The Subterraneans (4 page)

“Nothing—he didn’t move but was just with his head off the pillow when I glanced back in closing the door—I had no clothes on in the alley, it didn’t disturb me, I was so intent on this realization of everything I knew I was an innocent child.”—“The naked babe, wow.”—(And to myself: “My God, this girl, Adam’s right she’s crazy, like I’d do that, I’d flip like I did on Benzedrine with Honey in 1945 and thought she wanted to use my body for the gang car and the wrecking and flames but I’d certainly never run out into the streets of San Francisco naked tho I might have maybe if I really felt there was need for action, yah”) and I looked at her wondering if she, was she telling the truth.—She was in the alley, wondering who she was, night, a thin drizzle of mist, silence of sleeping Frisco, the B-0 boats in the bay, the shroud over the bay of great clawmouth fogs, the aureola of funny eerie light being sent up in the middle by the Arcade Hood Droops of the Pillar-templed Alcatraz—her heart thumping in the stillness, the cool dark peace.—Up on a wood fence, waiting—to see if some idea from outside would be sent telling her what to do next and full of import and omen because it had to be right and just once—“One slip in the wrong direction …,” her direction kick, should she jump down on one side of fence or other, endless space reaching out in four directions, bleak-hatted men going to work in glistening streets
uncaring of the naked girl hiding in the mist or if they’d been there and seen her would in a circle stand not touching her just waiting for the cop-authorities to come and cart her away and all their uninterested weary eyes flat with blank shame watching every part of her body—the naked babe.—The longer she hangs on the fence the less power she’ll have finally to really get down and decide, and upstairs Ross Wallenstein doesn’t even move from that junk-high bed, thinking her in the hall huddling, or he’s gone to sleep anyhow in his own skin and bone.—The rainy night blooping all over, kissing everywhere men women and cities in one wash of sad poetry, with honey lines of high-shelved Angels trumpet-blowing up above the final Orient-shroud Pacific-huge songs of Paradise, an end to fear below.—She squats on the fence, the thin drizzle making beads on her brown shoulders, stars in her hair, her wild now-Indian eyes now staring into the Black with a little fog emanating from her brown mouth, the misery like ice crystals on the blankets on the ponies of her Indian ancestors, the drizzle on the village long ago and the poorsmoke crawling out of the underground and when a mournful mother pounded acorns and made mush in hopeless millenniums—the song of the Asia hunting gang clanking down the final Alaskan rib of earth to New World Howls (in their eyes and in Mardou’s eyes now the eventual Kingdom of Inca Maya and vast Azteca shining of gold snake and temples as noble as Greek, Egypt, the long sleek crack jaws and flattened noses of Mongolian geniuses creating arts in temple rooms and the leap of their jaws to speak, till the Cortez Spaniards, the Pizarro weary old-world sissified pantalooned Dutch bums came smashing canebrake in savannahs to find shining cities of Indian Eyes high, landscaped, boulevarded, ritualled, heralded, beflagged in that selfsame New World Sun the beating heart held up to it)—her heart beating in the Frisco rain, on the fence, facing last facts, ready to go run down the land now and go back and fold
in again where she was and where was all—consoling herself with visions of truth—coming down off the fence, on tiptoe moving ahead, finding a hall, shuddering, sneaking—

“I’d made up my mind, I’d erected some structure, it was like, but I can’t—.” Making a new start, starting from flesh in the rain, “Why should anyone want to harm my little heart, my feet, my little hands, my skin that I’m wrapt in because God wants me warm and Inside, my toes—why did God make all this all so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream—why the wild ground and bodies bare and breaks—I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed—I started small and ballooned up and now I’m big and a naked child again and only to cry and fear.—Ah—Protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent its shell and thin veiled pain—wrap a robe around you, honey lamb—protect yourself from rain and wait, till Daddy comes again, and Mama throws you warm inside her valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time, be happy in the mornings.”—Making a new start, shivering, out of the alley night naked in the skin and on wood feet to the stained door of some neighbor—knocking—the woman coming to the door in answer to the frightened butter knock knuckles, sees the naked browngirl, frightened—(“Here is a woman, a soul in my rain, she looks at me, she is frightened.”)—“Knocking on this perfect stranger’s door, sure.” — “Thinking I was just going down the street to Betty’s and back, promised her
