Desolation Angels (17 page)

Desolation anyway—

73

It's the bridge that counts, the coming-into-San Francisco on that Oakland-Bay Bridge, over waters which are faintly ruffled by oceangoing Orient ships and ferries, over waters that are like taking you to some other shore, it had always been like that when I lived in Berkeley—after a night of drinking, or two, in the city, bing, the old F-train'd take me barreling across the waters back to that other shore of peace and contentment—We'd (Irwin and I) discuss the Void as we crossed—It's seeing the rooftops of Frisco that makes you excited and believe, the big downtown hulk of buildings, Standard Oil's flying red horse, Montgomery Street highbuildings, Hotel St. Francis, the hills, magic Telegraph with her Coit-top, magic Russian, magic Nob, and magic Mission beyond with the cross of all sorrows I'd seen long ago in a purple sunset with Cody on a little railroad bridge—San Francisco, North Beach, Chinatown, Market Street, the bars, the Bay-Oom, the Bell Hotel, the wine, the alleys, the poorboys, Third Street, poets, painters, Buddhists, bums, junkies, girls, millionaires, MG's, the whole fabulous movie of San Francisco seen from the bus or train on the Bridge coming in, the tug at your heart like New York—

And they're all there, my friends, somewhere in those little toystreets, and when they see me the angel'll smile—That's not so bad—Desolation aint so bad—

74

Wow, an entirely different scene, San Francisco always is, it always gives you the courage of your convictions—“This city will see to it that you make it as you wish, with limitations which are obvious, in stone and memory”—Or such—thus—that feeling, of, “Wow O Alley, I'm gonna get me a poorpoy of Tokay and drink it on the way”—The only city I know of where you can drink the open in the street as you walk and nobody cares—everybody avoids you like poison sailor O Joe McCoy just off the Lurline—“one of the bottlewashers there?”—“No, just a old seedy S.I.U. deckhand, and's been to Hongkong and Singapore and back more time's almost he's et that wine in backalleys of Harrison”—

Harrison is the street the bus comes in on, ramping, and we go twaddling seven blocks north to Seventh Street, where he turns into the city traffic of Sunday—and there's all your Joes on the street.

Things happening everywhere. Here comes Longtail Charley Joe from Los Angeles, suitcase, blond hair, sports shirt, big thick wrist watch, with him's Minnie O'Pearl the gay girl who sings in the band at Rooey's—“Whooey?”

There're the Negro baggagehandlers of the Greyhound Company, described by Irwin as Mohammedan Angels I believe—sending precious cargo to Loontown and Moontown and Moonlight in Colorado the bar where they'll be tonight whanging with the chicks among U-turning cars and Otay Spence on the box—down among the Negro housing projects, where we'd gone at morning, with whisky and wine and oolyakoo'd with the sisters from Arkansas who'd seen their father hanged—What notion could they get of this country, this Mississippi—There they are, neat and welldressed, perfect neckties and collars, the cleanest dressers in America, presenting their Negro faces at the employer-judge, who judges harshly on the basis of their otay perfect neckties—some with glasses, rings, polite pipesmokers, college boys, sociologists, the whole we-all-know-the-great-scene-in-otay that I know so well in San Fran—sound—I come dancing through this city with big pack on my back and so I have to hustle not to bump into anybody but nevertheless make time down that Market Street parade—A little deserted and desolate, Sunday—Tho Third Street be crowded, and great big Pariahs bark a-doors and discuss Wombs of Divinity, it's all houndsapack—I crap along and farty up Kearney, towards Chinatown, watching all stores and all faces to see which way the Angel points this fine and perfect day—

“By God I'm gonna give myself a haircut in my room,” I say, “and make it look like sumptin”—“Because first thing I'm gonna do is hit that otay sweet saxophone Cellar.” Where I'll immediately go for the Sunday afternoon jam session. O they'll all be there, the girls with dark glasses and blonde hair, the brunettes in pretty coats by the side of their little boy (The Man)—raising beers to their lips, sucking in cigarette smoke, beating to the beat of the beat of Brue Moore the perfect tenor saxophone—Old Brue he'll be high on Brew, and me too—“I'll tap him on the toenail,” I think—“We'll hear what the singers gotto say today”—Because all summer I've provided myself my own jazz, singing in the yard or in the house at night, whenever I had to hear some music, see which way the Angel pours the bucket, what stairs down she goes, and otay jazz afternoons in the Maurie O'Tay nightclub okay—music—Because all these serious faces'll only drive you mad, the only truth is music—the only meaning is without meaning—Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat.

