“Dated? No. Why? You getting insecure, baby? You know we don’t even really look when we’re in peeler bars.”
“Why wouldn’t you go out with a stripper?”
“Where you going with this?” he asked warily.
“You sit and watch these women but you think they’re beneath you.”
“Shit, here we go. You’re sounding just like your mother.”
“Yeah. Okay, well…”
“It’ll be better when you get home.”
“Yeah.”
On the way back into town, I stopped at a gas station. Inside, next to the cash was a rack of CDs: Country Oldies, Best of the 70s, Hooked on Classics, Best of Sinatra, Best of Shania Twain. I picked up one called Songs for Goodfellas—Mario Lanza, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin, Louis Prima, Dean Martin. Everybody. I went to the counter with that and Big Band Babes and paid for my gas.
Sitting just down the hill from Marcella’s in Café Greco on Columbus Avenue, the Goodfella Songs still coursing through my head from the drive back in, it hit me again that Frank knew nothing about my mother’s trunk. And now I had a second box I didn’t want him to know about. Maybe he was right. I was being unreasonable.
I looked out the window. The street was loaded with Italian restaurants and cafés but my mother would’ve hated this area. For its history anyway. A couple doors down was Vesuvio’s, the old beat-writer hangout. She hated Kerouac and the rest of them; just a bunch of misogynist jerk-offs, she said. She loved to quote Truman Capote’s appraisal: Kerouac doesn’t write, he types. To which I’d reply, “What do you care what that bitchy faggot said.” I never quite got over her use of the word once in reference to me. When I refused to get involved in sports at school I overheard her say to Sally, “Terrific. Despite all my best efforts, I’ve gone and raised myself a female faggot.” Female faggot was Germaine Greer’s slur for wimpy women, I later discovered, female eunuchs. For once Sally took my side. “Christ, give her a break. I’m not exactly running the six-minute mile myself.” My mother had started jogging. “At least you’re good with a drill,” she said. Sally laughed. She generally waved off what she didn’t agree with. Me, I lay awake stewing and rehearsing: Now, if she says this, I’ll just say that, and if she responds like so …
I sipped my coffee now, shoebox in my lap. Still hadn’t opened it. Instead, I’d opened a book I’d spotted in the window at City Lights. Straight from the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang. I read until I got up my nerve.
The envelopes were all postmarked but one. I rifled for the earliest.
March 27, 1962
Dear Annie-Fanny,
Greetings from the land of beats and honey! How’s it going, baby!
Well, we made it. We’re in Frisco. Kevin and I are sleeping in the Volkswagen out back of this really cool house on the edge of the Haight. Kevin says it’s kind of a flophouse and everybody comes and goes so we’ll probably have a room inside soon.
Ernie and Dinah are sleeping in a tent beside the van. So far it’s pretty cool. We pool our resources and have little camp-fires in the backyard for dinner. I know you think it was stupid of me but I’m glad I sold my car. When I told Kevin I got it as a gift from Frank, he flipped his wig. I explained it was for having a part in a movie. Kevin said it was just as well my part got cut because that Hollywood lifestyle with fancy cars and things is so bourgeois, but I think he’s secretly jealous. Last night we were lying in the back of the van and he said, “How’d you meet all these old dudes—you hung out with Sinatra!” We were smoking reefer. Oh, by the way, I keep using your line from that time in Kevin’s parents’ basement when we were at the play rehearsal and you said, “No thanks, I have to drink later.” Everyone laughs their head off. Anyway Kevin wanted to know what Frank was like, so I said he was very generous but had a bad temper. Then he asked, “Did you get it on with him?” I said no, of course not. (I didn’t say that you did.) So, then Kevin said—get ready for it—“Man, so, is it true he hangs with gangsters? In the papers they said he was tight with Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Segal. You ever meet Bugsy Segal?”
Bugsy Segal! I said, “Oh sure. Not much of a conversationalist. Kinda dead.” Ha ha! Kevin said he thought I look like a gangster’s moll with my white-gold hair. Which kind of bit my rump. Just like when Katie, his idiot ex, said I had a Marilyn Monroe dye job. After that creepy night with Marilyn and creepy Old Man Kennedy at the Cal-Neva, I don’t want anyone comparing me to that fried-up mess ever again. Have you seen her around? Promise me if I ever get like her you’ll shoot me. I’ll shoot you too. Deal?
