Big Sur (7 page)

14

I
NSTEAD THERE'S THE SOUND OF BOTTLES CRASHING
in the livingroom where poor Lex Pascal is holding forth yelling, it reminds of the time a year ago when Jarry Wagner's future wife got sore at Lex and threw a half gallonfull of tokay across the room and hooked him right across the eye, thereupon sailing to Japan to marry Jarry in a big Zen ceremony that made coast to coast papers but all old Lex's got is a cut which I try to fix in the bathroom upstairs saying “Hey, that cut's already stopped bleeding, you'll be alright Lex”—“I'm French Canadian too” he says proudly and when Dave and I and George Baso get ready to drive back to New York he gives me a St. Christopher medal as a goingaway gift—Lex the kind of guy shouldnt really be living in this wild beat boardinghouse, should hide on a ranch somewhere, powerful, goodlooking, full of crazy desire for women and booze and never enough of either—So as the bottles crash again and the Hi Fi's playing Beethoven's Solemn Mass I fall asleep on the floor.

Waking up the next morning groaning of course, but this is the big day when we're going to go visit poor George Baso at the TB hospital in the Valley—Dave perks me up right away bringing coffee or wine optional—I'm on Ben Fagan's floor somehow, apparently I've harangued him till dawn about Buddhism—some Buddhist.

Complicated already but now suddenly appears Joey Rosenberg a strange young kid from Oregon with a full beard and his hair growing right down to his neck like Raul Castro, once the California High School high jump champ who was only about 5 foot 6 but had made the incredible leap of six foot nine over the bar! and shows his highjump ability too by the way he dances around on light feet—A strange athlete who's suddenly decided instead to become some sort of beat Jesus and in fact you see perfect purity and sincerity in his young blue eyes—In fact his eyes are so pure you dont notice the crazy hair and beard, and also he's wearing ragged but strangely elegant clothing (“One of the first of the new Beat Dandies,” McLear told me a few days later, “did you hear about that? there's a new strange underground group of beatniks or whatever who wear special smooth dandy clothes even tho it may just be a jean jacket with shino slacks they'll always have strange beautiful shoes or shirts, or turn around and wear fancy pants unpressed acourse but with torn sneakers”)—Joey is wearing something like brown soft garments like a tunic or something and his shoes look like Las Vegas sports shoes—The moment he sees my battered blue little sneakers that I'd used at Big Sur when my feet go sore, that is in case my feet got sore on a rocky hike, he wants them for himself, he wants to swap the snazzy Las Vegas sports shoes (pale leather, untooled) for my silly little tightfitting tho perfect sneakers that in fact I was wearing because the Monterey hike blisters were still hurting me—So we swap—And I ask Dave Wain about him: Dave says: “He's one of the really strangest sweetest guys I've ever known, showed up about a week ago I hear tell, they asked him what he wanted to do and never answers, just smiles—He just sorta wants to dig everything and just watch and enjoy and say nothing particular about it—If someone's to ask him ‘Let's drive to New York' he'd jump right for it without a word—On a sort of a pilgrimage, see, with all that youth, us old fucks oughta take a lesson from him, in faith too, he has faith, I can see it in his eyes, he has faith in any direction he may take with anyone just like Christ I guess.”

It's strange that in a later revery I imagined myself walking across a field to find the strange gang of pilgrims in Arkansas and Dave Wain was sitting there saying “Shhh, He's sleeping,” “He” being Joey and all the disciples are following him on a march to New York after which they expect to keep going walking on water to the other shore—But of course (in my revery even) I scoff and dont believe it (a kind of story daydreaming I often do) but in the morning when I look into Joey Rosenberg's eyes I instantly realize it IS Him, Jesus, because anyone (according to the rules of my revery) who looks into those eyes is instantly convinced and converted—So the revery continues into a long farfetched story ending with thinking I.B.M. machines trying to destroy this “Second Coming” etc. (but also, in reality, a few months later I threw away his shoes in the ashcan back home because I felt they had brought me bad luck and wishing I'd kept my blue sneakers with the little holes in the toes!)

So anyway we get Joey and Ron Blake who's always following Dave and go off to see Monsanto at the store, our usual ritual, then across the corner to Mike's Place where we start off the 10 A.M. with food, drink and a few games of pool at the tables along the bar—Joey winning the game and a stranger poolshark you never saw with his long Biblical hair bending to slide the cue stick smoothly through completely professionally competent fingerstance and smashing home long straight drives, like seeing Jesus shoot pool of course—And meanwhile all the food these poor starved kids all three of them do pack in and eat!—It's not every day they're with a drunken novelist with hundreds of dollars to splurge on them, they order everything, spaghetti, follow that up with Jumbo Hamburgers, follow that up with ice cream and pie and puddings, Dave Wain has a huge appetite anyway but adds Manhattans and Martinis to the side of his plate—I'm just wailing away on my old fatal double bourbons and gingerale and I'll be sorry in a few days.