75

I'm in San Francisco and I'm Gonna take it all in. Incredible the things I saw.

I get out of the way for two Filipino gentlemen crossing California. I pass through to the Bell Hotel, by the Chinese playground, and go in get my room.

The attendant is immediately succinctly anxious to please me, and there are women in the hall gossiping Malay. I shudder to think the sounds will come in through the courtyard window, all Chinese and melodious. I hear even choruses of French talk, from the owners. A medley of a hotel of rooms in dark carpeted halls, and old creaky night steps and blinking wallclock and 80-year-old bent sage behind the grille, with open doors, and cats—The attendant brings me back my change as I wait with waited door. I take out my little tiny aluminum scissors that cant cut buttons off a sweater, but cut my hair anyway—Then I examine the effect with mirrors—Okay, then I go and shave anyway. I get hot water and I shave and I square away and on the wall is a nude calendar of a Chinese girl. Lot I can do with a calendar. (“Well,” said the bum in the burlesque to the other bum, two Limies, “I'm avin er naow.”)

In hot little flames.

76

I go out and hit the street crossing at Columbus and Kearney, by Barbary Coast, and a bum in a long bum overcoat sings out to me “When we cross streets in New York we cross em!—None a this waitin shit for me!” and both of us barrel across and walk among cars and shoot back and forth about New York—Then I get to the Cellar and jump down, steep wooden steps, in a broad cellar hall, right to the right is the room with the bar and the bandstand otay where now as I come Jack Minger is blowing on trumpet and behind him's Bill the mad blond pianist scholar of music, on the drums that sad kid with the sweating handsome face who has such a desperate beat and strong wrists, and on bass I cant see him bobbing in the dark with beard—Some crazy Wigmo or other—but it's not the session, it's the regular group, too early, I'll come back later, I've heard every one of Jack Minger's ideas alone with the group, but first (as I'd just dropped into the bookstore to look around) (and a girl called Sonya had prettily come up to me, 17, and said “O do you know Raphael? He needs some money, he's waiting at my place”) (Raphael being my old New York crony) (and more about Sonya later), I run in there and am about to turn around and swing out, when I see a cat looks like Raphael, wearing dark glasses, at the foot of the bandstand talking to a chick, so I run over (walking fast) (to avoid goofing the beat as the musicians play on) (some little tune like “All Too Soon”) I look right down to see if it's Raphael, almost turning over, looking at him upsidedown, as he notices nothing talking to his girl, and I see it aint Raphael and cut out—So the trumpetplayer who's playing his solo wonders what he sees, knowing me from before as always crazy, running in now to look upsidedown at someone then running out—I go running up to Chinatown to eat and come back to the session. Shrimp! Chicken! Spare ribs! I go down to Sun Heung Hung's and sit there at their new bar drinking cold beers from an incredibly clean bartender who keeps mopping the bar and polishing glasses and even mops under my beer several times and I tell him “This is a nice clean bar” and he says “Brand new”—

Meanwhile I watch for a booth to sit in—none—so I go upstairs and sit in a big curtained booth for families but they throw me outa there (“You cannot sit there, that's for families, big parties”) (then they dont come and serve me as I wait) so I slonk back my chair and stomp downstairs fast on quiet feet and get a booth and tell the waiter “Dont let nobody sit with me, I like to eat alone” (in restaurants, naturally)—Shrimp in a brown sauce, curried chicken, and sweet and sour spare ribs, in a Chinese menu dinner, I eat it with another beer, it's a terrific meal I can hardly finish—but I finish it clean, pay and cut out—To the now late afternoon park where the children are playing in sandboxes and swings, and old men are staring on benches—I come over and sit down.

The little Chinese children are waging big dramas with sand—Meanwhile a father gathers up his three different little ones and heads them home—Cops are going into the jailhouse across the street. Sunday in San Francisco.

A bearded point-bearded patriarch nods at me then sits near an old crony and they start talking loudly in Russian. I know olski-dolski when I hear it, nyet?

Then I amble along in the gathering cool and do walk through Chinatown duskstreets like I said I would on Desolation, the wink of pretty neons, the faces in the stores, the festooned bulbs across Grant Street, the Pagodas.

