Stop That Girl (14 page)

“Say it like you mean it!” he said.

“I am!”

“You are?”

And then the crowds started to arrive. Bonfires roared to big blazes on the sand, and we couldn’t make enough pizza to keep up. People were ordering whole trays. Unprecedented. Or else ten drinks at once. No time to talk. We’d never been under such pressure before. No sooner did we pull one tray from the oven than we jammed in another. At one point, during a lull, Jake said, “I need a break. I’m still feeling sick.” So as it turned out, I ran the place completely by myself for almost forty-five minutes.

It was then that something funny and strange happened which I’ve never really mentioned to anyone, starting with Jake. Maybe I didn’t want him to apologize again. After all, he was the one who took me to Santa Cruz, which changed the course of my life. (Because a letter came a few weeks later informing me I’d be receiving a full tuition grant, work study, and a loan. I would be leaving home in the fall, after all.)

But for the time being, I was running a pizza shack on the beach, and when the back door flew open and a metallic tube rolled across the floor, I barely gave it a thought, until it began to explode into sparks and smoke, thundering through the cement-block cavity like dynamite. Pieces of grit and ash flew into my eyes and I dropped to the floor, blinking and shaking my head.

Well, Sal had warned us. I heard people shouting, but I had a sensitive ear anyway and it sounded as if they were calling from a great distance. “You all right?” I heard. I spit some sand out of my mouth and wiped my eyes, while some customers took the liberty of coming in the back. They were wiping my face with one of our old towels and suggesting I take a trip to the emergency room. After a moment or two, I said no. I said I was fine.

I guess I was fine. My eardrums crackled and my eyes stung, but I got back on my feet and started working. In a few minutes the smoke had cleared and everything was running smoothly again. No one would have guessed there had been a problem. Including Jake. That was the funny part, that when he returned I never mentioned it. Just business as usual. Not a word. I liked him a lot, and always wondered later why I held back. It all could have been so much different.

S.O.S.

The fog was everywhere, in front of the car and behind, in great gusts rising in the headlights, shrouding the streetlamps, and Bart and I were on one of our missions and we were lost. We’d get the names of people with manuscripts from our professors, because they knew who was doing what; then we’d call these people up and ask if they wanted to submit to our journal, and then we’d go on a spree collecting the manuscripts with the car we borrowed from Doug, a guy who used to live on our hall.

“I can’t see anything!”

“I know, be careful.”

“It’s a solid wall,” I said.

“Smells like penguins,” he said.

We crawled forward, penetrating the fog as if we were exploring the inside of a mattress. Bart finally let himself out with his flashlight, trying to locate a street sign. He held his arms out like feelers so he wouldn’t walk right into one. “Okay, I found something,” he called out. “This is Lighthouse. We’re just a couple blocks over from Pelton.”

He walked ahead of the car. He’d wave the beam when I was supposed to turn, like a signalman on an airport run-way. Sometimes he’d flash
short short short, long long long,
short short short,
I guess to be funny. I’d see part of his arm or ear suddenly catching the light. Now a hand popped up in the roiling beam, directing me to park.

“So who’s this?” he asked, when I joined him on the sidewalk.

“Someone named Carter Berlin.”

“Carter Berlin?” His mouth puckered with distaste.

“Yeah, supposedly he has some great prose poems about the fecundity of farm life.”

“These people are so pretentious,” Bart muttered.

We strutted up the steps and knocked. An older woman in a housecoat, pin curls plastered to her head like limpets, fussed with a stack of locks to find out what we wanted from her.

“Is this where we can find Carter Berlin?” Bart said.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s not here anymore.”

I said, “Know when he’ll be back?”

She said, “Sometime tomorrow to pick up the rest of his things.”

“You mean, he moved out?”

“That’s right. We have a little room in back we rent to students, but Carter is no longer with us,” she said.

“It must have been sudden, because we just talked to him yesterday,” I said.

“Yes, it was very sudden and now he’s forfeited his deposit,” the woman said.

“Let’s leave him a message,” Bart said.

“Yeah, tell him to contact
The Blunt Probe,
” I said.

