Leslie In The Crystalline Night

One night in December 1961, Leslie Hipshman and I were driving across the city at the rainbow’s end in my beat-up Studebaker Lark. We weren’t on a date of course. Dates were uncool. It was just an ordinary Wednesday night in San Francisco and for some reason lost in the mist we were hanging together.

The night was cold and crisp – not crisp like eastern autumn nights when the leaves are falling, but crisp in clarity, the light exact, deep-focus, like it gets in San Francisco after a December rain and a windy afternoon. There was nothing left in the sky but clear sea air flowing over the downtown stockbroker’s offices, the Fillmore conk salons, and the desolate streetcar tracks of the Sunset.

We weren’t supposed to be together. Leslie was going with Don Auclair, the leader of our peacenik brotherhood. Against my will, I was ending a painful love affair with a seventeen year old beauty from Riverside, Carmen O’Shaugnessy. But neither of them were in the car. There was just Leslie and me cruising through the clear eternal night at the rainbow’s end listening to somebody singing how he didn’t like his mother-in-law and wondering what to do with ourselves.

I knew what I wanted to do, of course. I wanted to park somewhere and hold Leslie tight. Leslie waves beat against me like radio signals. They came in clear as the air: “I’m young, I’m beautiful, my skin is like satin and my hair is shiny black. I’m very, very delicious. And I like you too.”

But…you had to let these things take their course. Forcing yourself on someone was uncool and could lead to an unfortunate outcome. Besides, I didn’t have designs on Leslie. We were just together, that’s all. She couldn’t help owning a powerful radio transmitter any more than I could help having a receiver that worked really well.

Leslie and I had never spent time alone with each other before. Once we’d walked to the corner store together to buy Bugler cigarette tobacco. That was all. So we did what self-respecting young freaks did in the winter of 1961 when they weren’t on a date – we headed for the wasted remains of North Beach. The era of the beatniks was over and the era of the hippies hadn’t begun, yet we knew we were as happening as the beats had been. We just hadn’t had a chance to show it yet. We were drawn like moths to the flame. But the flame had burned out.

Upper Grant Avenue, scene of epic cultural battles when Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books stood trial for publishing a dirty poem called Howl, where Officer Bigarini had arrested beatnik chicks for wearing sandals in public, where poets like Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso and of course Ginsberg had broken free from writing airy martini-driven university puzzles like professors required me to study in English 101 and instead shouted visions of backyard greentree cemetery dawns on street corners or riding the Muni or standing in the smoke filled Coffee Gallery declaiming while Jack Kerouac ran to the deli for more dago red. Upper Grant Avenue in its quiet desolation was our link to the mighty heroes of old, whom we would never admit we sought to emulate. We were just going to get something to eat and look for our friend George The Beast.

George was the biggest beatnik we knew. Of course, since I was nineteen and Leslie was seventeen, we didn’t know too many. I was pretending to go to college at San Francisco State and Leslie was still at Lowell High School, but George – George was living the full-bore life. With his army fatigue jacket and single gold earring, his hypothetical parrot on his shoulder, and his magic to make everybody laugh with joy at anything, George was the dog who trotted freely in the streets. Maybe he wasn’t up there with Ginsberg and Corso yet, but hey, those guys were in their thirties already and George hadn’t hit twenty. Meanwhile, he slept where he could and cultivated acquaintance with the rotters, pimps, poets and crystal merchants who congregated in the Hot Dog Palace after midnight.

We found a place to park on Commercial Street jammed between a vegetable truck and a red zone. Out the door lay the land of tong wars and Fu Man Chu, of sweat shop lights glimmering behind curtains in the night, of dripping dried chickens and squirming fish in the butcher shop windows – Chinatown, the penultimate scene for San Francisco romance and I was walking though it with a beautiful unknown continent beside me. Before us lay the tiled stairs that lead to the coolest of Chinatown’s cheapest restaurants, Huey Gooey Looey, where the beat elite meet to eat.

Ah, where are the cheap Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? While you’re looking it up, I’ll tell you where Hooey Gooey Looie is. It’s buried under the weight of Chinatown international credit. It’s a bank. Even the steps leading to its florescent lit, subterranean depths are gone. Like George Bailey had never been born. Like Mister Potter had won. Like I imagined the whole thing. (Don’t worry too much about it – there are plenty of new ones.)

But in the winter of 1961 and for many years thereafter, Huey Gooey Louie’s was the restaurant of choice. Nowhere were the waiters as surly and the chances of meeting someone you knew as likely as at Huey Dewey Louie.

We slid into a red vinyl booth, ordered fried wontons with sweet and sour sauce, and leaned back, maybe wondering who that person was sitting across the table. I’d moved into the peacenik flat at 311 Judah Street a month before to live at the nerve center of our scene, and Leslie had come with the territory. Leslie was involved in some minor way with Don Auclair, the big dog of our little scene. Don was a couple years older than me, he was tall, he was brave and bold, he rode a Triumph Bonneville, he’d walked from LA to San Francisco on a famous peace march and been arrested for it. He knew all kind of ways to get high using legal substances like lighter fluid. He was a player and I was a beginner. It didn’t matter that he had a gentle spirit and a sweet smile, he still intimidated me. But I would never let it show, of course. To see Leslie and her pals Riley and Teresa ensconced on Don’s mattress playing guitar, listening to Joan Baez or Ray Charles, was as normal as looking to see if anyone had done the dishes yet.

One other thing I should mention about Leslie. She happened to have IT, as they used to say about twenties movie star Clara Bow. She wasn’t exceptionally beautiful. She didn’t attempt to be sexy or provocative. But something about her made young guys like me turn their heads to see her walk by. Perfume emanated from her that you couldn’t smell, but it smelled good anyway.

