Desolation Angels (18 page)

I just stand in the outside hall against the wall, no beer necessary, with collections of in-and-out listeners, with Sliv, and now here returns Chuck Berman (who is a colored kid from West Indies who barged into my party six months earlier high with Cody and the gang and I had a Chet Baker record on and we hoofed at each other in the room, tremendous, the perfect grace of his dancing, casual, like Joe Louis casually hoofing)—He comes now in dancing like that, glad—Everybody looks everywhere, it's a jazz-joint and beat generation madtrick, you see someone, “Hi,” then you look away elsewhere, for something someone else, it's all insane, then you look back, you look away, around, everything is coming in from everywhere in the sound of the jazz—“Hi”—“Hey”—

Bang, the little drummer takes a solo, reaching his young hands all over traps and kettles and cymbals and foot-peddle BOOM in a fantastic crash of sound—12 years old—what will happen?

Me'n Sliv stand bouncing to the beat and finally the girl in the skirt comes talk to us, it's Gia Valencia, the daughter of the mad Spanish anthropologist sage who'd lived with the Pomo and Pit River Indians of California, famous old man, whom I'd read and revered only three years ago while working the railroad outa San Luis Obispo—“Bug, give me back my shadow!” he yelled on a recorded tape before he died, showing how the Indians made it at brooks in old California pre-history before San Fran and Clark Gable and Al Jolson and Rose Wise Lazuli and the jazz of the mixed generations—Out there's all that sun and shade as same as old doodlebug time, but the Indians are gone, and old Valencia is gone, and all's left is his charming erudite daughter with her hands in her pockets digging the jazz—She's also talking to all the goodlooking men, black and white, she likes em all—They like her—To me she suddenly says “Arent you going to call Irwin Garden?”

“Sure I just got into town!”

“You're Jack Duluoz arent you!”

“And yeah, you're—”

“Gia”

“Ah a Latin name”

“Oh you frightening man,” she says seriously, suddenly meaning my impenetrable of myself way of talking to a woman, my glare, my eyebrows, my big lined angry yet crazy eye-gleaming bony face—She really means it—I feel it—Often frighten myself in the mirror—But for some tender chicken to look into my mirror of all-the-woes-you-know … it's worse!

She talks to Sliv, he doesn't frighten her, he's sympathetic and sad and serious and she stands there I watch her, the little thin body just faintly feminine and the low pitch of her voice, the charm, the veritable elegant oldworld way she comes on, completely out of place in the Cellar—Should be at Katherine Porter's cocktail—should be exchanging duet-os of art talk in Venice and Fiorenza with Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Compton-Burnett—should be in Hawthorne's novels—I really like her, I feel her charm, I go over and talk some more—

Alternately bang bang the jazz crashes in to my consciousness and I forget everything and just close my eyes and listen to the ideas—I feel like yelling “Play A Fool Am I!” which would be a great tune—But now they're on some other jam—whatever they feel like, the downbeat, the piano chord, off—

“How can I call Irwin?” I ask her—Then I remember I've got Raphael's phone number (from sweet Sonya in the bookshop) and I slip into the booth with my dime and dial, typical jazz joint stuff, like the time I'd slipped into the booth at Bird-land in New York and in the comparative silence suddenly heard Stan Getz, who was in the toilet nearby, blowing his saxophone quietly to the music of Lennie Tristano's group out front, when I realized he could do anything—(Warne Marsh me no Warne Marsh! his music said)—I call Raphael who answers “Yes?”

“
Raphael?
This is Jack—Jack Duluoz!”

“Jack! Where are you?”

“The Cellar—come on down!”

“I cant, I have no money!”

“Cant you walk?”

“
Walk?
”

“I'll call and get Irwin and we'll come over get you in a cab—Call you back half hour!”