Anyway, I also told Kevin I had a friend named Teddy the Ghost and he’d heard of him too, and Sam Giancana. I told him Sam goes by Sam Flood when he’s in mixed company. It kind of blows his mind that I know all this stuff. He said he also knows quite a bit because his uncle is a cop and he talks a lot about mobsters. His uncle thinks that Robert Kennedy is going to take them all down. Kevin said, “Ha! Can’t take those cats down, they’re like shape-shifters. I think that’s how you got infused with that holy barbarian soul of yours.” That’s from Jack Kerouac. I don’t know what it means, but it makes me laugh. Then he wrecked it and asked if I ever got it on with Sammy Davis Jr. And he figured I said no because I was prejudiced. “Does that make you uncomfortable, the idea of getting it on with a colored guy?” I told him no—it was because Sammy was married and don’t be stupid.
Then he wanted to know about my last old man. I said, “Boyfriend, you mean?” He laughed like crazy: “You’re so square, it kills me.” I felt foolish but he said he meant that I was cute. He said, “I love every corner on you.” Ha ha. So then I told him about nutty Michael Stark. I still have his ring on my necklace, which I showed him, and then I said, “But he went crazy and stabbed a guy for insulting me. So he went to jail.”
Kevin thought that was even more of a riot. And then he said I was beautiful. It makes me want to cry when he says such nice things. It’s like he really means it. He said when he kisses me he tastes God! I don’t know what that means either but it sounded sweet. Oh, Annie, he makes me so happy.
So here goes. You probably already figured it out but I’m not a virgin anymore! I feel strange saying that out loud. Writing it out loud? Kevin was pretty bug-eyed when he found out it was my first time. He figured I must’ve been doing it with Teddy and for SURE with Michael Stark. Maybe it is weird that I never did it with Michael. But lots of girls save themselves till marriage. Kevin says that’s bourgeois. But he was flattered that I picked him to be my first, though. I know he was.
I know you don’t like him but Kevin thinks you’re terrifically funny. And righteous. And that you laid the foundation for me to lose the shame that society tried to inflict on me when expressing the joys of my body and mind.
I guess I better go now. Kevin’s up. I’m sitting on the back porch of the house and I can hear him talking to Ernie and Dinah. This truly is a family of friends. It’s so great.
I miss you, supremely, truly!
Love,
the Cisco Kid
PS I’m learning to rejoice in the expansion of the soul instead of being caught in the prison of consumption. It’s great! PPS I guess I should send this to New York. I don’t know if you’re still in L.A. or not. Maybe I should send it care of Johnny’s place?? Also we don’t have a phone. (gasp! choke!)
April 12, 1962
Dear Annie Gitcher Gun,
Well, Kevin and I aren’t living in the van anymore. This lady and her daughter left, so we have a room in the house. Ernie and Dinah packed up their tent and moved into the van. They prefer it to the house, they said, because they feel free. I think I told you in my last letter that we don’t have a telephone though. It makes me nervous. What if there was an emergency and we couldn’t call an ambulance? Or something worse, like I miss Annie so bad I want to beat my head with a hammer?
I do like this city, though. Dinah and I have been the happy wanderers. We cruise around through all the neighborhoods—
South of the Market, the Castro, Fisherman’s Wharf—while Ernie and Kevin study writing. They read tons of Ginsberg and Kerouac. Plus they’ve been getting into Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They’re writing their own poetry now.
At night, we build a fire in the backyard and roast wieners for supper. Ernie plays guitar and I sing. It always kills everyone when I do some Peggy Lee or Dinah Washington song and I twang it up all country-and-western. Kevin has started accompanying us on a xylophone that the little girl who used to live in our room left behind. And Dinah whacks the bottom of a cooking pot. Sometimes everyone in the house is out there with us. I guess I’m trying to talk about fun stuff right now because I actually don’t feel that fun. I don’t know if I’m being a bourgeois jerk or what.
This morning (well, afternoon, we hardly open our eyes till noon or so) we were sitting round the kitchen table, drinking coffee. It was me, Dinah, Ernie and Kevin. Dinah and I said we were going to get dressed and explore the city some more. Then Ernie pipes up and says, “I think you girls should make breakfast.” I thought he was kidding so I said, “I ain’t hungry yet, Pa.” And then Kevin said, “For us, baby. Ernie and I’ve been talking and there’s got to be some changes around here. I think you girls ought to sweep the floor and make breakfast for us. You’ve got to do more than consume as we create.”
