Desolation Angels (52 page)

“I dont know, I'm only a Celtic Cornishman.”

“Name of Cornish language is Kernuak. Cymeric group. If Celt and Cymry were pronounced as if with soft C's we'd have to call Cornwall Sornwall and then what would happen to all that corn we've eaten. When you go to Bude beware of the undertow. Even worse to haunt Padstow if you're good looking. Best thing to do is go in a pub and raise your glass to Mr. Penhagard, Mr. Ventongimps, Mr. Maranzanvose, Mr. Trevisquite and Mr. Tregeargate or go around digging for kistvaens and cromlechs. Or pray to Earth in the names of St. Teath, St. Erth, St. Breock, St. Gorran and St. Kew and it's not too far from derelict tin mine chimneys. Hail the Black Prince!” As he was saying this we were carrying our shoevels back at sunset eating ice cream cones (you cant blame me for misspelling “shovels” there).

He adds: “Clearly Jack what you need is a Land Rover and go camping in Inner Mongolia unless you wanta bring a bed lamp.” All I could do, all anybody can ever do is
shrug
at all this, helplessly, but he goes on and on like that.

When we get back to my house the furniture has just come in from Florida and Ma and Ben are gleefully drinking wine and unpacking. Good old Ben has brought her some wine that night, and as tho he knew she didnt really want to unpack at all but just move back to Florida, which we finally did three weeks later anyway in this tangled year of my life.

78

Ben and I got drunk one last time, sitting in his grass in the moonlight drinking whiskey from the bottle, whooee and wahoo like old times, crosslegged facing each other, yelling Zen questions: “Under the quiet tree somebody's blown my pussywillow apart?”

“Was it you?”

“Why do sages always sleep with their mouths open?”

“Because they want more booze?”

“Why do Sages kneel in the dark?”

“Because they're creaky?”

“Which direction did the fire go?”

“To the right.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it burned me.”

“How do you know?”

“I didnt know.”

And such nonsense, and also telling long stories about our childhoods and pasts:—“Pretty soon Ben do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair—There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a Giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading—Seventy Million
Million
Kotis!—Whoopee!—Everything is free!—”

“Nobody has to care any more, we can even leave the whole scene to itself with Japanese fornicating machines fornicating chemical dolls on and on, with Robot Hospitals and Calculator Machine Crematories and just go off and be free in the universe!”

“In the freedom of eternity! We can just float around like Khans on a cloud watching the Samapatti T.V.”

“We're doing that already.”

One night we even got high on peotl, the Chihuahuan Mexican cactus button that gives you visions after three preliminary hours of empty nausea—It was the day that Ben had received a set of Buddhist monk robes in the mail from Japan (from friend Jarry) and the day I was determined to paint great pictures with my pitiful set of housepaints. Picture this for the insanity yet the harmlessness of a couple of goofballs who study poetry in solitude:—The sun is setting, ordinary people of Berkeley are eating their supper (in Spain, “supper” bears the mournful humble title of “La Cena,” with all its connotations of earthly sorrowful simple food for the living beings who cannot live without it), but Ben and I have a gob of green cactus glup stuck in our stomachs, our eyes are iris-wide and wild, and here he is in those mad robes sitting absolutely motionless on his cottage floor, staring in the dark, upheld thumbs touching, refusing to answer me when I yell from the yard, actually sincerely seeing the old Pre-Heaven Heaven of Old in his quiet eyeballs waving like kaleidoscopes all deep blue and rose glory—And there
I
am kneeling in the grass in the half dark pouring enamel paint onto paper and
blowing
on it till it blossoms out and mixes up, and's going to be a great masterpiece until suddenly a poor little bug lands on it and gets stuck—So I spend the last thirty minutes of twilight trying to extricate the little bug from my sticky masterpiece without hurting it or pulling off a leg, but no go—So I lie there looking at the struggling little bug in the paint and realize I should never have painted at all for the sake of that little bug's life, whatever it is, or will be—And such a strange
dragon
-like little bug with noble forehead and features—I almost cry—The next day the painting is dry and the little bug is there, dead—In a few months his dust just vanishes away from the painting altogether—Or was it Fagan sent that little bug from his magic Samapatti revery to show me that art so sure and art so pure is not so sure and pure as all that? (Putting me in mind of the time I was writing so swiftly I killed a bug with the rash of my pencil deed, ugh—)

