Big Sur (15 page)

32

W
E PACK UP LITTLE ELLIOTT'S PATHETIC WARMCLOTHES
and put food together and get the hamper all set and wait for Dave to come sadly in the night—And we have a big talk—“Billie but why did the fish die?” but she knows already they probably died because I gave them Kelloggs cornflakes or something went wrong, one thing sure is that she didnt forget to feed them or anything, it's all me, all my fault, I'd as soon be rusted by autumn too-much-think than be dead-fisher cause of those poor little hunks of golden death floating on that scummy water—It reminds me of the otter—But I cant explain it to Billie who's all abstract and talking about our abstract soul-meetings in hell, and little Elliott is pulling at her asking “Where we going? where we going? what for? what for?”—She's saying “And all because you think you dont deserve to be loved because you think you caused the death of the goldfish tho they probably just died on their own accord”—“Why would they do that? why? what kind of logic is that for fish to have?”—“Or because you think you drink too much and therefore every time you're feeling good on a little booze you give up and say your hands hang helpless, like you said last night when you were holding me with those hands blessing my heart and my body with your love, O Jack it's time for you to wake up and come with me or at least come with somebody and open your eyes to why God's put you here, stop all that staring at the floor, you and Perry both you're crazy—I'll draw you magic moon circles'll change all your luck”—I look her dead in the eye and it is blue and I say “O Billie, forgive me”—“But you see you go there talkin guilty again”—“Well I dont know all those big theories about how everything should be goddamit all I know is that I'm a helpless hunk of helpful horse manure looking in your eye saying Help me”—“But when you make those big final statements it doesnt help you”—“Of course I know that but what do you want?”—“I want us to get married and settle down to a sensible understanding about eternal things”—“And you may be right”—I see it all raving before me the endless yakking kitchen mouthings of life, the long dark grave of tomby talks under midnight kitchen bulbs, in fact it fills me with love to realize that life so avid and misunderstood nevertheless reaches out skinny skeleton hand to me and to Billie too—But you know what I mean.

And this is the way it begins.

33

I
T SOUNDS ALL SO SAD BUT IT WAS ACTUALLY SUCH A GAY NIGHT
as Dave and Romana came over and there's all the business of packing boxes and clothes down to the car, nipping out of bottles, getting ready in fact to sing all the way to Big Sur “Home On the Range” and “I'm Just a Lonsome Old Turd” by Dave Wain—Me sitting up front next to Dave and Romana for some reason maybe because I wanted to identify with my old broken front rockingchair and lean there flapping and singing but with Romana between us the seat is pinned down and no longer flaps—Meanwhile Billie is on the back mattress with sleeping child and off we go booming down Bay Shore to that other shore whatever it will bring, the way people always feel whenever they essay some trip long or short especially in the night—The eyes of hope looking over the glare of the hood into the maw with its white line feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure something that's been going on in America ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat—Billie doesnt mind that I dont sit in back with her because she knows I wanta sing and have a good time—Romana and I hit up fantastic medleys of popular and folk songs of all kinds and Dave contributes his New York Chicago blue light nightclub romantic baritone specialties—My wavering Sinatra is barely heard in fact—Beat on your knees and yell and sing Dixie and Banjo On My Knee, get raucous and moan out Red River Valley, “Where's my harmonica, I been meanin to buy me a eight dollar harmonica for eight years now.”