I try to call Irwin, it wont do, he's nowhere—Everybody in the Cellar is goofing, now the bartenders are beginning to whip at beers themselves and get flushed and high and drunk—The drunken brunette falls off her stool, her cat carries her to the ladies' room—Fresh gangs roam in—It's mad—And finally to cap everything (O Desolation Me Silent Me) here comes Richard de Chili the insane Richard de Chili who wanders around Frisco at night in long fast strides, all alone, examining the examples of architecture, strange hodgepodge notions and bay windows and garden walls, giggling, alone in the night, doesnt drink, hoards funny soapy candy bars and bits of string in his pockets and half out combs and half toothbrushes and when he comes to sleep at any of our pads he'll burn toothbrushes at the stove jet, or stay in the bathroom hours running water, and brush his hair with assorted brushes, completely homeless, always sleeping on someone's couch and yet once a month he goes to the bank (the night watchman vault) and there's his monthly income waiting for him (the daytime bank's embarrassed), just enough money to live on, left to him by some mysterious unknown elegant family he never talks about—No teeth in the front of his mouth whatever—Crazy clothes, like a scarf around his neck and jeans and a silly jacket he found somewhere with paint on it, and offers you a peppermint candy and it tastes like soap—Richard de Chili, the Mysterious, who was for a long time out of sight (six months earlier) and finally as we're driving down the street we see him striding into a supermarket “There's Richard!” and all jump out to follow him and there he is in the store lifting candybars and cans of peanuts on the sly and not only that he's seen by the Okie storeman and we have to pay his way out and he comes with us with his incomprehensible low-spoken remarks, like, “The moon is a piece of tea,” looking up at it in the rumble seat—Whom finally I welcomed to my 6-month-earlier shack in Mill Valley to stay a few days and he takes all the sleepingbags and slings them (except mine, hidden in the grass) over the window, where they tear, so the last time I see my Mill Valley shack as I start hitch hiking for Desolation Peak there's Richard de Chili sleeping in a great roomful of duck feathers, an incredible sight—a typical sight—with his underarm paper bags full of strange esoteric books (one of the most intelligent persons I know in the world) and his soaps and candles and giblets of junk, O my, the catalogue is out of my memory—Who finally took me on a long walk around Frisco one drizzly night to go peek through the street window of an apartment occupied by two homosexual
midgets
(who werent there)—Richard comes in and stands by me and as usual and in the roar I cant hear what he's saying and it doesnt matter anyway—He too goofing nervously, looking around everywhere, everybody reaching for that next kick and there's no next-kick …

“What are we gonna do?” I say—

Nobody knows—Sliv, Gia, Richard, the others, they all just stand shuffling around in the Cellar of Time waiting, waiting, like so many Samuel Beckett heroes in the Abyss—Me, I've
got
to do something, go somewhere, establish a rapport, get the talk and the action going, I fidget and shuffle with them—

The beautiful brunette is even worse—Clad so beautifully in a tightfitting black silk dress exhibiting all her perfect dusky charms she comes out of the toilet and falls down again—Crazy characters are milling around—Insane conversations I cant remember anymore, it's too mad!

“I'll give up, I'll go sleep, tomorrow I'll find the gang”

A man and a woman ask us to move over please so they can study the map of San Francisco on the hall wall—“Tourists from Boston, hey?” says Richard, with his witless grin—

I get on the phone again and cant find Irwin so I'll go home to my room in the Bell Hotel and sleep—Like sleep on the mountain, the generations
are
too mad—

Yet Sliv and Richard dont want me to leave, everytime I edge off they follow me, shuffling, we're all shuffling and waiting for nothing, it gets on my nerves—It takes all my willpower and sad regret to say so long to them and cut out into the night—

“Cody'll be at my place at eleven tomorrow,” shouts Chuck Berman so I'll make that scene—

At the corner of Broadway and Columbus, in the famous little open eatery, I call Raphael to tell him to meet me in the morning at Chuck's—“Okay—but listen! While I was waiting for you I wrote a poem! A terrific poem! It's all about you! I address it to you! Can I read it to you over the phone?”

“Go ahead”

“
Spit
on Bosatsu!” he yells. “
Spit
on Bosatsu!”

“Oo,” I say, “that's beautiful”

“The poem is called ‘To Jack Duluoz, Buddha-fish'—Here's the way it goes—” And reads me this long insane poem over the phone as I stand there against the counter of hamburgs, as he yells and reads (and I take in every word, every meaning of this Lower Eastside New York Italian genius reborn from the Renaissance) I think “O God, how sad!—I have poet friends who yell me their poems in cities—it's just as I predicted on the mount, it's celebrating in cities upsidedown—

“Sweet, Raphael, great, you're a greater poet than ever—you're really going now—great—dont stop—remember to write without stopping, without thinking, just go, I wanta hear what's in the bottom of your mind.”