79

So what do we all do in this life which comes on so much like an empty voidness yet warns us that we will die in pain, decay, old age, horror—? Hemingway called it a dirty trick. It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space, like the ordeal of the sieve and scissors, or even the water ordeal where they dump you in the water with toes tied to thumbs, O God—Only Lucifer could be so mean and
I am Lucifer
and I'm not that mean, in fact Lucifer Goes to Heaven—The warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get out of the dirty Ordeal by Death—

When Ben and I sober up I say “How goes it with all that horror everywhere?”

“It's Mother Kali dancing around to eat up everything she gave birth to, eats it right back—She wears dazzling dancing jewels and covered all over with silks and decorations and feathers, her dance maddens men, the only part of her aint covered is her vagina which is surrounded with a Mandala Crown of jade, lapis lazuli, cornelean, red pearls and mother of pearl.”

“No diamonds.”

“No, that's beyond …”

I ask my own mother what's with all our horror and unhappiness, dont mention Mother Kali to scare her, she goes beyond Mother Kali by saying: “People's got to do right—Let's you and me get out of this lousy California with the cops wont let you walk, and the fog, and those damn hills about to fall on our back, and go
home.
”

“But where's home?”

“Home is with your family—You've only got one sister—I've only got one grandson—And one son,
you
—Let's all get together and live
quiet.
People like your Ben Fagan, your Alex Poorbrother, your Irwin Gazootsky, they dont
know
how to live!—You gotta have
fun,
good food, good beds, nothing more—
La tranquillité qui compte!
—Never mind all the fuss about you worry this and that, make yourself a
haven
in this world and Heaven comes after.”

Actually, there can be no haven for the living lamb but plenty haven for the dead lamb, okay, soon enough, but I'll follow Memère because she speaks of
tranquillity.
In fact she didnt realize it was I myself who'd wrecked all Ben Fagan's tranquillity by coming here in the first place, but okay. We already start packing to go back. She has her social security checks every month as I say and my book is coming out in a month. What she is really delivering to me is a message about quietude: in a previous lifetime she must surely (if there is such a thing as a previous lifetime possible to an individual soul-entity)—she must surely have been a Head Nun in a remote Andalusian or even Grecian nunnery. When she goes to bed at night I hear her rosary beads rattle. “Who cares about Eternity! we want the Here and Now!” yell the snakedancers of streets and riots and Guerneca hand grenades and airplane bombs. When sweetly waking in the night on her pillow my mother opens her tired pious eyes, she must be thinking: “Eternity? Here and Now? Wat they talkin about?”

Mozart on his death bed must have known this—

And Blaise de Pascal most of all.

80

The only answer Alex Fairbrother has for my question about horror is with his eyes, his words are hopelessly entangled in a Joycean stream of learning like: “Horror Everywhere? That sounds like a nice idea for a new Tourist Bureau? You could have Coxie's Armies laid out in Arizona canyons buying tortillas and ice cream from the shy Navajos only the ice cream is really peyote ice cream green like pistachio and everybody goes back home singing Adios Muchachos Companéros de la Vida—”

Or something. It's only in his sighing eyes you see it, in his
crumbling
eyes, his disillusioned Boy Scout Leader eyes …

And then to top it all off one day Cody is rushing across our porch and into the house dying to borrow ten dollars from me for an urgent pot connection. I've practically
come
to California to be near old buddy Cody but his wife has refused to help this time, probably because I have Memère with me, probably because she's afraid he'll go mad with me again like he did on the road years ago—To him it makes no difference, he hasnt changed, he just wants to borrow ten dollars. He says he'll be back. Meanwhile he also borrows Ben's tendollar
Tibetan Book of the Dead
and rushes off, all muscular as usual in T-shirt and frayed jeans, crazy Cody. “Any girls around here?” he cries anxiously as he drives off.

