We talked for some time. I wasn’t hungry. She made herself a sandwich. We undressed and went to bed. We kissed goodnight and then slept. . . . At 6 a.m. she got up and told me she was going to look at the sunrise.
I’d been up an hour or so, and we were talking about Jim when Tod and Nickey came over from the court across the way. They were in their mid-20s: Tod worked at a dirty bookstore and Nickey danced in one of the bars. “Want some shit?” asked Tod. “It’s too early,” I said.
“What’ll we do?” asked Tod.
“God bless me, I don’t know,” I said. It was Saturday morning.
“Let’s go to Laguna Beach,” said Tod. “I know where we can get a big double at a motel for $18.”
Helen leaped up and clapped her hands. “Oh, let’s do! Laguna Beach! I’ll even get drunk!”
Tod walked into the bedroom, got on the phone, and made the reservations. . . .
“This 55-mile-per-hour speed limit doesn’t mean shit,” said Tod.
Tod had it up to 80, 85, weaving in and out of heavy traffic. Nickey smoked a cigarette and relaxed beneath her dark shades. A joint appeared. Helen declined. It was hot and the beer went down good. Helen crouched in the corner of the back seat watching traffic. Tod turned up the radio and we got it out of the speaker in the rear seat. I threw my coat over it and asked them, “You ever hear about the male frog with the three assholes?”
“No,” said Nickey.
“Well,” I said, “he pissed out of all three of them because his wife said she didn’t want to take any more of his crap, hahahaha!”
“Pass me a beer, will you?” asked Tod. . . .
The motel was all right, just off the ocean, bottom-floor front. But there wasn’t anything to drink.
“Where’s the nearest liquor store?” I asked.
“We can all walk down there together, right along the water,” said Tod.
“Right along the water?” asked Helen. “Oh, wonderful!” We set out.
Helen took her shoes off and walked down along the shore letting the water run over her feet. She walked along with her head down looking at the water. Then she’d turn and look at the waves. We left her down there when we got to the liquor store. Nickey needed something out of the drugstore. We waited outside. When Nickey came out I suggested that she go down and check out Helen and that we’d be along. Tod then suggested a bar on the way and we went in. There were only two seats left and they were next to a young woman. We slid in.
We ordered. The girl next to me was a strawberry blonde, young, not really a whore, not really anything, or maybe something. Just like in one of my fucking short stories. We got our drinks and I talked to Tod a moment and then I said to the girl, “Pardon me, but you are just like the girls in my short stories, and so it’s funny.”
“And how are the girls in your short stories?”
“Just like you, mostly like you, fair in eye and body but mostly with sensitive lips just like yours.”
“Are you a writer?”
“Yes, look at my hands.”
“Are you any good?”
“Oh, yes, but better in bed than at the ribbon.”
“Are you better than Lawrence, better than Hemingway?”
“In or out of bed?”
She smiled. Tod nudged me with his knee: “Hey, man, you’re really making it with her.”
“My friend says that I am really making it with you. Is that true?”
“I’m not sure. Tell me more about the women in bars in your short stories.”
“Well, like any other bar cowboy, next thing I do is to lay my leg against hers while I’m feeding her my line of shit, but there’s a way to lay a leg against a leg and a way to feed a line of shit. Everything is a way of writing a poem and most men can’t write them. Now, here’s my leg.”
“I can hardly feel it.”
“I know. But when I do that, anyhow, in the stories the lady usually buys me a drink.”
“Peter,” said the strawberry blonde, “three drinks.” She paid. “Tell me more.”
“Well, in the story I usually tell the strawberry blonde the sad facts of my life. It’s an old male ploy—looking for sympathy, looking for mother, looking for a fuck. Get a fuck, you score one against the female race and move on to the next one.”
“Is that what you’d like to do?”