Dinah and I looked at each other and Dinah squealed, “We create!” and I said, “I told you last night that I want to sing at the next Poetry Follies.”
Kevin said, “Baby, look at me. You don’t contribute by competing with Ernie and me for time and space. There’s a guy coming over this afternoon who knows a guy who used to be roommates with Jack Kerouac. He’s going to teach us how to compose our poetry in such a way as to entrance the common mind. This should be a welcoming place.” He pulled me onto his lap and touched a finger to my nose like I was a child. He said, “I know you got a lot of attention from being pretty and flashing your legs. But that was another place, one where people were happy to consume you. They worked soulless jobs in order to consume you. It’s like Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? Nowhere, man.” He’s always quoting this stuff and I don’t know what he’s talking about. He said that he and Ernie want to beatify the square world and set them all on a quest for meaning. Then he reached into my blouse and pulled out the diamond ring that nutty Michael Stark gave me and said, “This thing was used to purchase you.” And he YANKED it right off my neck and said, “I want you and Dinah to make us all breakfast to show solidarity and then I think you should go down to a pawnshop and hock this. For us all.”
So, I said, “This was my ENGAGEMENT ring. And I do so contribute,” but I felt like bawling all over the place. It seemed so mean of him, especially in front of everybody like that. “You’re talking with ego now,” he said. “The ego is self and the self is an illusion.” He pointed out that Ernie hocked his horn to help us buy the Volkswagen and that the horn really meant something—music!—whereas my ring was just evidence that I was once a whore. He actually SAID that. And I just squeaked, “What?” like a mouse that was already eaten. Just because nutty Michael Stark gave me a diamond ring does NOT mean I’m a whore. Then he slapped my butt and pushed me in the direction of the fridge. How can he be so sweet and then so mean to me?
We made breakfast, Dinah and me—we did the dishes too, then left Kevin and Ernie to await their writing guru. Jack Kerouac’s roommate. Oh BROTHER. We went down to the Tenderloin where all the pawnshops are. Dinah was pissed off and scuffing her feet along the sidewalk, which drives me crazy. Dinah has a voice like Minnie Mouse on helium. “I don’t know about this floor-sweeping shit,” she says. “Once your old man starts hounding you about keeping his floor clean, it’s over. Last night Ernie wanted me to have myself a lollipop while he meditated. That’s the third time.” Which made me sick because it reminded me of Okie Joe. Remember I told you about him using that expression. Dinah didn’t think I knew what it meant so she made an O with her lips and stuck her tongue in her cheek to demonstrate. She can be quite crude. “He claims it helped his mind drift to the uncharted nooks of beatitude … He can kiss my beatitude goodbye if this keeps up.” Then she asked, “How much bread you think we’ll get?” I didn’t want to think about it. It didn’t seem fair. But it’s not as if I was ever in love with nutty Michael Stark so maybe I was just being a baby. Dinah thought we should go into a few places and see who was the highest bidder. The money offers were all over the place, everything from one-fifty up to two-eighty and then Dinah haggled them up to two-ninety.
She said we should tell the guys we got one-fifty. I felt bad about lying because the money’s supposed to be for all of us. Two hundred, I said. I think she was kind of disgusted with me because she said, “Fine. But you better stick with the story. Don’t you sell me out just cuz he gives your button a tickle.” I know I tease you about being crude but when you do it, you still sound clever and it’s funny. Dinah just sounds gruesome.
As we left she asked me, “Whaddya think that rock set him back in real life? Had to be a couple grand at least.” I made the mistake of saying he gave me a sable stole too and she whistled and said, “Guess you got lots of stuff to hock if things don’t pan out.”
And then I remembered the pearls that my stepdad gave me. They’re in the velvet pouch at the bottom of my suitcase. Stewart’s a jerk and a pill but I’m never giving up those pearls! What if Kevin goes through my stuff? And then I start thinking about everything I left in Johnny’s closet—my mink, the stole, my dresses, my cashmere suit, the rhinestone pumps, my beautiful satin-bowed slingbacks. If they knew they’d call me a capitalist glutton pig.