It always starts out good like that, the bad moments—Nothing is gained or lost also by the fact that I insist we stop at Cody's en route so I can pick up some clothes I left there but secretly I want Evelyn to finally come face to face with Billie—It surprises me more however to see the look of absolute fright on Cody's face as we pour into his livingroom at midnight and I announce that Billie's in the jeep sleeping—Evelyn is not perturbed at all and in fact says to me privately in the kitchen “I guess it was bound to happen sometime she'd come here and see it but I guess it was destined to be you who'd bring her”—“What's Cody so worried about?”—“You're spoiling all his chance to be real secretive”—“He hasnt come and seen us for a whole week, that's in a way what happened, he just left me stranded there: I've been feeling awful, too”—“Well if you want you can ask her to come in”—“Well we're leaving in a minute anyway, you wanta see her at least?”—“I dont care”—Cody is sitting in the livingroom absolutely rigid, stiff, formal, with a big Irish stone in his eye: I know he's really mad at me this time tho I dont really know why—I go out and there's Billie alone in the car over sleeping Elliott biting her fingernail—“You wanta come in and meet Evelyn?”—“I shouldnt, she wont like that, is Cody there?”—“Yah”—So Willamine climbs out (I remember just then Evelyn telling me seriously that Cody always calls his women by their full first names, Rosemarie, Joanna, Evelyn, Willamine, he never gives them silly nicknames nor uses them).

The meeting is not eventful, of course, both girls keep their silence and hardly look at each other so it's all me and Dave Wain carrying on with the usual boloney and I see that Cody is really very sick and tired of me bringing gangs arbitrarily to his place, running off with his mistress, getting drunk and thrown out of family plays, hundred dollars or no hundred dollars he probably feels I'm just a fool now anyway and hopelessly lost forever but I dont realize that myself because I'm feeling good—I want us to resume down that road singing bawdier and darker songs till we're negotiating narrow mountain roads at the pitch of the greatest songs.

I try to ask Cody about Perry and all the other strange characters who visit Billie in the City but he just looks at me out of the corner eye and says “Ah, yah, hm,”—I dont know and I never will know what he's up to anyway in the long run: I realize I'm just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason far away from anything that ever mattered to me whatever that was—Always an ephemeral “visitor” to the Coast never really involved with anyone's lives there because I'm always ready to fly back across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either, just a traveling stranger like Old Bull Balloon, an exemplar of the loneliness of Doren Coit actually waiting for the only real trip, to Venus, to the mountain of Mien Mo—Tho when I look out of Cody's livingroom window just then I do see my star still shining for me as it's done all these 38 years over crib, out ship windows, jail windows, over sleepingbags only now it's dummier and dimmer and getting blurreder damnit as tho even my own star be now fading away from concern for me as I from concern for it—In fact we're all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom for nothing—And small talk at that, like Billie saying “I always wanted a nice fireplace” and I'm yelling “Dont worry we got one at the cabin hey Dave? and all the wood's chopped!” and Evelyn:-“What does Monsanto think of you using his cabin all summer, weren't you supposed to go there alone in secret?”—“It's too late now!” I sing swigging from the bottle without which I'd only drop with shame face flat on the floor or on the gravel driveway—And Dave and Romana look a little uneasy finally so we all get up to go, zoom, and that's the last time I see Cody or Evelyn anyway.

And as I say our songs grow mightier as the road grows darker and wilder, finally here we are on the canyon road the headlights just reaching out there around bleak sand shoulders—Down to the creek where I unlock the corral gate—Across the meadow and back to the haunted cabin—Where on the strength of that night's booze and getaway gladness Billie and I actually have a good time lighting fires and making coffee and
gong
to be together in the one sleepingbag easy as pie after we've bundled up little Elliott and Dave and Romana have retired in his double nylon bag by the creek in the moonlight.

No, it's the next day and night that concerns me.

34

T
HE WHOLE DAY BEGINS SIMPLY ENOUGH
with me getting up feeling fair and going down to the creek to slurp up water in my palms and wash up, seeing the languid waving of one large brown thigh over the mass of Dave's nylons indicative of an early morning love scene, in fact Romana telling us later at breakfast “When I woke up this morning and saw all those trees and water and clouds I told Dave ‘It's a beautiful universe we created'”—A real Adam and Eve waking up, in fact this being one of Dave's gladdest days because he'd really wanted to get away from the City again anyway and this time with a pretty doll, and's brought his surf casting gear planning a big day—And we've brought a lot of good food—The only trouble is there's no more wine so Dave and Romana go off in Willie to get some more anyway at a store 13 miles south down the highway—Billie and I are alone talking by the fire—I begin to feel extremely low as soon as last night's alcohol wears off.