Now here we were at Huey Louie Gooey’s, leaning back, waiting for the wontons, waiting for the world to end, waiting for our lives to begin, and talking about the inconsequentialities of the day. Some friends in the peace movement were going to drive across the country over Christmas break. We were going to march in front of the White House waving placards and chanting and not eating anything for twenty-four hours and being non-violent about it but still making a little mark against death from the skies. We knew it was hopeless. But we couldn’t just sit there.

Leslie couldn’t go but I thought I would. Then we moved on to Joanie Baez, whom we loved, and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Her father collected jazz records; she’d grown up listening to the greats. She even knew about the Dixieland guys from long ago. That was cool. I liked a girl who stood up for something, even if it only Dixieland jazz.

I don’t think I had noticed before how intelligent she was, how full of brimming life, eager to experience the full range of human possibility. Restless, reckless, a little crazy. I just took it for granted — we were all like that. We didn’t talk about it. And of course I noticed her shining black hair cut in a dutch boy bob. Of course I noticed how she filled her bulky-knit blue sweater against the booth’s red vinyl. Her easy laugh. Even her slightly crooked teeth were cute. Why couldn’t I be in love with her instead of the braided, insane wild child who teased and tortured me, driving me insane too, but my craziness was to want her more and more. Leslie was reckless, but in a different way – I felt easy and comfortable with her.

Like every other restaurant in Chinatown in 1961, Huey specialized in Cantonese delicacies. Besides fried wontons they offered pork fried rice, cashew chicken, seaweed soup with little pink shrimps swimming through kelp beds in the bowl. I’m sure they had more authentic food over on the Chinese side of the menu, but for for Leslie and me, fried wontons were still pretty exotic. After the meal, I splurged and treated her to Hooey Dewey Gooie’s signature culinary delight: shivering, quivering, glistening almond pudding with a nut in the center and a canned mandarin orange slice and a fortune cookie on the side. We took bites from the gelatinous, translucent substance in our bowls as Leslie told me about her life as a hip high school kid. It wasn’t a lot different than my own life as a high school hippie in San Mateo, the suburb where I’d learned to hate suburbs.

On weekend nights, Leslie told me she’d get home by curfew, make a show of going to bed early, brush her teeth, flush the toilet, yawn, then make a body shape from pillows under the blankets and quietly sneak out to meet her beat wannabe friends. No one had a car – so they walked through the city, down to Market Street, or over Russian Hill to North Beach. There they patrolled its back allies to see if any big beat parties were still going on. Maybe one day they’d catch Jack Kerouac running out to the late night deli on Broadway for even more dago red. But they never saw him. Maybe they saw his shadow once.

We were all under his shadow.

Next we headed for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s great information station for the underground world – City Lights Books. By now we were comfortable with each other and enjoying the night. Finding George the Beast became a handy reason for wandering around the best neighborhood in the best city on the best coast.

Shig was at the counter as usual, leafing doubtfully through some baggy poet’s self-published tome. We checked for George upstairs and down, and poked around the poetry section. I leafed through the new issue of Sing Out! to see if it had the plastic record to hear how the songs sounded if you couldn’t read music. Two months before, high on peyote, I had listened to Joanie Baez sing The Great Silkie on one of those acetate pull-outs, listened to her over and over until it was inscribed in my consciousness. I wanted another one of those little records if I could find it.

George wasn’t anywhere around, so we browsed until we were bored, then crossed Broadway to check the Hot Dog Palace.

The Hog Dog Palace, fabled hangout for meth freaks, junkies, beat wannabes, angel-headed hipsters, posers and hosers, also known as the Ant Palace or the Meth Palace – maybe it was grim, cold, florescent, unsanitary, but it was really really cheap. From its fly-specked windows you could see everything and everybody making it down Columbus Avenue or even Upper Grant if you snuck up the back stairs and peered through the glass door. The Hot Dog Palace stood on the site of Pandora’s Box, which in its day had been a genuine pseudo-beatnik sandwich shop where they served Zen Soup to sip while wearing zen slippers and pretending to read Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. It was kicks, man, kicks! And they kept getting harder to find.

George wasn’t there either, but I saw Pat Lofthouse scribbling cartoons in his sketchbook with a Rapidograph like he always did. And I saw Gypsy Boots, a street hustler who made his living doing things with other men I didn’t want to imagine. Gypsy was shoveling quarters into the jukebox like they were slugs. Maybe they were. I guess he was in the mood for Bright Lights, Big City, because we heard it three times in the ten minutes we strolled from table to table.

Looking for George was getting boring. We decided to walk on up Grant Avenue. There were no more hangouts up that way unless you were over twenty-one. I wondered if Bria was in the Anxious Asp. She was the first Lesbian kid I knew I knew, and she could pass for twenty-one. She was usually drinking in the gay Asp or somewhere nearby.

The question in my mind was – should I take Leslie’s hand? Were we at that point? I wanted to. I liked her. But…well…I didn’t want to look uncool in her eyes. Cool people didn’t hold hands while they walked along. That was it. Unfair, but true. The rules were the rules.

The moon rose, silvery and full, its mysterious light rolling past us as we hiked towards Greenwich Street. At the corner we passed the laundromat that had been Pierre DeLattre’s Bread and Wine Mission, where poetry and bongos and Jesus and hipsters, made for each other really, had touched and kissed and sadly parted. The moonlight glimmered on the laundromat’s red neon sign 15 CENTS WASH. 10 CENTS DRY. We kept going. Pierre didn’t live there any more.

Such a beautiful night. Why not walk on up the hill, all the way to Coit Tower, the floodlit phallus that pierces the skyline for fifty miles on a night like this. None of the city’s Manhattan style high-rises had been built yet and the City still looked Renaissance, magical, from up there. Let’s go look again.

