The postmistress was a middle-aged woman, and she had copied on her face one of those mouths they used to wear during the 1920s. Uncle Jarv bought a postcard and filled it up on the counter as if it were a glass of water.
It took a couple of moments. Halfway through the postcard Uncle Jarv stopped and glanced up at Marilyn Monroe. There was nothing lustful about his looking up there. She just as well could have been a photograph of mountains and trees.
I don't remember whom he was writing to. Perhaps it was to a friend or a relative. I stood there staring at the nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe for all I was worth. Then Uncle Jarv mailed the postcard. "Come on," he said.
We went back to the house where the bears were, but they were gone. "Where did they go?" somebody said.
A lot of people had gathered around and they were all talking about the missing bears and were kind of looking for the bears all over the place.
"They're dead," somebody said, trying to be reassuring, and pretty soon we were looking inside the house, and a woman went through the closets, looking for bears.
After a while the mayor came over and said, "I'm hungry. Where are my bears?"
Somebody told the mayor that they had disappeared into thin air and the mayor said, "That's impossible," and got down and looked under the porch. There were no bears there.
An hour or so passed and everybody gave up looking for the bears, and the sun went down. We sat outside on the front porch where once upon a time, there had been bears.
The men talked about playing high school football during the Depression, and made jokes about how old and fat they had grown. Somebody asked Uncle Jarv about the four hotel rooms and the four bottles of whiskey. Everybody laughed except Uncle Jarv. He smiled instead. Night had just started when somebody found the bears.
They were on a side street sitting in the front seat of a car. One of the bears had on a pair of pants and a checkered shirt. He was wearing a red hunting hat and had a pipe in the mouth and two paws on the steering wheel like Barney Old-field.
The other bear had on a whits silk negligee, one of the kind you see advertised in the back pages of men's magazines, and a pair of felt slippers stuck on the feet. There was a pink bonnet tied on the head and a purse in the lap.
Somebody opened up the purse, but there wasn't anything inside. I don't know what they expected to find, but they were disappointed. What would a dead bear carry in its purse, anyway?
***
Strange is the thing that makes me recall all this again: the bears. It's a photograph in the newspaper of Marilyn Monroe, dead from a sleeping pill suicide, young and beautiful, as they say, with everything to live for.
The newspapers are filled with it: articles and photographs and the like—her body being taken away on a cart, the body wrapped in a dull blanket. I wonder what post office wall in Eastern Oregon will wear this photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
An attendant is pushing the cart out a door, and the sun is shining under the cart. Venetian blinds are in the photograph and the branches of a tree.
Pale Marble Movie
THE room had a high Victorian ceiling and there was a marble fireplace and an avocado tree growing in the window, and she lay beside me sleeping in a very well-built blond way.
And I was asleep, too, and it was just starting to be dawn in September.
1964.
Then suddenly, without any warning, she sat up in bed, waking me instantly, and she started to get out of bed. She was very serious about it.
"What are you doing?" I said.
Her eyes were wide open.
"I'm getting up," she said.
They were a somnambulist blue.
"Get back in bed," I said.
"Why?" she said, now halfway out of bed with one blond foot touching the floor.
"Because you're still asleep," I said.
"Ohhh ... OK," she said. That made sense to her and she got back into bed and pulled the covers around herself and cuddled up close to me. She didn't say another word and she didn't move.
She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie.
Partners
I like to sit in the cheap theaters of America where people live and die with Elizabethan manners while watching the movies. There is a theater down on Market Street where I can see four movies for a dollar. I really don't care how good they are either. I'm not a critic. I just like to watch movies. Their presence on the screen is enough for me.
The theater is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, soldiers, sailors and the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.
"No! No! Get back in the car, Clyde. Oh, God, they're killing Bonnie!"
I am the poet-in-residence at these theaters but I don't plan on getting a Guggenheim for it.
Once I went into the theater at six o'clock in the evening and got out at one o'clock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.
In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.
I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theater called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.
The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.
There was a man sitting next to me.
He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity.
His baggy no-style clothes covered him like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.
Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, so that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.
Getting to Know Each Other
SHE hates hotel rooms. It's like a Shakespearean sonnet. I mean, the childwoman or Lolita thing. It's a classic form:
She hates hotel rooms. It's the light in the morning that really bothers her. She doesn't like to wake up surrounded by that kind of light.
The morning light in hotel rooms is always synthetic, harshly clean as if the maid had let herself so quietly in, like a maidmouse, and put the light there by making phantom beds with strange sheets hanging in the very air itself.
