Desolation Angels (15 page)

I turn back and go in.

Throw my pack on the floor, get a beer at the crowded bar, sit down at a table, occupied by another old man facing the other way out the street, and I roll a joint and watch the fight and the faces—It's
warm,
humanity is warm, and it's got potential love in it, I can see it—I'm a pure fresh daisy, I know—I could deliver them a speech and remind them and reawake them—Even then I see in their faces the boredom of “Oh we know, we've heard all that, and we've been down here all this time waitin and prayin and watching the fights on Friday nights—and
drinkin
”—My God they ben drinkin! Every one is a lush, I can see it—Seattle!

I have nothing to offer them but my stupid face, which I avert anyway—The bartender's busy and has to step over my pack, I move it aside, he says “Thanks”—Meanwhile Basilio's not hurt by Saxton's light punches, he steps in and wallops him all over—it's guts against brains and guts'll win—Everybody in the bar is Basilio guts, I'm just brains—I have to hurry out of there—At midnight they'll put on a fight of their own, the young toughs in the booth—You gotta be a nutty wild masochistic Johnny O New York to go to Seattle and take up fist-fighting in bars! You gotta have scars! Backgrounds of pain! Suddenly I'm writing like Céline—

I get out of there and go get my Skid Row hotel room for the night.

A night in Seattle.

Tomorrow, the road to Frisco.

65

Hotel Stevens is an old clean hotel, you look in the big windows and see a clean tile floor and spittoons and old leather chairs and a clock talkin and a silver-rimmed clerk in the cage—$1.75 for one night, steep for Skid Row, but no bed bugs, that's important—I buy my room and go up in the elevator with the gent, second floor, and get my room—Throw my pack in the rocking chair, lay on the bed—Soft bed, clean sheets, reprieve and retreat till 1
P.M.
checkout time tomorrow—

Ah Seattle, sad faces of the human bars, and you dont realize you're upsidedown—Your sad heads, people, hang down in the unlimited void, you go skipplering around the surface of streets and even in rooms, upsidedown, your furniture is upsidedown and held by gravity, the only thing prevents it from all flying off is the laws of the mind of the universe, God—Waiting for God? And because he is not limited he can not exist. Waiting for Lefty? Same, sweet Bronx-singer. Nothing there but mind-matter essence primordial and strange with form and names you have for it just as good—agh, I get up and go out to buy my wine and paper.

A drinking and eating place is still showing the fight but also what attracts me (on the rosy blue neon-coming-on street) is a fellow in a vest carefully chalking out the day's baseball scores on a huge Scoreboard, like old days—I stand there watching.

In the paper store my God a thousand girlie books showing all the fulsome breasts and thighs in eternity—I realize “America's going sex-mad, they cant get enough, something's wrong, somewhere, pretty soon these girlie books'll be impossibly tight, they'll show you every crease and fold except the hole and nipple, they're crazy”—Of course I look too, at the rack, with the other sexfiends.

Finally I buy a St. Louis
Sporting News
to catch up on the baseball news, and a
Time
Magazine, to catch up on world news and read all about Eisenhower waving from trains, and a bottle of Italian Swiss Colony port wine, expensive one of the best—I thought—With that I go cutting back down the drag and there's a burlesque house, “I'll go to the burlesque tonight!” I giggle (remembering the Old Howard in Boston) (and recently I'd read how Phil Silvers had put on an oldtime burlesque act in some burlesque somewhere and what a delicate art it was)—Yes—and is—

For after an hour and a half in my room sipping that wine (sitting with stockinged feet on the bed, pillow back), reading about Mickey Mantle and the Three-I League and the Southern Association and the West Texas League and the latest trades and stars and kids upcoming and even reading the Little League news to see the names of the 10-year-old prodigy pitchers and glancing at
Time
Magazine (not so interesting after all when you're full of juice and the street's outside), I go out, carefully pouring wine in my polybdinum canteen (used earlier for trail thirsts, with red bandana around my head), stick it in my pocket of jacket, and down into night—

Neons, Chinese restaurants

coming on—

Girls come by shades

Eyes—strange Negro kid who was afraid I would criticize him with my eyes because of the segregation issue down South, I almost do criticize him, for being so square, but I dont want to attract his attention so I look away—Filipino nobodies going by, with hands hanging, their mysterious poolhalls and bars and barrels of ships—A Surrealistic street, with cop at a bar counter stiffens when he sees me walk in, as tho I'd's about to steal his drink—Alleys—Views of old water between older rooftops—Moon, rising on downtown, coming up to be unnoticed by Grant's Drug Store lights shining white near Thom McAns, also shining, open, near marquee of
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing
movie with pretty girls waiting in line—Curbstones, dark back alleys where hotrodders do the screaming turn—racing the motor on their tires, skeek!—hear it everywhere in America, it's tireless Joe Champion biding his time—America is so vast—I love it so—And its bestness melts down and does leak into honkytonk areas, or Skid Row, or Times Squarey—the faces the lights the eyes—