Everything is trembly again, the trembling band, I cant for a fact even light the fire and Billie has to do it—“I cant light a fire any more!” I yell—“Well I can” she says in a rare instance when she lets me have it for being such a nut—Little Elliott is constantly pulling at her asking this and that, “What is that stick for, to put in the fire? why? how does it burn? why does it burn? where are we? when are we leaving” and the pattern develops where she begins to talk to him instead of me anyway because I'm just sitting there staring at the floor sighing—Later when he takes his nap we go down the path to the beach, about noon, both of us sad and silent—“What's the matter I wonder” I say out loud—She:-“Everything was alright last night when we slept in the bag together now you wont even hold my hand . . . goddamit I'm going to kill myself!”—Because I've begun to realize in my soberness that this thing has come too far, that I dont love Billie, that I'm leading her on, that I made a mistake dragging everyone here, that I simply wanta go home now, I'm just plumb sick and tired just like Cody I guess of the whole nervewracking scene bad enough as it is always pivoting back to this poor haunted canyon which again gives me the willies as we walk under the bridge and come to those heartless breakers busting in on sand higher than earth and looking like the heartlessness of wisdom—Besides I suddenly notice as if for the first time the awful way the leaves of the canyon that have managed to be blown to the surf are all hesitantly advancing in gusts of wind then finally plunging into the surf, to be dispersed and belted and melted and taken off to sea—I turn around and notice how the wind is just harrying them off trees and into the sea, just hurrying them as it were to death—In my condition they look human trembling to that brink—Hastening, hastening—In that awful huge roar blast of autumn Sur wind.

Boom, clap, the waves are still talking but now I'm sick and tired of whatever they ever said or ever will say—Billie wants me to stroll with her down towards the caves but I dont want to get up from the sand where I'm sitting back to boulder—She goes alone—I suddenly remember James Joyce and stare at the waves realizing “All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool, you happy kid with a pencil, dont you realize you've been using words as a happy game—all those marvelous skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death it's ALL TRUE YOU FOOL! Joyce is dead! The sea took him! it will take YOU!” and I look down the beach and there's Billie wading in the treacherous undertow, she's already groaned several times earlier (seeing my indifference and also of course the hopelessness at Cody's and the hopelessness of her wrecked apartment and wretched life) “Someday I'm going to commit suicide,” I suddenly wonder if she's going to horrify the heavens and me too with a sudden suicide walk into those awful undertows—I see her sad blonde hair flying, the sad thin figure, alone by the sea, the leaf-hastening sea, she suddenly reminds me of something—I remember her musical sighs of death and I see the words clearly imprinted in my mind over her figure in the sand:-ST. CAROLYN BY THE SEA—“You were my last chance” she's said but dont all women say that?—But can it be by “last chance” she doesnt mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared—Can it be I'm withholding from her something sacred just like she says, or am I just a fool who'll never learn to have a decent eternally minded deepdown relation with a woman and keep throwing that away for a song at a bottle?—In which case my own life is over anyway and there are the Joycean waves with their blank mouths saying “Yes that's so,” and there are the leaves hurrying one by one down the sand and dumping in—In fact the creek is freighting hundreds more of them a minute right direct from the back hills—That big wind blasts and roars, it's all yellow sunny and blue fury everywhere—I see the rocks wobble as it seems God is really getting mad for such a world and's about to destroy it: big cliffs wobbling in my dumb eyes: God says “It's gone too far, you're all destroying everything one way or the other wobble boom the end is NOW.”