We turned right up Greenwich. The street was lined with pastel colored narrow flats climbing in the moonlight like in some Italian hilltown, Verona maybe, where Mercutio was stabbed by the Jets while Romeo screamed. Maybe Mardou Fox had lived in one of those flats when Kerouac mourned for her in The Subterraneans. Years later I learned Jack moved his story from Greenwich Village to North Beach because his publisher said it would sell better. Oh, protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain…the inventor of spontaneous bop prosody had shifted locales at the advice of his marketing director. He’d done it so smoothly I never even wondered.

At the top of Greenwich a narrow staircase leads into the trees. We climbed on through the spooky city park darkness. Did I touch her? Our spirits were beginning to touch, just a little. Spidery tendrils of…what? Friendship? Understanding? Whatever it was, we were wrapped in it, and it was nice. The tendril webs were going to prove strong enough to link us across the continent as we tossed through squalling marriages, and stayed strong enough to urge me to to keep her letters for nearly fifty years. I’m not sure those spiderweb tendrils have a name, but they wrapped round us like ectoplasm. They weren’t named romantic love, and surely not just friendship — you don’t want to hold a friend tight in the moonlight. But whatever it was it felt good. I had enough problems with passion at the moment. Who needed more?

We eventually emerged into a clearing beneath the great illuminated tower, its white stone turned golden by the floodlights. A half dozen couples like us and several melancholy gents perhaps looking for same wandered hither and thither in the moonlight. Leslie and I sat on the damp grass and looked out over the city at the rainbow’s end sparkling crystalline in the December night.

The ramparts of the Shell Building lit in blue-green shimmers, the parapets of the Russ Building flooded with gold shimmers, they beaconed over the Renaissance city like Doge’s towers, papal towers, Aztec towers, Inca towers – over the great city that sprang from the sand dunes on the far Pacific shore. And we were sprung too. Aw, Frisco – how’d you get to be so blessed?

You probably didn’t know native-born San Francisco kids can be just as manic about the town as any fresh arrival from Dubuque. On a crystal December night from the top of Telegraph hill we could feel somehow we’d been accidentally born in the perfect place.

Leslie said, “City’s sure beautiful tonight.”

I said, “Yeah…”

I didn’t mention the other nights I’d sat here, usually with Ricky and Parm, my high school pals, occasionally with a girl. Leslie didn’t go into her past either. The light descended upon us and into us. I had no plans beyond loving this night, this city, this sweet girl beside me – all in pretty much the same way. Generalized and without any particular future.

We thought we knew what we wanted. Leslie wanted to be free from sitting in rows waiting for the bell to ring, free from her mother’s plans for some wrong future, free to go where she wanted, to find out who she was, who she could be.

I was already free to be blown wherever the wind blew me, if not free from the chains of the skyway. What I wanted was someone to love forever with the freedom of complete equals. Someone who would want to go see where Mercutio got stabbed that starlit night. An adventurer comrade who would also be beautiful and very very hot.

It was eight years before I got her. And she came with kids and responsibilities. I had a lot of growing to do.

We sat there a long time, talking quietly and then not talking at all. Maybe this moment was what we really wanted.

Eventually though, the damp seeped its way through our jeans. It was a week night, anyway. Leslie needed to be home by ten-thirty.

When we hit Greenwich Street again, Les decided to run. She wasn’t really in that much of a hurry. Screw curfew. But the hill was so steep and we were so full of moonlight that when she took off I peeled out after her, catching up and grabbing her hand like we were kids or young lovers in a New Wave movie, running and laughing and trying to go yet faster but stay in step. Cats looked up from their garbage can in surprise. The old man walking his poodle turned to see more of this beautiful girl and the freak with the Buddy Holly glasses trying to beat each other to Grant Avenue. We careened around the corner onto Grant laughing breathless and didn’t stop until we passed the Coffee Gallery where we hugged each other as drunks shouted encouragement out the door and tossed quarters.

We kept going now just walking past The Fox and Hound where we could hear Jorma Kaukonen playing Delta blues inside on his slide guitar. Back past the Hot Dog Palace — through the window we saw George the Beast standing at the counter jawing with Fast Walker. But the night was coming to an end.

Aw, there’d be other nights. Hundreds and thousands of other nights in the city of our hearts where the fog never lifts and the moonlight never ends and the wind blows always bright and clean. George wasn’t going anywhere and we’d be young forever.

We drove across the City again over Russian Hill down past Van Ness and out through the Fillmore to Leslie’s mother’s flat on Baker Street. Miles was blowing Freddie the Freeloader on the radio and the night was sacred.

I double parked of in front of Mom’s place so Leslie could jump out but she didn’t jump out. I didn’t want her to jump out. We were illuminated, bright and I took her in my arms and we kissed. We took a long time. We could have kissed forever as far as I was concerned. But then it was over and she did jump out and in though the door and she did look back at me before diving through, Hi Mom! I drove back to 311 Judah levitated one foot off the front seat.

Did we fall in love and live happily ever after?
Did we save up together to go find where Mercutio was stabbed?
Or did the wild child Carmen O’Shaugnessy finally break up with me forever and
then did I finally completely disintegrate and catch mononucleosis and go home to recuperate in the suburbs and
there did I meet a girl at a party in Burlingame and
didn’t we split for Pacific Grove three days later and
didn’t she get pregnant that summer and
didn’t we marry and live together in love and misery and
didn’t Leslie run off to New York with Peter Van Gelder when she turned eighteen and
didn’t she get pregnant too and
didn’t she give up her son for adoption but find him again years later as
I found Leslie’s letters again in a dusty box and put them on the blog and
didn’t we meet each other again one time more when we’re old?