But a week later I take Memère into San Francisco to let her ride the cable cars and eat in Chinatown and buy toys in Chinatown and I have her wait for me in the big Catholic church on Columbus while I rush to the Place, Cody's hangout, to see if I can recoup that $10 from him. By God there he is sipping a beer, playing chess with “The Beard.” He looks surprised but he knows I want my ten bucks. He cashes a twenty at the bar and pays me and then even comes with me to meet Memère in the church. As we walk in he kneels and does the sign of the Cross, as I do, and Memère turns to see us do that. She realizes Cody and I are fatal lovely friends who are not bad boys at all.

So three days later as I'm kneeling on the floor unpacking a crate of advance copies of my novel
Road
which is all about Cody and me and Joanna and big Slim Buckle, and Memère's at the store so I'm alone in the house, I look up as a golden light appears in the porch door silently: and there stands Cody, Joanna (golden blonde beauty), big tall Slim Buckle, and behind them the midget 4:2 inch Jimmy Low (known not as a “midget” at all but simply Jimmy, or as Deni Bleu calls him, “A Little Man”). We all stare at one another in the golden light. Not a sound. I'm also caught red handed (as we all grin) with a copy of
Road
in my hands
even before I've looked at it for the first time!
I automatically hand one to Cody who is after all the hero of the poor crazy sad book. It's one of the several occasions in my life when a meeting with Cody seems to be suffused with a silent golden light, as I'll show another later, altho I dont even know what it means, unless it means that Cody is actually some kind of angel or archangel come down to this world and I recognize it. A fine thing to say in this day and age! And especially with the wild life he was now leading that was going to end in tragedy in six months, as I'll tell in a minute—A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street … When the highest ideals on earth are based on the month and the day of some cruel bloody revolution, nay when the highest ideals are simply new
reasons
for murdering and despoiling people—And Angels? Since we've never seen an angel what angel do you mean? But it was Christ said “Since you've never seen my Father then how can you know' my Father?”

81

Ah yes, maybe I'm wrong and all the Christian, Islamic, Neo Platonist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Zen Mystics of the world were wrong about the transcendental mystery of existence but I dont think so—Like the thirty birds who reached God and saw themselves reflected in His Mirror. The thirty Dirty Birds, those 970 of us birds who never made it across the Valley of Divine Illumination did really make it anyway in Perfection—So now let me explain about poor Cody, even tho I've already told most of his story. He is a
believer
in life and he
wants
to go to Heaven but because he loves life so he embraces it so much he thinks he sins and will never see Heaven—He was a Catholic altar boy as I say even when he was bumming dimes for his hopeless father hiding in alleys. You could have ten thousand cold eyed Materialistic officials claim they love life too but can never embrace it so near sin and also never see Heaven—They will contemn the hot-blooded lifelover with their cold papers on a desk because they have no blood and therefore have no sin? No! They sin by lifelessness! They are the ogres of Law entering the Holy Realm of Sin! Ah, I've got to explain myself without essays and poems—Cody had a wife whom he really loved, and three kids he really loved, and a good job on the railroad. But when the sun went down his blood got hot:—hot for old lovers like Joanna, for old pleasure like marijuana and talk, for jazz, for the gayety that any respectable American wants in a life growing more arid by the year in Law Ridden America. But he did not hide his desire and cry
Dry!
He went all out. He filled his car with friends and booze and pot and batted around looking for ecstasy like some fieldworker on a Saturday night in Georgia when the moon cools the still and guitars are twangin down the hill. He came from sturdy Missouri stock that walked on strong feet. We've all seen him kneel
sweating
praying to God! When we went to San Francisco that day whole cordons of police were surrounding the streets of North Beach looking for crazy people like him. Somehow by some miracle we walked with pockets full of bottles and pot right thru them, laughing with girls, with little Jimmy, to parties, to bars, to jazz cellars. I couldnt understand what the cops were doing! Why werent they looking for murderers and robbers? When I once suggested this to a policeman who stopped us because I was flagging my buddy's car back with a railroad lamp so there'd be no accidents anywhere the policeman said “You've got quite an imagination, havent you?” (meaning I might be a murderer or robber myself.) I'm no such thing and neither is Cody, you have to be DRY to be those things! You have to HATE life to kill it and rob it!