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but cant sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in—Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, (nightmares of death) . . . well, there's more of that up later.

About noon which is now the peak of a golden blurry new day for me we pick up Dave's girl Romana Swartz a big Rumanian monster beauty of some kind (I mean with big purple eyes and very tall and big but Mae West big), Dave whispers in my ear “You oughta see her walking around that Zen-East House in those purple panties of hers, nothing else on, there's one married guy lives there who goes crazy every time she goes down the hall tho I dont blame him, would you? she's not trying to entice him or anybody she's just a nudist, she believe in nudism and bygod she's going to practice it!” (the Zen-East house being another sort of boardinghouse but this one for all kinds of married people and single and some small bohemian type families all races studying Subud or something, I never was there)—She's a big beautiful brunette anyway in the line of taste you might attribute to every slaky hungry sex slave in the world but also intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything, is in fact just simply a big healthy Rumanian Jewess who wants to marry a good hardy man and go live on a farm in the valley, that's it—

The T.B. hospital is about two hours away through Tracy and down the San Joaquin Valley, Dave drives beautiful with Romana between us and me holding the bottle again, it's bright beautiful California sunshine and prune orchards out there zipping by—It's always fun to have a good driver and a bottle and dark glasses on a fine sunny afternoon going somewhere interesting, and all the good conversation as I said—Ron and Joey are on the back mattress sitting crosslegged just like poor George Baso had sat on that trip last year from Frisco to New York.

But the main thing I'd liked at once about that Japanese kid was what he told me the first night I met him in that crazy kitchen of the Buchanan Street house: from midnight to 6 A.M. in his slow methodical voice he gave me his own tremendous version of the Life of Buddha beginning with infancy and right down to the end—George's theory (he has many theories and has actually run meditation classes with bells, just really a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done) is that Buddha did not reject amorous love life with his wife and with his harem girls because he was sexually disinterested but on the contrary had been taught in the highest arts of lovemaking and eroticism possible in the India of that time, when great tomes like the Kama Sutra were in the process of being developed, tomes that give you instructions on every act, facet, approach, moment, trick, lick, lock, bing and bang and slurp of how to make love with another human being “male or female” insisted George: “He knew everything there is to know about all kinds of sex so that when he abandoned the world of pleasure to go be an ascetic in the forest everybody of course knew that he wasnt putting it all down out of ignorance—It served to make people of those times feel a marvelous respect for all his words—And he was just no simple Casanova with a few frigid affairs across the years, man he went all the way, he had ministers and special eunuchs and special women who taught him love, special virgins were brought to him, he was acquainted with every aspect of perversity and non perversity and as you know he was also a great archer, horseman, he was just completely trained in all the arts of living by his father's orders because his father wanted to make sure he'd NEVER leave the palace—They used every trick in the books to entice him to a life of pleasure and as you know they even had him happily married to a beautiful girl called Yasodhara and he had a son with her Rahula and he also had his harem which included dancing boys and everything in the books” then George would go into every detail of this knowledge, like “He knew that the phallus is held with the hand and moved inside the vagina with a rotary movement, but this was only the first of several variations where there is also the lowering down of the gal's hips so that the vulva you see recedes and the phallus is introduced with a fast quick movement like stinging of a wasp, or else the vulva is protruded by means of lifting up the hips high so that the member is buried with a sudden rush right to the basis, or then he can withdraw real teasing like, or concentrate on right or left side—And then he knew all the gestures, words, expressions, what to do with a flower, what not to do with a flower, how to drink the lip in all kinds of kissing or how to crush kiss or soft kiss, man he was a
genius
in the beginning” . . . and so on, George went all the way telling me this till 6 A.M. it being one of the most fantastic
Buddha Charitas
I'd ever heard ending with George's own perfect enunciation of the law of the Twelve Nirdanas whereby Buddha just logically disconnected all creation and laid it bare for what it was, under the Bo Tree, a chain of illusions—And on the trip to New York with Dave and me up front talking all the way poor George just sat there on the mattress for the most part very quiet and told us he was taking this trip to find out if HE was traveling to New York or just the CAR (Willie the Jeep) was traveling to New York or was it just the WHEELS were rolling, or the tires, or what—A Zen problem of some kind—So that when we'd see grain elevators on the Plains of Oklahoma George would say quietly “Well it seems to me that grain elevator is sorta waitin for the road to approach it” or he'd say suddenly “While you guys was talkin just then about how to mix a good Pernod Martini I just saw a white horse standing in an abandoned storefront”—In Las Vegas we'd taken a good motel room and gone out to play a little roulette, in St. Louis we'd gone to see the great bellies of the East St. Louis hootchy kootchy joints where three of the most marvelous young girls performed smiling directly at us as tho they knew all about George and his theories about erogenous Buddha (there sits the monarch observing the donzinggerls) and as tho they knew anyway all about Dave Wain who whenever he sees a beautiful girls says licking his lips “Yum Yum.”. . .