Would it have been better if we had found George the Beast and gone off to his hotel room and smoked pot all night? Or if Leslie had caught a cold and stayed home?

What does this scanty story mean, anyway? Why go sit under the moon observing a city with no clouds when you could be making money, lots of money? For that matter,
What is the meaning of life? I have no idea of course, but it might have something to do with the little tendrils that might creep out in the moonlight. Sometimes they grow into strong cables like the ones between Patrushka and me. Tested and true, no matter what. And sometimes they never grow beyond a tentative little spiderweb. But either way – they’re the best things God gave us poor humans. Nourish them. They make life worth living.

Photo credits:Coit Tower Moon: Dan Heller Photography; Chinatown restaurant: Dizzy Atmosphere’s Photostream; North Beach Hangout: Jerry Stoll from I Am A Lover copyright 1961

A Letter From Leslie OnThe Road – 1962

Leslie H. was a sister in our little San Francisco band of dirty Peaceniks. I lost touch with her years ago so I can’t ask her for permission to print this letter to me. But it’s a document well worth sharing – it seems to me a brilliant picture of The Life, as we baby beatniks conceived it in that long ago year of 1962.

I don’t have much left from that era, but God is gracious, and left me this letter. How can I not share it with you? That it still exists is a minor miracle.

Leslie is eighteen and on the road with Peter, her lover (they married later, a true-love match.) She’s living the life we loved. The long hitch-hiking journeys, the drugs, a bit of the world-weary feeling I associate with those unpsychedelicized times, the uncapitalized sentences, the eternal ongoing planning of adventures to come. And of course – the literate self-awareness and ability to express herself well on paper.

Together they make up the essence of my times, kiddos – welcome to the winter of 1962. The day I received it the snows were beginning to fall over Long Island and the first winter rains were pouring into the sewers of Lily Alley, San Francisco.

I’ve added a few links to references that may be obscure today.

christopher christopher christopherhow happy i am to get your lawn letter–i’m childishly delighted and even overjoyed. here for the last couple of days i had been, not homesick, but kind of surprised and sad at being 3000 miles away from anyone who really knew how i function. (this is the result of being bored silly and therefore starting to take it out on peter, but trying not to, because he really doesn’t react well to threats of leaving or not sleeping with him at all.)

all this culminated last night with peter pouring chocolate milk shake on my head and i throwing my newly acquired enovid out the car window. i cried myself to sleep thinking of the past with the help of three seconal. but all is slightly better this morning–peter and i woke up early and talked and made love. so i have made him his breakfast, listened to e power biggs playing bach’s royal instrument (the organ), finished sanding, oiling, stringing, and tuning our new guitar–we took off all the mexican finish and wanted to leave it like that and oil it, but we ended up some how putting mahogany varnish on it–, and teaching myself bach’s minuet in g major on the piano and guitar.

a new thing for me–a snow storm the other night. if i had been younger or marguerita i would have run outside in it naked. now the snow has been here for two days and it is melting and looking a bit soiled.

we have been here for three weeks and i haven’t yet seen new york city, which is why i think we hitched out here. i can’t really remember why we came anymore except it has something to do with rolexin and the president and me and peter and new york/and cuba and kruschev and bombs

once i had a job for two weeks where i had to type all day.

i could tell you what happened to us hitch hiking and the people we met and what they said but it is not really very interesting or xxxxxx

(typing fades and gets scratchy-looking)

What is wrong with the fucking typewriter?

(she switches to pencil)

i will use a drafting pencil for want of a pen.

(she switches to blue ink)

i found a pen – i don’t like it

(this time she switches to black ink with bold point)

here is a fountainpen. i’ll use this.

anyway my point was that before i started i thought that hitch hiking to new york would be a great adventure and it wasn’t at all just mostly cold and boring. i have lost all my faith in jack kerouac.

we did meet some wonderful people in madison, wisconsin. They were students and mostly hippies but some cool – not cool really, but sweet. peter and i set out to close the university of wisconsin by turning everyone on to rolaxin (romilar there) i was introduced to everyone as the high priestess of romilar. we were staying with two great friends of peter’s – sam and john. one night we were all high and someone knocked on the door. john answered it and a man asked – do you have any cockroaches. sam told him – yes, but they’re on our side.

the night before we left i got into a drinking contest with peter. i lost miserably. it’s the first time i’ve ever been drunk. i vaguely remember crying for two hours about my abortion – peter was very sweet and says i really wasn’t too bad. i also somehow cut off a large section of big toe. i am now firmly convinced that pot is so much better for teen-agers than booze.

i don’t want to write on and on and bore you. so i will shortly close.

how are you and linda and expected baby? and working, being responsible, etc.

everyone there except peter’s mother thinks we’re married. address any future mail accordingly. i even have a woolworth’s golden wedding band ($1.00, without tax) i am also maybe pregnant, which is fine with both of us. peter is a very fine person to have babies from.

we have plans. we will be back in san francisco by april (by way of virginia, etc.) and then peter and i will get jobs (if i am not pregnant, i will) save money until june. take a bus to mexico city – some odd $60 dollars (both) and go to mexico city college. my parents will support me – i will support peter. will have baby in mid-August and let a maid take care of him ($15 a month). i want so much to learn things! i mean, at college – therefore a maid for the baby. i am going to see all the art galleries and museums in new york (while peter works – he may be able to get a job as an artist’s model for 7.50 an hour). i am going to learn to really cook – no instant anything. and find a place to practice piano, and look at new york and maybe sew pregnant clothes. – why do i always plan things?

anyway write to me – maybe often. i need it. are you kidding about the naval? tell me about it.

have you seen or heard of riley, teresa, and george. do you have addresses of the first two?

very much love to you – and i will think about you.

