He tried to go to the toilet and the minor poets did not do at all. They began gossiping about their careers as he sat there trying to take a shit. One of them had written 197 sonnets about a penguin he had once seen in a travelling circus. He sensed a Pulitzer Prize in this material.
Suddenly the man realized that poetry could not replace plumbing. It's what they call seeing the light. He decided immediately to take the poetry out and put the pipes back in, along with the sinks, the bathtub, the hot water heater and the toilet.
"This just didn't work out the way I planned it," he said. "I'll have to put the plumbing back. Take the poetry out." It made sense standing there naked in the total light of failure.
But then he ran into more trouble than there was in the first place. The poetry did not want to go. It liked very much occupying the positions of the former plumbing.
"I look great as a kitchen sink," Emily Dickinson's poetry said.
"We look wonderful as a toilet," the minor poets said.
"I'm grand as pipes," John Donne's poetry said.
"I'm a perfect hot water heater," Michael McClure's poetry said.
Vladimir Mayakovsky sang new faucets from the bathroom, there are faucets beyond suffering, and William Shakespeare's poetry was nothing but smiles.
"That's well and dandy for you," the man said. 'But I have to have plumbing, real plumbing in this house. Did you notice the emphasis I put on real? Real! Poetry just can't handle it. Face up to reality," the man said to the poetry.
But the poetry refused to go. "We're staying." The man offered to call the police. "Go ahead and lock us up, you illiterate," the poetry said in one voice.
"I'll call the fire department!'
"Book burner!" the poetry shouted.
The man began to fight the poetry. It was the first time he had ever been in a fight. He kicked the poetry of Emily Dickinson in the nose.
Of course the poetry of Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky walked over and said in English and in Russian, "That won't do at all," and threw the man down a flight of stairs. He got the message.
That was two years ago. The man is now living in the YMCA in San Francisco and loves it. He spends more time in the bathroom than everybody else. He goes in there at night and talks to himself with the light out.
The Pretty Office
WHEN first I passed by there, it was just an ordinary office with desks and typewriters and filing cabinets and telephones ringing and people answering the telephones. There were half a dozen women working there, but there was nothing to distinguish them from millions of other office workers across America, and none of them were pretty.
The men who worked in the office were all about middle age and they did not show any sign of ever having been handsome in their youth or actually anything in their youth. They all looked like people whose names you forget.
They did what they had to do in the office. There was no sign on the window or above the door telling what the office was about, so I never knew what those people were doing. Perhaps they were a division of a large business that was located someplace else.
The people all seemed to know what they were doing, and so I let it go at that, passing by there twice a day: on my way to work and on my way home from work.
A year or so passed and the office remained constant. The people were the same and a certain amount of activity went on: just another little place in the universe.
Then one day I passed by there on my way to work and all the ordinary women who had worked there were gone, vanished, as if the very air itself had given them new employment.
There was not even a trace of them, and in their wake were six very pretty girls: blondes and brunettes and on and on into the various pretty faces and bodies, into the exciting feminine of this and that, into form-fitting smart clothes.
There were large friendly-looking breasts and small pleasant breasts and behinds that were all enticing. Every place I looked in that office there was something nice happening in woman form.
What had happened? Where had the other women gone? Where had these women come from? They all looked new to San Francisco. Whose idea was this? Was this the ultimate meaning of Frankenstein? My God, we all guessed wrong!
And now it's been another year with passing by there five days a week and staring intently in the window, trying to figure it out: all these pretty bodies carrying on whatever they do in there.
I wonder if the boss's wife, whoever the boss is, which one he is, died and this is his revenge over years of dullness, getting even it's called, or maybe he just got tired of watching television in the evening.
Or just what happened, I don't know.
There is a girl with long blond hair answering the telephone. There is a cute brunette putting something away in a filing cabinet. There is a cheer leader type with perfect teeth erasing something. There is an exotic brunette carrying a book across the office. There is a mysterious little girl with very large breasts rolling a piece of paper into a typewriter. There is a tall girl with a perfect mouth and a grand behind, putting a stamp on an envelope.
It's a pretty office.
A Need for Gardens
WHEN I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again. As usual, it was a hastily dug grave, not really large enough to hold the lion and dug with a maximum of incompetence and they were trying to stuff the lion into a sloppy little hole.