“All right.” A bulging black handbag sat by the door like a toad. She pulled a little memo pad from one of its folds, the kind of memo pad that had a little loop on the side holding a miniature pencil. “Let me write it down, or I’ll forget. Say it again.”

“Tell him we’re looking for him and we want him to submit something to
The Blunt Probe,
” I said, watching her write in her big schoolmarmish hand:
Carter—you must
submit to the blunt probe!

“It’s a magazine, so you should capitalize it,” I said.

Her hand froze, as if spanked.

“Never mind,” I said.

“Thank you,” Bart said.

“The room is very clean and the rent is two hundred a month. That includes all utilities, and of course there are kitchen and laundry privileges—” I could see, over her shoulder, the man who completed the picture. He was sporting an enlarged yellow cardigan, and the capillaries of his cheeks were ruddy and bursting, and he was pacing fretfully, as if his world was out of balance because we were at the door.

“Yeah, we’ll spread the word,” I said.

When we got back in the car, Bart said, “We’re screwed. We’re past our deadline, and we still don’t have anything good.”

“So what about
your
stuff?” I said.

“As a fallback,” said Bart. “What about the list—anybody else?”

I tried to make it out in the light from the streetlamp, which was moving in whorls through the fog. “Okay, there’s a woman in the Soquel hills who’s got some shaped poetry,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“You know, say, a poem about a tree in the shape of a tree, that kind of thing.”

“Fuck her,” Bart said.

“Why?”

“Who needs it? Why can’t we find the next Beckett, the next—did I tell you about Allen Ginsberg?”

“What?” I said.

“Holy shit, I didn’t tell you he’s coming here?”

“No!”

“He’s coming here next month. He’s giving a reading downtown. Donald Pickett told me. He asked if I’d write it up for the paper!”

“Wow, I can’t believe it!”

“Yeah, I knew you’d be excited.”

“More than excited.”

Perhaps incongruously, Ginsberg was a hero of mine. What we had in common was just about nothing, but his writings had, over the past few years, worked their way heavily into my consciousness and were the nuts and bolts of my current worldview. My City Lights editions of
Kaddish
and
Howl
were mauled from use, and I’d poured through numerous biographies and accounts of the Beat movement: Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, to name a few. I envied the camaraderie I read about, respected how those people lived their lives around the clock in the name of art. Hardly my style. I had fantasies of myself as a hard-liver, grim and determined, tooling down the road with my cronies and my dreams, but found myself unable to keep it up. It was hard for me to roar and jostle with a roomful of people more than an hour or two. A strange thing would happen. I’d suddenly feel like I was
pretending
to have fun even if I
really
was having fun; then I’d start looking around and wondering the same about everyone else, and it would abruptly seem like we were all as frivolous as decals on an eerie black backdrop of oblivion, and it would wreck everything.

“Did you know Ginsberg’s mother was insane, and she was in an institution and had electroshock therapy, and finally he authorized a lobotomy?” I said.

“It’s nice when someone’s certifiably insane,” Bart said.

“How?”

“Because then they can’t ruin your life by being
covertly
insane.”

I nodded with full understanding. “Hey, ever been to Paterson, New Jersey?”

“Never,” Bart said.

“I want to go someday. William Carlos Williams came from there too.”

It had been my idea to use Ginsberg’s quote from the inside cover of
Kaddish
as an epigram in our magazine—
The
established literary quarterlies of my day are bankrupt poeticallythru their own hatred, dull ambition, or loudmouthed
obtuseness
—and of course we strove to counteract all that by printing the best ditties we could possibly scrounge up from the students and faculty at the school.

“You’ll have to come meet him when I interview him,” Bart threw in.

“I’ll say. You know, maybe we could get some stuff from him,” I suggested.

Bart said, “For
our
magazine?”

“Why not?”

“If we get something from him, we’ll be made,” Bart said. “We’ll get funding to keep it going for sure!”

“Yeah!” We then fell into the kind of passionate embrace that we would fall into if Bart was feeling happy, and kissed the way we did when he was happy, so I felt happy, at least I felt the way I did when he felt happy.