[this letter started out fine but it bogs at the end and is incoherent - i'm sorry]

leslie

Sixty-Six And All That

So what’s so bad about turning sixty-six? All the cool and famous people do it. For instance, how about…Peter Tork?  He turned sixty-six this week, just like me. And don’t you dare say, “Who’s Peter Tork?”(Deafening Silence)

Brother! OK, children, if you really don’t know, Peter Tork was a beautiful, Grammy award winning singer from Iceland. Oh wait, that’s Bjork.

Sorry. Now I’ve got it. Peter Tork was an funny guy from another planet who lived in Mindy’s attic…hmm, that doesn’t seem right either.

Let me think, He must be famous for something. Now I remember! He is from another planet but he has long pointy ears and used to have a job on the Starship Enterprise.

Oh, I don’t know! I can’t remember either. I’m only monkeeing around. I guess it just shows – fame is fleeting. Take for instance, Brian Jones. (Don’t you DARE ask ‘Who?’) He’d be sixty-six this month
if he hadn’t drowned in his swimming pool in 1969 after being eighty-sixed from the Rolling Stones. Poor bastard. But you probably already know his sad story. If you don’t, apply to Marianne Faithfull
(and don’t give me that ‘who?’ stuff again.) I only tell stories about the interesting unknowns and barely knowns of my San Francisco youth.

Anyway, what’s the point of all this scrambling for fame so our names will live forever?

Like Brian Jones, for all his fame now laying in a country churchyard off the A435 forgotten by flowers and children.

Like Yvette Mimiuex (age sixty-six), beautiful freak from the future famous for her wonderful name, now immersed in money somewhere in the LA basin. Does she collect her lobby cards? And dream she’ll still be
famous again when the time machine lands?

Like…like…CAROL CLEVELAND! She’s sixty-six, and look at her! (Oh look her up. If you know who Monty Python was, you should know who Carol Cleveland is. She was famous.)

Like Pete Best, ousted by Ringo so long ago, still organizing his next nostalgia band tour. If that promoter in Winnipeg ever calls, I’ll be down pub.

Like Tom Fogerty, he waited a long time for that steamboat round the bend, but it never came. Now he’s in the ground. About him, people like to say, “Wasn’t he John Fogarty’s brother?” Other people say, “What was
Credence Clearwater Revival?”

Or like Ellen Naomi Cohen, really Cass Elliot, but really Ellen Naomi Cohen, big voiced, big bodied, still alone in a little grave in the LA hills. Just a few months older than the Pondering Pig. If she were here.

Like Fingerless Joe Novakovich, missing on San Francisco streets these long years, and following a trail of tokay glistened glass somewhere towards home…

Like Saint Jack Kerouac who vomited his guts into the toilet, cried out, “La j me rapele! La j me rapele!” (Now I remember! Now I remember!), breathed deep one farewell breath for remembrance of this rainwet earth before the black shroud finally smiled upon him.

Like the Lovely Linda, one half of rock’s greatest love affair, the kind that comes with children who grow up without artillery holes in their hearts and grandchildren and a marriage that didn’t let massive
fame snatch love forever and homemade loaves. No early death from cancer can take that laurel from her brow. God bless that girl, also sixty-six.

Or like Country Joe McDonald (age sixty-six), who don’t care (I think) that he’s not headlining Woodstock any more but getting on with his life honoring Woody and Vietnam vets and still singing “It’s one two three what are we fightin’ for don’t ask me i don’t give a damn next stop is Vietnam” in the shower or in the daffodils come spring.

Like our own Saint Joan, who will matter forever, already far past her sixty-sixth, yet still on the road night after night through phantom music halls of Yugoslavia and South Carolina.

Like, I don’t know, like me.

Like you, dear reader. Well, maybe not YOU. You’ve got too much sense.

Whaddayasay we forget the whole thing, walk over to Golden Gate Park and join The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship in a little game of Frisbee? As Jinx the Cat says, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?
They’re playing Frisbee in the park.”

Once I heard him add, “See that dog over there? Watch out for that dog”

Photo Credits: Cryptomundo, Linda McCartney, FSM Gallery 1964-65

On The Road – Fifty Years Ago Today…

It was fifty years today
Saintly Jackie taught us how to play…

I think that’s how the Beatles song goes. Yes, on this exact day in 1957, the sky turned red over my high school campus and a voice spoke from the clouds: “Hie thee to the Hillsdale Bookstore right after school, oh feeble mortal, and learn how life is to be lived.”

It was kind of a screwy time (see my A Fifties Teenager pieces) , and for me, On The Road was a one way ticket out of a suburban wasteland into a thrilling new world that made some sense. I bought it all, and I still buy it. In fact I read On The Road three or four more times at different stages of my life and each time it spoke to me in a fresh way. As I got older I saw the sadness lurking behind the kicks. I saw the hurt of best friends breaking up because they didn’t understand each other any more. Later on in the sixties, I met the real Dean Moriarity a few times. He wasn’t a bit like in the story, although still cool and crazy. And I saw that, although Jack based his book on real people, he had recreated them and made them more than they were.

I still cringe for Jack when I remember the vituperation the literary establishment poured on his head for writing such a subversive, immoral and, worst of all, sloppily written novel. Celebrity writer Truman Capote said famously about it, “That’s not writing, that’s typing!”

Today On the Road is praised across the world as perhaps the dominant novel of the mid- twentieth century – (check Google News if you doubt me). They’re even teaching Jack Kerouac in high school! – not that this is a good thing. For the book to work right, you can’t be lectured about it. But Truman must be sulking in some infernal corner. I don’t think too many people look forward to reading In Cold Blood again.

If you’ve never read On The Road, give it a shot. Forget all the hoopla. Just read the book, okay? See if it speaks – or still speaks – to you. And watch for the Saint of the Susquehanna.

