Desolation Angels (21 page)

“But we'll all make it together!” yells Irwin. “We'll all be famous—Donald and McLear you come with us!”

Donald is 32, plump, fair-faced, sad-eyed, elegant, looks quietly away, and McLear, 20's, young, crew cut, looks blankly at Irwin: “O we're having our pictures taken separately tonight”

“And we're not in it!?” yells Irwin—then he realizes there are plots and intrigues and his eyes darken in thought, there are alliances and rifts and separations in the holy gold—

Simon Darlovsky says to me “Jack I've been looking for you for two days! Where you been? What you doin? Dyav any dreams lately? Anything great? Dany girls loosen your belt? Jack! Look at me! Jack!” He makes me look at him, his intense wild face with that soft hawk nose and his blond hair crew cut now (before a wild shock) and his thick serious lips (like Irwin's) but tall and lean and really only just outa high school—“I've got a million things to tell you! All about love! I've discovered the secret of beauty! It's love! Everybody love! Everywhere! I'll explain it all to you—” And in fact at the forthcoming poetry reading of Raphael (his first introduction to the avid poetry fans of 50's Frisco) he was scheduled (by arrangement and consent of Irwin and Raphael who giggled and didnt care) to stand up after their poems and deliver a big long spontaneous speech about love—

“What will you say?”

“I'll tell them everything—I wont leave nothing out—I'll make them cry—Beautiful brother Jack listen! Here's my hand to you in the world! Take it! Shake! Do you
know
what happened to me the other
day?
” he suddenly cries in a perfect reproduction of Irwin, elsetimes he imitates Cody, he's just 20—“Four
P.M.
go into library with a rasperry pill—what do you know?—”

“Rasperry?”

“Dextidrene—in my stomach”—patting it—“See?—high in my stomach I came upon Dostoevsky's
Dream of a Queer Fellow
—I saw the possibility—”

“
Dream of a Ridiculous Man
, you mean?”

“—the possibility of love within the clasel halls of my heart but not outside my heart in real life, see, I got a glimpse of the love life Dostoevsky had in his deep light dungeon, it stirred my tears to move in my heart to swell all over blissful, see, then Dostoevsky has the dream, see he puts in the drawer the gun after he wakes up, was gonna shot himself, BANG!” socks his hands, “he felt a even extra keen desire to love and to preach—yes to
Preach
—that's what he said—‘To Live and Preach that Bundle of Truth I know so Well'—so that when the time comes for me to give that speech when Irwin and Raphael read their poems, I'm going to embarrass the group and my self with ideas and words about love, and why people dont love each other as much as they could—I'll even cry in front of them to get my feelings across—Cody! Cody! Hey you crazy youngster!” and he runs over and pummels and pulls Cody, who goes “Ah hem ha ya” and keeps glancing at his old railroad watch, ready to go, as we all mill—“Irwin and I have been long l-o-n-g talks, I want our relationship to build like a Bach fugue see where the all the sources move in between each other see—” Simon stutters, brushes back his' hair, really very nervous and crazy, “And we've been taking our clothes off at parties me and Irwin and having big orgies, the other night before you came we had that girl Slivovitz knew and took her in the bed and Irwin made her, the one you broke her mirror, such a night, it took me a half minute to come the first time—I've been having no dreams, in fact a week and a half ago I had a wet dream without remembering the dream, how lonely …”

Then he grabs me “Jack sleep read write talk walk fuck and see and sleep again”—He's sincerely advising me and looking me over with worried eyes, “Jack you gotta get laid more, we must get you laid
tonight!
”

“We're going to Sonya's,” interjects Irwin who's been listening with glee—

“We'll all take our clothes off and do it—Come you Jack do it!”

“What's he
talkin
about!” shouts Raphael coming over—“Crazy Simon!”

And Raphael pushes Simon kindly and Simon just stands there like a little boy brushing back his crew cut and blinking at us, innocently, “It's the truth!”