“I’d like to, but I’m weak, sentimental—a red onion, a piece of smitten dust—terribly weak, a crippled dog with a red, white, and blue bunghole—brought up out of strict parentage that never allowed emotion or love. I’m trying to get it, finally, at this end when the gray is crawling into my eyebrows. How’d you like that song?”
“You’ve got a line.”
“I’ve got a line, but sometimes I awaken in front of a bathroom mirror, it’s like a dream, and I’ve got this mother butcher knife laying right across the jugular vein. So far I have laughed, tossed the blade into the bathtub, and poured another drink.”
“You sound like a fucking mess.”
“I am a fucking mess. But at the same time I am sentimental. I get attached—to dirty dishes, the sound of women pissing, a piece of paper on the rug, even the side of a bus passing in traffic—it seems like an old friend. I don’t know what it means, but I don’t want to be cured of it.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said, “wherever you’re going.”
“Oh, shit, I was afraid of that.”
“What’s the matter?”
“He’s got a woman. I’ve got a woman. Mine’s wandering the beach. His is watching mine. She’s not even mine, that’s the sad part. We could have made it.”
“I know it.”
I couldn’t remember my phone number but I gave her my address on a torn piece of brown paper. I knew I would never see her again and I couldn’t blame her. . . . After Tod and I got out of the bar we saw her walking down the sidewalk toward the east. . . .
“Hey, there she goes,” said Tod. I watched her walk away, 24 years old, red yellow hair down to her butt, revolving, moving slowly, slowly away. . . .
Back at the motel we sat and drank, all of us but Helen, she said she didn’t care for any. We talked about Jim and his work, and I said that Jim’s strongest poems were his poems about drugs. Helen said again that she refused to mourn Jim, and I said, that’s fine, and I kept drinking, thinking of the strawberry blonde. I drank quite a bit, more than I usually drink, which is a good serving for any man. We finally all went to our beds. I remembered one of the last things Jim had told me: “She’s been good to me but she doesn’t need me anymore. I can’t get it up.”
I looked over at her in the bed. She was heavy, squat, with short fat hands, almost no nose at all. Irish?
“Why don’t you turn on your fucking side?” I asked her. “You lay like a brick.”
There was no sound from her bed but she was not asleep. Tod knocked on the door. “Hey, let’s take a swim in the pool!”
“O.K, babe,” I said. It was 12:15 a.m. and I had been drinking for hours. I didn’t have any trunks, hadn’t been in water for 30 years. I was in dark blue shorts, skivvies. I drank a bottle of warm beer, walked out. Tod and Nickey were already swimming, squealing, they were high on the shit. Ten p.m. was closing time for the pool. “SHIT UPON THE UNIVERSE OF LOVE!” I screamed. That awakened somebody. He came out. “I’ll turn on the lights,” he said, “I’ll turn the heat on in the pool.”
“Fine,” I told him, “so long as you don’t fuck with me. Just shut up and vanish.”
I sat there in my skivvies, looking down at the green water. I noticed how fat my belly was, how ugly and unpliable and graceless that flesh was, and then I noticed Helen standing behind me in a housedress.
Back inside, Helen and I went to bed again.
“You just lay there like a big box of margarine,” I said.
She wouldn’t converse with me.
“To live with a woman like you for nine years,” I said, “no wonder your husband took the needle.” Then I rolle
d over and slept. . . .
I awakened sick, of course. Helen had awakened me at 6 a.m. to tell me that she had wanted to walk along the shore to see the beauties of the sunrise. She came back around 9:30 and Tod awakened me to ask if I wanted to have breakfast with the three of them. I told them no and Tod came back later with a 7-UP and some Alka-Seltzer. They left. I took both, then watched a cowboy movie on TV. The girl in the movie reminded me much of the strawberry blonde, her eyes were not great but it was the lips. I got a hard-on watching her so I knew I had my strength back; I vomited and opened a beer. Then I had another. . . .
