Confessions of an Ignoramus

Prologue

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:11:00 +0000

(Letter to David Saxe)

Couldn't sleep all night. Wracked with guilt. I got to come clean: I didn't write that last letter! I copied it from the kid at the desk next to mine. Herman something. I was desperate, man. The thought of all those bytes I owe you and my mind a blank. I kept looking out the window at the dogs fucking in the grass and I longed to be out there, standing on the corner with my hands in my pockets waiting for the rain to stop. I was imagining myself hitchhiking to Kansas City with my saxophone and getting into some cutting contests with Coleman Hawkins at the Cherry Blossom, instead of sitting here with Michael Fitch poking me in the back of my head with his ruler.

I watched the clock's imperceptible movement, with five minutes to go eternities just kept piling up, yet time stood still. Everything was slow motion, like a death scene in a Peckinpah movie, all those kids with their huge heads and bulging eyes, motionless. And the teacher's voice like a 78 played at 16 RPM. My head hurt, my stomach was in knots, my teeth falling out all over my desk and on to the floor rattling around, crunched underfoot as Mrs Files' wooden clogs stomped down the aisle past me with that sickening sneer all over her pustulent face. As she passed my desk she let go this huge fart that rattled the maps and food-rule pinups on the green walls and echoed seemingly endlessly despite the absence of time. Overwhelming nausea rose from my feet, through my legs and body to my head and enclosed me in odious vapours. I was gasping, desperate to get away.

Those audacious dogs on the lawn and the sparrows flitting freely in the tree branches seemed to mock my bondage. In that room, frozen in time, I was invisible. Who could see me? All those remote, insensate bodies consumed with desires only to get home to their tv's, their sexless fornications, their bland porridges and sawdust dreams. I felt I could strip naked if so moved and not be observed. It was so tempting. How could I resist? A few quick glances, a furious scribbling, and the deed was done.

For a few brief hours I was a free man. With paper in hand I leapt from my seat and was out the door, clouds of chalk dust swirling in my wake and clinging to my face, filling my lungs so that I could barely breathe. I ran down the halls, tears of joy streaming from my eyes, flying in all directions, and mixing with the chalk dust and forming a thick white paste that clung to the walls, the green lockers filled with pictures of tits ripped from photo magazines, and the ceilings. But even as I ran I felt remorse begin its inevitable stirrings in the pit of my belly.

I saw you at your Mac, in your Vermont studio, your heart aflutter at new mail. My thoughts were troubled. "Would he know? Could he tell? And, if not, could I live with myself? His trust betrayed? Could I pass a mirror or my reflection in Belman's window without self-loathing welling up from my twinburger-clogged arteries?" The thought of your reading my letter, moved to tears and passionate sentiments by words that were actually written by that Herman kid, began to torment me. Even as I ran I vowed to destroy that letter and admit my failure to you; to cancel my Internet account and burn my computer; to go Offline, shamed forever. But as I passed the girl's washroom Desirée Lopez appeared, the flourescent light glinting off her pony-tail as the door behind her gently swung shut. One look at the light illuminating those silken strands and I was a goner. My shiksa goddess! Her V-neck tunic stretched across those glorious pubescent tits and flowed downward across yearning hips stopping just in time to reveal her golden ankles where they rose from pure, blessed white socks. At that moment, and for eternity, I was a lost soul.

That moment was like years as I froze, transfixed, in that darkened hallway, with only the vision of Desirée in a circle of light before me. All fear, loathing, and worrisome angst vanished from my mind, my spirit, my very soul. My epistolary debt to you was not even a dim memory. My flight was forgotten, slowed to a gentle stroll as I passed by her silent, unaware beauty. And as I passed I nonchalantly punched her shoulder. She turned to me, her face bathed in a sunrise.

Desirée Lopez. Blonde Madonna of the wrong side of the tracks. Jerk-off fantasy for pimply, juvenile hoodlums and sheygetz boneheads. Scion of alcoholic remittance men and grey-skinned harridans cooking wiener breakfasts in radioactive livingrooms watching Leave it to Beaver through gigantic magnifying lenses while their sons fondle their grotesque uncircumcised schlongs in puke-infested Chevys. Standing there on the verge of a hopeless future, she sees me, boner rising; her shoulder tingling with love and the promise of salvation; touched by a poet.

The drowning man sees his life in a flash. So, too, the saved man, and the saved chick, see not only the history of their bleak, unpromising lives but also the luminous purview of a golden eternity beckoning. The years before us filled my heart with glee. There'd be months of preparation as I nourished her starving soul. At my feet, massaging my ankles, I'd read poetry to her, teaching her the wisdoms. I'd play albums, instilling in her a deep understanding of the various drummers. Soon she'll be tacking up posters of Greek art, Spanish bullfights, Mongo Santamaria, all over the kitchen walls, of her own accord. Then on to Manhattan, where in our Soho love-loft she'll cook me stews as I sit at my table writing masterpiece after masterpiece...

Whoa!!!...."Desirée," I cried. "Wait here. Don't budge. I'll be back in a few hours. I just got to go write Dave a letter. We can't start a new life with Guilt hanging over my head like this. Stay right there. I'll be right back." And I was off again.

Down past the radioactive slop-ponds I fell into a trance watching x-ray men sitting on the benches, tears falling on their photo-albums. I could see right through them, veterans of nuclear wars and Walmarts. Hopeless orphans creaking through the days. I searched my pockets for loonies and, finding none, I doffed my toque and went on, a sad heart crying within. I'm so lucky, I thought. I fell to my knees praising God, thanking him for sparing me. Suddenly a big truck came roaring down the street, wildly out of control, headed directly for a baby playing on the street, her mother watching horror-struck from the opposite sidewalk, immobilized with dread.

Suddenly I saw Witney Beamish coming out of the Walmart with Mitzi Gaynor. They both carried big bags of kitchen gadgets. I called to him and walked over, grasping his hand in mine and pumping madly, causing him to drop some of his load. At first he didn't recognize me but Mitzi did. "Hey, Beamish," she cried. "It's Brian. Sonofabitch!" We walked over to the Starbucks and sat silent over three lattes. None of us could think of a thing to say. We sat there for half an hour, totally silent, looking around nervously and humming. The monotony was occasionally broken when some old duffer recognized Mitzi Gaynor and asked for her autograph. Finally, I could stand it no longer. It was driving me crazy. I turned to Witney and, with thoughts of all that we'd been through together, I said to him, "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon those with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know that my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."

Suddenly the phone rang, but it was a wrong number. I got on a bus and went home. Stars like sandwiches in a birdlike monastery flew, a hortense of callishers, sad but invisible destinies filled with paint. Rocks to go, I thought. Butter news or fats waller in time for time ascap sentences, or the flippy sides dental orchestra - I have will not but no to have go not no yes but who, who would yes? And Aaron took him Elisheba, daughter of Amminadab, sister of Naashon, to wife; and she bare him Nadab, and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. And the sons of Korah; Assir, and Elkanah, and Abiasaph: these are the families of the Korhites. And Eleazar Aaron's son took him one of the daughters of Putiel to wife; and she bare him Phinehas: these are the heads of the fathers of the Levites according to their families.

Suddenly I remembered something I read about Clifford Brown, in a book by Julio Cortazar. It went something like this: "That difficult custom of being dead. Like Bird, like Bud, ``he didn't stand the ghost of a chance'', but before dying he spoke his most obscure name, he had long held the thread of a secret discourse, damp with the modesty that quivers on the Greek stelae where a thoughtful young man gazes at the white night of the marble. Clifford's music in these moments captures something that usually escapes in jazz, that nearly always escapes from what we write or paint or love. Suddenly, near the middle of the piece we sense that the unerringly groping trumpet, searching for the only way to sail beyond the limit, is less a soliloquy than a contact. It is the description of an ephemeral and difficult affirmation, of a precarious relinquishment:
before and after, normality. When I want to know what the shaman feels in the highest tree on the path, face to face with a night apart from time, I listen oncemore to the testament of Clifford Brown, a wing-beat that rends the continuum, that invents an island of the absolute within disorder. And afterwards, once again the custom wherein he and so many others are dead."

Wait a minute! How could you possibly have written 149,424 bytes more than me? It's inconceivable. Something's wrong here. I got to check this out, again.

It's Sunday. Lucky for me it's still raining. I had to wait around the house all day waiting for these two guys from Price Waterhouse to show up. I had a bad feeling that I'd fucked up somehow and I called this outfit to send someone over to do an independent audit of our correspondence.

When they showed up I'd been lying on the porch face up so I could watch the rain come straight down at me, and if I let my mind go it was like I was hurtling through outer space, the drops of rain like miniscule wet stars bashing me all over. These two guys, a fat one with a moustache and a thin one with a scar that ran from the top of his head down the back of his brown gaberdine suit, stood over me without saying a word for minutes on end.

Finally the big guy says, "Didn't you used to hang out at the La Paloma, back in the early to mid-sixties?"

"It's not THE La Paloma, it's LA Paloma," I replied. "LA means THE in Spanish. That's like saying The The Paloma."

"Wise guy," the thin one said. Then they let themselves in. I got up and went in and turned on all the elements on the stove so I could get hot and dry off. I was a mess. I poured myself a cup of coffee. Thick, dark coffee. Piping hot, rich, dark coffee. Deep roasted, steaming, thick, rich, dark, good-to-the-last-drop coffee. Coffee to restore a man's soul to the condition it was in before he found it. A cup of java to singe the linings of a soprano's throat; to raise the injured spirit and make the heart flinch in joy. A big, fat, ceramic mug with "Boss Lady" stencilled on it, steaming full of an ebony fluid brewed from specially selected beans raised on the verdant slopes high atop an Andean paradise by short men with big hats.

The kitchen filled with heavy steam from my sodden clothes and body. Condensation formed on the walls and appliances and ran down in rivulets, forming puddles on the floor which grew deep and started spreading towards the livingroom where they soaked into the rug. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Desirée Lopez and Candy Lutz singing Swingle Singer versions of Bach's Goldberg Variation in close harmony from a phone booth in Oakland. It was so beautiful. There was a knock on the door. I put the phone down and splashed to the front door to answer the pounding there. There were seventeen mailmen with a registered letter for someone who had lived here before but had died when he tried to walk to Halifax to raise awareness of the plight of scat singers in Iran. I asked them why it took seventeen mailmen and the shortest one replied that they were taking a night course in mail delivery. I looked past them at the darkness everywhere and realized that it had gotten late. So late that darkness was everywhere upon the face of the earth and the waters thereon. The mailmen left in tears when I said their addressee was dead but, as they descended the steps, twenty-three cabdrivers arrived demanding clam chowder. It seems they'd all arranged to meet on a break and had gotten lost. They thought our place was an all-night diner. How foolish.

When I got back to the phone the two guys from Price Waterhouse were both trying to listen to the gals doin' the twenty-first variation and tears streamed from their eyes, it was so beautiful. You can imagine, I was getting pretty pissed off by then. After all, a phone call is a private matter. I didn't even know these guys.