Simon wants to be “as perfect as Cody,” he says, as a driver, a “talker,”—he adores Cody—You can see why Mal the Namer called him the Mad Russian—but always doing innocent dangerous things, too, like suddenly running up to a perfect stranger (surly Irwin Minko) and kissing him on the cheek out of exuberance, “Hi there,” and Minko'd said “
You don't know how close you just came to death.
”

And Simon, beset on all sides by prophets, couldnt understand—luckily we were all there to protect him, and Minko's kind—Simon a true Russian, wants the whole world to love, a descendant indeed of some of those insane sweet Ippolits and Kirilovs of Dostoevsky's 19th Century Czarist Russia—And looks it too, as the time we'd all eaten peyotl (the musicians and I) and there we are banging out a big jam session at 5
P.M.
in a basement apartment with trombone, two drums, Speed on piano and Simon sitting under the all-day-lit red lamp with ancient tassels, his rocky face all gaunt in the unnatural redness, suddenly then I saw: “Simon Darlovsky, the greatest man in San Francisco” and later that night for Irwin's and my amusement as we tromped the streets with my rucksack (yelling “The Great Truth Cloud!” at gangs of Chinese men coming out of card rooms) Simon'd put on a little original pantomime à la Charley Chaplin but peculiar to his own also Russian style which consisted of his running dancing up to a foyer filled with people in easy chairs watching TV and putting on an elaborate mime (astonishments, hands of horror to mouth, looking around, woops, tipping, humbling, sneaking off, as you might expect some of Jean Genêt's boys goofing in Paris streets drunk) (elaborate masques with intelligence)—The Mad Russian, Simon Darlovsky, who always reminds me of my Cousin Noël, as I keep telling him, my cousin of long ago in Massachusetts who had the same face and eyes and used to glide phantomly around the table in dim rooms and go “Muee hee hee ha, I am the Phantom of the Opera” (in French saying it,
je suis le phantome de l'opera-a-a-a
)—And strange too, that Simon's jobs have always been Whitman-like, nursing, he'd shaved old psychopaths in hospitals, nursed the sick and dying, and now as an ambulance driver for a small hospital he was batting around San Fran all day picking up the insulted and injured in stretchers (horrible places where they were found, little back rooms), the blood and the sorrow, Simon not really the Mad Russian but Simon the Nurse—Never could harm a hair of anybody's head if he tried—

“Ah yes, aw well,” says Cody finally, and goes off, to work on the railroad, with instructions to me in the street, “We go to the racetrack tomorrow, you wait for me at Simon's”—(Simon's where we all sleep) …

“Okay”

Then the poets Donald and McLear offer to drive the rest of us home two miles down Third Street to the Negro Housing Project where even right now Simon's 15½ year old kidbrother Lazarus is frying potatoes in the kitchen and brushing his hair and wondering about the moon-men.

83

That's just what he's doing as we walk in, frying potatoes, tall goodlooking Lazarus who stands up in high school freshman class and says to the teacher “We all want to be free to talk”—and always says “Dyav any dreams?” and wants to know what you dreamed and when you tell him he nods—Wants us to get him a girl too—He has a perfect profile like John Barrymore, will really be a handsome man, but here he's living alone with his brother, the mother and other crazy brothers are back east, it's too much for Simon to take care of him—So he's being sent back to New York but he doesnt want to go, in fact he wants to go to the moon—He eats up all the food Simon buys for the house, at 3
A.M.
he'll get up and fry all the lamb chops, all eight of them, and eat em without bread—He spends all his time worrying about his long blond hair, finally I let him use my brush, he even hides it, I have to recover it—Then he puts on the radio fullblast to Jumpin George Jazz from Oakland—then he just simply wanders out of the house and walks in the sun and asks the weirdest questions: “Dyou think the sun'll fall down?”—“Is there monsters where you said you were?”—“Are they goyna have another world?”—“When this one's done?”—“Are you blindfolded?”—“I mean really blindfolded like with a hanky round your eyes?”—“Are you twenty years old?”

Four weeks previous, on his bike, he'd gone barreling down the intersection at the foot of the Housing Project hill, right by the Steel Company office building, near the railroad underpass, and blammed into a car and fractured leg—He's still limping a little bit—He looks up to Cody also—Cody had been most worried about his injury—There are simple commiserations in even the wildest people—“That poor kid, man, he could hardly walk—he was in pretty bad shape for a time—I was really worried about old Lazarus there. That's right, Laz, more butter,” as tall shambly kiddy Laz is serving us at table and brushing back his hair—very silent, never says much—Simon addresses his brother by his real first name Emil—“
Emil,
dyou go to the store?”