meaning
it deeply I’d bring the clothes back and she did let me in and she got a blanket and wrapped it around me, then the clothes, and luckily she was alone—an Italian woman.—And in the alley I’d all come out and
on,
it was now first clothes, then I’d go to Betty’s and get two bucks—then buy this brooch I’d seen that afternoon at some place with old seawood in the window, at North Beach, art handicraft ironwork like, a shoppey, it was the first symbol I was going to
allow myself.”—“Sure.”—Out of the naked rain to a robe, to innocence shrouding in, then the decoration of God and religious sweetness.—“Like when I had that fist fight with Jack Steen it was in my mind strongly.”—“Fist fight with Jack Steen?”—“This was earlier, all the junkies in Ross’s room, tying up and shooting with Pusher, you know Pusher, well I took my clothes off there too—it was … all … part of the same … flip …”—“But this
clothes,
this
clothes!”
(to myself).—“I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, ‘Man don’t pluck those dirty notes at ME,’ and like he just got up without a word and left.”—And Jack Steen was furious at her and thought if he hit her and knocked her out with his fists she’d come to her senses so he slugged at her but she was just as strong as he (anemic pale 110 lb. junkey ascetics of America), blam, they fought it out before the weary others.—She’d pulled wrists with Jack, Julien, beat them practically—“Like Julien finally won at wrists but he really furiously had to put me down to do it and hurt me and was really upset” (gleeful little shniffle thru the little out-teeth)—so there she’d been fighting it out with Jack Steen and really almost licking him but he was furious and neighbors downstairs called cops who came and had to be explained to—“dancing.”—“But that day I’d seen this iron thing, a little brooch with a beautiful dull sheen, to be worn around the neck, you know how nice that would look on my breast.”—“On your brown breastbone a dull gold beautiful it would be baby, go on with your amazing story.”—“So I immediately needed this brooch in spite of the time, 4
A.M
. now, and I had that old coat and shoes and an old dress she gave me, I felt like a streetwalker but I felt no one could tell—I ran to Betty’s for the two bucks, woke her up—.” She demanded the money, she was coming out of death and money was just the means to get the shiny brooch (the silly means invented by inventors of barter and haggle and styles of who owns who, who owns what—). Then she was running
down the street with her $2, going to the store long before it opened, going for coffee in the cafeteria, sitting at the table alone, digging the world at last, the gloomy hats, the glistening sidewalks, the signs announcing baked flounder, the reflections of rain in paneglass and in pillar mirror, the beauty of the food counters displaying cold spreads and mountains of crullers and the steam of the coffee urn.—“How warm the world is, all you gotta do is get little symbolic coins—they’ll let you in for all the warmth and food you want—you don’t have to strip your skin off and chew your bone in alleyways—these places were designed to house and comfort bag-and-bone people come to cry for consolation.”—She is sitting there staring at everyone, the usual sexfiends are afraid to stare back because the vibration from her eyes is wild, they sense some living danger in the apocalypse of her tense avid neck and trembling wiry hands.—“This ain’t no woman.”—“That crazy Indian she’ll kill somebody.”—Morning coming, Mardou hurrying gleeful and mind-swum, absorbed, to the store, to buy the brooch—standing then in a drugstore at the picture postcard swiveller for a solid two hours examining each one over and over again minutely because she only had ten cents left and could only buy two and those two must be perfect private talismans of the new important meaning, personal omen emblems—her avid lips slack to see the little corner meanings of the cable-car shadows, Chinatown, flower stalls, blue, the clerks wondering: “Two hours she’s been in here, no stockings on, dirty knees, looking at cards, some Third Street Wino’s wife run away, came to the big whiteman drugstore, never saw a shiny sheen postcard before—.” In the night before they would have seen her up Market Street in Foster’s with her last (again) dime and a glass of milk, crying into her milk, and men always looking at her, always trying to make her but now doing nothing because frightened, because she was like a child—and because: “Why didn’t Julien or Jack Steen or Walt Fitzpatrick give you a place to stay and leave you
