Desolation Angels (20 page)

“The juicy Saviour that was manoralized and reputated on the gold hill,” I say to myself, like often I'll read me a string of talk from my head and see what it says.

Kevin is just laughing to beat the band, crosslegged, on the floor, I look and see the little Hindu, I remember now his little bare feet always made me realize I knew him before in some temple where I was a priest and he was a dancer making it with the outer women—And how delicately he's received all that storm of sound and talk from both Cody and Raphael—laughing with a choking little hold of his belly, which is lean and hard like the belly of a young Yogi—

“Why,” Cody's saying, “they even have readers who see auras over people's heads perfectly which ah reflect
exactly
the purposes-of-speaking inner mind of the entity, so
that!
” pounding his hand and leaping ahead to pound it with his voice suddenly breaking with excitement like Old Conny Murphy in the Mill Valley morning, and doing this after a long pause of thought or of word-hangup, “they can see like with a cat, like who was read by an aura reader as to having it under the necessity (and placed there by God, the Almighty) of meeting with his Karma, his earned fate as Jack says, or his just needs, or his deed-upon-done pile, of sins and mistakes—meet that Karma by actually doing what the Aura reader says,
you have an evil spirit
and
a good spirit
vying for your special entity soul, I see them (above their heads, see), you can repel the evil and draw the good by meditating on the white square of your mind which I see above your head and in which the two spirits do dwell—sfact,” and he spits a cigarette pip. Gazes at the floor. Now if Raphael's an Italian, a Renascent Italian, Cody's a Greek—a Roman Aryan mixture (claims he's “Atlantean”) confined to the athletes of Sparta and having its roots in nomad miocene man.

Then Cody further explains that by a process of osmosis, through our capillary veins and veinlets, comes the actual pulling juicy influence of the stars and especially the moon—“So that when the moon's out the man's mad, to put an example—the
pull
of that Mars, man.”

He scares me with his Mars.

“Mars is the
closest!
That's our next journey.”

“We're going from Earth to Mars?”

“And then
on,
don't you see” (Kevin is cackling with glee) “to the next and to the others and the really mad ones, dadd”—“on the outer fringe there,” he adds. Matter of fact brakeman on the railroad, Cody is, in fact he's wearing his brakeman's blue pants right now, neatly pressed, and starched white shirt under a blue vest, his blue TRAINMAN hat is in the little pathetical gogetter 33 Chewy, Ah me—many's the time Cody fed me when I was hungry—A
believing
man—What an anxious and troubled man!—How he'd run out into that dark with a lamp and go get her, and throw that flower car for Sherman's Local in the morning—Ah Old Cody, what a man!

I remember the daydreams of desolation and see how it happens all right. Everything is the same emptiness, Cody and I drive along blankly staring ahead knowing this. Cody just runs the machine, I sit and meditate Cody and the machine both. But it's his hard arm has to swack over the pool-wheel and guide the car off head-on crashes (as he slips in and out of the lane)—We know it all, we heard the heavenly music one night driving along in the car, “Did you hear that?” I had just heard clangor of music suddenly in the motor-humming room of the car—“Yes” says Cody, “what
is
it?” He'd heard.

80

Amazing me as he is, what amazes me even more is Raphael coming back with his manuscript in his hand, from the yard, where he silently studied the trees, and says, “I have a leaf in my pamphlet”—To Cody who deals and disbelieves, hears him say it, but I see the look he gives Raphael—But it's two different worlds, Urso and Pomeray, both their names mean something that may once have been Casa D'Oro, which would make it no coarser than Corso, but it's the Italian Sweet Singer vs. the Irish Brabacker—crash—(it's Keltic, wood cracking in the sea)—Raphael saying “All Jack has to do is write little insensible ditties and be the nowhere Hamlin's leader”—songs like that from Raphael.

“Well if that's what he wants to do check check check,” comes from Cody like a machine without music and singing—

Raphael sings: “You! my aunts always warned me about you Pomeray—they tole me not to go down the Lower East Side”—

“Burp”

That's the way they fought back and forth—

Meanwhile sweet and gentle Jesus Father Joseph, Kevin with the Joseph beard, smiles and listens and all round and bent on the floor, sitting up.

“What are ya thinkin, Kevin?”

