he says it's like “There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you'd be scared and couldnt comprehend and you'd despair so much you'd drop dead,' that's what he just about said in one of those sutras—Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all these marvelous books a man aint even got time to read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, César Birotteau, Shakespeare, Satyricons, Dantes, in fact long stories guys tell you in bars, in fact the sutras themselves, Sir Philip Sidney, Sterne, Ibn El Arabi, the copious Lope de Vega and the uncopious goddamn Cervantes, shoo, then there's all those Catulluses and Davids and radio listening skid row sages to contend with because they've all got a million stories too and you too Ron Blake in the backseat shut up! down to everything which is so much that it is of necessity dont you think NOthing anyway, huh?” (expressing exactly the way I feel, of course).

And to corroborate all that about the too-much-ness of the world, in fact, there's Stanley Popovich also in the back mattress next to Ron, Stanley Popovich of New York suddenly arrived in San Francisco with Jamie his Italian beauty girl but's going to leave her in a few days to go work for the circus, a big tough Yugoslav kid who ran the Seven Arts Gallery in New York with big bearded beatnik readings but now comes the circus and a whole big on-the-road of his own—It's too much, in fact right this minute he's started telling us about circus work—On top of all that old Cody is up ahead with HIS thousand stories—We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

13

B
UT ON THE WAY TO CODY'S MY MADNESS ALREADY BEGAN TO MANIFEST ITSELF
in a stranger way, another one of those signposts of something wrong I mentioned a ways back: I thought I saw a flying saucer in the sky over Los Gatos—From five miles away—I look and I see this thing flying along and mention it to Dave who takes one brief look and says “Ah it's only the top of a radio tower”—It reminds me of the time I took a mescaline pill and thought an airplane was a flying saucer (a strange story this, a man has to be crazy to write it anyway).

But there's old Cody in the livingroom of his fine ranchito home sittin over his chess set pondering a problem and right by the fresh woodfire in the fireplace his wife's set out because she knows I love fireplaces—She a good friend of mine too—The kids are sleeping in the back, it's about eleven, and good old Cody shakes my hand again—Havent seen him for several years because mainly he's just spent two years in San Quentin on a stupid charge of possession of marijuana—He was on his way to work on the railroad one night and was short on time and his driving license had been already revoked for speeding so he saw two bearded bluejeaned beatniks parked, asked them to trade a quick ride to work at the railroad station for two sticks of tea, they complied and arrested him—They were disguised policemen—For this great crime he spent two years in San Quentin in the same cell with a murderous gunman—His job was sweeping out the cotton mill room—I expect him to be all bitter and out of his head because of this but strangely and magnificently he's become quieter, more radiant, more patient, manly, more friendly even—And tho the wild frenzies of his old road days with me have banked down he still has the same taut eager face and supple muscles and looks like he's ready to go anytime—But actually loves his home (paid for by railroad insurance when he broke his leg trying to stop a boxcar from crashing), loves his wife in a way tho they fight some, loves his kids and especially his little son Timmy John partly named after me—Poor old, good old Cody sittin there with his chess set, wants immediately to challenge somebody to a chess game but only has an hour to talk to us before he goes to work supporting the family by rushing out and pushing his Nash Rambler down the quiet Los Gatos suburb street, jumping in, starting the motor, in fact his only complaint is that the Nash wont start without a push—No bitter complaints about society whatever from this grand and ideal man who really loves me moreover as if I deserved it, but I'm bursting to explain everything to him, not even Big Sur but the past several years, but there's no chance with everybody yakking—And in fact I can see in Cody's eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel that recently we havent had chances to talk whatever, like we used to do driving across America and back in the old road days, too many people now want to talk to us and tell us
their
stories, we've been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered—The circle's closed in on the old heroes of the night—But he says “However you guys, come on down round 'bout one when the boss leaves and watch me work and keep me company awhile before you go back to the City”—I can see Dave Wain really loves him at once, and Stanley Popovich too who's come along on this trip just to meet the fabled “Dean Moriarty”—The name I give Cody in “On the Road”—But O, it breaks my heart to see he's lost his beloved job on the railroad and after all the seniority he'd piled up since 1948 and now is reduced to tire recapping and dreary parole visits—All for two sticks of wild loco weed that grows by itself in Texas because God wanted it—

And there over the bookshelf is the old photo of me and Cody arm in arm in the early days on a sunny street—

I rush to explain to Cody what happened the year before when his religious advisor at the prison had invited me to come to San Quentin to lecture the religious class—Dave Wain was supposed to drive me and wait outside the prison walls as I'd go in there alone, probably with a pepup nip bottle hidden in my coat (I hoped) and I'd be led by big guards to the lecture room of the prison and there would be sitting a hundred or so cons including Cody probably all proud in the front row—And I would begin by telling them I had been in jail myself once and that I had no right nevertheless to lecture them on religion—But they're all lonely prisoners and dont care what I talk about—The whole thing arranged, in any case, and on the big morning I wake up instead dead drunk on a floor, it's already noon and too late, Dave Wain is on the floor also, Willie's parked outside to take us to Quentin for the lecture but it's too late—But now Cody says “It's alright old buddy I understand”—Altho our friend Irwin had done it, lectured there, but Irwin can do all sorta things like that being more social than I am and capable of going in there as he did and reading his wildest poems which set the prison yard humming with excitement tho I think he shouldna done it after all because I say just to show up for any reason except visiting inside a prison is still SIGNIFYING—And I tell this to Cody who ponders a chess problem and says “Drinkin again, hey?” (if there's anything he hates is to see me drink).

We help him push his Nash down the street, then drink awhile and talk with Evelyn a beautiful blonde woman that young Ron Blake wants and even Dave Wain wants but she's got her mind on other things and taking care of the children who have to go to school and dancing classes in the morning and hardly gets a word in edgewise anyway as we all yak and yell like fools to impress her tho all she really wants is to be alone with me to talk about Cody and his latest soul.

Which includes the fact of Billie Dabney his mistress who has threatened to take Cody away completely from Evelyn, as I'll show later.

So we do go out to the San Jose highway to watch Cody recap tires—There he is wearing goggles working like Vulcan at his forge, throwing tires all over the place with fantastic strength, the good ones high up on a pile, “This one's no good” down on another, bing, bang, talking all the time a long fantastic lecture on tire recapping which has Dave Wain marvel with amazement—(“My God he can do all that and even explain while he's doing it”)—But I just mention in connection with the fact that Dave Wain now realizes why I've always loved Cody—Expecting to see a bitter ex con he sees instead a martyr of the American Night in goggles in some dreary tire shop at 2 A.M. making fellows laugh with joy with his funny explanations yet at the same time to a T performing every bit of the work he's being paid for—Rushing up and ripping tires off car wheels with a jicklo, clang, throwing it on the machine, starting up big roaring steams but yelling explanations over that, darting, bending, flinging, flaying, till Dave Wain said he thought he was going to die laughing or crying right there on the spot.

So we drive back to town and go to the mad boarding-house to drink some more and I pass out dead drunk on the floor as usual in that house, waking up in the morning groaning far from my clean cot on the porch in Big Sur—No bluejays yakking for me to wake up any more, no gurgling creek, I'm back in the grooky city and I'm trapped.