Dinah had on black dungarees, a black turtleneck, these scruffy tennis shoes that she just dyed last week. She dyes everything she wears black. Her feet are tinted black from the dye. I started getting paranoid about my capri pants. They’re black but they probably cost more than her whole wardrobe and I had this yellow sweater on too. It’s as if they can’t stand color. Can’t you reach enlightenment with a bit of color?
Never go to the Tenderloin. It’s completely disgusting and seedy. There’s nothing but rundown buildings and all kinds of crummy characters kicking around the sidewalks. I was bugging a bit and I said, “Let’s get out of here and go treat ourselves to a nice lunch.”
So that put a bulb in her lamp again. We found a little café, nothing terribly swish but still pretty rich for Dinah’s blood. She kept her hand on the door as we came in as if she thought the ceiling might crush her for the sin of even coming in the joint. She said, “Look at everyone. They’re so bourgeois.” So I said, “Let’s just sit. We’ll have some wine.” I figured maybe if I got her a little drunk she’d shut her trap. I just wanted to be somewhere NICE for a change!
We sat down at a table and Dinah picked up the menu. “Holy shit!” she squealed. LOUD. “I could cook us dinner for a week for this kinda dough.” She is so loud and squeaky at the same time. Like a kicked rat. And then she looked around and said, “You think any of these people was ever so broke they lived on rice for two months?” I stopped feeling bad right about then. It was my damn ring! I said, “How ’bout we pretend that we only got the one-fifty. We cooked breakfast, swept the damn floor…”
She was up for that. By her third glass of wine she DUG that café. And all I could think about was getting my hair done. You should’ve seen my roots. I looked like a skunk in negative! Even old Dinah got excited. She’d never been in a beauty parlor. Her mother cut her hair. Or her friends. So, after lunch we got our hair done.
By the time we got home the guys had already left for the Follies. Did I tell you about the Poetry Follies? It’s like a vaudeville night with readings and jazz and comedy sketches. Like the way you said the burlesque theaters used to be in New York. Except with poetry.
We got dressed up so we could go surprise them. I thought maybe we could go dancing after or something. When we got to Harry’s Drink there was a poet onstage and
the jazz guys were playing while he did his thing. I was feeling all girlie and pretty again so I started casing the joint for signs of Kevin. The poet was finished and everyone snapped their fingers (that’s what they do instead of clapping) and I thought I’d hear Kevin because he always yells when he likes a poet but I couldn’t find him and then they announced the Dynamic Dueling Philosophers and two poets got up: a skinny guy and a chubby girl with dark hair. It took me a second. Katie? Goddamn Katie and she was holding Kevin’s hand!
I tried to find Dinah but she was sitting in idiot Ernie’s lap necking her brains out. And then they started in on this poetry-battle thing. Katie said something like, “He despises the thought of thought. From a She that Is. He wants a boudoir baby …” I suppose that was supposed to mean me? I don’t remember much more except where Kevin said, “She needs to get behind, to worship at the altar of poetry, of her man and her soul.” And Katie told him, “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” It was like the argument they had that time in the basement at Kevin’s parents’ when we were going to do that play and she was quoting from Simone de Beauvoir and he was doing Kerouac and saying that de Beauvoir just ripped off stuff from Sartre. It’s all this philosophy crap I don’t know anything about and now there they were making fun of me onstage. God, even Dinah and Ernie knew all the jokes and when to laugh and when to snap their fingers. When their crummy duet ended, Kevin dipped Katie and bit her neck. Everybody snapped like crazy. He BIT her neck!! God. And then they went back into the audience, holding hands! When I went over I didn’t even know what to say because I didn’t want Katie to have the satisfaction of seeing me mad. Remember her hair was light in L.A.? Now it’s pitch-black. She smiled at me and I wanted to bash her in the face, I swear.
Kevin said, “Hey, you got your hair cut.” He pulled me onto his lap and he said, “Did you spend all our bread, you bad girl?” And then he bit my shoulder. With the same teeth he bit her with! Ew. “You catch us goofin’ onstage, baby?” Then he told me that Katie just moved up here too. “She’s gonna crash with us for a while.” Crash with US!! Then he started yapping about how Katie worked the phones for a bookie just before she am-scrayed and how us girls had a lot in common.? I said I had to go to the bathroom and pulled a Houdini instead.
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