I grabbed the phone and pressed the receiver to my ear. Tears began to stream from my eyes. It was so beautiful. I was reminded of all the wonderful, happy days of my youth in Montreal. Growing up on Clark Street was an experience I'll never forget. Those long, endless summer days playing with my friends Gordy and Carl Arfin, and Gerry Weinman, building scooters out of broken roller skates and old orange crates, and hanging out on the stoops at night telling each other ghost stories under a huge Canadian sky filled with stars, the face in the moon watching over us. We'd walk down to White's for ice cream and dawdle there, listening to older guys joking and telling tall tales, about fast broads and gangsters. Older men spoke about Russia. About hard times and the journey to America. But at night, in my room, I was shaken with unknown terrors. Lying there, I'd watch the lights from car headlamps three floors below form stripes on the ceiling as they shone through the venetian blinds. They'd stretch across the walls and ceiling, then fade and come again. What was I scared of? The future? In other rooms the family drama was played out. A life I could not fathom. Mysteries. Sex and death. Russia. Old men with beards praying. Fear of goyim. Hate. Stalin. Duplessis. Korea.

And it just kept getting worse. The older I got the worse it got. School. Work. Roles. It stayed a mystery. Yet the more I grasped of that strange puzzle the more of a mystery I became to myself. One of us was out of whack, me or conventional reality. The town just wasn't big enough for both of us. We had a showdown at high noon on a spring day in 1961 on Main Street under a blazing hot sky. I lost. I had twenty-four hours to get out of town.

I set forth in search of Truth. I was prepared to spend my life in it's quest, roaming the globe. I'd go hungry, if need be. I'd starve if I had to. I'd skip meals, if so required. I saw before me endless years without rest tillI found the answer. A vagabond drifting o'er the world, from town to city to mountain, clad in jeans and sweatshirt, my army surplus pack on my back, thumbing rides and sleeping in jails and missions and fields on the edges of cities, my tattered copy of The Scripture of the Golden Eternity stuck in my back pocket and a jug of Liebfraumilch in my pack. As it turned out, Truth wasn't hard to locate. I think it took about twenty minutes before Truth tapped my shoulder and said, "Pssst, hey...over here."

Thirty or more years later there I am in a cardboard townhouse on a nuclear dumpsite with a phone to my ear listening to lost love singing duets to me while auditors from a multi-national accounting firm check my hard drive for evidence of epistolary rectitude. Somewhere in another room my fiancee is painting furniture, the neighbours are slamming doors, their dogs bark nonstop, and the air is filled with bad smells and obnoxious noises from terrible machines that do no good.

I've forgotten something. I don't know what. I put the phone down and go outside. The rain has stopped. I go down to the water and stare out across False Creek at the city, it's glass towers shrouded in brown smog. I light a cigarette and breathe deep. I shut my eyes and feel that nicotine glow lift me in it's beatific arms. I'm fifty years old. I don't feel as if I've even begun to live, yet. Because I've forgotten something. A kid walks up behind me and taps my shoulder. "Pssst, hey...over here."

I turn around. It's me. It's me at six years old. No...wait. That's ridiculous. It's a panhandler looking for a handout. No, there are no panhandlers around here. It's Mr Pycock, back from the beyond with poetry tips. No, it's Allen Ginsberg. It's Witney Beamish. Okay, okay...I don't know who it is. It's no one. Forget it. I finish my fag and toss the butt into the water and watch it float and bob past a couple of lazy good-for-nothing ducks.

cont'd . . .

Prologue part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:09:00 +0000

I recall the ducks of my youth. Big white things with yellow bills. These guys are small brown dirty-looking little faggots. They mock me. They're mock ducks. Anyway, I turn to go back to the house when it starts raining again. I love the rain. It's the middle of December and it's raining. I recall the precipitation of my youth. Snow and ice that soon turned black and crusty on the glacial pavement. Dangerous miserable hell. Once I slipped on a sliding ice patch on my way to school. You know those ice patches that would form on the sidewalk and kids would take a running start, slide from one end to the other. So I slid and fell over backwards and whacked my head down hard on solid ice. I got up and stood for a second. It was mid-day, bright, I was heading back to school after lunch my mom made me: meat loaf and french fries, my absolute favorite meal. Suddenly it got black as night with two streams of brightly coloured stars shooting outward from my eyes. I thought I'd died. It was a glorious sight but I knew I was one dead kid. But it passed. The day lit up, again, and I got along to school, believing in my heart that I'd certainly fucked up my brain for good. I was scared shitless. For days, weeks, months I waited to go berserk with a bashed brain. To disintegrate mentally and die a painful lunatic death. Eventually I forgot about it, I guess.

One day Sheldon Beckler and me were walking by the railroad tracks. We watched a train go by and as it passed us it emitted a blast of steam from under one of the cars. Sheldon told me that it was poison gas and that we were gonna die. I said I felt okay and he said it might take days or weeks but eventually it would kill us. I was nine or ten. It never occurred to me to wonder why trains would go around poisoning kids during peacetime. For days and weeks I was terrified, waiting to die a slow poison death.

He was a weird kid, anyway. His aim in life was to mug old ladies and just generally be a hooligan. Once we ran into his old man in an alley and he told him to fuck off and called him a jerk. I never heard anyone talk to a parent like that. I was completely impressed and disturbed. His dad looked pathetically at me, smiling this sick, lost, smile. I felt awful. I'd pay up to five bucks to find out where Sheldon Beckler is now.

I walk home, wet again. I go in the kitchen, stand by the red hot elements and pour more coffee. I stand in the kitchen all night long drinking cup after cup of black coffee. Really. My strength is as the strength of a hundred men. I never tire, I never sit. Caffeine for blood by now. By morning, despite no sleep and having stood in sopping clothes by a hot stove, all elements going redhot and even the oven on with open door, I feel like a million bucks, though I am very speedy and my mind is racing furiously. Barbara saunters in about eight, nightgowned and bleary-eyed and pours herself a cup. She says, "What happened to you last night and who're those guys in your room?" I'm so speedy her voice sounds like a 78 played at 16. Outside it's raining again, harder than ever. Sometimes, despite the fact that I like the winter rain, being far better than eastern weather, the relentless drizzle day after day can get on my nerves. But I love it when it pours like this. The roar of water everywhere, battering the roof, overflowing the gutters, biblical vengeance. One of my most memorable cinematic experiences was the part in The Illustrated Man that takes place entirely on the planet of constant, everlasting rain, two space travellers marooned there forever.

I look at Barbara standing there cute as a button in her paint splattered nightie. Paint on her arms, in her hair, on her face. For weeks now she's been painting everything in sight. Walls, furniture, old coffee tins. I'm afraid to move around in this place for fear of sticking to the walls. She waits for me to answer her query and I continue to stand there dumbstruck by lack of sleep and gallons of java. She shrugs and takes her cup to the living room where she puts on a Kate and Anna tape. This is not what I want to hear at this particular time so I go outside and lie down on the porch and once again surrender to the assaulting deluge, the earth beneath our house humming with nuclear decay.

I recall the nuclear nightmares of my youth. At the time I had no idea that that's what they were, but they were so vivid and frightening. The city's desolate and grey, no one in sight. There is a sickness in my brain as alone I wander. I go to the school, the yard is bleak and empty. No one's there but Witney Beamish. He appears calm, untroubled, as though he understands yet I am in an unknowing fog. The air is thick and grey, death is everywhere. I wake up, still sick in mind, alone at night in a dark room in a world I can't fathom. Not till many years later do I realize that I was just not getting enough to eat. I may be hypoglycemic or otherwise afflicted by some kind of blood-sugar disorder. I was a problem eater as a kid. I hated just about everything except meatloaf and fries. And sugar. I ate sweets constantly, even whole sugarcubes which we stocked for the grandparents tea. They'd suck a cube while sipping tea, that's how it worked. The sugar actually came in squares and my grandmother would sit there with an old sugarcube splitter that she brought from Russia, splitting each square into four cubes. And remember those erasers we had in school? Half pencil and half ink and neither worked? Or wooden Yo-yos? Bolo-bats? Anyway, for years I hardly ate and compounded my problems by addling my wits further with mega- doses of glucose. I'm lucky to be alive.

The rain keeps afalling. And now a howling wind adds to the mayhem. It's too much, even for me, so I go back inside to stand by the stove again. The McGariggle tape is over but I still hear singing, faintly, as if from a distant hotel for unwed mothers. I strain to hear. It's like the cry of snowbirds in a careless revery. It's like a dream of moondogs lost in time. It's like the cutting edge of being and nothingness. It's like wildebeest caught in a senseless trek 'cross the Serengeti with no money. Like ocelots dreaming of fireplaces on the Plains of Abraham. Like tenor saxes wailing on the frozen tundra in broad daylight. Like the angels of Russia weeping over innocent blood on a Saturday night. Like squares of sugar rolling off the assembly line in a factory in smokey Pointe St Charles. Like the luminous skin of Desirée Lopez shining taut and naked in the rosy illumination of lights in a hallway in paradise. Like the sweet heavenly fragrance of Candy Lutz unclothed under covers in a bed in the basement maid's room with my hands on her perfect dainty breasts and crotch mystery while her mother broods and worries from the master bedroom upstairs and calls out, "Candy, Candy What're you doing?", and my cock fearful and won't rise and her eyes invisible behind the dark glasses.

I'm baffled. Am I crazy, finally? Hearing voices. Son of Sam. I go in the livingroom and they become less faint. I go to the window and look out at the appletree, bedecked now with inedible christmas lights where just weeks ago apples hung. No one's out there and even if there were they'd hardly be singing in this godawful theme park. Just a bleak wet vista brightened slightly by tiny coloured bulbs twinkling. I recall the yuletide ornaments of my youth. At home we could happily ignore the derangement of the christian citizens. But school was another matter altogether. No choice but to feign consent when sucked in to memorializing the birth of some kid who'd go on to inspire two thousand years of pogroms. We were aliens here, to be sure, but still had to kick in a couple of bucks for the class tree, though we were reviled by the uncircumcised ones who took our money. The fact that this upstart they were going apeshit over was one of us was beyond their grasp. That we had this holiday for three thousand yearsbefore the bastard's birth was likewise too deep to get. We not only paid for the tree, we each had to bring some cheap object to hang on it. I didn't mind that part. There was something pleasant about these shiny orbs, so light and delicate and perfect. I actually feel some slight nostalgia just thinking about them. The last day before xmas break we got to take them home. We delighted, walking home in gangs, in bashing each other skulls with them. It didn't hurt and the balls crumpled into puny fragments so easily.

The rain let up a while. Brightness grew in the southern sky. The sun wouldn't break through, I knew that, but for a while it was lookin' good. I stood my ground. Watched the lights. Listened to faint, distant voices singing. Where in goddam hell were they coming from? I had to have something to eat. Barbara's mixing paint somewhere. Newspapers are scattered all over the floor, protecting vinyl and carpeting from paint drops. I haven't looked at a newspaper for about six months. No radio or TV. I discuss current affairs with no one. At last I know what's going on. I'm still as ignorant as a piece of furniture but, somehow, my understanding of world events has never been clearer. And it's second to none. Basically, in my view, we're doomed.

We live in astounding technological times. I sit at my table in western Canada banging out nonsense on a hunk of plastic with buttons all over it while the rain falls outside in the dark and within seconds this garbage can infest your brain out there in Vermont, thousands of miles away. Yet the guy next door can't understand a word I say. For all he knows I might as well be a Turk strumming on a prairie dog.