Labels: Jack Kerouac

Transcendental Old Donovan

Donovan fans have been begging for more stories about him now that he’s turned 61. Is the old boy driving a garbage truck? Or singing at the Coconuts Lounge in Ely, Nevada?

I just located this interview with him in the Palm Springs newspaper, and I thought I’d better share it while it’s hot.

Turns out (1) Donovan has stuck with the Maharishi all these years, (2) he believes that bringing spiritual lyrics to pop music was an intentional plan thought up by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in the Times Square Automat one evening in 1947 and that (3) Donovan and David Lynch are planning a future world government that will change everything in some interesting and perhaps groovy way. At least that’s what I could get out of the interview.

My Mom and Dad used to practice transcendental meditation. Mom had her own mantra and practiced TM faithfully each day. Dad liked it too, but I think he saw it more as a chance for a little afternoon nap.

Here’s the story. Your sort it out. I’m not sure I really dig Donovan that much any more.

thedesertsun.com | He’s not ‘mellow’

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In 1969 Jack Kerouac died…

Here’s a little poem left over from my mid-life crisis. Now that I’m up to my Medicare crisis I don’t need it any more. ..

In 1969,

Jack Kerouac died.

It was an ignominious death,

he puked his guts into a toilet,

moaned to Ste. Therese,

and left his mother to carry on.

After all those miles.

In 1969,

Some outlaws of art were still young –

rock desperadoes,

poets of armed robbery,

exiles on main street

But Neal Cassady was dead already

and John Lennon was fixin to die.

They met their rightful destiny.

But what happens to the outlaws who go free?

Whose sun-bleached hair grows grey?

Who have to walk the seacoast in a mothbitten overcoat

or raise a family?

What happens to bad mothers who don’t get shot?

when their time runs out and they’re still here?

There’s all those days to fill when the Muse won’t show – -

watering the geraniums

or teaching English to high-school gunmen

with slower draws than they had.

With sleeping in their cars,

answering the phone at the Institute for Parapsychology,

seeing their kids grow up,

looking into soft dead eyes forever in their dream.

Photo by Patrushka

Freshman English Papers

Looking back on my freshman college year, you know what’s better about today? I don’t have to turn these posts in for a grade! No grim faced professor is allowed to scratch pencil marks around the edges of each little essay. Just think – I can write a whole blog full of fragmentary sentences and there’s not one thing they can do about it!

And I do write them. Hither and thither. Sometimes you just have to go with the way the words sound. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

On my desktop I keep a list of Jack Kerouac’s thirty axioms for modern prose. They’re pretty good and I recommend you immediately go over here and study them. You’ll notice Number 13 suggests “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” He doesn’t say we don’t need to understand grammar or syntax – but don’t let them get in your way. Try to get the picture clear in your mind and go straight for it. I keep Jack’s list at hand for inspiration and to remind myself that anytime I put words to paper (so to speak), I’m part of a long line of guys who struggled their whole lives to learn how to write out of the box, how to keep their idea line as free of crap as if Keith Jarrett (a piano player I like) was writing it.

The only difference is I’m a pig. It’s hard for me to tell where my inspiration leaves off and the crap begins. Jack’s axiom #1 is the whole key, for me anyway: “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” And if I make myself laugh as I type, then I figure I’m heading in the right direction.

Those professors at San Jose State in 1959 wanted me to write clean, clear prose. Like this: A plus B = C. Start with your introductory paragraph (which itself has to start with a grabber sentence), add body, then concluding paragraph. All nice and neat and when you’re done your reader thinks, “Aha – I see. Cats eat rats! Very interesting.”

Sorry, Dr. Smith. I already heard all this already in high school. Next you’ll want me to turn in my outline.

The more they tried to whip me into shape (of a square) the more I wriggled and jiggled and wandered off in four directions. It became a game. I was sublimely confident in my ability. I was convinced my English Comp professor wouldn’t know good writing if Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti broke into the classroom with their guns leveled straight at him.

I knew exactly what I was doing. I just wasn’t very good at it. Needed more practice. Still do.

I always felt when they wrote ’spelling’ in the margin they really meant “Why can’t you be more like a girl? They check their spelling! They’re nice! They smell good! No – you’re sloppy and improvisational and you should shave off that scruffy beard if you think you’re going to get a decent grade in here.

“And what’s this? Horrors! Slang! You’ve used slang in a college-level essay! And just look at this illogical and non-parallel series of clauses and phrases. How can anyone possibly understand this beatnik prose? Why don’t you write like Ernest Hemingway? Mr. Pig, you are MUCH TOO SELF-INDULGENT! You must write to communicate, not for your own private pleasure…Tsk tsk tsk..”

And on and on. Next I was accused of ‘rambling’. What’s wrong with ‘rambling’ anyway? I’ve spent my life rambling round this country, and I’ve met a lot of funny men. Some robbed me with a six gun, others with a fountain pen. Woody Guthrie said that. There! I used an eminent authority to emphasize my point. Are you happy now?

Whatever I was doing in college, I was not here to learn how to write a simple, clear, direct essay. That was for sissies. Sissies, drones, English professors, and other bores. Funny, in later life I have come to admire that approach. I usually write to capture a feeling or a moment of time, or possibly make you laugh if I can, but if someone is writing to communicate an idea, and I can actually understand what they are trying to say – I love it! That’s the whole idea.

Don’t know quite why I rambled down this path this morning. I really meant to tell you about my beatnik-lefty-socialist seventeen year old pal Bob Gill. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t write out your outline ahead of time. By now, you’d be up to the demonstration and kids getting washed down the stairs with fire hoses and it would be really exciting. Instead I’m still sitting up in my attic room in the boarding house writing a paper I have to turn in in the morning. Wonder what he’ll say this time! I know. “You use too many exclamation marks! This reads like a comic book!”