But now George has T.B. and they tell me he may even die—Which adds to that darkness in my mind, all these DEATH things piling up suddenly—But I cant believe old Zen Master George is going to allow his body to die just now tho it looks like it when we pass through the lawn and come to a ward of beds and see him sitting dejected on the edge of his bed with his hair hanging over his brow where before it was always combed back—He's in a bathrobe and looks up at us almost displeased (but everybody is displeased by unexpected visits from friends or relatives in a hospital)—Nobody wants to be surprised on their hospital bad—He sighs and comes out to the warm lawn with us and the expression on his face says “Well ah so you've come to see me because I'm sick but what do you really want?” as tho all the old humorous courage of the year before has now given away to a profoundly deep Japanese skepticism like that of a Samurai warrior in a fit of suicidal depression (surprising me by its abject gloomy fearful frown).

15

I
MEAN IT WAS LIKE MY FIRST FRIGHTENED REALIZATION OF WHAT TO BE JAPANESE REALLY MEANT
—To be Japanese and not to believe in life any more and to be gloomy like Beethoven yet to be Japanese in gloom, the gloom of Bashô behind it all, the huge thunderous scowl of Issa or of Shiki, kneeling in the frost with the bowed head like the bowed-head-oblivion of all the old horses of Japan long dust.

He sits there on the lawn bench looking down and when Dave asks him “Well you gonna be alright soon George” he says simply “I dont know”—He really means “I dont care”—And always warm and courteous with me he now hardly pays any attention to me—He's a little nervous because the other patients, G.I. vets, will see that he's received a visit from a bunch of ragged beatniks including Joey Rosenberg who is bouncing around the lawn looking at flowers with that bemused sincere smile—But little neat George, just 5 feet 5 and a few pounds over that and so clean, with his soft feathery hair like the hair of a child, his delicate hands, he just stares at the ground—His answers come like an old man's (he's only 30)—“I guess all the Dharma talk about everything is nothing is just sorta sinking in my bones,” he concedes, which makes me shudder—(On the way Dave's been telling us to be ready because George's changed so)—But I try to keep things going, “Do you remember those dancing girls in St. Louis?”—“Yeh, whore candy” (he's referring to a piece of perfumed cotton one of the girls threw at us in her dance, which we tacked up later to a highway accident cross we'd yanked out of the ground one blood red sunset in Arizona, tacking this perfumed beautiful cotton right where the head of Christ was so that when we brought the cross to New York naturally we had everybody smelling it but George pointed out how beautiful we'd done all this subconsciously because the net result was that all the hepcats of Greenwich Village who came in to see us were picking up the cross and putting their heads (noses) to it)—But George doesnt care any more—And anyway it's time to leave.

But ah, as we're leaving and waving back at him and he's turned around tentatively to go into the hospital I linger behind the others and turn around several times to wave again—Finally I start to make a joke of it by ducking around a corner and peeking out and waving again—He ducks behind a bush and waves back—I dart to a bush and peek out—Suddenly we're two crazy hopeless sages goofing on a lawn—Finally as we part further and further and he comes closer to the door we are making elaborate gestures and down to the most infinitesimal like when he steps inside the door I wait till I see him sticking a finger out—So from around my corner I stick out a shoe—So from his door he sticks out an eye—So from my corner I stick out nothing but just yell “Wu!”—So from his door he sticks out nothing and says nothing—So I hide in the corner and do nothing—But suddenly I burst out and there HE is bursting out and we start waving gyrations and duck back to our hiding places—Then I pull a big one by simply walking away rapidly but suddenly I turn and wave again—He walking backwards and waving back—The further I go now also walking backwards the more I wave—Finally we're so far apart by about a hundred yards the game is almost impossible but we continue somehow—Finally I see a distant sad little Zen wave of hand—I jump up into the air and gyrate both arms—He does the same—He goes into the hospital but a moment later he's peeking out this time from the ward window!—I'm behind a tree trunk thumbing my nose at him—There's no end to it, in fact—The other kids are all back at the car wondering what's keeping me—What's keeping me is that I know George will get better and live and teach the joyful truth and George knows I know this, that's why he's playing the game with me, the magic game of glad freedom which is what Zen or for that matter the Japanese soul ultimately means I say, “And someday I will go to Japan with George” I tell myself after we've made our last little wave because I've heard the supper bell ring and seen the other patients rush for the chow line and knowing George's fantastic appetite wrapped in that little frail body I dont wanta hang him up tho he nevertheless does one last trick: He throws a glass of water out the window in a big froosh of water and I dont see him any more.

“Wotze mean by that?” I'm scratching my head going back to the car.