“I'm thinkin what a bad day it'll be tomorrow if I cant find that goddam driver's license.”

Cody digs Kevin, of course, has dug him for months, as a fellow Irish father perhaps as well as fellow cat—Cody has been in and out of their house eating a hundred thousand myriads of times, bringing the True Law.—Cody is now called “The Preacher” by the Namer, Mai, who calls Simon Darlovsky “The Mad Russian” (which he is)—

“Where's old Simon these days?”

“O we'll pick him up there this afternoon bout five,” says Cody very rapidly matter of factly.

“Simon Darlovsky!” yells Raphael. “What a mad cat!” And the way he says mad, m-a-h-d, real Eastern—real crazy strange from the Baltic alley cats—real fence-talk … like you hear little kids talking in gas yards around the used tire lots—“He's insane,” bringing his hands to his head, then knocking off and grinning, sheepishly, a strange little humble absence of pride in Raphael, who's also sittin on the floor now crosslegged, but as though he'd collapsed like that.

“Strange strange world,” says Cody marching away a little bit then wheeling and coming back to our group—The Chekhovian Angel of Silence falls over all of us and we're all dead quiet, and listen to the hmm of the day and the shh of the silence, and finally Cody coughs, just a little, says “Hnf—haf”—indicating, with his big smokes, the Indian mystery—Which Kevin acknowledges with a typical upward tender look toward Cody of amazement and wonder, out of his mind with blue-eyed clear astonishment—Which Cody also sees, eyes slitted now.

Penny is still sitting there (and has been) in the formal Buddha position for all this half and an hour of talk and thought—Buncha nuts—We all wait for the next thing to happen. It's happening all over the world only some places they supply prophylactics, and some places they talk business.

We havent got a leg to stand on.

81

It's only a story of the world and what happened in it—We all go down to Kevin's main house and his wife Eva (sweet sisterly greeneyed barefooted longhaired beauty) (who lets little Maya wander around naked if she wants, which Maya does, going “Abra abra” in the high grass) a big lunch spread out but I'm not hungry, in fact announce a little sententiously “I dont eat anymore when I'm not hungry, I learned that on the mountain” so of course Cody and Raphael eat, voraciously, yakking at table—While I listen to records—Then after lunch Kevin is kneeling there on his favored straw-weaved rug unfolding a delicate record from its onion-papered delicatenesces in a white album, the most Hindu-perfect little guy in the world, as Raphael directs him, they're also going to play the Gregorian Chants—It's a bunch of priests and brothers singing beautifully and formally and strangely together to old music older than stones—Raphael is very fond of music especially Renaissance music—and Wagner, the first time I met him in New York in 1952 he'd yelled “Nothing matters but Wagner, I want to drink wine and trample in your hair!” (to girl'd Josephine)—“Balls on that jazz!”—tho he's a regular little hepcat and should like jazz and in fact his rhythm comes from jazz tho he doesnt know it—but there's a little Italian Bird in his makeup has nothing to do with modern cacophonic crashbeats—Judge him for yourself—As for Cody he loves all music and is a great connoisseur, the first time we played him Indian Hindu music he realized right away that the drums (“The most subtle and sophisticated beat in the world!” says Kevin, and Kevin and I even speculated whether Dravidia had contributed anything to Aryan Hindu themes)—Cody'd realized that the soft gourds, the soft drums, the kettle Blonk bottom soft hand-drums, were simply drums with loose skins—We play the Gregorian Chants and also Indian again, every time Kevin's two little daughters hear it they start chattering happily, they've heard it every night all spring (before) at bed time with the big Hi Fi wall speaker (the back of it) opening and blasting right out on their cribs, the snake flutes, the wood charmers, the softskinned gourds, and the sophisticated old Africa-softened-by-Dravidia drumbeat, and above all the old Hindu who has taken a vow of silence and plays the oldworld Harp with showers of impossible heavengoing ideas that had Cody stupefacted and others (like Rainey) (in the big Dharma Bum season we'd had before I left) stoned outa their heads—All up and down the quiet little tar road, you can hear Kevin's Hi Fi booming soft chants of India and high Gothic priests and lutes and mandolins of Japan, even Chinese incomprehensible records—He'd had those vast parties where big bonfires were built in the yard and several celebrants (Irwin and Simon Darlovsky and Jarry) had stood around it stark naked, among sophisticated women and wives, talking Buddhist philosophy with the head of the Asian Studies himself, Alex Aums, who positively didnt care and sipped his wine only and repeated it to me “Buddhism is getting to know as many people as you can”—