Red Cloud, Willa Cather…and Jack Kerouac.

This is Red Cloud, Nebraska, the little praire town where novelist Willa Cather grew up, and where she set many of her best stories. In those days, at the turn of the twentieth century, Red Cloud was happening. A big railroad hub for the Burlington line, eight passenger trains a day disgorged easterners going west, westerners heading east, vaudeville troupes and professors, cowboys and clowns and Shakespearean actors ready to do two nights at the opera house. The town fed and housed them as they waited to change trains. A wide-awake kid could learn a lot about life here.

Today, the railroad has gone away and Red Cloud supports three industries that I can see – a big feedlot on the edge of town which you can smell when the wind is right, a smallish grain elevator….and Willa Cather. She is the Colossus of Red Cloud, and the engine that lifted this little Nebraska town out of the ranks of hundreds and into eternity.

I wonder what those 1890s townsfolk would have thought if they had known that little kid with the short hair and the eternal questions and the dramatic flair was going to write down (and transmute) their gossip, crimes, sins and love affairs and toothaches and gardens into stories so vivid and pure that those ordinary folks would be given a sort of immortality on this earth. Scholars were going to scour the town’s attics for their letters and journals – for any clue to help them understand how Willa changed them and rearranged them to create her immortal characters.

Take Annie Pavelka, for instance. She was an unschooled Czech immigrant girl whose father killed himself out on the prairie one Christmas day. Her older brother decided they had to hire her out into town as a servant girl, and she went to work for the Miner family who lived on the next block over from the Cathers. Willa got to know Annie and they became friends when they were both teenagers. And Annie transmuted into Antonia of My Antonia. Which is, in my humble piggish opinion, the best novel you will ever read about the American pioneer experience and is probably the best novel ever written about anything. (hyperbole warning) And it’s about what happened to the kid on the next block over.

Today the Willa Cather foundation owns the tiny Catholic Church where Annie’s “illegitimate” baby was baptized. The local Catholics moved to bigger quarters generations ago and the little church became somebody’s house for more generations. In the normal American course of things it would have been torn down forty years ago. But the church of St. Juliana Falconteri is Red Cloud gold. It’s one of the reasons this little lost prairie town with the feed lot hosts scholars from all over the world as they come to research at the Willa Cather archives. And why the Cather’s Retreat bed and breakfast on Seward Street is full most nights.

Offhand, I can think of two other little nowhere towns that became somewhere towns because a novelist grew up there. First, Jack Kerouac’s Lowell, Massachusetts. Second, D.H. Lawrence’s Eastwood, Nottinghamshire.

Kerouac’s work hovers out there somewhere all by himself, not quite memoirs, but not ordinary novels either. He has more in common with Walt Whitman than with Willa Cather. But his stories of Lowell in the Twenties and Thirties just nail that town.

Lawrence’s Eastwood, though, is a pretty exact parallel. Used to be a coal mining town till the coal mines closed down. Now, I guess, it’s a suburb of Nottingham. When I was there in the Seventies it was depressed and still looked very much like Lawrence describes it in Sons and Lovers and a lot of other books. Like Cather’s, his babyhood home was owned by a foundation and set up to look like it must have looked in the 1890s. But the foundation was composed of local enthusiasts. To my knowledge, the international Lawrence scholar cartel took no interest. The folks digging in their gardens next door knew who Lawrence was but he affected their lives in no way.

Here in Red Cloud, the folks really know who Cather is. The tour guides and the receptionists and the archive workers are all Red Cloud natives. As I noted above, the bed and breakfast here is in Willa’s parent’s home and is called Cather’s Retreat. The Foundation is preparing to restore and revitalize an entire block of the business district to expand space for their archives. The Opera House where Willa gave her high school oration is back in business, restored thanks to her largesse, and is again a cultural center for the town.

Funny thing. Willa left Red Cloud to go to college and never lived here again. But she loved it and wrote about it and came back for visits up to 1930 when her parents died. Once she started making it as a writer – she sent money home. She always remained a member of Red Cloud’s Episcopal church, and when she heard through letters that folks were going through hard financial times, a mysterious check would arrive in the mail.

And now, though Willa Cather has been dead since 1947 – she is still taking care of her hometown.

Baby Beatniks Seek Truth Too

And now I’ve started questioning
If anything is true…
Christopher Newton (1966)

All I want is the truth
Just give me some truth.
John Lennon

In my distress I cry to the Lord,
that he may answer me:
‘Deliver me, O Lord,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.’
Psalm 120

I’m afraid I’m making my Christian readers a little nervous here. Believe me, I am not turning my back on Jesus Christ. I am saying there was nothing in the brand of Christianity that I was served up at the age of sixteen, with its tender ritual and mindless rote prayer and comfortable satisfaction with the status quo, that could hold me.

And second, to those who say why don’t I forget about the past and just forge on ahead, I say “Forget about it? Forget about it!”. My mind teems with these images and memories. I am convinced that what I saw and felt and heard is as eternally important as that snowshoe bunny over there running down the glacier. I hope that’s clear. OK?

Now, meanwhile, back in 1959…

I wanted God in my life. I longed for Him/Her/It. But, near as I could tell, the Biblical God was not really God. For instance, I read Psalm 18 about God riding down to earth on his thundercloud with smoke coming out of his nostrils – well, what God is this? Did he create the entire universe and now is riding around shooting lightning out of a thundercloud in the hill country of Israel? How could anybody take this stuff seriously? That’s how I felt. I’m just being honest, okay? At seventeen, this was an issue about truth for me. And it’s still a valid, if sophomoric, question. Especially if you are presenting a struggling truth-seeker with a fundamentalist, every word is literally true, belief about the Book and how it works.