I go into seaward backalleys, where's nobody, and sit on curbs against garbage cans and drink wine, watching the old men in the Old Polsky Club across the way playing pinochle by brown bulb light, with green slick walls and timeclocks—Zooo! goes an oceangoing freighter in the bay,
Port of Seattle,
the ferry's nosing her say from Bremerton and plowing into the piles at bottom's otay, they leave whole pints of vodka on the white painted deck, wrapt in
Life
Magazine, for me to drink (two months earlier) in the rain, as we nose in—Trees all around, Puget Sound—Tugs hoot in the harbor—I drink my wine, warm night, and mosey on back to the burlesque—

I walk in just in time, to see the first dancer.

66

Aw, they've got little sis merriday up there, girl from across the bay, she oughtnt be dancing in no burlesque, when she shows her breasts (which are perfect) nobody's interested because she aint thrown out no otay hip-work—she's too clean—the audience in the dark theater, upsidedown, want a dirty girl—And dirty girl's in back getting upsidedown ready before her stagedoor mirror—

The drapes fade back, Essie the dancer goes, I take a sip of wine in the dark theater, and out come the two clowns in a sudden bright light of the stage.

The show is on.

Abe has a hat, long suspenders, keeps pulling at them, a crazy face, you can see he likes girls, and he keeps smacking at his lips and he's an old Seattle ghost—Slim, his straight man, is handsome curlyhaired pornographic hero type you see in dirty postcards giving it to the girl—

ABE
Where the hell you been?

SLIM
Back there countin the money.

ABE
What the hell d'you mean, money—

SLIM
I've been down at the graveyard

ABE
What were you doin there?

SLIM
Burying a stiff

and such jokes—They go through immense routines on the stage before everybody, the curtains are simple, it's simple theater—Everybody gets engrossed in their troubles—Here comes a girl walking across the stage—Abe's been drinkin out of the bottle meanwhile, he's been tricking Slim into emptying the bottle—Everybody, actors and audience, stare at the girl that comes out and strolls—The stroll is a work of art—And her answers better be juicy—

They bring her out, the Spanish dancing girl, Lolita from Spain, long black hair and dark eyes and wild castanets and she starts stripping, casting her garments aside with an “Olé!” and a shake of her head and showing teeth, everybody eats in her cream shoulders and cream legs and she whirls around the castanet and comes down with her fingers slowly to her cinch and undoes the whole skirt, underneath's a pretty sequined virginity-belt, with spangles, she jams around and dances and stomps and lowers her haid-hair to the floor and the organist (Slim) (who jumps in the pit for the dancers) is wailing tremendous Wild Bill jazz—I'm beating with my feet and hands, it's jazz and great!—That Lolita goes slumming around then ends up at the side-drape revealing her breast-bras but wont take them off, she vanishes offstage Spanish—She's my favorite girl so far—I drink her a toast in the dark.

The lights go bright again and out come Abe and Slim again.

“What ya been doin out in the graveyard?” says the Judge, Slim, behind his desk, with gavel, and Abe's on trial—

“I've been out there burying a stiff.”

“You know that's against the law.”

“Not in Seattle,” says Abe, pointing at Lolita—

And Lolita, with a charming Spanish accent, says “He was the stiff and I was the under-taker” and the way she says that, with a little whip of her ass, it kills everybody and the theater is plunged into dark with everybody laughing, including me and a big Negro man behind me who yells enthusiastically and claps at everything great—

Out comes a middleaged Negro dancer to do us a hotfoot tap dance, hoof, but he's so old and so puffing he cant finish up and the music tries to ride him (Slim on the Organ) but the big Negro man behind me yells out “Oh ya, Oh ya” (as if to say, “Awright go home”)—But the dancer makes a desperate dancing panting speech and I pray for him to make good, I feel sympathetic here he is just in from Frisco with a new job and he's gotta make good somehow, I applaud enthusiastically when he goes off—

It's a great human drama being presented before my all-knowing desolation eyes—upsidedown—

Let the drapes open more—

“And now,” announces Slim at the mike, “presenting Seattle's own redhead KITTY O'GRADY” and here she comes, Slim leaps to the Organ, and she's tall and got green eyes and red hair and minces around—

(O Everett Massacres, where was I?)