The lion as usual took it quite stoically. Having been buried at least fifty times during the last two years, the lion had gotten used to being buried in the back yard.
I remember the first time they buried him. He didn't know what was happening. He was a younger lion, then, and was frightened and confused, but now he knew what was happening because he was an older lion and had been buried so many times.
He looked vaguely bored as they folded his front paws across his chest and started throwing dirt in his face.
It was basically hopeless. The lion would never fit the hole. It had never fit a hole in the back yard before and it never would. They just couldn't dig a hole big enough to bury that lion in.
"Hello," I said. "The hole's too small."
"Hello," they said. "No, it isn't."
This had been our standard greeting now for two years.
I stood there and watched them for an hour or so struggling desperately to bury the lion, but they were only able to bury ¼ of him before they gave up in disgust and stood around trying to blame each other for not making the hole big enough.
"Why don't you put a garden in next year?" I said. "This soil looks like it might grow some good carrots."
They didn't think that was very funny.
The Old Bus
I do what everybody else does: I live in San Francisco. Sometimes I am forced by Mother Nature to take the bus. Yesterday was an example. I wanted to get some place beyond the duty of my legs, far out on Clay Street, so I waited for a bus.
It was not a hardship but a nice warm autumn day and fiercely clear. An old woman waited, too. Nothing unusual about that, as they say. She had a large purse and white gloves that fit her hands like the skins of vegetables.
A Chinese fellow came by on the back of a motorcycle. It startled me. I had just never thought about the Chinese riding motorcycles before. Sometimes reality is an awfully close fit like the vegetable skins on that old woman's hands.
I was glad when the bus came. There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.
I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with castle floors following me onto the bus.
I dropped in my fifteen cents, got my usual transfer, even though I did not need one. I always get a transfer. It gives me something to do with my hands while I am riding the bus. I need activity.
I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wr
ong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.
I was young. Everybody else on the bus, about nineteen of them, were men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and I only in my twenties. They stared at me and I stared at them. We were all embarrassed and uncomfortable.
How had this happened? Why were we suddenly the players in this cruel fate and could not take our eyes off one another?
A man about seventy-eight began to clutch desperately at the lapel of his coat. A woman maybe sixty-three began to filter her hands, finger by finger, through a white handkerchief.
I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?
I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.
I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight.
The Ghost Children of Tacoma
THE children of Tacoma, Washington, went to war in December 1941. It seemed like the thing to do, following in the footsteps of their parents and other grown-ups who acted as if they knew what was happening.
"Remember Pearl Harbor!" they said.
"You bet!" we said.
I was a child, then, though now I look like somebody else. We were at war in Tacoma. Children can kill imaginary enemies just as well as adults can kill real enemies. It went on for years.
During World War II, I personally killed 352,892 enemy soldiers without wounding one. Children need a lot less hospitals in war than grown-ups do. Children pretty much look at it from the alldeath side.
I sank 987 battleships, 532 aircraft carriers, 799 cruisers, 2,007 destroyers and 161 transport ships. Transports were not too interesting a target: very little sport.
I also sank 5,465 enemy PT boats. I have no idea why I sank so many of them. It was just one of those things. Every time I turned around for four years, I was sinking a PT boat. I still wonder about that. 5,465 are a lot of PT boats.
I only sank three submarines. Submarines were just not up my alley. I sank my first submarine in the spring of 1942. A lot of kids rushed out and sank submarines right and left during December and January. I waited.
I waited until April, and then one morning on my way to school: BANG! my first sub., right in front of a grocery store. I sank my second submarine in 1944. I could afford to wait two years before sinking another one.
I sank my last submarine in February 1945, a few days after my tenth birthday. I was not totally satisfied with the presents I got that year.
And then there was the sky! I ventured forth into the sky, seeking the enemy there, while Mount Rainier towered up like a cold white general in the background.
I was an ace pilot with my P-38 and my Grumman Wildcat, my P-51 Mustang and my Messerschmitt. That's right: Messerschmitt. I captured one and had it painted a special color, so my own men wouldn't try to shoot me down by mistake. Everybody recognized my Messerschmitt and the enemy had hell to pay for it.
I shot down 8,942 fighter pianes, 6,420 bombers and 51 blimps. I shot down most of the blimps when the war was first in season. Later, sometime in 1943, I stopped shooting down blimps altogether. Too slow.