I haven't seen those guys in a while. Price and Waterhouse or whatever. Probably upstairs stealing records, though they didn't strike me as the types to be much interested in music. Maybe looking for porno magazines or dope. I recall the sex and drugs of my youth. Ah, skip it. I go in the kitchen and fry up some buckwheat. I sit down with a comic book and eat the shit with tahini and soy sauce poured all over it, read the funnies. My mind wanders. Maybe I ought to go back to work, I think. My life's getting ridiculous. Strange thoughts weave through my daily speculations. Bizarre episodes and impossible ambitions deter clear reasoning. Since the rains came I never leave the house, except to go for more buckwheat or up to the drugstore for batteries. If I'm lucky Barbara will pick up my smokes on her way back from the paint store. I spent most of the summer in bars but now I'd rather lie face up on the porch getting pummeled by raindrops. Usually, when the rain stops I go up to my room and bang out letters on the computer. I'd write one now but those guys are up there, supposedly analyzing files, counting bytes, or whatever. No, I can't go back to work. As far as I'm concerned I've retired. I've been on sick leave almost six months now. My friend Terry says that as I'm fifty I may qualify for a disability pension. Wow! That's for Me! I got this nifty little computer program. You enter your exact date and time of birth, your sex, and whether you smoke or not. Then every time you call it up you get a picture of an hour glass displaying your time left, in seconds, as the sand trickles from top to bottom. Of course I've got way more sand at the bottom than at the top. There are about 640 million seconds left on top. That's about twenty years, which pretty well jibes with what I'd figured, anyway. So no more jobs. No more post office. No more dealing daily with lesser beings who mistakenly believe they exercise some sort of authority over me or that we're doing something important. Why should I waste my time performing senseless tasks when I could waste my time living a senseless life?

Maybe I should go to night school. The night school flyer showed up a few days ago and I've been reading it while eating buckwheat when I can't find a comic or old Down Beat. Barbara's talking about taking some housepainting course and it'd be nice to ride the bus to school with her one rainy night a week, like a couple of kids going steady...carry her books, feel her up. Don't know what to take, though. All previous night school tries were dismal failures. Silk screen, darkroom, fashion photo, ballroom dancing, figure drawing (felt like seeing nudes awhile). All arty deals. But I never lasted more than a couple of weeks. There I was, voluntarily...enthusiastic, even. Yet it felt like school. I couldn't shake that dread. I stared at the clock and waited for it to end. What was the point? I'd like to give it another shot, though. Nothing arty this time. Something practical. I see they now have topics like Self Esteem Workshop, Basic Communication Skills for Interpersonal Relationships ("It's not what you say, it's HOW you say it." "Fuck you thank you!"), Self Realization through Macrame, Identifying Voices in the Background, etc. Or one of these travel deals. Food Tour of Romania. I'd get to go somewhere. Let's face it, my hitch-hiking days are over. I've lost the nerve to just GO, anywhere anytime. Although it was a great satisfaction to learn that I'd hitch-hiked at least thirty times more than Kerouac by the time I was fifteen. He probably got laid more, though. Maybe I could be a Guide for one of those things. That would solve two problems. Work and night school. Combine them. Nation's Guided Tour of Hot Spots of the Beat Generation, bongos provided. Hang out in the Village, North Beach, the studios where Peter Gunn and Johnny Staccato were filmed, L'Enfer, Guilbault Street, etc. Of course I'd rather go to Paris.

I finish my groats and put the bowl in the freezer. I don't wash my bowls till the freezer's full. Germs don't grow there so it's better than leaving them lying around. For some reason, when Barbara found out she had a fit. I said, "Okay, I'll leave 'em lying around so you can paint them. That'd be just as good." She shut up after that. Now I pour myself another coffee to wash down my Paxil and vitamin C tablet. I should have a nap. Normally I sleep about ten hours a night and have four or five naps during the day. Of course last night I didn't sleep at all. I just stood in the kitchen trying to make sense of my life. So I may need more naps today. We'll see.

The maid, Germinal, enters the kitchen with my mail and the latest newspapers from Zagreb. Germinal is seventy-two and weighs close to six hundred pounds. No kidding. She was already here when Barbara moved in. It seems she worked for the previous occupants but, rather swiftly, gained about four hundred and fifty pounds within weeks before they moved out. They died, actually. Radiation poisoning. Anyway, Germinal got too big to get through the doorways, so she stayed on. We don't pay her anything since she can't leave in any case. She sleeps in the foyer as, of course, she won't fit into any bedroom. The only flaw in this setup is that she masturbates continually and is a junkie. I've never seen such a fat junkie. Also, Barbara and I have to go downtown regularly to score for her. But it's worth it as she does occasionally remove my bowls from the freezer and put them in an oven set at 800 degrees Fahrenheit to burn off any crud. She also brings my mail, etc. And she translates the newspapers since I don't speak whatever language it is they speak in Zagreb. Neither does Germinal but she makes it all up and has a very interesting imagination. Mostly she tells stories from her youth, when she was thin. Barbara usually waits impatiently by the doorway for Germinal to finish pretending she's reading the papers to me so she can start spreading them around to keep paint off our stuff.

Okay, okay, I'm making it up. There's no Germinal. I must be crazy. Why would I make up a fat seventy-two-year-old maid? Newspapers from Zagreb? I need help. No, I need sleep. That's it.

The truth is, we have a butler. Witney Beamish. We ran an ad one day and he showed up. Amazing, huh? Small world. I know you think I'm making this up but it's God's truth. Of course it's not the same Witney Beamish from Grade 9. Just another guy with the same name who looks exactly like the guy we knew but older. He's fifty, from Montreal, and went to West Hill. He showed up with his pal, David Saxe. Not you. Another David Saxe that looks like you and lives in Vermont. We only needed one butler so Saxe had to go. Lucky for him he got a job right next door to us at our neighbour John Nutt's. Helps him steal cars.

A fellow will remember things you wouldn't think he'd remember. One day I was on a bus going to Miami. Not the beach. Miami. I was eighteen. A girl got on and sat beside me. She was going to Daytona to visit her grandmother. It was nighttime so I could not see her so well but I could see enough to know she was very young and very beautiful. We spoke a while and fell asleep. I slept lightly for every time she moved she touched me slightly. Her arms were bare and were the softest, loveliest things I'd ever seen or touched. We were on that bus together less than a couple of hours - but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl. Just thought I'd mention it.

Kharmann Ghia

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:08:00 +0000

I walked out of the Seattle bus terminal in the early morning. I saw a Kharmann Ghia pull up and a guy, about twenty-five, twenty-six, carrying a guitar case gets out. The driver, a girl a bit younger, kisses him goodbye and gets back behind the wheel. I rush over and poke my head in the window and say the first thing that comes to mind. "Is that guy a folk singer?" A dumb question, to be sure, but I had to think fast and, also, I'd had a lot of good luck with folksingers in my journeys. She's a bit taken aback but replies, "Uh...yeah. He is."

"Oh...well, uh, yeah I just wondered. I see he's got a guitar so I just wondered. He your husband?"

"No. He's my brother. You just get off a bus?"

"Yeah, just a few minutes ago. I just came down from Vancouver."

"Uh...listen...would you like some breakfast? I could make you something to eat."

"Sure. That would be great."

"Alright. Get in."

It's summer. 1963. I'm nineteen years old, on my way to San Francisco. I'd started out hitchhiking but got turned back at the border. I had to bum a ride back to Vancouver and get on a bus. The border cops knew I was going to San Francisco, which I stupidly told them, so I had to get a roundtrip San Francisco ticket, which I planned to get refunded in Seattle. Sure enough, when they get on the bus at the border to check every one out, they call out my name. "Brian Nash..Nach... (mumble) aboard?" Checked my ticket and I was cool. In Seattle I get off the bus. It may be June or July. Sun shining. Glorious day.

Depending on where you stand, or sit, when surveying the unfolding of my life it may appear in any number of different ways. One might witness an endless chain of failures. On the other hand, from a different point of view, it very well may appear as an endless chain of failures. But not to me. I don't care what anyone thinks. Whatever's happened, happened. And whatever I've done, I've done. (Brilliant, huh?) I've just as much right to publish memoirs as anyone. Why's Henry Miller more interesting than me? I'll tell you why. He can write. That's it. He's just better at lying about sex than I am. And if I'd lived exactly the same life as I have lived, only in Paris, everyone would be clamouring to buy my books. I think. My problem is honesty. I can't lie. Otherwise I'd be a bigger hit at parties, in bars, and with certain types of women. For example, twenty-eight years ago Ivy Carpenter offered me a jean jacket that had belonged to Lenny Bruce. I don't remember why I turned it down. Maybe it didn't fit me or maybe it was white. I didn't wear white denim. But the thing is I often, over the years, told people that I almost had Lenny Bruce's jacket. This news was usually received with about as much interest as what grades of sandpaper I had at home. It finally occurred to me:
why not just say my jacket used to belong to Lenny Bruce? People would be entertained for about fifty seconds and no harm done. But I could never bring myself to lie about it. So what I started doing was telling the original dull story and then added what I've just said about trying to lie about it. This is why Henry Miller is a better storyteller, but I'm way deeper, philosophically.

I climbed in the passenger seat of that sexy Ghia, tossing my pack over into the back. We drove for no more than ten or fifteen minutes before we got to her house. On the way I learned that her name was Jane Bow, she had a very young daughter, about three years old, named Eve, and a husband. I always find it so amazing when I read memoirs. The details of a life that are so richly rendered. Moods, conversations, meals, how everyone looked and what they wore. And almost by definition a published autobiography must describe the life of one who has done a lot over a long period. Memoirs are usually composed by old people. How do they remember so much? I'm only fifty and have hardly done anything and yet those incidents in my life that I treasure as meaningful, illuminating, or even just interesting, are vague myths, obscured by time. I remember so little about them. Do those authors lie? Make stuff up to fill in the blanks? In fact, aren't myths lies that tell the Truth? Isn't it more revealing to make up a good story than to simply itemize facts?

Why would a young woman, no older than twenty-three or four, probably less, married, and the mother of a baby girl, pick up a strange guy at a bus station and take home to fix him a meal? I admit, at nineteen I was a pretty sweet kid. I looked like a bum, with long scraggly hair and beard, dirty clothes, stinky running shoes and grungy teeth. But I was sweet, and my talk was pleasant. Despite my bold play in front of the depot, I was shy, innocent. I think, also, in spite of of my ratty attire, I was somewhat handsome back then, more or less. Why else would even a dame like Booby have fallen for me at the Spanish Club? But, still, Jane was no dope. Why'd she do it?

Banana Splitsville

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:07:00 +0000

Once upon a time.

Well, so much for fairy tales. Why did she do it? Maybe she was just being friendly. Just being nice. It happens. Maybe she was depressed and suicidal. You don't pick up strange guys at a bus station without a certain amount of risk involved. Maybe I was not, am not, really so strange. Could it be she saw an ally in my eyes, those sad eyes? All these years I wondered about her but maybe I should have wondered more about the brother with the guitar case off to god knows where. Where did he go? Did she tell me? Not surprising I'd forget even if she did.