alone in the corner, or lend you a couple bucks?”—“But they didn’t care, they were frightened of me, they
really
didn’t want me around, they had like distant objectivity, watching me, asking
nasty
questions—a couple times Julien went into his head-against-mine act like you know ‘Whatsamatter, Mardou,’ and his routines like that and phony sympathy but he really just was curious to find out why I was flipping—none of them’d ever give me
money,
man.”—“Those guys really treated you bad, do you know that?”—“Yeah well they never treat anyone—like they never do anything—you take care of yourself, I’ll take care of me.”—“Existentialism.”—“But American worse cool existentialism and of junkies man, I hung around with them, it was for almost a year by then and I was getting, every time they turned on, a kind of a contact high.”—She’d sit with them, they’d go on the nod, in the dead silence she’d wait, sensing the slow snakelike waves of vibration struggling across the room, the eyelids falling, the heads nodding and jerking up again, someone mumbling some disagreeable complaint, “Ma-a-n, I’m drug by that son of a bitch MacDoud with all his routines about how he ain’t got enough money for one cap, could he get a half a cap or pay a half—m-a-a-n, I never seen such nowhereness, no s-h-i-t, why don’t he just go somewhere and
fade,
um.” (That junkey ‘um’ that follows any out-on-the-limb, and anything one says is out-on-the-limb, statement,
um, he-um,
the self-indulgent baby sob inkept from exploding to the big bawl mawk crackfaced WAAA they feel from the junk regressing their systems to the crib.)—Mardou would be sitting there, and finally high on tea or benny she’d begin to feel like she’d been injected, she’d walk down the street in her flip and actually feel the electric contact with other human beings (in her sensitivity recognizing a fact) but some times she was suspicious because it was someone secretly injecting her and following her down the street who was really responsible for the electric sensation and so independent of any natural law of the universe.—“But you really didn’t believe
that—but you did—when I flipped on benny in 1945 I really believed the girl wanted to use my body to burn it and put her boy’s papers in my pocket so the cops’d think he was dead—I told her, too.”—“Oh what did she do?”—“She said, ‘Ooo daddy,’ and hugged me and took care of me, Honey was a wild bitch, she put pancake makeup on my pale—I’d lost thirty, ten, fifteen pounds—but what happened?”—“I wandered around with my brooch.”—She went into some kind of gift shop and there was a man in a wheel chair there. (She wandered into a doorway with cages and green canaries in the glass, she wanted to touch the beads, watch goldfish, caress the old fat cat sunning on the floor, stand in the cool green parakeet jungle of the store high on the green out-of-this-world dart eyes of parrots swivelling witless necks to cake and burrow in the mad feather and to feel that definite communication from them of birdy terror, the electric spasms of their notice, squawk, lawk, leek, and the man was extremely strange.)—“Why?”—“I dunno he was just very strange, he wanted, he talked with me very clearly and insisting—like intensely looking right at me and at great length but smiling about the simplest commonplace subjects but we both knew we meant everything else that we said—you know life—actually it was about the tunnels, the Stockton Street tunnel and the one they just built on Broadway, that’s the one we talked of the most, but as we talked this a great electrical current of real understanding passed between us and I could feel the other levels the infinite number of them of every intonation in his speech and mine and the world of meaning in every
word
—I’d never realized before how much is
happening
all the time, and people
know
it—in their eyes they show it, they
refuse
to show it by any other—I stayed a very long time.”—“He must have been a weirdy himself.”—“You know, balding, and queer like, and middleaged, and with that with-neck-cut-off look or head-on-air,” (witless, peaked) “looking all over, I guess it was his mother the old lady with the Paisley shawl—but