They came back at 11:15 and Helen saw me in my shorts with the beer bottle in my hand, and I was smoking a small black cigar and she said, “I think I’ll sit outside and watch the last of my California sunlight.” And with that she walked outside and placed herself in one of the canvas chairs about the pool. Nickey walked out and photoed her lounging in the chair. . . .
It was a long ride to the airport. Helen sat as far away from me in the back seat as she could get, she was utterly pushed against the other side of the car as if she wanted to squeeze away from me forever. I had my beer. We drove on in silence. I reached up and yanked Nickey’s hair, poked my finger into her throat. She smiled back at me. I told Tod, “Please, let’s turn on the radio.”
The music came on through. Helen sat crouched, appearing to be viewing the landscape, then she appeared to be asleep. “She needs sleep,” I said, “she got up at 6 a.m. both mornings I slept with her.”
Then she leaned up, as if awake: “This is a lovely countryside.”
“Look, Helen,” I said, “we’re going back to Los Angeles. Your flight doesn’t leave until 4:30. We’ll drive you back in.”
“No, drive me there now.”
“But it’s only 12:30.”
“It’s all right. I’ll get a chance to look at people. I’ll have a drink.”
“O.K.,” I said.
We made International. Tod made as if to pull into a parking lot. “No,” said Helen, “just leave me off in front of TWA.”
“Are you sure?”
As we pulled up to the ramp area she finally looked at me. “Well, goodbye.” I picked up one of her hands, kissed it, said, “Goodbye, Helen.” Then she was gone into the glass doors. We drove off. I suppose the best part I remember was the dinner we had that night before in Laguna. I had threatened everybody, promised to open their ventilators, but nothing had happened—no need for me to smash glass and be belted across the back of the neck and jailed—it had come off fairly well for a change, people were laughing, even Helen laughed a little bit. The food was good—seafood mixed with steak. We ate everything, and drank—except for one of us. I liked that night.
Driving back to our court, Tod and Nickey were cooling it.
“That was a long breakfast you mothers had. I was afraid we were going to be overcharged for not making check-out time.”
“She talked a long time,” said Tod. “She told us a story about where her and Jim had killed a wasp one time and they sat down on their rug and cried. Then she told us the morning she got up early she went down to the shore and saved an animal, some children were trying to kill an animal and she saved it.”
“It was still a long breakfast.”
“I know, but she paid for it.”
“It still seemed like a long breakfast.”
“She said she had intended to go to Frisco to see some more poets but that after seeing you that she just didn’t care to.”
“My god, didn’t you tell her that they weren’t like me?”
“She didn’t believe us. She only wanted to go back home.”
We drove on in. Tod passed me a joint. “Still going to write the foreword?”
“Hell, yes.”
“But she lived with him for nine years.”
“She just thought she did.” I passed the joint on up.
L.A. Free Press, July 12, 1974
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
They were drunk and driving along the coast near the water. Pinky, the guitar player, and his girl, Zelma, were up front. Carl and Kathy were in the back. They were on the rift.
“The time comes to finally call it,” said Carl, “if you’re a man of any kind at all, the time comes to finally call it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Kathy, “why don’t you shut up for a while?”
“The time comes,” said Carl, “to discard that sound of loud ignorance that we once thought was glory. The time comes to toss that cunt into the air like a dirty napkin, the time comes, finally, to call it.”
“All right,” said Kathy, “we’ll call it, why do you have to keep on going on and on about it?”
“Balzac had some excellent advice. He said if you got yourself a woman of 50 that the shit-level dropped way off. That was his advice, get yourself a woman of 50.”
“Well, get yourself one then,” said Kathy.
“Hey,” said Pinky, “here’s a place that serves food and drink. We’re stopping.”
Pinky drove into the parking lot and they got out. They walked in and found a table at the back.