Back in her kitchen we had some food. She nursed her baby girl, Eve, at the table and I ate some eggs and toast. Coffee. Her husband slept in the next room and I was careful not to let my imagination go crazy. Is this where I'd at long last abandon my virginity? Probably not. Whether her husband was sleeping a room away or not. All these sexy ruminations were, of course, way off the mark since the scene enacted there in the kitchen had more to do with lost souls, with the sad, aimless human journey. The freight of past errors. And constant hope. I ate my eggs and had more coffee. A cigarette. James Baldwin. She asked me if I knew anything about James Baldwin.

"I read Another Country. Thought it was pretty good. He happens to be a fag, though. I know that."

"I met James Baldwin. When I was in London he gave a talk I went to and I went up and talked to him after."

What a putz I am, I thought. So what if he's a homo? I got nothing against homos. In fact I like homos. I'm just showing off how smart I am and I am in fact a putz. Lucky for me she's far too kind to pay my outburst any mind. She goes on, as if she understands my sexual anxiety, to say that despite his queerness he was the most brilliant man she ever heard talk and he was, as a matter of fact, very nice to her. They went for coffee and talked for hours. Exchanged addresses and phone numbers. She wants to write, she writes. James Baldwin looked at a story of hers and liked it, offerred advice.

Her husband shows up, half asleep from the bedroom and grunts at me when we're introduced. He couldn't care less.

"Any coffee?" Grabs a cup and gulps several mouthsfull before slamming the door on his way out. I should marry her now, I think, or at least go to bed with her and think of a way to save her life. I'm not ready for a family, though the idea has great romantic appeal. Two writers in Paris with baby Eve crawling about the atelier. I play jazz albums for them. No, expatriate black american musicians living in Paris will be our friends. James Baldwin comes for dinner. Babysits. I realize now that all those thoughts are exactly what Jane Bow is thinking as she watches me consume her scrambled eggs and toast, her delicious coffee.

Later we drive to the university district and get out of the car and walk around. The sun shines down. Eve's in her stroller happy as can be thinking, no doubt, I'll be her daddy now. I'm too young and scraggly looking but my heart's in the right place. I observe how lovely the day is, how lovely the city is. We discuss the city's qualities and Jane suggests I could stay there, since there's no more real purpose to my journey than to look things over in San Francisco. Ah, she knows I can't take her with me so she wants me to stay. So I get back on a bus and head south.

I never forgot Jane and Eve Bow. I never forgot a guy who picked me up on a northern Ontario highway and drove me to a campsite where his wife and daughter were waiting for him. They fed me and let me sleep in the back of the car and in the morning, while breakfast cooked, I took a walk in the woods with their little girl who was no more than seven or eight. She talked to me, asked questions I couldn't answer, and told me about happy family life in Ontario. I never forgot her, or that walk.

Imagine letting a strange guy walk off into the dewy morning forest with your baby girl. Imagine picking him up beside the night highway in the first place. Those were different times. And I suppose that despite my looks I appeared to be, like I said, just a sweet kid on a worthy trip. But, still. Why did they do it?

A kind of whirlwind from nowhere moves in so quick I'm stunned. Stunned and sucked up into its heart. I'm spun a year into the future. I know, I know. These things don't happen. Well, yes, they do happen when you're just writing it. Suddenly everything's gone. The house and creek and the endless rain. Paint and cabdrivers and mystery music. I'm ten flights up in an apartment from which I can see great distances. Huge ships floating in English Bay. A crazy quilt of fog-enshrouded cities. Lights and stars and everything blinking, twinkling, and trembling. I take the elevator down and walk out into the street and find a nearly-deserted restaurant with just an old lady struggling with a tiny cream container. Once I sat in the Marquis de Sade Cafe with Jane, another Jane, saying goodbye. I was heading west again. Across the aisle another old lady sat trying toget her creamer open as a silent sadness enclosed us all. I can't get those damn things open either. Suddenly the thing explodes in her fat hands and a comet tail of cream shoots over and splatters us like white blood. Oh christ I mutter to Jane and the obese but otherwise innoucuous old lady flips her wig and gets mad at me. "No need to get rude," she explains. "It's just an accident I didn't mean it you don't have to get so filthy." I only want to talk to Jane, to be there with her in a quiet parting, my last night. I never even looked at the cream lady but she won't let up. "You're really disgusting you know it was just an accident and ...." Jane and I can't get a word in. Eventually we just have to get up and go. Walk back to the flat through autumn. Dark, wet streets and the chill just coming on. Another reason to head west now: a milder climate.

I find a booth as far as possible from this new cream lady.

Once I went to the Long John Silver Ice Cream Parlour with Eddie, Spiff, Juanita, and Marcel and tried to order a banana. I don't like ice cream. I saw this pile of bananas pretty as a picture on a glass shelf above the Hamilton Beaches.

"I'll just have a banana, thanks."

"We don't sell bananas."

"What do you call those yellow things up there?"

"Those'r for banana splits."

"Well, just sell me one."

"I can't sell a banana. I wouldn't know what to charge."

"I'll pay you a dollar. Banana's probably worth a dime or less."

"No, can't do it." She's starting to get peeved.

"Okay. I'll pay the price of a banana split. Just give me the banana."

"Listen, son. We don't sell bananas. Now is there something else you would like?"

"Tell you what. Make me a banana split, okay?"

"Fine."

"Then shove everything off the banana and serve it to me."

By now Flo or Doris or whatever she's called is about ready to phone the police. Except she would never call the cops because she is in full possession of the extraordinary strength of her beliefs. Unlike my own universe, hers has order, certainty, and an unshakable confidence. I respect her for this. I even love her for it. She needs no help from the authorities.

"I can make you a banana split. But if I do you're gonna eat it. Otherwise you can sit there till your friends leave."

"Can you make me an egg cream?"

"Yes."

Tonight I sit alone over a cup of black coffee.

The lady with the cream thing gets up to leave. She lifts her cup and holds it high, turns it over and drains the last remaining drops into her lipsticked mouth. She puts the cup down and takes her smoldering fag from the ashtray and sucks the last bit of burning nicotine out of it before squashing the butt. I watch her every move because there's nothing else to watch. Shuffling out she stops at my booth and says, "I love this view."

I look out the window. There's nothing but traffic. Cars and trucks, buses, people moving quickly. No one's dawdling or talking and it's about as interesting as the pet food section at Safeway. I don't get it.

"Trouble is people nowadays, mostly Asians, never stop for the view. It's so beautiful but they're all looking straight ahead and they never see it."

I humour her. "Yes it's a great view. I like the sunsets, especially."

"No. I mean right now!"

I grab the menu and pretend I've got to read something important there, pray she'll continue her shuffle on out of here. She stands there a while and I steel myself for her next observation.

"You're obsessed by memory," she says, in perfect English. "And you smoke too much. I had a son for thirty years and I smoked the whole time I raised him and ruined his lungs, they say."

"It's all right."

"You should quit."

The waitress shows up with my coffee.

"How much for the coffee?"

"A dollar."

I put a dollar on the table. "Any tax?"

"It's included."

I get up to go.

I go.

The Hot Dog Palace Never Closes

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:06:00 +0000

I should go to a movie. Get away for a while. Think things over. I think well in movie theatres, especially up front, away from the kids and old men in raincoats. First row is best if the screen's not too big. Then I'm blinded by it all and get headaches but, even so, it's probably worth it. I am completely rapt in movies, yet can think most clearly about myself at the same time. Make plans, dream, plot escapes, fall in love - even if it's with no one in particular. Or just a character in the show.

Once I wound up in San Francisco with just enough money for one week at the Golden Eagle Hotel on Broadway, above Bennie the Bum's bar and across the street from the Jazz Workshop. Seven dollars a week for a small room with a sink in the corner I could piss into. All week long the lady next door screamed at her husband who, evidently, was a no good bum who ruined her life. She liked to rattle off the names of all the guys she could have married, most of whom owned banks or breweries by now. He had no job, I guess, because he was always there to get yelled at but he must have been a saint for he never said a word. I pictured him at the table in his pee-stained underwear patiently reading the paper and loving his wife in spite of everything. Meanwhile the thumping stripper music from the bar downstairs rattled the windows. One night, on my way out, I passed their open door and saw their room was as small as mine and the old dame was in there yelling as usual and she was there alone. "Oh, well," I thought. Better to blame a ghost than no one.

Mornings I'd have my coffee and pie breakfast at the cafe across the street. Once Carol Doda sat beside me at the counter. I recognized her tits if nothing else but, of course, I'd seen her on TV and also knew her from the posters on Broadway. If you don't know, Carol Doda was the topless go-go dancer, world famous for her for gargantuan silicone injected bazongas.

"They really are something," I clucked.

This was the conversation I imagined.

She smiled good-naturedly and said nothing. Ordered coffee from the counterman.

"I wouldn't mind having a look, sometime."

"Come to my show."

There was a twice life-sized neon image of her hanging outside the Condor, where she performed nightly, just down the street.

"I think I'm too young to get in. Besides I'm broke."

"Where you from?" She began a friendly conversation over our coffees and the whole time I'm hoping she'll invite me somewhere to look at her tits. She could tell I had no motive but scientific curiosity. I'd seen the Golden Gate Bridge. Why not Carol Doda's tits? I imagined they were quite uncomfortable but people have done worse things to their bodies for a job and, also, I could see she was kinda proud of them. I found them not the least bit sexual. And I thought to myself, I came here to find Jack Kerouac and found Carol Doda.

When she'd downed her coffee she ordered two more to go and got up to leave. She smiled at me on her way out and I knew she'd overheard our imaginary conversation and had enjoyed it as much as I had.

Evenings I'd cross Broadway to stand in front of the Jazz Workshop and listen to the great music pouring through the open doors. There was always a gang of us too cheap or too broke to go inside but the sound out on the pavement was good enough to infuse our bloodstreams with glorious jazz. When John Coltrane played there I had to see him with my own eyes. The doorman knew me as one of the regular sidewalk aficionados but this night I walked past him saying, "I'm meeting some friends inside." He knew I was not good for the door charge but let me pass. Inside I approached the bandstand as Trane's tenor sound filled me and filled the room and filled the entire ecstatic universe. His music really had the power, no jive! There they were. McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, and up front, at the edge of the stage, as though he were about to leap forth and fly heavenward, with closed eyes, sweat soaked face, and his golden tenor raised to New Jerusalem, wailing, John Coltrane. I swear to god I rose a foot off the floor. I stood there no more than five or ten minutes before the doorman's hand touched my shoulder, finally. "You gonna have to go back outside." He said it gentle, knowing why I was there, and slowly I backed out of the joint.

But the movies. I was talking about the movies. When my week at the Golden Eagle was up I'd go sleep days in the Market Street movie houses. I always got there early, having been up all night at the Hot Dog Palace, mostly, and then I'd walk down Columbus to Market Street.

