Desolation Angels (28 page)

The dialogue of such parties is always one vast hubbub that rises to the ceiling and seems to clash and thunder there, the effect when you close your eyes and listen, is “Bwash bwash crash” as everybody is trying to
emphasize
their conversation at the risk of interruption or drown-out, finally it gets louder, the drinks keep coming, the hors d'oeuvres are destroyed and the punch is slaked in by hungry talking tongues, finally it degenerates into a shoutfest and always the host begins to worry about the neighbors and his last hour is spent in politely closing up the party—There are always late loud stragglers,
i.e.,
us,—the last partyers are always gently pushed out—as in my case, I go to the punch bowl to dump it in my cup but the host's best friend gently removes the bowl from my hand, saying “It's empty—besides the party's over”—the last horrible scene shows the bohemian cramming his pockets with free cigarettes that have been generously left in open boxes made of teakwood—It's Levesque the painter who does that, with an evil leer, a penniless painter, a crazy man, all his hair shaved off to a bare minimum fuzz and pucks and bruises all over him where he got drunk and fell down the night before—Yet the best painter in San Francisco—

The hosts nod and assure us out to the garden path and we all go shouting away in a drunken singing gang consisting of: Raphael, me, Irwin, Simon, Lazarus, David D'Angeli and Levesque the painter. The night's only begun.

93

We all sit on a curbstone and Raphael collapses sitting crosslegged in the road facing us and begins talking and gesturing in the air those hands—Some of us are sitting crosslegged—It's a long speech he makes which has drunken triumph in it, we're all drunk, but it's also got that bird-pure triumph of Raphael's anyway but here come the cops, and pull up in a cruiser. I get up and say “Let's go, we're making too much noise” and everybody's following me but the cops walk in on us and want to know who we are.

“We just came from that big party over there.”

“Well you been makin too much noise—We got three calls from the neighbors”

“We're leaving,” I say, and start off, and besides now the cops dig the big bearded Irwin Abraham and the suave gentlemanly David and the crazy dignified painter and then they see Lazarus and Simon, and they decide it would be too much in the station-house, which it surely would have been—I wanta instruct my bhikkhus to avoid the authorities, it's written in the Tao, it's the only way—It's the only straight line, right through—

Now we own the world, we buy wine on Market Street and jump all eight in buses and drink in the back and get off and go shouting down the middle of streets big long conversations—We climb a hill and go over a long path and up to a grass sidewalk top overlooking the lights of Frisco—We sit in the grass and drink wine—All talking—Then up to a man's pad, a house with a yard, a big Hi-Fi electromagnetic poo-bah big phonograph and they boom big numbers, organ masses—Levesque the painter falls down and thinks Simon's hit him, and comes crying to tell us—I start crying because Simon hit somebody, it's all drunk and sentimental, David finally leaves—But Lazarus “seen it,” saw Levesque fall and hurt himself, and turns out next morning nobody hit nobody—An evening somewhat silly but filled with a triumph that was surely a drunken triumph.

In the morning Levesque comes with notebook and I tell him “Nobody hit you!”

“Well I'm glad to hear
that!
” he bellows—I'd once said to him “You must be my brother that died in 1926 and was a great painter and drawer at nine, when were you born?” but now I realize it's not the same person at all—if so, Karma has twisted. Levesque is earnest with big blue eyes and eager to help and very humble but suddenly too he'll go mad before your eyes and do a mad dance in the street that scares me. Also he laughs “Mwee hee hee ha ha” and hovers behind you …

I study his notebook, sit on the porch looking at the city, spend a quiet day, sketch pictures with him (one picture I sketch of Raphael asleep, Levesque says “O that's the Raphael-waist all right”)—Then Lazarus and I dribble ghosts into his notebook with our crazy cartoon pencils. I'd like to see them again, especially Lazarus' strange wandering ghost-lines, which he draws with a radiantly bemused smile … Then by God we buy porkchops, all the store, Raphael and I discuss James Dean in front of the movie rack, “What necrophilia!” he yells, meaning the girls adore a dead actor but what actor isnt, what actor is—We cook porkchops in the kitchen and it's already dark. We take a short walk up that same strange trail through a cliffgrass empty lot, as we come down again Raphael is striding thru the moonlit night exactly like an opium-pipe Chinaman, his hands are in his sleeves and his head is bowed and he walks right along, real dark and strange and bent to sorrowful regards, his eyes raising and sweeping the scene, he looks lost like little Richard Barthelmess in an old picture about London opium smokers under lamps, in fact Raphael comes right under the lamp and walks across to the other dark—hands in sleeves he looks moody and Sicilian, Levesque says to me “Oh I wish I could paint him walking like that.”