She used to lie in bed and pretend that she was still asleep, so as to catch the maid coming in with the morning light folded in her arms, but she never caught her and finally gave it up.
Her father is asleep in the other room with a new lover. Her father is a famous movie director and in town to promote one of his pictures.
This trip to San Francisco he is promoting a horror movie that he has just finished directing called The Attack of the Giant Rose People. It is a film about a mad gardener and the results of his handiwork in the greenhouse working with experimental fertilizers.
She thinks the giant rose people are a bore. "They look like a bunch of funky valentines," she recently told her father.
"Why don't you go fuck yourself?" had been his reply.
That afternoon he would have lunch with Paine Knickerbocker of the Chronicle and later on in the afternoon he would be interviewed by Eichelbaum of the Examiner and a few days later her father's same old line of bullshit would appear in the papers.
Last night he rented a suite at the Fairmont but she wanted to stay at a motel on Lombard.
"Are you crazy? This is San Francisco!" he'd said.
Sh
e likes motels a lot better than she does hotels, but she doesn't know why. Maybe it's the light in the morning. That probably has something to do with it. The light in motel rooms is more natural. It's not as if the maid had put it there.
She got out of bed. She wanted to see who her father was sleeping with. It was a little game of hers. She liked to see if she could guess who her father was in bed with, but it was a kind of silly game and she knew it because the women that her father went to bed with always looked just like her.
She wondered where her father kept finding them.
Some of his friends and other people liked to make little jokes about it. They liked to say that his lovers and his daughter always looked like sisters. Sometimes she felt as if she were the member of a strange and changing family of sisters.
She was 5-7, had straight blond hair that went almost down to her ass. She weighed 113 pounds. She had very blue eyes.
She was fifteen years old but she could have been any age. With just the turn of a whim she could look anywhere between thirteen and thirty-five.
Sometimes she would deliberately look thirty-five, so that young men in their early twenties would be attracted to her and consider her to be an older, experienced woman.
She could perform perfectly the role of a still glamorous but fading thirty-five-year-old woman, having studied so many of them in Hollywood, New York, Paris, Rome, London, etc.
She'd already had three affairs with young men in their early twenties without them ever catching on that she was only fifteen.
It had become a little hobby of hers.
She could invent whole lifetimes for herself and it was as if she had lived them in a kind of dreamy telescope way. She could be a thirty-four-year-old matron with three children in Glendale married to a Jewish dentist and having a lost youth fling on the side or she could be a thirty-one-year-old spinster literary editor from New York trying to escape the clutches of an insane lesbian lover and needing a young man to provide her salvation from perversion or she could be a thirty- year-old divorcée with an incurable but attractive disease and wanting to have one more chance at romance before...
She loved it.
She got out of bed and tiptoed without any clothes on into the living room and went over to the door of her father's bedroom and stood there listening to see if they were awake or making love.
Her father and his lover were sound asleep. She could feel it through the door. It was like a chunk of warm frozen space in their bedroom.
She opened the door a crack and saw the blond hair of the woman spilling over the side of the bed like the sleeve of a yellow shirt.
She smiled and closed the door.
And that's where we leave her.
We know a little about her.
And she knows a lot about us.
A Short History of Oregon
I would do things like that when I was sixteen. I'd hitch-hike fifty miles in the rain to go hunting for the last hours of the day. I'd stand alongside the road with a 30:30 and my thumb out and think nothing of it, expecting to be picked up and I always was.
"Where are you going?"
"Deer hunting."
That meant something in Oregon.
"Get in."
It was raining like hell when I got out of the car at the top of the ridge. The driver couldn't believe it. I saw a draw half-full of trees, sloping down into a valley obscured by rain mist.
I hadn't the slightest idea where the valley led to. I'd never been there before and I didn't care.
"Where are you going?" the driver said, hardly believing that I was getting out of the car in the rain.
"Down there."
When he drove off I was alone in the mountains and that was how I wanted it to be. I was waterproofed from head to toe and had some candy bars in my pocket.
I walked down through the trees, trying to kick a deer out of the dry thickets, but it didn't really make any difference if I saw one or not.
I just wanted the awareness of hunting. The thought of the deer being there was just as good as the deer actually being there.
There was nothing stirring in the thickets. I didn't see any sign of a deer or the sign of a bird or the sign of a rabbit or anything.
Sometimes I would just stand there. The trees were dripping. There was only the sign of myself: alone, so I ate a candy bar.