I found the Hot Dog Palace one night when I met two college guys with backpacks roaming Broadway. We got into a conversation and decided to go for coffee. The Hot Dog Palace at the triangle of Columbus, Grant, and Broadway was convenient and seemed harmless enough, and cheap. After a while they wandered back out into the night in search of accommodation while I nursed another coffee. For a fast food joint the place seemed unusually agreeable. The jukebox played two tunes again and again, endlessly. For All We Know by Aretha Franklin, who was still a pop singer at that time, and Ramsey Lewis's Wade in the Water. There was a raised counter on one side behind which a tall black man, whose name turned out to be Edgar Jones, doled out coffee, sandwiches and, of course, the occasional hot dog. In the corner by the Grant Street entrance stood a pinball machine and on the opposite side was the Columbus entrance. Plate glass ran around the remaining walls through which you could see the North Beach night and all its characters, beats, hipsters, tourists, showgirls, and the regular working stiffs who actually lived in the neighbourhood's hotels and rooming houses.

As the night rolled on the action picked up in The Hot Dog Palace. I was perfectly happy to sit and watch the comings and goings of the various characters. "What time does this place close?" I asked Mr Jones while picking up another refill. "We never close." Perfect!

Though I'd have been content, for the time, to remain an innocent bystander, the easy sociability of the place soon included me. There were just so many tables so anyone sat anywhere and soon I was startled to find myself witness to an exchange of dope for money at my table. No one seemed concerned that I might be a narc or worse. After the seller split I got into a conversation with the buyer, a guy in his twenties with shaggy hair and nervous demeanor. We became friends, in a way, because I was to see him many times there and he made no bones about warning me to avoid the junk he was addicted to. I took his advice.

I spent many all-nighters at The Hot Dog Palace, drinking coffee, playing pinball to which I became addicted, and getting to know some of the regulars. Aretha's For All We Know and Ramsey's Wade in the Water played non-stop on the juke box, a kind of soundtrack that was to make it all seem like I was living in a movie. One night a man came in, an older man, maybe in his fifties, that carried himself like some kind of hipster sage. The thing that drew me to him more than anything was his walking stick. I have a thing about walking sticks. All my life I've had an eye for a good walking stick. I'd spot them on beaches, in the woods, trash heaps, etc., and never passed a good one by. I'd pick it up and use it for a few days, lose it, and then find another one. Crazy. Sometimes I even faked a limp so I wouldn't just look like some damn fool kid with a stick. This cat's stick was unlike any I'd ever seen. Solid, heavy, and stained the rich colour of ancient mysteries. I was very impressed. I sat at the man's table and listened to him speak in a gnarled, junky voice, keeping my eye on his staff the whole time, willing him to give it to me. Whether his words were really deep or merely inane I have no way of now judging but at the time I might have been ready to become a devotee. He said, "Everything is nothing and nothing is everything and everything is everything and nothing is nothing but pain is pain." This floored me, obviously, because I never forgot it. He was either a mystic or his feet hurt, I don't know. Then he held out his walking stick to me and said, "Here, hold this for me." I couldn't believe it. An hour later he got up to go and I prayed he'd forget the stick. It was crazy. Why would he? He must have needed it. He would surely have felt its absence as he walked out. He walked out and I had the stick in my hands.

At dawn I went to Washington Square to sleep in the sun. Later I got a few more hours sleep in a Market Street movie house. Then I walked all over the city with that stick. It's impossible to describe the sense it gave me. I felt I could walk forever and see things more deeply than ever before. I could go anywhere and do anything. I was bouyed by a confidence and strength entirely new to me. I was ready to walk over the whole world. I don't believe now, nor did I believe then that there was anything magical about that piece of wood but for some reason it had this effect on me. I suppose it was because I believed that it did. Later in the day I realized I had to return the thing and that became a quest for the man who's name I didn't even know. Back in North Beach I started asking around by describing the guy and showing people the stick till, finally, someone recognized who I looking for. I followed various clues till I wound up at a rooming house on Columbus where I was told a girlfriend of his, Suzanne, lived. I knocked on the door and she yelled to come in. I walked into a medium-sized room where a guy was cooking up some beans on a hotplate in the corner and Suzanne was walking towards the door in perfectly naked beauty. She might have been about twenty or so, long-haired , slim, perfect in every way that I could tell. I must admit that my nineteen-year-old virgin brain was set on fire. I told my story as best I could, sitting the only place to sit, on the bed,. I tried not to wear out her body with my eyes while at the same time memorizing every single one of its features, as I spoke. Yeah, she knew the guy and would get his stick back to him. Did I want something to eat? I didn't know what to do. Of course, I always want something to eat and I wanted, even more than food, to stay in that room and study Suzanne. The guy at the frypan silently stirred at something. I knew, though, that I'd be hard-put to bite, chew, and swallow in the correct order while pretending not to be boring holes through her skin with my horny eyes. The cook in the corner said, "Hey, why don't I take off for a while while you fuck Suzanne," but only in my wistful imagination.

When I couldn't stand it any more I left the stick leaning against Suzanne's bed and thanked them. Down the spiral stairway that seemed to never end, down and down and down - out the main door and back down Columbus to the Hot Dog Palace. My mind aflame with the sights and sounds of my San Francisco walking-stick day, I could not yet know that sexual melodrama, futile longing, and the crazy play of desire and disappointment were not over yet. Edgar, the counterman, tall, black, and beautiful, is ending his shift and invites me back to his place, just a couple of blocks away. We'd had some conversations during long night hours and I saw nothing more than friendship in his offer. How the hell was I supposed to know the man was queer? Back at his place he made us coffee while I wandered around admiring his collection of artworks. It was the most beautiful apartment I'd ever seen. He put on a Jimmy Smith album and asked me a million questions. He seemed to be so sincerely interested in my saga yet he grew increasingly agitated as he talked to me from his kitchen while I snooped around. I thought I sounded so hip, so sincere, so smart, and yet the feeling that my answers to his questions were somehow out of whack puzzled me. I had my coffee and left. I was halfway down the street before the pathetic realization dawned that the man was just after a little nookie.

Meanwhile, I was getting my sleep in Market Street movie joints. Back then the door charge changed through the day, cheapest in the morning. I'd get there when admissions were lowest and for a quarter I'd get a seat up front in the near-empty theatre where triple, and even quadruple features were the deal. I'd watch a bit then fall asleep. I'd wake up and see a bit of something else then sleep some more. I'd be in there most of the day and more or less see all the movies but in broken up, haphazard pieces, in random order, mixed in with bits of dreams, fantasies, memories.

This kind of crazy sleeping affected my waking hours, too. Through all that time, maybe a month, my mind was a confusion of various realities, movie scenes, strange nights and days peopled with the odd characters at the Hot Dog Palace, Kirk Douglas, Maureen O'Hara, Suzanne, me.... There were strange moments when I woke up in the dark theatre, the giant screen alive with people and light, not knowing who or where, or what, I was. Seconds of desperate groping for comprehension. I think I came to understand the amnesiac's view of things.

I've wondered more than once how all this affected my consciousness in the long run. Whatever, I still find my clearest thoughts in the dark theatre. Though, lately, this hasn't worked so well. I'm probably going to the wrong theatres. No perverts. Now it's just a place people go to when they've got things to talk over with their friends. And eat food that comes in crinkly wrappers. I get too distracted not only from the world depicted onscreen but my own thoughts. It's just no good.

I first arrived in San Francisco summer 1963. Got off the bus, bought a map at the depot newsstand, found Columbus Avenue, and walked all the way to the City Lights Bookstore. The electrifying feel and smell of San Francisco hit me immediately and were sensations that endured through all that time and all future times that I was there. Cities have their unique aromas, for good or bad. This was the bouquet of a garden of beatific spirits. The air itself seemed charged with poetry and light. I looked up and saw a California sky like blue glass. And some kind of reflection of myself therein.

City Lights was my San Francisco centre. Other homeless poets got their mail there I saw, shoved in a slot on the bulletin board. So it became my S.F. address, too. I went there every day. Checked for mail and talked to Robert Scheer who worked the cash in those days. Or I went down to the cellar and read books seated at one of the tables. All those books, poems and stories by names I'd learned to love - my beat daddies. Scheer had not only been to Cuba, as had I the year before, he wrote a book about it and gave me a copy, paperback, Grove Press, publisher of my idols. One day I was hanging out talking to Bob when a truck pulled up out front filled with cartons of Ginsberg's Reality Sandwiches, hot off the press from England, where it had been printed. I gave Bob a hand with the cartons, opened one of the boxes, and removed a copy. I asked him if he'd autograph and inscribe it as the first copy sold but not only did he refuse to do it, he refused to let me buy it and gave it to me. (Later that year Ferlinghetti himself donated a copy of Kerouac's Book of Dreams to my personal library of beat masterworks.)

Poet Tom Jackrell got busted in Sacramento. His hope of raising bail was his friend, S, who lived in Nob Hill, San Francisco, but had no phone. Tom called City Lights to see if someone there could get a message to S. I'd been standing there talking to Scheer when he took the call and so volunteered to make the trip to Nob Hill. I found S living in an abandoned mansion. He took off for Sacramento, leaving me to stay at his place, a marvelous home empty but for a couple of matresses, some kitchen stuff for cooking up brown rice and seaweed, and several marijuana plants in the sun room out behind the kitchen. Before heading off, S performed the mitzvah of introducing me to the pleasures of the divine herb.

Later that day or the next I ran into Dale somewhere in North Beach. Probably at City Lights. My life in those years was a seemingly unending series of incredibly lucky episodes. I was always in the right place at the right time. I was always finding places to stay. Meeting the right people. I believe it was simply a matter of always being on the go, out there where people and events were happening. A lesson I too easily kept forgetting in the years that came later. Anyway, there I was running into Dale, once again, with a place to stay. I took him back to Nob Hill and got him high. He'd been a dope virgin, too, it turned out, and he was nervous and immediately threw up. Other than that neither of us felt very different, in fact. By then I'd smoked three or four times and didn't think much was happening but kept at it, if for nothing else, for the idea of it. Later on I figured out that unlike the genuinely dangerous drugs, like alcohol, which get crudely to the point straightaway, Maria Juanita's a gentle mentor with whom you leisurely learn the ins and outs of highness. Well something happened because later Dale and I bebopped through most of nighttime San Francisco winding up gorging ourselves on Chinese food in North Beach. A lone cablecar sped past us, the black conductor clanging out a boppish rhythm. I looked at Dale. "See, man? Blacks have got more soul." "Yes, I can see now you are right."

Dale, son of Black bourgeois Chicago and stepson now of famous Ellington sideman, had argued this point with me on an all day walk between Banff, Alberta and Hope, BC. (We got a ride part of the way after about fifteen hours of non-stop walking.) Now he knew better. Still, when we both ran out of money after a couple of days he wanted to go home to Teaneck, New Jersey. He hit the Traveller's Aid up for bus fare and as the Greyhound pulled out of the station I yelled after him that I'd be at his place in a few months. "Great, man, great. C'mon, we'll have a ball." For weeks he'd been telling me about his parent's place. He'd been painting a gorgeous picture of hanging out there, where neighbours like J.J.Johnson and other jazz legends came by and partied and played. I couldn't wait to get there. (When I did finally arrive in New York and called Dale from the bus station, suddenly he was too busy or his parents were too uptight or some bullshit. He said he'd meet me in the Village and I waited there for hours but he never showed up. It was years before I ran into him again and it seemed as though he either had turned into an asshole or had been one all along.)

Meanwhile I tried to get the lowdown on the poetry convention up in Vancouver, that Al Neil had told me about. I wasn't going to miss that. The day after my trip to Nob Hill to save Jackrell's butt I was once again loitering in City Lights, shooting the breeze with Bob.