We ended up back at my house that evening, first dropping the Datsun back at Doug’s, then walking eighteen blocks home through the mist. A Fruit and Nut stand by a lonely highway, enhanced with technicolor to make it look like a destination spot, had found its way onto the face of a postcard that was now waiting for me on the kitchen table. On the writing side there was barely room for a message, because it was cluttered with ancient penny stamps that looked like they’d been peeled from rocks and stumps. In tiny print:

Am driving north to attend a medical conference in SF
3/9. Thought I’d come through and see you. Set me a
place at dinner! Looking forward, darling, Your Mumsy.

“Oh, my God,” I said to Julie, my roommate, who was chasing the last Cheerio in her bowl. “My mumsy’s coming.”

“Your what?”

“My mumsy.”

“What’s that?”

I started laughing hysterically. “It’s a grandmother you haven’t seen in years because she’s schizoid!”

“Seriously?” She looked like she wanted to laugh too but wasn’t sure if she should.

“Oh, no!” I said, examining the postcard again.

“What?”

“She’s coming the day of the Allen Ginsberg reading. That’s going to mess up everything!”

“Well, she’ll understand you have a life, won’t she?”

“I don’t know. Damn.”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll probably be home. I’ll let her in, give her something to eat, administer the tranquilizers.”

“You would? That would be swell,” I said.

“Sure, don’t worry about it,” Julie said. She was a rock, the kind of roommate you want to hold on to. We’d been together since freshman year, first in the dorms and now in our own little house off campus. She grew up on a farm in South Dakota, was a biology major, studied a lot, knew how to fix things, and acted like a protective older brother. “How schizo can she be?”

“She’s usually benevolent to strangers.”

In my room, Bart was already under the covers of my lumpy futon bed. His pants continued to stand in a dwarfish pile exactly where he’d shed them. André Breton’s
Manifestoesof Surrealism
poked up from the sheets.

“I have a dilemma,” I said.

“What?”

I said, “Okay, I’ve told you about my grandmother, right?”

“Your grandmother. Dead?”

“No, alive.”

“What about her?”

“The crazy one in Santa Barbara?” I coached.

“Yeah, right.”

“Well, she’s driving through next month, and she’s going to stop by.”

“She can still drive?”

“She’s only in her sixties,” I said.

“Is she safe on the road? I mean, being crazy and all.”

“She isn’t crazy that way. She’s twisted and vicious to family members.”

“She functions in society.”

“Used to,” I said. “I mean, I guess she’s still a doctor in some capacity. She’s on her way to a medical conference. But Roy happens to know one of her neighbors, and they always tell us the latest on how she’s becoming really eccentric. Like everyone calls her place the Haunted House of Hope Ranch because it’s all overgrown and the shutters are falling off, but then she has these big parties, like she’ll meet some guy on an airplane who says he’s an Italian count and she’ll befriend him and throw him a party, and then people come over and everything’s all cobwebs and stuff, and she’s wearing these horrible furs and a wig and acting like it’s all really elegant even though rats are running up the drapes.”

Bart wrinkled his nose. “Episcopalian?”

“Yeah, but, so?”

“Just sounds like the way they bite the dust.”

“Anyway, maybe Roy embellishes it to make my mother happy. I don’t know if I believe it.”

My phone rang. I decided not to tell him about the timing.

“Oh, hi,” I said to my mother. I rounded my back to Bart, employing my technique of stretching the phone as far as the cord would allow, until I was sitting cross-legged inside my own closet.

“Hi, dear,” she said. “How was your day? Get the package yet?”

“Oh, yeah, I did. Yesterday.”

“You were supposed to call!”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I was going to. But I have some bizarre news. Guess who’s coming.”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“I hate guessing.”

One thing at a time. “Allen Ginsberg,” I said.

“Wait, isn’t he one of those poets you like so much?” Mom said.

“Exactly.”

“Is he coming to your college to speak?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s very exciting. I hope you’ll get to see him.”

“I might get to
meet
him. Oh, and guess who else is coming.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Frost,” I said.

A silence.

“What does she have to do with Allen Ginsberg?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t understand,” Mom said.

“She wrote me a postcard and said she’s coming,” I said.