“The Second Coming, tick tock,” I think shuddering—St. Carolyn by the Sea is going in further—I could run and go see her but she's so far away—I realize that if that nut is going to try this I'll have to make an awful run and swim to get her—I get up and edge over but just then she turns around and starts back. . . “And if I call her ‘that nut' in my secret thoughts wonder what she calls me?”—O hell, I'm sick of life—If I had any guts I'd drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldnt be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it—I guess that's what the kid feels—She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.

On top of that now here come the tourists, people from other cabins in the canyon, it's the sunny season and they're out two three times a week, what a dirty look I get from the elderly lady who's apparently heard about the “author” who was secretly invited to Mr. Monsanto's cabin but instead brought gangs and bottles and today worst of all trollopes—(Because in fact earlier that morning Dave and Romana have already made love on the sand in broad daylight visible not only to others down the beach but from that high new cabin on the shoulder of the cliff) (tho hidden from sight from the bridge by cliffwall)—So it's all well known news now there's a ball going on in Mr. Monsanto's cabin and him not even here—This elderly lady being accompanied by children of all kinds—So that when Billie returns from the far end of the beach and starts back with me down the path (and I'm silly with a big footlong wizard pipe in my mouth trying to light it in the wind to cover up) the lady gives her the once over real close but Billie only smiles lightly like a little girl and chirps hello.

I feel like the most disgraceful and nay disreputable wretch on earth, in fact my hair is blowing in beastly streaks across my stupid and moronic face, the hangover has now worked paranoia into me down to the last pitiable detail.

Back at the cabin I cant chop wood for fear I'll cut a foot off, I cant sleep, I cant sit, I cant pace, I keep going to the creek to drink water till finally I'm going down there a thousand times making Dave Wain wonder as he's come back with more wine—We sit there slugging out of our separate bottles, in my paranoia I begin to wonder why I get to drink just the one bottle and he the other—But he's gay “I am now going out surf castin and catch us a grabbag of fish for a marvelous supper; Romana you get the salad ready and anything else you can think of; we'll leave you alone now” he adds to gloomy me and Billie thinking he's in our way, “and say, why dont we go to Nepenthe and
pri
vate our grief tonight and enjoy the moonlight on the terrace with Manhattans, or go see Henry Miller?”—“No!” I almost yell, “I mean I'm so exhausted I dont wanta do anything or see anybody”—(already feeling awful guilt about Henry Miller anyway, we've made an appointment with him about a week ago and instead of showing up at his friend's house in Santa Cruz at seven we're all drunk at ten calling long distance and poor Henry just said “Well I'm sorry I dont get to meet you Jack but I'm an old man and at ten o'clock it's time for me to go to bed, you'd never make it here till after midnight now”) (his voice on the phone just like on his records, nasal, Brooklyn, goodguy voice, and him disappointed in a way because he's gone to the trouble of writing the preface to one of my books) (tho I suddenly now think in my remorseful paranoias “Ah the hell with it he was only gettin in the act like all these guys write prefaces so you dont even get to read the author first”) (as an example of how really psychotically suspicious and loco I was getting).