"Y'ever smoke marijuana?"

His eyes about bugged out but he said nothing.

"That guy, S., gave me some marijuana."

"Jesus, keep it down. That shit's illegal, you know. People go to jail."

I felt like a baby child scolded for crayoning on the Magna Carta. I musta turned the colour of borscht. The only other person within earshot was holding a copy of New American Poetry in his hand. After returning to my normal hue I changed the subject. "Ahh, er... say, that's a great book. Really great." (My own bedraggled copy had been a kinda bible to me in my pursuit of poetness.)

"I know. I edited it."

Donald Allen! Well I'll be ding-donged! As it turned out Allen had all the dope on the Vancouver Poetry Fiesta, starting in August. About a month away. I decided on the spot to catch the Vancouver bus, register for the conference, and return to stay in San Francisco till it began.

I remember nothing specific about the bus trip. I'd spent so many days and nights riding various buses that, with few exceptions, all those trips are a blur of endless sleeping, smoking, and meal stops. Though near the end of bus trips I'd be desperately looking for highway signs counting down the last desperate miles to my destination, for the most part I enjoy the bus. Lean back with my head against the window, watch the country roll by. Sleep. Once in a rare while a fellow traveler to talk to. Smoke. But those days are over. For one thing you can't smoke now. For another the thought of a solid day, twenty-four hours, on the bus is beyond even imagining in these, my years of impatience and sore assbones.

Somehow the driver failed to take my ticket. I tried to stay invisible all the way to Vancouver and must have succeeded for I got there with a ticket still valid for my next trip up. This was good because even at only twenty dollars a pop all these bus trips were eating into my poverty. I got off the bus and walked to the Espresso Coffee House for a meal in exchange for some dish-washing. I hitchhiked out to UBC, registered for the conference, hitchhiked back out, found a place to stay and party for the night, and bussed back to San Francisco the next morning.

--
See followup, Son of Hot Dog Palace

Hair

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:02:00 +0000

When I got back to New York I was apparently in need of a haircut. I was riding the subway out to Brooklyn to visit Murray. A rather tired-looking woman in about her sixties couldn’t take her eyes off me which, as New Yorkers will tell you, on the BMT line is an invitation for violence or death. Even I had learned the famous subway gaze with which you can be packed into a subway car yet not see, or be seen by, anyone. I saw that look the first time I rode the New York subway with my uncle Sol in 1956. It startled every hair on my brush-cut head and I pray I don’t see it in Hell when I get there because, otherwise, Hell will be easy.

When I got to Murray’s stop I brushed passed the old woman on my way out. She took my hand and pressed a green U.S. one dollar bill into it and pleaded, "Get a haircut."

As the train pulled out I turned to look at the woman but saw only my own reflection in the streaming windows. I sure was a sight with that mop on top. Somehow or another it just never dawned on me, all those months in the West, that I should get myself clipped and now I saw my scrawny image mirrored in the sick light under Brooklyn streets. A disturbing vision.....but me.

I was very self-conscious walking past Murray’s mother into his Brooklyn bedroom, her eyes glued to my head. We shut the door and lit up a couple of cigarettes and I told him about the lady on the train and he agreed I looked unusual.

I was probably five or six when Larry took me on my first trip to the barbershop on the Main. Immigrant parents, I guess, saw no reason in the 1940’s to cut their kids hair, boy or girl. Pictures prove I had lovely locks back then and to this day my mother keeps curled locks of her three baby boy’s hair in a little blue box. The barbershop was huge, had about five or six chairs, all occupied by grown men, and a half dozen others sat around waiting, reading magazines or participating in the general discussions of sports, politics, etc. Framed 8x10’s hung on the walls, portraying various Hollywood leading men sporting the latest hairstyles. I suppose the idea was you’d take your pick, who you wanted to look like.

The world of Men. Bullshitting in the surgical atmosphere of crackling scizzors and flying hair. Bonding. An old half-wit with a broom mutters and drools his way around the shop under the flourescent lights and the supremely mysterious sight of men tilted backwards in their chairs with their heads wrapped in steaming towels confounds me. Another barber straps a small shiny machine to his hand, plugs it in, turns it on, and moves it around his patient's skull. What the hell are they doing? The one woman present goes chair to chair with her little bowl of sudsy liquids in which the elite baptize their fingertips. When my turn came Larry walked me to the chair upon the armrests of which the barber slapped a board for me to sit on, raising me to scizzor height. Dead boy walking.

Nobody told me hair felt no pain. Or if they did I didn’t believe them, of course. I expected blood to flow from the first slice. Well, it didn’t. But I felt the pain no less. It was a big joke to all the Men, no doubt. (Though the manicurist, I’m sure, would have saved me if she could. All my life I expected women to save me, though none ever did. I cried and screamed and still the butcher hacked away. Of course it was my yanking my poor head with every cut that caused the hair-pulling pain but I didn’t figure that out for years and by then it was too late. I’d sworn vengeance on all men. Or, at least, I’d forget to get my hair cut whenever possible.

Back in Montreal, broke again, I needed work. My brother Sam tipped me off to a job at Rideau Metal, one of his clients. Rideau’s a scrap yard and junk machinery dealer located in Point St. Charles, one of the most depressing areas in the western world. French-speaking working class catholic slum. Everything, including the people, seemed to be made from some kind of ash-coloured tin. Each day I’d pass an imposing gothic church that surely cost more to heat in one week than the entire population of Point St. Charles earned in a lifetime. I imagined myself in some third world papal slum and, matter of fact, that’s pretty well what it was. But the job looked good. I got some workclothes and a hardhat and I’d be outside, mostly, moving piles of scrap metal, cast iron, I-beams, and the like with a gang of frenchmen who ate raw weiners and drank pepsis on their coffee breaks.

I got up that first Monday morning and took a look at myself in the mirror. I needed a haircut and a shave. I hadn’t worked in a while and so had let myself go. Not by design, I have to say. It just wasn’t something I thought much about. That old lady’s dollar bill was either still in my pocket or else had gone towards the purchase of my first ten-dollar pay envelope full of marijuana from a black guy named Leo who lived on Guy Street. Dave Pinson, one of the guys I hung out with at Le Bistro on Crescent Street, also black, poet, railroad worker, took me there. Up a couple of flights into a dark apartment, jazz on the box, Leo goes off and returns with one of those little brown pay envelopes they used back then. Banks gave them out and they had forms printed on them for hourly wages, deductions, and all that and they were a handy size for ten bucks worth of marijuana. So I contemplated my mug in the mirror, with the Sweet Caporal pasted in it, and thought, "Fuck it."

As usual, the job taught me a lot about how things really go in the social setup. On the one hand there were the men I worked with. These guys still had a ways to go before getting their PhD’s, that’s for sure, but they were all straight shooters, as far as I could see. They worked hard, as did I, and we got along fine. I drank beer with more than one of them more than once. The bosses, on the other hand, (there were three) all venerated pillars of the Jewish community, sat around the office bragging about whores they porked at various scrap metal conventions. They’d be first in line waving the "family values" flag, no doubt, and demanding the lockup of drug users but regularly got shit-faced in Chicoutimi, Trois Rivieres, and even Toronto with various shiksas while the wife and kids watched Perry Como in the suburban abyss. Of course my colleauges in the yard could have a good time, too, but at least they looked down their noses at no one.

By spring my hair must have been hanging over my shirt collar and my scraggly beard finally began to look like I hadn’t merely forgotten to shave for a few months. A little historical perspective might be useful here. Forget about hair for a minute. Today you’ll find beards on bankers, priests, cashiers, bus drivers, nazis, landlords, milkmen, you name it......... A mere 30 years ago a beard could get you fired from your job, mugged, stoned (in the traditional sense), shot, ridiculed,.... You might almost escape persecution if you were a college professor but that was about it. Even Fidel Castro was vilified more for his whiskers than for carousing with Nikita Khrushchev. Around 1955 my cousin, Jerry, grew a beard and, though I knew next to nothing about his life, beliefs, hobbies, or whatever, this alone was enough to make him my idol for the next twenty years. Of course he was in show business, (radio announcer), so he could almost get away with it. As for long hair on a male head, this was enough to produce fits of blasphemy and violence. Even Zeydeh , when he saw me, could only mutter, "Rasputin". Other than Rasputin, the only other man I knew of who looked like this was the famed French-Canadian sculptor, Armand Vaillancourt. The one who built that fabulous fountain at the San Francisco Hyatt around 1975 and then spray painted seperatist slogans on it. The hotel sued but I never heard the outcome. I'd run into him once in a while at LeBistro and we'd sort of stare dumbly at each other. I was mistaken for him more than once, maybe even by him.

I was a voluntary monster. I practically demanded persecution. I was refused service in restaurants. Cops automatically stopped me on the street. Soon as I saw a cruiser I'd get my wallet ready, to show them I.D. I may also have been one of the first guys to carry a shoulder bag, an old army surplus canvas thing I picked up in an American army-navy store and used for notebooks, pens, whatever I was reading at the time, etc. This drove the cops crazy and they needed to see inside it, though I never showed them. Without the beard I’d a most likely looked like just an ugly girl but as it was I seemed to drive everyone mad. Children stoned me. My hair was set fire to on an Ottawa bus. Passing motorists yelled at me in several languages. I also attracted the attention of a certain kind of female (e.g., Booby) so there were rewards. Also, certain people assumed I was an artist, probably a genius. And they were right but, still, why did I do this?

If I was smart I could probably write a book on this subject, with many footnotes and references to deep thinkers. But all I’ve got is a failry simple idea. I not only felt alienated from straight society, I kinda despised it. And the feeling appeared to be mutual. By adopting this deviant appearance I pretty well guaranteed that there’d be no slip-ups on either side and that, besides expressing my wild spirit, I’d have no choice but to live my life beyond the depraved domain of Good Housekeeping approved culture. More or less.

I rented my first pad, a funky old flat at 55 Guilbault Street, from an old Greek couple that lived around the corner on Pine. Forty dollars a month. When I left the landlord’s flat after signing the lease and all I passed his son coming up the stairs. I heard him yelling at the poor old guy when he got inside. "What??? You rented to a beatnik???" At least he didn’t call me an existentialist.

It turned out to be one of the great pads of the century. A one bedroom layout with sloping floors, walls which consisted of about 100 layers of paint over 100 layers of wallpaper, and a gas-burning hot-water tank in the kitchen. I rarely bathed in those days because the bathroom scared me. Though I never saw the rats they ate any food left out and left little calling cards here and there. Roaches, dust, and mystery were my roommates. It worried me at first with it’s blazing yellow walls and secret passageway from the bedroom to a separate little structure out back that was a kind of storage area where I’d hide out and smoke dope occasionally. There was an old mattress left behind, all the furniture I had at first, that I assumed someone had died on and so for a year I slept with a ghost. But it got to be known that I was available to have a good time night or day so visitors abounded, wine, drugs, and even once the amazingly lovely Lebanese femme fatale, Yvette, who literally drove men mad, danced naked to Ray Charles (Genius + Soul = Jazz). One night Harvey came by and asked if he could sleep the night there. I’d been in the bedroom (which was my study, actually. I slept in the living room) at my typewriter. It might have been one or two in the morning. He went to sleep on the extra mattress in the livingroom. I kept writing. About an hour later Christian Beaugrandechampagne Sivrell, the French-Canadian beatnik, dropped by and we went out for something to eat. We got back around four. All the lights were blazing and we could hear jazz pounding the windows from halfway down the street. Inside a half-dozen or so revellers were partying with jugs of wine, dancing to the music on the mono hifi while bleary-eyed Harvey sat draped in his blaket on the mattress scowling in utter defeat.