In a world that was full of lies and deception coming at me from every corner like arrows whizzing by – which is how I and every truth-seeker has to feel, why should I believe your version of the truth just because you say it is the real one? Coca-Cola is the real thing too, according to them.

The book Dharma Bums, which I’ve been blogging about the last few days, presented me with another option – seeking God through direct experience of him. I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment – lost or given away in my many years of wandering – but in memory at least, the book is about three guys searching for God, and God is Truth. Simplistically, that’s what Dharma means. In one episode of the book Jack and Gary Snyder (under novelistic pseudonyms) go on a crazy mountain climbing quest in the Sierras. Even at seventeen I could see climbing the mountain was really about two things — first, going on a totally great adventure with great wild friends , and second, about getting higher – higher into the pure truth and out of the smog of the world’s stupidity. A direct experience. An enlightenment. Real proof because it happened to you!

That’s what it still comes down to, guys and girls, truth is true if it happened to you. (For a modernist, I’m quite a good post-modernist). I know God is real. Not because of anything in the Bible, but because I saw him. The Bible fills in the picture because it’s about other guys who saw him.

And there are other scenes in Dharma Bums where Jack (I think this is in Dharma Bums – but maybe it’s On The Road or Subterraneans) is sitting in a library in the Santa Clara Valley day after day surrounded by the spring cherry orchards and reading the Diamond Sutra. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to be some kind of teaching where you didn’t have to belief in all of these stories about God riding around on his thundercloud. He was –Something Else. Unknowable. Ineffable. Something beyond understanding. Both personal and impersonal. Encompassing everything. Wow! I felt that must be the way God really is. Big.

Where was someone who could have shown me the Christian Way in its adventure and power and truth? Who was there to show me Jesus Christ in His awesome complexity?

I didn’t hear you knockin’. In fact, in all those long years from 1959 to 1968, when I encountered my first Jesus Freak, there was not one soul who defended or even spoke to me of the Christian faith with a fair understanding or true commitment. If I didn’t ask – well, who would I ask?

OK, that’s a fair question. Let’s see. At San Francisco State a few years later there was the Campus Crusade for Christ. They had a regular table outside the Student Commons, handing out tracts and stuff. At the next table over there was another group called the Young Americans For Freedom. They espoused every right-wing conservative position available in the early Sixties, from going into Viet Nam to stop the Communists to getting arch-conservative Barry Goldwater elected president. (Man, Goldwater’s looking pretty good these days! He was a man of honor.) Members of both organizations wore the same short sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties, crew cuts and they carried the same kind of bookbags. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t think about it much, but I figured maybe they were both part of the same organization. They both looked like The Enemy. I couldn’t see much difference between them, except they both wanted me to believe things that weren’t true.

I don’t remember ever being “witnessed to” by a Campus Crusade guy but if I had been, you know what I would have said? “The only thing I want to be saved from is having to spend eternity with guys like you! How dare you try to “save me,” whatever that means. You know nothing of the pain I suffer. You haven’t earned the right! Go away!”

No preaching, no witnessing, no handing out of tracts would have had the slightest effect on me. If they pointed out some eternal truth from The Bible, I could counter with an eternal truth from Bambi. They were both just books!

You know who I might have listened to? A Christian girl I was in love with. If she spoke earnestly and I could see through her life that it was true, then I would have given Jesus a fair shot.

Second best would be if I heard about Jesus from another freak. Someone I trusted would speak truth to me about his own experience. Someone I respected. Not some preacher dressed up in hippie clothes, but one of my close friends.

I wish I had known about a secret house church of dirty underground beatniks who were at war against the Great Society of lies and malice for all. In other words, people who were really following Jesus. I would have gone there in a New York minute.

Now that I think about, I STILL want to go to that church!

Allen Ginsberg on Love, Hatred, and Peace Marches

I’ve been reading Empty Phantoms: interviews and encounters with Jack Kerouac, a sad but necessary account of one of our great American writers’ descent into alcoholism. It’s funny and brutal.

Here’s Allen Ginsberg in 1980, looking back on his separating friendship with Jack as he dug into the anti-War movement of the Sixties while Jack stayed home and drank:

“One built-in stereotype which still exists and is poisoning the left here insists on “hatred” as a “revolutionary weapon,” an old-fashioned prepsychedelic nineteenth-century hatred…which was contrary to his nature as it is contrary to mine. This hatred is at the root of most radical consciousness in America [...] when the entire left went into a completely masturbatory period of social violence, calling everybody pigs, with self-righteousness and self-isolation which finally led to the election of Nixon.

That gross element in the left repelled Kerouac, who felt it was a betrayal of what he had prophesied. He prophesied a spiritual, angelic generation that would ultimately take over with long hair and exquisite manners, you know, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” Instead they were, like, greedy as pigs and harmful as dogs. It’s still a problem, the left being poisoned by its own anger…

I always had Kerouac in mind when I got on a peace march and I always made sure it was, like really, straight, pure, surrealist, lamblike, nonviolent, magical, mantric, spiritual politics rather than just marching up and down the street screaming hatred at the president.”

So what has changed in the twenty-five years since Allen spoke? The warlords won, the left is impotent, screeching and snarling but with fewer teeth than in 1980, the world seems even bleaker than it was. The dark Sixties will soon be referred to by the media as “a time of innocence” like the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, and Fifties before them. And still no revolution wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

I, wistfully and with some trepidation, still demand the revolution of love to begin today. To the barricades, you guys. No more screeching and snarling but rather touching and healing with hearts of compassion. Even for that sonuvabitch in the White House.

Labels: Jack Kerouac, Peaceniks