I also destroyed 1,281 tanks, 777 bridges and 109 oil refineries because I knew we were in the right.
"Remember Pearl Harbor!" they said.
"You bet!" we said.
I shot the enemy planes down by holding out my arms straight from my body and running like hell, shouting at the top of my lungs: RAT-tattattattattattattattattattattattat!
Children don't do that kind of stuff any more. Children do other things now and because children do other things now, I have whole days when I feel like the ghost of a child, examining the memory of toys played back into the earth again.
There was a thing I used to do that was also a lot of fun when I was a young airplane. I used to hunt up a couple of flashlights and hold them lit in my hands at night, with my arms straight out from my body and be a night pilot zooming down the streets of Tacoma.
I also used to play airplane in the house, too, by taking four chairs from the kitchen and putting them together: two chairs facing the same way for the fuselage and a chair for each wing.
In the house I played mostly at dive-bombing. The chairs seemed to do that best. My sister used to sit in the seat right behind me and radio urgent messages back to base.
"We only have one bomb left, but we can't let the aircraft carrier escape. We'll have to drop the bomb down the smokestack. Over. Thank you, Captain, we'll need all the luck we can get. Over and out."
Then my sister would say to me, "Do you think you can do it?" and I'd reply, "Of course, hang onto your hat."
Your Hat
Gone Now These
Twenty Years
January 1,
1965
Talk Show
I'M listening to a talk show on a new radio that I bought a few weeks ago. It's an AM/FM solid state white plastic radio. I very seldom buy anything new, so it was quite a surprise to my economy when I went into in Italian appliance store and bought this radio.
The salesman was very nice and told me that he had sold over four hundred of these radios to Italians who wanted to listen to an Italian language program that was on FM.
I don't know why but somehow that impressed me a great deal. It made me want to buy the radio, so that's how I surprised my economy.
The radio cost $29.95.
Now I'm listening to a talk show because it's raining hard outside and I've got nothing better to do with my ears. While I'm listening to this new radio, I'm remembering another new radio that lived in the past.
I think I was about twelve years old up in the Pacific North- west where winter meant that it was always raining and muddy.
We had an old 1930s kind of radio that was in a huge cabinet that looked like a coffin and it scared me because old furniture can frighten children and make them think about dead people.
The radio was in pretty bad shape soundwise and it had become harder and harder to listen to my favorite programs on it.
The radio was beyond any kind of real repair job. It was holding onto a pathetic sound by the skin of its dial.
We had needed a new radio for a long while but we couldn't afford one because we were too poor. Finally we got enough money for the down payment to buy a radio on time and we walked over through the mud to the local radio store.
This was my mother and me and my sister and we all listened to brand-new radios as if we were in paradise until we had narrowed it down to the radio that we finally bought.
It was breathtakingly beautiful in a fine wooden cabinet that smelled like a lumberyard in heaven. The radio was a table model which was really nice, too.
We walked home with the radio down muddy streets that had no sidewalks. The radio was in a guarding cardboard box and I got to carry it. I felt so proud.
That was one of the happiest nights of my life listening to my favorite programs on a brand-new radio while a winter's rainstorm shook the house. Each program sounded as if it had been cut from a diamond. The hoof beats of the Cisco Kid's horse sparkled like a ring.
I'm sitting here now, baldingfatmiddleagedyearslater, listening to a talk show on the second brand-new radio of my life while shadows of the same storm shake the house.
I was Trying to Describe You to Someone
I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.
I couldn't say: "Well, she looks just like Jane Fonda except that she's got red hair and her mouth is different and of course she's not a movie star."
I couldn't say that because you don't look like Jane Fonda a
t all.
I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma, Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or '42: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect 1930s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.
The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio.
Then they built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.
There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.
Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.
Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.
The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.
It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to "The Star-Spangled Banner" or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt or hearing him on the radio.
"... The President of the United States ..."
I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.
That's how you look to me.
Trick or Treating Down to the Sea in Ships
AS a child I used to play at Halloween as if I were a sailor and go trick or treating down to the sea in ships. My sack of candy and things were at the wheel and my Halloween mask was sails cutting through a beautiful autumn night with lights on front porches shining like ports of call.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 5