67

Pretty miss O'Grady, I can see her bassinets—Have seen them and will see her someday in Baltimore leaning in a redbrick window, by a flowerpot, with mascara and her hair masqueraded in shampoo permanent—I'll see her, have seen her, the beauty spot on her cheek, my father's seen the Ziegfeld Beauties come down the line, “Aint you an old Follies girl?” asks W. C. Fields of the big 300-pound waitress in the Thirties Luncheonette—and she says, looking at his nose, “There's something awfully big about you,” and turns away, and he looks at her behind, says, “Something awfully big about you too”—I'll have seen her, in the window, by the roses, beauty spot and dust, and old stage diplomas, and backdoors, in the scene that the world was made out to present—Old Playbills, alleys, Shubert's in the dust, poems about graveyard Corso—Me'n old, Filipino'll pee in that alley, and Porto Rico New York will fall down, at night—Jesus will appear on July 20 1957 2:30
P.M.
—I'll have seen pretty pert Miss O'Grady mincing dainty on a stage, to ‘amuse the paying customers, as obedient as a kitty. I think “There she is, Slim's broad—That's his girl—he brings her flowers to the dressing-room, he serves her”—

No, she tries as hard to be naughty but caint, goes off showing her breasts (that take up a whistle) and then Abe and Slim, in bright light, put on a little play with her.

Abe is the judge, desk, gavel, bang! They've arrested Slim for being indecent. They bring him in with Miss O'Grady.

“What's he done indecent?”

“Aint what he's done, he
is
indecent.”

“Why?”

“Show him, Slim”

Slim, in bathrobe, turns his back to the audience and opens his flaps—

Abe stares and leans almost falling from the judge desk—“Great day in the morning, it cant be! Who ever saw a thing like that? Mister, are you sure that's all yours? It's not only indecent it aint
right!
” And so on, guffaws, music, darkness, spotlight, Slim says triumphant:

“And
now
—the Naughty Girl—SARINA!”

And jumps to the organ, ragdown jazz drag, and here comes naughty Sarina—There's a furor of excitement throughout the theater—She has slanted cat's eyes and a wicked face—cute like cat's mustache—like a little witch—no broom—she comes slinking and bumping out to the beat.

Sarina the fair-haired

bright

Bedawnzing girl

68

She immediately gets down on the floor in the coitus position and starts throwing a fit at heaven with her loinsies—She twists in pain, her face is distorted, teeth, hair falls, shoulders squirm and snake—She stays on the floor on her two hands supporting and knocking her works right at the audience of dark men, some of em college boys—Whistles! The organ music is lowdown get-down-there what-you-doin down there blues—How really naughty she is with her eyes, slant blank, and the way she goes to the righthand box and does secret dirty things for the dignitaries and producers in there, showing some little portion of her body and saying “Yes? No?”—and sweeping away and coming around again and now her hand-tip sneaks to her belt and she slowly undoes her skirt with tantalizing fingers that snake and hesitate, then she presents a thigh, a higher thigh, a pelvic corner, a belly corner, she turns and reveals a buttock corner, she lolls her tongue out—she's sweating juice at every pore—I cant help thinking what Slim does to her in the dressingroom—

By this time I'm drunk, drank too much wine, I'm dizzy and the whole dark theater of the world swirls around, it's all insane and I remember vaguely from the mountains it's upsidedown and wow, sneer, sleer, snake, slake of sex, what are people doing in audience seats in this crashing magician's void hand-clapping and howling to music and a girl?—What are all those curtains and drapes for, and masques? and lights of different intensity playing everywhere from everywhere, rose, pink, heart-sad, boy-blue, girl-green, Spanish-cape black and black-black? Ugh, ow, I dont know what to do, Sarina the Naughty One is now on her back on the stage slowly moving her sweet loins at some imaginary God-man in the sky giving her the eternal works—and pretty soon we'll have pregnant balloons and castoff rubbers in the alley and sperm in the stars and broken bottles in the stars, and soon walls'll be built to hold her
protect
inside some castle Spain Madkinghouse and the walls will be cemented in with broken beer glasses and nobody can climb to her snatch except the Sultan organ who'll bear witness to her juices then go to his juiceless grave and her grave be juiceless too in time, after the first black juices the worms love so, then dust, atoms of dust, whether as atoms of dust or as great universes of thighs and vaginas and penises what will it matter, it's all a Heaven Ship—The whole world is roaring right there in that theater and just beyond I see files of sorrowing humanity wailing by candlelight and Jesus on the Cross and Buddha sitting neath the Bo Tree and Mohammed in a cave and the serpent and the sun held high and all Akkadian-Sumerian antiquities and early sea-boats carrying courtesan Helens away to the bash final war and broken glass of tiny infinity till nothing's there but white snowy light permeating everywhere throughout the darkness and sun—pling, and electromagnetic gravitational ecstasy passing through without a word or sign and not even passing through and not even being—