Now it's noon and lunch over, a few records, and we cut out back to the city, with my old manuscripts and clothes which I'd left in a wooden box in Kevin's cellar—I owe him $15 from previous Spring so I sign him two of my Sedro-Woolley traveler's checks and he mistakenly (in the cellar) (and gently with sad eyes) hands me back a crumpled handful of dollar bills, four, one short, which I cant for the life of me bring up—For Kevin is by now stoned (on wine of lunch and all) and saying “Well when do I see you again Jack?” as we'd gone one night six months earlier and sat in the Waterfront railyards with a bottle of tokay and wallgazed (like Bodhidharma the bringer-of-Buddhism-to-China) a vast Cliff that protrudes from the lower haunches of back Telegraph Hill, at night, and both of us had seen the waves of electromagnetic-gravitational light coming out of that mass of matter, and how glad Kevin was that with me he'd spent a good night of wine and wallgazing and street-prowling instead of the usual beer in The Place—

We get back in the little coupe and U-run and all wave at Kevin and Eva, and go back across the Bridge to the City—

“Ah Cody, you're the craziest cat I've ever known,” concedes Raphael now—

“Listen Raphael, you said you was Raphael Urso the Gambling Poet, come on boy, come on to the racetrack with us tomorrow,” I urge—

“Dammit we could make it today if it wasnt so late—” says Cody—

“A deal! I'll go with you! Cody you show me how to win!”

“It's in the bag!”

“Tomorrow—we'll pick you up at Sonya's”

Sonya is Raphael's girl but in the earlier year Cody had (naturally) seen her and fallen in love with her (“O man you dont realize how mad Charles Swann was over those
girls
of his—!” Cody had once told me … “Marcel Proust couldnt possibly have been a queer and written that book!”)—Cody falls in love with every pretty chick around, he'd chased her and brought his chess board to play with her husband, one time he'd brought me and she'd sat there in slacks in the chair with her legs spread before the chessplayers looking at me and saying “But doesnt your life as a lonely writer get monotonous, Duluoz?”—I'd agreed, seeing the slit in her pants, which Cody naturally while slipping Bishop to Queen's Pawn Four had also seen—But she finally put Cody down saying “I know what you're after,” but then left her husband anyway (the chess pawn) (now gone from the scene temporarily) and gone to live with newly-arrived-from-the-east yakking Raphael—“We'll go pick you up at Sonya's pad”

Raphael says “Yeah, and I'm having a fight with her leaving this week, Duluoz you can have her”

“Me? Give her to Cody, he's mad—”

“No, no,” says Cody—he's got her off his chest—

“We'll all go to my pad tonight and drink beer and read poems,” says Raphael, “and I'll start packing”

We come back to the coffee place where Irwin is back waiting, and here simultaneously in the door walk in Simon Darlovsky, alone, done with his day's work as ambulance driver, then Geoffrey Donald and Patrick McLear the two old (old-established) poets of San Fran who hate us all—

And Gia walks in too.

82

By now I've slipped out and stuck a poorboy of california rotgut wine in my belt and started to belt at it so everything is blurry and exciting—Gia comes in with her hands in her skirt as ever and says in her low voice “Well it's all over town already,
Mademoiselle
Magazine is going to take all your pictures Friday night—”

“Who?”

“Irwin, Raphael, Duluoz—Then it'll be
Life
Magazine next month.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Count me out,” says Cody just as Irwin is grabbing his hand and telling him to come, “Friday I'll be on duty Friday night”

“But
Simon
will have his picture taken with us!” calls Irwin triumphantly, grabbing Darlovsky by the arm, and Darlovsky nods simply—

“Can we have a sex orgy after?” says Simon.

“Count me out,” says Gia—

“Well I'd may not be around for that either,” says Cody, and everyone is pouring coffee themselves at the urn and sitting at three different tables and other Bohemians and Subterraneans are coming in and out—