“And that's what I'm doing, see?—do you dig it? do you under
stand?
” The way he says “under
stand
,” like, “stahnd,” like Frank Sinatra, like something New York, like something new in the world, a real down-from-the-bottom city Poet at last, like Christopher Smart and Blake, like Tom O Bedlam, the song of the streets and of the alley cats, the great great Raphael Urso who'd made me so mad in 1953 when he made it with my girl—but whose fault was that? mine as much as theirs—it's all recorded in
The Subterraneans
—

“Great great Raphael I'll see you tomorra—Let's sleep and be silent—Let's dig silence, silence is the end, I've had it all summer, I'll teach you.”

“Great, great, I dig that you dig silence,” comes his sad enthusiastic voice over the pitiful telephone machine, “it makes me sad to think you dig silence, but I will dig silence, believe it, I
will
”—

I go to my room to sleep.

And lo! There's the old night clerk, an old Frenchman, I dont know his name, when Mal my buddy used to live in the Bell (and we'd drink big toasts of port wine to Omar Khayyam and pretty girls with short haircuts in his bulb-hanging room) this old man used to be angry all the time and screaming at us incoherently, annoyed—Now, two years later, he's completely changed and with it his back has bent all the way, he's 75 and walks completely bent over muttering down the hall to unlock your transient room, he's completely sweetened, death is soothing his eyelids, he's seen the light, he's no longer mad and annoyed—He smiles sweetly even when I come on him (1
A.M.
) standing bent on a chair trying to fix the clerk cage clock—Gomes down painfully and leads me to my room—

“
Vous êtes francais, monsieur?
” I say. “
Je suis francais moimême.
”

In his new sweetness is also new Buddha-blankness, he doesnt even answer, he just unlocks my door and smiles sadly, way down bent, and says “Good night, sir—everything all right, sir”—I'm amazed—Crotchety for 73 years and now he'll bide right out of time with a few dewdrop sweet years and they'll bury him all bent in his tomb (I dont know how) and I would bring him flowers—
Will
bring him flowers a million years from now—

In my room invisible eternal golden flowers drop on my head as I sleep, they drop everywhere, they are Ste. Terese's roses showering and pouring everywhere on the heads of the world—Even the shufflers and madcaps, even the snarling winos in alleys, even the bleating mice still in my attic a thousand miles and six thousand feet up in Desolation, even on the least her roses shower, perpetually—We all know that in our sleep.

78

I sleep a good solid ten hours and wake up roses-refreshed—But I'm late for my meet with Cody and Raphael and Chuck Berman—I jump up and put on my little checkered cotton shortsleeved sportshirt, my canvas jacket over that, and my chino pants, and hurry out into the bright ruffling Monday Morning harbor wind—What a city of whites and blues!—What air!—Great churchbells bonging, the hint of tinkling flutes from Chinatown markets, the incredible Old Italy scene on Broadway where old dark-garmented Wops gather with twisted black little cigarillos and chot the black coffee—It's their dark shadows on the white sidewalk in the clean bell-ringing air, with white ships seen coming in the Golden Gate down below the etched Rimbaud milky rooftops—

It's the wind, the cleanness, great stores like Buon Gusto's with all the hanging salamis and provelones and assortments of wine, and vegetable bins—and the marvelous oldworld pastry shops—then the view of the tangled wood tenement child-screaming daydrowsy Telegraph Hill—

I swing along on my new heavenly softsoled canvas blue-shoes (“Oog, like the shoes queers wear!” comments Raphael next day) and lo! there's bearded Irwin Garden coming down the opposite side of the street—Wow!—I yell and whistle and wave, he sees me and throws out his arms with rounded eyes and comes running across the traffic with that peculiar gazotsky run of his, flapping feet—but his face is immense and serious surrounded by a great solemn Abrahamic beard and his eyes are steady in a candlesteady gleam in their ogling sockets, and his sensuous fulsome red mouth shows out thru the beard like the poopoo lips of old prophets about to say something—Long ago I'd dug him as a Jewish prophet wailing at the final wall, now it was official, a big article had just been written about him in the New York
Times
mentioning that—The author of “Howling,” a big wild free verse poem about all of us beginning with the lines:—