my god it would take me all day.”—“Wow.”—“Out on the street this beautiful old woman with white hair had come up to me and saw me, but was asking directions, but liked to talk—.” (On the sunny now lyrical Sunday morning after-rain sidewalk, Easter in Frisco and all the purple hats out and the lavender coats parading in the cool gusts and the little girls so tiny with their just whitened shoes and hopeful coats going slowly in the white hill streets, churches of old bells busy and downtown around Market where our tattered holy Negro Joan of Arc wandered hosannahing in her brown borrowed-from-night skin and heart, flutters of betting sheets at corner newsstands, watchers at nude magazines, the flowers on the corner in baskets and the old Italian in his apron with the newspapers kneeling to water, and the Chinese father in tight ecstatic suit wheeling the basket-carriaged baby down Powell with his pink-spot-cheeked wife of glitter brown eyes in her new bonnet rippling to flap in sun, there stands Mardou smiling intensely and strangely and the old eccentric lady not any more conscious of her Negroness than the kind cripple of the store and because of her out and open face now, the clear indications of a troubled pure innocent spirit just risen from a pit in pockmarked earth and by own broken hands self-pulled to safety and salvation, the two women Mardou and the old lady in the incredibly sad empty streets of Sunday after the excitements of Saturday night the great glitter up and down Market like wash gold dusting and the throb of neons at O’Farrell and Mason bars with cocktail glass cherrysticks winking invitation to the open hungering hearts of Saturday and actually leading only finally to Sunday-morning blue emptiness just the flutter of a few papers in the gutter and the long white view to Oakland Sabbath haunted, still—Easter sidewalk of Frisco as white ships cut in clean blue lines from Sasebo beneath the Golden Gate’s span, the wind that sparkles all the leaves of Marin here laving the washed glitter of the white kind city, in the lostpurity clouds high above redbrick track and Embarcaaero
pier, the haunted broken hint of song of old Pomos the once only-wanderers of these eleven last American now white-behoused hills, the face of Mardou’s father himself now as she raises her face to draw breath to speak in the streets of life materializing huge above America, fading—.) “And like I told her but talked too and when she left she gave me her flower and pinned it on me and called me honey.”—“Was she white?”—“Yeah, like, she was very affectionate, very plea
-sant
she seemed to love me—like save me, bring me out—I walked up a hill, up California past Chinatown, someplace I came to a white garage like with a big garage wall and this guy in a swivel chair wanted to know what I wanted, I understood all of my moves as one obligation after another to communicate to whoever not accidentally but by
arrangement
was placed before me, communicate and exchange this news, the vibration and new meaning that I had, about everything happening to everyone all the time everywhere and for them not to worry, nobody as mean as you think or—a colored guy, in the swivel chair, and we had a long confused talk and he was reluctant, I remember, to look in my eyes and really listen to what I was saying.”—“But what were you saying?”—“But it’s all forgotten now—something as simple and like you’d never expect like those tunnels or the old lady and I hanging-up on streets and directions—but the guy wanted to make it with me, I saw him open his zipper but suddenly he got ashamed, I was turned around and could see it in the glass.” (In the white planes of wall garage morning, the phantom man and the girl turned slumped watching in the window that not only reflected the black strange sheepish man secretly staring but the whole office, the chair, the safe, the dank concrete back interiors of garage and dull sheen autos, showing up also unwashed specks of dust from last night’s rainsplash and thru the glass the across-the-street immortal balcony of wooden bay-window tenement where suddenly she saw three Negro children in strange attire waving but without yelling at a Negro man four stories below
in overalls and therefore apparently working on Easter, who waved back as he walked in his own strange direction that bisected suddenly the slow direction being taken by two men, two hatted, coated ordinary men but carrying one a bottle, the other a boy of three, stopping now and then to raise the bottle of Four Star California Sherry and drink as the Frisco