“Draw it first with a pencil,” I say, because all day I've been drawing unsuccessfully with his ink—

We come in and I go to bed, in my sleepingbag, windows open to the cool stars—And I sleep with my cross.

94

In the morning “me and Raphael and Simon” walk off through the hot morning through big cement factories and ironworks and yards, I wanta walk and show them things—At first they complain but then they get interested in the big electromagnets that lift piles of pounded scrap, and dumps em into hoppers, blam, “just by releasing the juice at the switch, the power goes off, the mass drops,” I explain to them. “And mass equals energy—and mass plus energy equals emptiness.”

“Yeah but look at that god-d-a-m ting,” says Simon, mouth open.

“It's
great!
” yells Raphael pounding his fist at me.—

We march on—We're going to see if Cody's at the railroad station—We walk right in the trainman's lockers and I even see if I got any mail there, from two years before when I was a brakeman too, then we cut out to meet Cody in the Beach—the coffee joint—We take a bus the rest of the way—Raphael grabs the back seat and talks loudly, the maniac he wants the whole bus to hear, if he feels like talking—Meanwhile Simon has a banana he just bought and he wants to know if ours are just as big.

“Bigger,” says Raphael.

“
Bigger?
” yells Simon.

“That's right.”

Simon receives this information with complete serious consideration and reconsideration, I can see him moving his lips and counting—

Sure enough there's Cody, in the road, backing the little coupe 40 miles an hour up the steep hill, to swerve backwards into a slot and jump out—door wide open he leans out with big laughing red face hollering a sentence to us boys in the street and at the same time warning off impending motorists—

We rush up to a beautiful girl's pad, a beautiful pad, she's got a short haircut, she's in bed, under blankets, she's sick, she has big sad eyes, she has me play Sinatra louder on the phonograph, she has a whole album spinning—Yes, we can use her car—Raphael wants to move his stuff, from Sonya's, to the new pad of the party where the organ music was and Levesque cried, okay, Cody's car is too small—And then we'll slip to the races—

“No you cant go to the races in my car!” she yells—

“Okay—” “We'll be back”—We all stand around admiring her, sit awhile, even have long silences during which then she'll turn and start looking at us, and finally addresses us:

“What are you cats up to”—“anyway”—snuffing—“Wow,” she says—“Relax”—“I mean it, you know?”—“
Like
, you know?”—

Yeah, we all agree but we cant get in at the same time so off we go to the races but Raphael's moving takes up all our time and finally Cody begins to see we'll be late for the first race again—“I'll miss the daily double again!” he cries frantically—showing his mouth open and his teeth—he really means it.

Raphael is fishing all his socks and things and Sonya is saying, “Listen, I dont want all them old biddies to know about my life—I'm
living,
see—”

“That's great,” I say, and to myself: a completely serious little girl seriously in love—She's got a new boyfriend already and that's what she means—Simon and I lift big albums of records and books and bring them down to the car where Cody is sulking—

“Hey Cody,” I say, “come up and see the pretty girl—” He doesnt want to—finally I say “We need your muscles to carry that stuff” then he does come but when we're all settled and back in the car ready to go, and Raphael says “Phew! that's that!” Cody says:

“Hmf, muscles”

We have to drive to the new pad, and there I notice for the first time a beautiful piano. The host, Ehrman, is not even up. Levesque also lives here. Raphael will at least leave his stuff here. It's already too late for the second race so finally I persuade Cody not to go to the races at all but go next time, check the results tomorrow (turns out later he woulda lost), and just enjoy an afternoon of doing nothing in particular.

So he pulls out his chessboard and plays chess with Raphael to clobber him in revenge—His anger has already subsided from a point where he was belting Raphael with his elbows as he turned the car and Raphael'd yelled “Hey why you hittin me? How come you dont think—”

“He's hittin you because he's sore cause you conned him into moving your stuff and now he's late at the races. He's
chastisin
you!” I add, shrugging—Now Cody, having heard us talk this way, seems apparently contented and they play big evil games of chess where Cody yells “
I got ya!
” while I play the big loud records, Honegger, and Raphael plays Bach—What we'll do is just goof, and in fact I make a run for two carry-cartons of beer.