Alone with Billie's even worse—“I cant see anything to do now,” she says by the fire like an ancient Salem housewife (“Or Salem witch?” I'm leering)—“I could have Elliott taken care of in a private home or an orphanage and just go to a nunnery myself, there's a lot of them around—or I could kill myself and Elliott both”—“Dont talk like that”—“There's no other way to talk when there's no more directions to take”—“You've got me all wrong I wouldnt be any good for you”—“I know that now, you want to be a hermit you say but you dont do it much I noticed, you're just tired of life and wanta sleep, in a way that's how I feel too only I've got Elliott to worry about. . . I could take both our lives and solve that”—“You, creepy talk”—“You told me the first night you loved me, that I was most interesting, that you hadnt met anyone you liked so much then you just went on drinking, I really can see now what they say about you is true: and all the others like you: O I realize you're a writer and suffer through too much but you're really ratty sometimes . . . but even that I know you cant help and I know you're not really ratty but awfully broken up like you explained to me, the reasons . . . but you're always groaning about how sick you are, you really dont think about others enough and I KNOW you cant help it, it's a curious disease a lot of us have anyway only better hidden sometimes . . . but what you said the first night and even just now about me being St.Carolyn in the Sea, why dont you follow through with what your heart knows is Good and best and true, you give up so easy to discouragement . . . then I guess too you dont really want me and just wanta go home and resume your own life maybe with Louise your girlfriend”—“No I couldn't with her either, I'm just bound up inside like constipation, I cant move emotionally like you'd say emotionally as tho that was some big grand magic mystery everybody saying ‘O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that,' how do you know he doesnt hate what He did: He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done tho of course that's not true”—“Maybe God is dead”—“No, God cant be dead because He's the unborn”—“But you have all those philosophies and sutras you were talking about”—“But dont you see they've all become empty words, I realize I've been playing like a happy child with words words words in a big serious tragedy, look around”—“You could make some effort, damn it!”

But what's even ineffably worse is that the more she advises me and discussed the trouble the worse and worse it gets, it's as tho she didnt know what she was doing, like an unconscious witch, the more she tries to help the more I tremble almost too realizing she's doing it on purpose and knows she's witching me but it's all gotta be formally understood as “help” dingblast it—She must be some kind of chemical counterpart to me, I just cant stand her for a minute, I'm racked with guilt because all the evidence there seems to say she's a wonderful person sympathizing in her quiet sad musical voice with an obvious rogue nevertheless none of these rational guilts stick—All I feel is the invisible stab from her—She's hurting me!—At some points in our conversation I'm a veritable ham actor jumping up to twitch my head, that's the effect she has—“What's the matter?” she asks softly—Which makes me almost scream and I've never screamed in my life—It's the first time in my life I'm not confident I can hold myself together no matter what happens and be inly calm enough to even smile with condescension at the screaming hysterias of women in madwards—I'm in the same madward all of a sudden—And what's happened? what's caused it—“Are you driving me mad on purpose?” I finally blurt—But naturally she protests I'm talking out of my head, there's no such evident intention anywhere, we're just on a happy weekend in the country with friends, “Then there's something wrong with ME!” I yell—“That's obvious but why dont you try to calm down and for instance like make love to me, I've been begging you all day and all you do is groan and turn away as tho I was an ugly old bat”—She comes and offers herself to me softly and gently but I just stare at my quivering wrists—It's really very awful—It's hard to explain—Besides then the little boy is constantly coming at Billie when she kneels at my lap or sits on it or tries to soothe my hair and comfort me, he keeps saying in the same pitiful voice “Dont do it Billie dont do it Billie dont do it Billie” till finally she has to give up that sweet patience of hers where she answers his every little pathetic question and yell “Shut up! Elliott will you shut up! DO I have to beat you again!” and I groan “No!” but Elliott yells louder “Dont do it Billie dont do it Billie dont do it Billie!” so she sweeps him off and starts whacking him screamingly on the porch and I am about to throw in the towel and gasp up my last, it's horrible.

Besides when she beats Elliott she herself cries and then will be yelling madwoman things like “I'll kill both of us if you dont stop, you leave me no alternative! O my child!” suddenly picking him up and embracing him rocking tears, and gnashing of hair and all under those old peaceful bluejay trees where in fact the jays are still waiting for their food and watching all this—Even so Alf the Sacred Burro is in the yard waiting for somebody to give him an apple—I look up at the sun going down golden throughout the insane shivering canyon, that blasted rogue wind comes topping down trees a mile away with an advancing roar that when it hits the broken cries of mother and son in grief are blown away with all those crazy scattering leaves—The creek screeches—A door bangs horribly, a shutter follows suit, the house shakes—I'm beating my knees in the din and cant even hear that.