Business was bad. There was one girl drinking at the bar and only one other table was taken. They could see the ocean from the window. They ordered drinks and sandwiches. The ocean kept breaking against the rocks but the sound seemed more neurotic than peaceful. Carl drank half of his drink. “No soup in the mainline,” he said, “no heather paradise home; the whore parts her hair with a fresh yellow gladiola. . . .”
“The asshole,” said Kathy. “I caught him in the kitchen talking to this professor of French and she was asking him if he’d like to go to Paris with her, and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll go to Paris with you.’ She’s translating this poet from Algeria and Carl calls him an ‘Algerian nigger’ and when they go to shake hands Carl spits on his hand. You call that a great soul? He’s an asshole.”
“Yes, he is.”
“I mean you.”
“Oh.”
Carl ordered another round of drinks. “Kathy likes Ransom Jepson. She says he’s a strong man and that I hurt his feelings. Jepson is eternally crouched at the outer edges of art. He came over uninvited one day and crouched on the floor with his chapbook of poems that he paid to have published. And he began his funny-man routine. Unfortunately, only one or two recognize the source of his comedy: a bitchy mildewed jealousy. I got up and left and Kathy said he became very angry about that. He screamed, ‘Well, we don’t NEED him! We don’t need him!’ And he’s right.”
“People needn’t be invited! I like people dropping by every 10 minutes! It was a hell of a lot more interesting when we were seeing people than it is now.”
“Interesting for who?”
“And that house is the perfect house for parties! It’s made for parties!”
Carl didn’t answer. The sandwiches arrived. Carl ordered another drink for himself.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” said Kathy. “I’ve got a HELL OF A LOT MORE POTENTIAL THAN YOU HAVE! That’s right! A HELL of a lot more! You and your stories about 10-year-old girls getting raped!”
Carl went to his new drink.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” she went on, “if you were as great as you think you are, you’d be a lot more tolerant toward people than you are! And you lie in your work! My sisters write the truth and I do too! We put it down as it is and you’ll see, it will count for something!”
Pinky and Zelma had long ago begun a quiet conversation of their own. The sandwiches managed to get finished, and the drinks, and they paid and walked back to the car.
Carl had a few drinks left in the pint and he took one. They drove on down the coast.
“You should surround yourself with strong people,” Karen went on, “all you do is surround yourself with weak people, people who agree with you, like the Mannards.”
“The Mannards?”
“As it is, people wonder what the shit I’m doing with you anyhow!” Then Ka
thy settled back on the seat.
If you looked out the window, you could see that the water kept running up along the sand and then falling back. Then it tried again. Sometimes it did better, sometimes it did worse. And up higher, perched on cliff areas, were the expensive homes with the windows that overlooked it all, but the homes had a sadness and a futility to them, and if you looked carefully enough and if you caught the rays, you could sense the agony and the argument and the uselessness that occurred inside of them. If you looked carefully enough and caught the rays, you could see that even the cliffs were immersed in the uselessness of what was transpiring or not transpiring. Carl caught it, the edge of it on top of everything else. The sandwich began to come up. He rolled the window down and stuck his head out and vomited in the wind. Through his mind flashed the line: bedpans as helmets out of Knoxville. Then he pulled his head back in, rolled the window up.
Nobody said anything, not even Kathy.
L.A. Free Press, August 16, 1974
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
The Great Poet had finished his reading and was answering questions from the audience. It was apparent that the Great Poet had become intoxicated while drinking from his thermos during the reading but he continued to answer questions.
“What do you think of poetry readings?”
“I believe them to be a soul-suck but when the phone rings and the price is right I am as big a whore as the next. Next question?”
“Why don’t you like readings? If you don’t like them, why do you give them?”
The Great Poet lifted his thermos and tilted it. It was empty.
“Readings keep me off food stamps and ATD. A poetess I know gave 82 readings last year. She claims that if you don’t like to give readings you shouldn’t. ‘There are other jobs, other ways of making a living,’ she says. This isn’t true. For some people there aren’t other jobs, for some people there are no jobs at all.”
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way Page 11