Meanwhile I went to work at the scrapyard. I don’t remembering missing a single day and if I was ever late it was by minutes only. I liked the job. I was busy and the time went by quickly. Everyday after work when I walked to the busstop (this was before I got my bike) I passed the massive, expensive church and I saw the dark woman in the black trenchcoat.

All day long truckloads of scrap metals came in and went out. We loaded and unloaded the trucks, sorted the metal into growing and shrinking piles of steel, iron, brass, copper, aluminum, lead, etc. The work was dirty and hard and in the summer the sun beat down and we could see the metal dust we breathed. I felt like I was handling the raw materials of creation. I wore a hardhat and heavy gloves inside which my hands sweated. Somehow, the bosses decided I had more on the ball in the brain department so had me doing all kinds of extra work, figuring things out. I helped out in the office with bookwork and answered the phone. Half the time the callers spoke french so I had to say "attends minute" and call Rusty, the bilingual office manager. Guys pulling kid’s wagons loaded with various metal junk they found in the streets and alleys would come in and I’d have to weigh the shit up and pay them a few dollars.

They also had another business going there which was buying and selling used machines. The gym-sized warehouse was a jungle of old motors, air compressors, puddles of black oil, and the like. Suspended from mid-ceiling a long steel I-beam on a pivot swung to reach the whole area and hanging from that a long pulley was used to lift and move these heavy objects, using the principle of mechanical advantage which seemed to be the only thing I learned in high school that made any kind of sense in the long run. Guys’d come in and say, "I need a two-and-a-half horsepower so-and-so motor" or "a such-and-such compressor" and I’d go find it. I had a pretty good idea where things were. But to make things easier I concocted a system, using an old ledger I found in the office, of recording what was where. Pretty soon the bosses relied on me to instantly let them know what we had and where it was. This old fart, Rene, who lived next door to the yard with his family, had worked there for years and was, technically, the foreman but, for all intents and purposes I was pretty well running things after a few months.

Payday Rusty would hand me one of those little pay envelopes. The same kind that I would also get marijuana in from Leo on Guy Street. This particular Friday the main boss, Irving Burnbeam, had my pay envelope in his office.

"Brian, come in the office I gotta talk to you a minute"

"Sure, what’s up?"

"Brian, what’s with the hair?"

By now I was looking a lot like Mexican pinups of Jesus himself.

"Nothing’s with the hair. I just don’t cut it, that’s all."

"Well, you got to cut it, Brian. We don’t mind the beard so much. Just trim it up a little, that’s okay but, Jesus, that hair."

"Mr Burnbeam, I work in a junk yard. What’s it matter what I look like?"

"Uh...well, we got clients come in here. They don’t like it. They make comments."

"I know they make comments. They bug me about it all the time. Call me Jesus and shit but I don’t mind. We joke about it. What?... they’re not gonna buy your junk cause my hair’s too long? The guys in the yard rib me, too, but I get along with them fine and I do a good job here so what’s the problem?"

"Lissen, Brian. You got more brains than any a these guys here. You practically run the place. We wanna give you promotions, make you a salesman, send you on the road. We can’t do that the way you look."

"Salesman? I don’t wanna be a salesman. I like my job in the yard. It’s all I want."

Did I tell him I already had a life and all I needed was a job? I don’t remember. I remember the long pause, though. He was stunned. I suppose this went against everything he was raised to believe in. Progress, success, money, who knows?

"Brian...." He hands over my pay. "Don’t show up Monday without a haircut."

So I didn’t.

North

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:40:00 +0000

It started raining, which is not surprising. I forget the season I'm in, they're interchangeable in this city. Cold summers, hot winters...whatever - it rains. Umbrellas pop up everywhere and though I can't recall ever hearing of anyone blinded by umbrella spokes I'm dodging them angrily. Why the fuck don't they just wear hoods, like I do? My jackets, my sweatshirts, all have hoods. Handy to hide in, too, should the need arise. If I see an enemy approaching I can pull my hood down tight over most of my head. Far as I can tell I have no enemies but you can't be too cautious. I jam my hands into my jean pockets and charge head-first into the rain.

I spot a girl in the doorway of Beano's Haircuts. I note her lanky good looks and frizzy hairdo, heavy with rainwater, hanging over her face. She sees me, too, and once again I reckon the months since I last felt the brush of a girl's skin against my own hairy self. There's a tingling behind my fly. Of course, it's all very hopeless, but as I pass she grabs my arm and pulls me out of the rain. "Lissen, this guy's following me. Pretend you're with me a sec."

"Who is it? Someone you know?"

"My boyfriend."

Well, yes, of course. I'm glad to help. I'll fuck her in the doorway if it does the trick. Or marry her. She jabbers a while, I guess to look like she knows me and then takes off down the street. I look around and there's no one in sight that appears to care one way or another whether she lives or dies. Is she nuts? Probably. Why am I so attractive to lunatics? I muse upon this topic as I venture forth once more into the rain. I realize I'm hungry and should have had a bite with that coffee so I stop in the Laundromat for an old magazine to read while I gulp down a sandwich or something at the next diner I see. An old man rushes out of an invisible doorway in the back yelling, "Hey you dumb punk those are for customers." I have a full and detailed defense ready but it would take too long to deliver so I rush out and walk fast across the street to Bernice's Fast Lunch. Soaked by now I flop into the first booth with my wet, old Newsweek.

I scan the menu and wonder why it looks so familiar. Somewhere some printing outfit decided what choices I'd have at mealtime. It's the same menu coast to coast. Why do I need to even look at it? It'll be either a burger, a BLT, a clubhouse, or breaded veal cutlets, depending how flushed I feel, no matter whether I'm at Bernice's in Vancouver or the Bongo Rest Stop in Northern Michigan. It's always the same, just like the newspapers. Same news, different names. Still, I scan the choices. The waitress strolls by and slides beside me into the booth. What the hell's going on? I look up and see it's Her, the doorway damsel-in-distress.

A truck pulled over on the Michigan highway leading up to Mackinaw City, and Canada beyond. I climbed up and into the rider's seat, slamming the door gratefully. "Thanks," I said, throwing my pack into the bunk behind me. As he pulled back onto the asphalt the driver, a chubby man about fifty with stubble and a red shirt under his nylon windbreaker, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card a bit bigger than a business card and handed it to me. It said, in fat handwritten letters, "I CANNOT SPEAK. PLEASE TALK TO ME."

I stared straight ahead, through the smoke-filled air in the cab, through the bug-splattered windshield, into the dust-speckled atmosphere, at the onrushing ribbon of asphalt with its frenzy of yellow dashes speeding by, at the flight of trees, poles, and billboards disappearing beyond the peripheries of my view. I watched the future roll under our wheels and become my past. I heard the whine of wind and engine wail, grieving lost time. I was Jagannath rolling on, over the corpses of lost love, failed hopes, disappointment, and wasted chances; into an unfolding glorious future.

I couldn't think of a thing to say. Tongue-tied, dumbstruck, mute. Speechless, voiceless, wordless. I ached to speak but couldn't even find where to begin. Miles rolled beneath us in thundering silence. Tell a joke? My life story? Recite a poem? What? I suppose I could have told him about the previous night in the Nowhere Hotel, going to bed alone in the middle of nowhere and listening to We'll Sing in the Sunshine booming up from the bar and the sounds of Americans getting drunk and happy and how I woke up in the morning and saw my arm lying on the bed and wondered why it looked like just an arm, nothing that belonged to me in any way except as a memory of an arm. The strangeness of it like a block of ice in my brain, following me out to the road where I stood for less than a minute till the first car to pass stopped for me.

She sits beside me in the booth, says "Hi", as though we're old pals, fucked in a doorway once, possibly were husband and wife. The waitress appears with poised pad and pencil.

"You wanna coffee?" I ask. She nods. "Two coffees and, um, a BLT."

"You gonna have something to eat?" the waitress asks, looking at my secret wife.

"Just the coffee."

She seemed so tall in the doorway but now appears to be about a foot shorter than me, thin and breastless with sharply featured face, huge eyes, and wet hair hanging down in random strands. I decide to fall in love with her.

As it turns out, I'm very good at falling in love but terrible at actually loving. And even worse at being in love with. When our coffees arrive she moves around to the opposite side of our booth. I ask her a series of questions in alphabetical order, questions concerning her name, whether or not she ditched her stalker, where she's from, etc. I try to make out her breasts, but fail. I consider her gray sweater and decide that the manner in which it is draped over her upper body has, somehow, concealed two lovely yearning papillae. I recall how misleading clothes can be, how Valerie, who seemed a bag of bones, revealed a body so glorious it haunted me for years when she got out of bed to get the phone as I talked to her in her room. Imagining my new friend is easy. I can see her skin, smell the fragrances arising from her miscellaneous regions, hear the pop of my pecker pulled from her pulsating pudendum, smell the cooling coffees beside our Epicurean mattress. Suddenly I grasp that the coffee I smell occupies the abandoned mug across the table. She never answered a single one of my questions. She fidgeted there a while and then was gone. Probably a junkie or just an ordinary maniac. I recognized at once that my life had reached yet another dead end.

Back home, Ross informed me that Jessie, (who was later to attend Woodstock and accidentally become an immortal, if anonymous, icon of our culture by having her picture wind up on the album cover, draped in a blanket, buried in the arms of a stranger) was despondent due to having just been dumped by her man, John. So Ross and Lissa were taking her camping for a few days up to Robert's Creek. For the cure. "Why not join us?"

I had nothing to do. I'd just started a new business so the idea of skipping town appealed to me. I hated camping but what the hell? Within hours we were on the Horseshoe Bay bus, the Langdale Ferry, and soon trekking across the stony beach looking for a good spot to spend the night. Ross and Lissa babbled non-stop about every natural feature of the universe, pointing out certain birds, trees, etc., each of which they knew personally. They loved nature, it seems. I was more interested in every natural feature of Lissa, a tall and supremely gorgeous example of god's handiwork. Ross, a shortish and witty guy, and arty in the bargain, I liked a lot but I'd have happily killed him to get into Lissa's botanicals. Besides, he was too short for her. When she dumped him a few years later he became a scientologist. For now they chatted amiably while Jessie stared at rocks despondently and I made stupid jokes, since I knew nothing about nature.