Meanwhile the host, Ehrman, who's been sleeping in his room, comes out, watches us awhile, and goes back to bed—He doesnt care, he's got all that music blasting for him—It's Raphael's records, Requiems, Wagner, I jump and play Thelonious Monk—

“It's ridiculous!” yells Raphael examining his hopeless chess position—Then later: “Pomeray you wont let me finish the end game, you keep pulling the checks off the set, put em back, wa—” and Cody is plunging chesspieces on and off the board so fast I suddenly wonder if he is Melville's Confidence Man playing fabulously secretive earnest chess.

95

Then Cody goes to the bathroom and shaves, and Raphael sits down at the piano slumped with one finger on the keys.

He starts hitting one note then two and back to one—

Finally he starts to play a melody, a beautiful melody that nobody heard before—tho Cody, razor to chin, claimed it was “Isle of Capri”—Raphael starts to lay down brooding fingers on chords—Pretty soon he's got his whole sonatal étude going so perfectly he's got bridges and choruses, returns to his choruses with fresh new themes, amazing how he'll suddenly plink up the perfect note-cry to resume his Italian Lovebird Song—Sinatra, Mario Lanza, Caruso, all sing that bird-pure note of cello-like sadness as is seen in the sad Madonnas—their appeal—Raphael's appeal is like Chopin, soft understanding fingers laid intelligently to a keyboard, I turn from the window where I'm standing and stare at Raphael playing, thinking “This is his first sonata—” I notice everybody quietly is listening, Cody in the bathroom and old John Ehrman in the bed, staring at the ceiling—Raphael plays only the white keys, as tho in a previous lifetime maybe (beside Chopin) he might have been an obscure organist in a belfry playing an early Gothic organ without minor notes—Because he does whatever he wants with his major (white) notes, and produces indescribably beautiful melodies that keep getting more tragic and heartbreaking, he's a pure bird singing, he said it himself, “I felt like a little bird singing,” and he said it so shiningly. Finally by the window as I listen, every note perfect and it's the first time in his life on the piano before serious listeners like the music master in the bedroom, it gets so sad, the songs too beautiful, as pure as his utterances, showing his mouth's as clean as his hand—his tongue as pure as his hand so that his hand knows where to go for song—a Troubadour, an early Renaissance Troubadour, playing a guitar for the ladies, making them weep—He has me weep too … tears come into my eyes to hear it.

And I think “How long ago it was I stood by a window, when I was a music master in Pierluigi, and discovered a new genius of music,” I really have such grandiose thoughts—meaning in previous rebirth, I was I and Raphael the new pianist genius—behind the drapes of all Italy wept the rose, and the moon shined on the love bird.

Then I picture him playing like this, with candles, like Chopin, even like Liberace, to gangs of women like Rose, making them cry—I picture it, the beginning of the spontaneous virtuoso composer, whose works are taken down on a tape recorder, then written, and who therefore “writes” the first free melodies and harmonies of the world, which should be pristine music—I see, in fact, he's possibly even a greater musician than a poet and he is a great poet. Then I think: “So Chopin got his Urso, and now the poet blows both on piano and language—” I tell all this to Raphael, who doesnt hardly believe it—He plays another tune just as beautiful as the first anyway. Then I know he can do it every time.

Tonight is the night we're going to have our pictures taken by the magazine so Raphael yells at me “Dont comb your hair—leave your hair uncombed!”

96

And as I stand by the window, one foot out like a Parisian Dandy, I realize the greatness of Raphael—the greatness of his purity, and the purity of his regard for me—and letting me wear the Cross. It had been his girl Sonya had just said, “Arent you wearing the Cross anymore?” and in such a nastified tone of voice as to indicate,
it was wearing the weary cross living with me?
—“Don't you comb your hair,” says Raphael to me, and he has no money—“I dont believe in money.”—The man on the bed in the bedroom hardly knows him, and he's moved in, and's playing his piano—The music master does agree and I see next day, as Raphael begins to play again to perfection, after a slower start than the day before owing to my perhaps rash mentioning of his musical talent—his musical genius—then Ehrman comes out of his sick room and strolls up in bathrobe, and as Raphael hits a perfect pure melodic note, I look at Ehrman and he's looking at me and both of us seem to nod agreement—Then he stands watching Raphael a few minutes.