“Not yet”

“What time is it?”

Long pause—then Lazarus' deep mature voice—“Four”—

“Well aint you goin to the store?”

“Right now”

Simon brings out insane leaflets that the stores distribute door to door showing the daily bargains, instead of writing out a list of groceries he just arbitrarily rings in some of the bargains, like,

TYDOL SOAP

TODAY ONLY
45¢

—they ring that in, not because they really need soap, but it's there, offered to them, at two cents saving—they bend their pureblood Russian-brother heads together over the leaflet and make additional rings—Then Lazarus goes uphill whistling with the money in his hand and spends hours in the store looking at science fiction bookcovers—comes back late—

“Where ya been?”

“Looking at pitchers”

There's old Lazarus frying his potatoes as we all drive up and walk in—The sun is shining over all San Francisco as seen from the long housing porch in back

84

The poet Geoffrey Donald is an elegant sad-weary type who's been in Europe, to Ischia and Capri and such, known the rich elegant writers and types, and had just spoken for me to a New York publisher so I am surprised (first time I meet him) and we go out on that veranda to look at the scene—

It's all South Side San Fran of lower Third Street and gas-tanks and water tanks and industrial tracks, all smoky, slimy with cement dust, rooftops, beyond which the blue waters go all the way to Oakland and Berkeley, seen plain, even unto the foothills beyond that start their long climb to the Sierra, under cloud tops of divine majestical hugeness of snow-rosy-tinted at dusk—The rest of the city to the left, the whiteness, the sadness—A typical place for Simon and Lazarus, it's all Negro families living around there and they are of course well liked and even gangs of children come right in the house and shoot play guns and scream and Lazarus instructs them in the arts of quiet, their hero—

I wonder as I lean with sad Donald if he knows all this (type) or cares or what he's thinking—suddenly I notice he's turned fullface around to stare at me a long serious stare, I look away, I cant take it—I dont know how to say or how to thank him—Meanwhile young McLear's in the kitchen, they're all reading poems all scattered among bread and jam—I'm tired, I'm already tired of all this, where will I go? what do? how pass eternity?

Meanwhile the candle soul burns in our “clasel” brows …

“I suppose you've been to Italy and all that?—what are you going to do?” I finally say—

“I dont know what I'm going to
do,
” he says sadly, with sad-weary humor—

“What does one does when one does,” I say listless witless—

“I heard a lot about you from Irwin, and read your work—”

In fact he's too decent for me—all I can understand is franticness—I wish I could tell him—but he knows I know—

“We'll be seeing you around?”

“Oh yes,” he says—

Two nights later he arranges a kind of little dinner party for me at Rose Wise Lazuli, the woman who runs the poetry readings (at which I never read, from shame)—On the phone she invites me, Irwin standing by me whispers “Can we come too?” “Rose, can Irwin come too?”—(“And Simon”)—“And Simon?”—“Why certainly”—(“And Raphael”)—“And Raphael Urso the poet?” “But of course”—(“And Lazarus” whispers Irwin)—“And Lazarus?”—“Surely”—so that my dinner party with Geoffrey Donald there with a pretty elegant intelligent girl, turns into a frantic screaming supper over ham, ice cream and cake—which I describe in its place right ahead—

Donald and McLear go off and we eat some kind of crazy gobble supper of everything there is in the icebox and rush out to Raphael's girl's pad for an evening of beer and talk, where Irwin and Simon immediately take off their clothes (their trademark) and Irwin even plays with Sonya's bellybutton—and naturally Raphael a hepcat from the Lower East Side dont want nobody playing with his chick's belly, or have to sit there looking at naked men—It's a surly evening—I see that I have a big job on my hands patching things up—And in fact Penny is with us again, sitting in the background—it's an old Frisco roominghouse, topfloor, littered with books and clothes—I just sit with a quart of beer and dont look at anyone—the only thing that attracts my attention from out of my thoughts is that beautiful silver crucifix Raphael's been wearing around his neck, and I mention it—