I had no idea of the time. The sky was dark with winter rain. I only had a couple of hours when I started and I could feel that they were nearly at an end and soon it would be night.
I came out of a thicket into a patch of stumps and a logging road that curved down into the valley. They were new stumps. The trees had been cut sometime that year. Perhaps in the spring. The road curved into the valley.
The rain slackened off, then stopped and a strange kind of silence settled over everything. It was twilight and wouldn't last long.
There was a turn in the logging road and suddenly, without warning, there was a house right there in the middle of my private nowhere. I didn't like it.
The house was more of a large shack than anything else with a lot of old cars surrounding it and there was all sorts of logging junk and things that you need and then abandon after using.
I didn't want the house to be there. The rain mist lifted and I looked back up the mountain. I'd come down only about half a mile, thinking all the time I was alone.
That was a joke.
There was a window in the house-shack facing up the road toward me. I couldn't see anything in the window. Even though it was starting to get night, they hadn't turned their lights on yet. I knew there was somebody home because heavy black smoke was coming out of the chimney.
As I got closer to the house, the front door slammed open and a kid ran out onto a crude makeshift porch. He didn't have any shoes or a coat on. He was about nine years old and his blond hair was disheveled as if the wind were blowing all the time in his hair.
He looked older than nine and was immediately joined by three sisters who were three, five and seven. The sisters weren't wearing any shoes either and they didn't have any coats on. The sisters looked older than they were.
The quiet spell of the twilight broke suddenly and it started raining again, but the kids didn't go into the house. They just stood there on the porch, getting all wet and looking at me.
I'll have to admit that I was a strange sight coming down their muddy little road in the middle of God-damn nowhere with darkness coming on and a 30:30 cradled down in my arms, so the night rain wouldn't get in the barrel.
The kids didn't say a word as I walked by. The sisters' hair was unruly like dwarf witches'. I didn't see their folks. There was no light on in the house.
A Model A truck lay on its side in front of the house. It was next to three empty fifty-gallon oil drums. They didn't have a purpose any more. There were some odd pieces of rusty cable. A yellow dog came out and stared at me.
I didn't say a word in my passing. The kids were soaking wet now. They huddled together in silence on the porch. I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this.
A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America
I'M wandering along, thinking about how I'd like to get laid by somebody new. It's a cold winter afternoon and just another thought, almost out of my mind when—
A tall, God-I-love the tall-ones girl comes walking up the street, casual as a young animal with Levi's on. She must be 5-9, wearing a blue sweater. Her breasts are loose beneath it and move in firm youthful tide.
She has no shoes on.
She's a hippie girl.
Her hair is long.
She doesn't know how pretty she is. I like that. It always turns me on, which isn't very hard to do right now because I'm already thinking about girls.
Then as we pass each other she turns toward me, a thing totally unexpected and she says, "Don't I know you?"
Wow! She is standing beside me now. She's really tall!
I look closely at he
r. I try to see if I know her. Maybe she's a former lover or somebody else I've met or made a pass at when I've been drunk. I look carefully at her and she is beautiful in a fresh young way. She has the nicest blue eyes, but I don't recognize her.
"I know I've seen you before," she says, looking up into my face. "What's your name?"
"Clarence."
"Clarence?"
"Yeah, Clarence."
"Oh, then I don't know you," she says.
That was kind of fast.
Her feet are cold on the pavement and she's hunched in a cold-like way toward me.
"What is your name?" I ask, maybe I'm going to make a pass at her. That's what I should be doing right now. Actually, I'm about thirty seconds late in doing it.
"Willow Woman," she says. "I'm trying to get out to the Haight-Ashbury. I just got into town from Spokane."
"I wouldn't," I say. "It's very bad out there."
"I have friends in the Haight-Ashbury," she says.
"It's a bad place," I say.
She shrugs her shoulders and looks helplessly down at her feet. Then she looks up and her eyes have a friendly wounded expression in them.
"This is all I have," she says.
(Meaning what she is wearing.)
"And what's in my pocket," she says.
(Her eyes glance furtively toward the left rear pocket of her Levi's.)
"My friends will help me out when I get there," she says.
(Glancing in the direction of the Haight-Ashbury three miles away.)
Suddenly she has become awkward. She doesn't know exactly what to do. She has taken two steps backward. They are in the direction of going up the street.
"I...," she says.
"I...," looking down at her cold feet again.
She takes another half-step backward.
"I."
"I don't want to whine," she says.
She's really disgusted with what's happening now. She's ready to leave. It didn't work out the way she wanted.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 7