I go to my hotel room and rest awhile on the bed, smoking, listening to the sounds coming in the window from the Bell Hotel court, the noises of dishes and traffic and Chinese—It is all one big wailing world, all over, even in my own room there is sound, the intense roaring silence sound that swishes in my ear and swashes the diamond persepine—I let go and feel my astral body leave, and lay there completely in a trance, seeing through everything. It's all white.

77

It's a north beach tradition, Rob Donnelly had done it in a Broadway hotel and floated away and saw whole worlds and came back and woke up in his room on the bed, all dressed to go out—

Like as not, too, Old Rob, wearing Mai Damlette's sharp cap on the side of his head, would be in the Cellar even right now—

By now the Cellar is waiting for the musicians, not a sound, nobody I know in there, I hang on the sidewalk and here comes Chuck Berman one way, and Bill Slivovitz the other, a poet, and we talk at a fender of a car—Chuck Berman looks tired, his eyes are all puffed, but he's wearing soft smart shoes and looking so cool in the twilight—Bill Slivovitz doesnt care, he's wearing a shabby sports coat and scuffed out shoes and carrying poems in his pocket—Chuck Berman is high, says he's high, lingers a minute looking around, then cuts—He'll be back—Bill Slivovitz the last time I saw him'd said “Where you goin?” and I'd yelled “Ah what's the difference?” so now I apologize and explain I was hungover—We repair to The Place for a beer.

The Place is a brown lovely bar made of wood, with sawdust, barrel beer in glass mugs, an old piano for anybody to bang on, and an upstairs balcony with little wood tables—who care? the cat sleeps on the bench. The bartenders are usually friends of mine except today, now—I let Bill get the beers and we talk at a little round table about Samuel Beckett and prose and poetry. Bill thinks Beckett is the end, he talks about it all over, his glasses glint in my eyesight, he has a long serious face, I cant believe he's serious about death but he must be—“I'm dead,” he says, “I wrote some poems about death”—

“Well where are they?”

“They're not finished, man.”

“Let's go to the Cellar and hear the jazz,” so we cut around the corner and just as we walk in the streetdoor I hear them baying down there, a full group of tenors and altos and trumpets riding in for the first chorus—Boom, we walk in just in time for the break, bang, a tenor is taking the solo, the tune is simply “Georgia Brown”—the tenor rides it big and heavy with a big tone—They've come from Fillmore in cars, with their girls or without, the cool colored cats of Sunday San Fran in incredibly beautiful neat sports attire, to knock your eyes out, shoes, lapels, ties, no-ties, studs—They've brought their horns in taxis and in their own cars, pouring down into the Cellar to really give it some class and jazz now, the Negro people who will be the salvation of America—I can see it because the last time I was in the Cellar it was full of surly whites waiting around a desultory jam session to start a fight and finally they did, with my boy Rainey who was knocked out when he wasn't looking by a big mean brutal 250-pound seaman who was famous for getting drunk with Dylan Thomas and Jimmy the Greek in New York—Now everything is too cool for a fight, now it's jazz, the place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there, one mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys—One strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody—Up and down the stairs they come—The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat—It's the beat generation, it's
béat,
it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat—The faces! There's no face to compare with Jack Minger's who's up on the bandstand now with a colored trumpeter who outblows him wild and Dizzy but Jack's face overlooking all the heads and smoke—He has a face that looks like everybody you've ever known and seen on the street in your generation, a sweet face—Hard to describe—sad eyes, cruel lips, expectant gleam, swaying to the beat, tall, majestical—waiting in front of the drugstore—A face like Huck's in New York (Huck whom you'll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sad-sweet, dark, beat, just out of jail, martyred, tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce new worlds with a shrug)—The colored big tenor with the big tone would like to be blowing Sunny Stitts clear out of Kansas City roadhouses, clear, heavy, somewhat dull and unmusical ideas which nevertheless never leave the music, always there, far out, the harmony too complicated for the motley bums (of music-understanding) in there—but the musicians hear—The drummer is a sensational 12-year-old Negro boy who's not allowed to drink but can play, tremendous, a little lithe childlike Miles Davis kid, like early Fats Navarro fans you used to see in Espan Harlem, hep, small—he thunders at the drums with a beat which is described to me by a near-standing Negro connoisseur with beret as a “fabulous beat”—On piano is Blondey Bill, good enough to drive any group—Jack Minger blows out and over his head with these angels from Fillmore, I dig him—It's terrific—