Within minutes of settling into our campsite I discovered that I'd lost my cigarette papers so, after trying to roll a cigarette in some cardboard I found on the beach, I went immediately to sleep. First thing at dawn I walked back along the beach directly to where my pack of Export Aquafuge papers lay. I have always taken this as a sign that I have some kind of paranormal finding skill, despite the fact that I've lost enough Swiss Army knives in my life to defeat the Iraqis. I enjoyed my metaphysical cigarette while waiting for my companions to find me. For the next few hours we roamed the beach, after our breakfast of ranch-style coffee and some crap out of cans. The talk continued in the same vein as the night before until Jessie turned on me:

"Why the fuck don't you shut yer damn mouth? Yer a goddam idiot," she explained. I instantly forgot every word I'd said. I had no idea what set her off. I could understand she'd be in a lousy mood but what was this all about? Generally, I think, we were all having a mediocre time only I hadn't been aware of it since it's about what I expected, anyway. Camping! I kept my mouth shut while Ross tried to calm her down. Lissa was hunting for some kind of intertidal lifeform down a ways from us. I sat down on a log.

"Maybe we oughta just go home," Ross suggested. Jessie agreed and they called to Lissa. I sat on the log. "I'm just gonna stay here."

Now and then this strange thing would come over me. Out of nowhere I'd be seized with a certain kind of idea. It went something like this: What the hell am I doing?

Not just me, this may happen to others. Once Judy and I were crossing the Burrard Bridge at night. A line of street lights spans the bridge along the pedestrian walkway. As we passed under each one our shadows grew longer and longer till, halfway to the next light, they began to fade. Under the new light our long shadows appeared again, to repeat the cycle so that as we walked these shadows stretched before us and faded and emerged anew to stretch and fade, again and again and again, like a crazed cartoon movie of ghostly pistons. The wind came howling down False Creek causing the shadows of our windblown hair to appear like nightmare Medusas. Judy had apparently been studying this sight. "Look at that! What the hell are we?" The next time I saw her she'd gotten a Jean Seberg hairdo.

It happened to me a couple a times. A year before the Bridge Epiphany I got up one day with the bizarre notion that I needed to clean up my act. Get straight. I shortened my hair by a foot or two, picked up some kind of sport jacket at the Sally Ann, and went down to Canada Manpower to get a job.

I sat around the waitingroom picturing the new life upon which I was embarking. Fine digs, clothes, cars, travel, etc. As a serious member of Society I'd command respect and my noble thoughts would be honoured, transforming not only myself but the entire world. And about time, too!

They gave me a pencil and some kind of form and sent me into a booth with both. They took the completed form and I waited some more, picturing me and Judy throwing fabulous dinner parties in our sky-high penthouse. I'd be explaining my world-peace theories to Lester Pearson after persuading him to get dope legalized. Charles Mingus'd borrow money from me. Doormen will call me "sir".

A crewcut guy named Frank called my name and I followed him to his cubicle. I sat there twiddling my thumbs as he stared, glassy-eyed, at the sheet I'd just scribbled on. I thought the fluorescent lights and file-folder dust might make me puke.

"Hmmmm. Says here your last job was Hartford Insurance in San Francisco?"

"Yeah, that's right." Was he gonna say something about Wallace Stevens? I didn't think so.

"So... you lived in San Francisco?"

"Yeah, that's right. For a while."

"Hmmmm. Innaresting. Seen on TV and the papers, there's a lotta hippies there."

"Yeah. I guess."

"They use marijuana, don't they? The hippies? I heard they use marijuana."

"Well, yeah, I think they might."

"You smoke marijuana? I mean you ever try it? Must be a lotta marijuana in San Francisco."

"Well, yeah, I tried it once."

"Really, eh? Hmmmm. So......uh.....could you get me some?"

Every week I kept my appointment with Canada Manpower. I'd bring Frank a pay-envelope filed with drugs and he'd hand me a sawbuck and a stack of index cards with various jobs described on them, none of which seemed to bear a relationship to any reality I knew of. The only job the Canadian government ever got me was dope peddler!

I stared at the stony beach, the surf, the general mess of a natural landscape strewn with the immeasurable garbage of humankind's stupid endeavors: lost logs, broken glass, old paint. It resembled beauty, in a way, and for the first time I saw it as my own peaceful place. A place I could just look at, without disturbance, with no design.

Once again, in my life, I was free to follow any inclination, go any way, without worry or plan. I had no money or friends or anything at all here on the beach at the far western edge of the land. I breathed the marine air with its smells of intertidal life, clams, seaweed, and salt. It was rich and thrilling and only years later would it become an aroma to transport me back in time to an almost forgotten world that once I'd inhabited. For now it was only the smell of serenity. I sat awhile, then got up and walked back to the highway. For just a moment I wavered and looked south, back towards Vancouver. I stood by a gas station at the intersection of roads. A man, about sixty, in jeans and checkered shirt and obviously an Indian, walked up to me.

"Beautiful day!"

"It's a beautiful day," I agreed. It must have been about ten or eleven A.M. by now. Hot, bright, clean and clear.

"Go North," he said. That's all he said.

I was a little disoriented. He pointed North and walked away. That was it. That was our entire conversation. I stood where I was, on the Eastern side of Highway 101, and stuck my thumb out at the first passing car. The green Chevy pulled over into a cloud of dust and I climbed in.

Earlier that spring bill bissett showed up and had announced the new world. He'd joined some friends up the coast to start a commune at Galley Bay and urged us to go back there with him. Dick and Catherine took Beorn and the two pups I'd named, Abie and Max, and followed bill to paradise. I declined. Now I thought to find them. I knew, vaguely, that it was North, up along the coast somewhere. So all I had to do was follow the coastline North and I'd run into them. This was the first example of my complete ignorance of life on the planet that we refer to as "Earth".

A city boy, having grown up near-poor among the flats of Clark Street, I'd been smug with my own hipness. In the backwater logging town of Vancouver I was supremely assured of my place on a superior plane of being. I knew it all and what I didn't know I could pick up quickly in a smoky bar on the lower Main, as required. I knew who the authors were of Howl, The Dharma Bums, Moby Dick; who played drums in the Jazz Messengers and where and when that mysterious tenorman, Lester Young, showed up to cut the Father, Coleman Hawkins, at an all-night jam. (The Cherry Blossom, Kansas City, July, 1934.) Street smart, with it, I could leave the East with four dollars in my pocket and arrive in the West with six, without skipping a meal. I knew the ropes, could get money, drugs, whatever; walk the streets at night unharmed; go anywhere and do anything and never work. I was really, really smart.

I was really dumb. My world was a string of big cities with empty spaces between. I'd pass by towns by the sides of highways and wonder: do people live here? And, if so, why? There's nothing here! To me, country life was exile. I was beginning, now, to find myself strange in a stranger land. But the scope of my ignorance had not yet begun to dawn on me. I could read "North" on a roadsign. I could stand on the proper side of the highway and point my thumb in the direction of my future, facing my past, squinting into the ozone, fearless and free.

My first ride took me about ten miles up the road. Behind the wheel of the green Chev a man about fifty with decent, suburban looks hardly spoke at all after pointing out the pallor of my shorts-clad legs. I realized then and there that something had been lacking, so far, in my imperfect life. What it was I did not yet know, but I knew that henceforth my legs would be as tanned as they could be, if that's what it took to join the natural creatures of the Earth.

A couple of short rides later a young man, of the academic type, with his father beside him, picked me up and got me to the next ferry at Earl's Cove. I sat silently in the back seat while up front some kind of family drama was being played out. Seems the younger man, obviously yet another in the long series of draft-dodging, tortilla-chip eaters that were filling up the country, was vainly trying to win the old man over to the new age of peace and communes. The old guy loved the kid, was giving him a chance to make good, but was buying none of it. I was glad to get off at the ferry terminal which consisted of a ramp at the end of the road. The crossing from there was a voyage through Empyrean Isles, a spectral passage through a dreamscape that almost had me believing in some sort of God. Still waters, looming slopes shrouded in Douglas Fir floating by, eagle-eyed Eagles, no sound but gentle water laps against the hull and the hum of diesels underfoot. The Laurentians, as I knew them, with their babbling Jews and French chip-vendors and tombolas in the summer night, was never like this. Surely I was the first white man, or at least the first Semite, to venture into this innocent region.

I was learning the geography as I went along. By the time we docked at Saltery Bay I knew I had to get to Powell River, the next town. I waited dockside as the cars erupted out of the front of the boat. My old pals, pop and son, pulled over once again, so I could catch up on their conflict, I suppose. Their struggle was still unresolved when they dumped me only another ten miles closer to my destination. By now night was creeping up. The warm summer air, filled with a strange, repugnant odour, drifted over everything with a spooky shadows. I stood in the same spot a couple of hours when two hooligans screeched up to me in an old heap. Death by wilderness or death by thugs, it didn't matter. I hopped in. They drove me around a while so I could experience coastal hooliganism close up. They turned out to be pretty sweet kids in the end. One lived with his parents, who were away for a couple of days, so we went back to his bungalow in Powell River where we smoked dope, drank beer, and I told them lies about big city life. I spent the night there and the next morning they drove me to Lund, literally the end of the road. They knew about Galley Bay. Seems it got famous in these parts as the hippie commune. After a couple more beers at the Lund Hotel they left me to wander around the marina looking for a ride up to Galley Bay.

Hardly a town, Lund consisted mainly of the hotel and pub, scattered buildings, some ramshackle sheds and a government wharf. And boats. Lots of boats. Big boats. Small boats. Skiffs, tugs the size of a hotel, sailboats, cruisers, kayaks, rafts, dinghies. You name it. Wealthy Americans keep yachts here and, come summer, they'd bring their families and/or parties of business associates and harlots and go out on the blessed sea to drink, fuck, and watch TV. Some here also made their livings on the sea. Fishermen, beachcombers, and the like. The marine smells were becoming very familiar and refreshing to me. The horrible smells of yesterday turned out to be the emanations from the pulp mills near Powell River.

Finally I got my ride. About an hour later, standing on the boat deck, we sailed round the point into Galley Bay. If I die and go to heaven my arrival there will be second to this. Never in this life did I behold such a paradisiacal vision as arose before my eyes, sliding towards the rickety wharf. Heaven's sun lit the universe, serene waters rolled beneath our bow, an ovine lamentation resonated up towards the sky from some unknown place deep in the forest, and as we sidled up against the gentle bobbing of the ancient wharf, naked kiddies scampered down to welcome me. The tide was so low that the swaybacked ramp from wharf to land, about a hundred feet long, rose at about a sixty degree angle. The kids were sprinting up and down the thing as I clutched the nearly rotten rail, pulling myself up, scared half to death that I'd plunge to my briny grave, that awesome sight burned before my eyes for eternity.

A raggedy path ran beside some woods towards a huge clearing in the middle of which stood the House, circled on three sides by a wide, covered porch. Off a ways beyond the house four or five sheep grazed, a ewe with its lambs. (This ewe was the source of the baritone wail I heard earlier.) Scattered here and there, singly and in small groups, idling and working, talking and singing, or lying silently in the sun, were the residents of the commune, about thirty in number, a few of them familiar, and almost all naked.

Theory of Searches

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:14:00 +0000

Everybody and everything was on the go. As explained in the Theory of Searches, in the right location point, if you stayed put long enough, everyone would find you, and in the summer of 1968 you didn't have to stay put for long.

Galley Bay was on a lot of itineraries and almost daily another boat, such as the one that deposited me here, slid up to the wharf to discharge a wild assortment of visitors. Some who'd stay an hour or so, some for a few days or weeks, and some who would never leave. One day the MacGuire's showed up. Couple of brothers looking for land on which to start a commune. They knew about computers (as few did back then) and spoke of an advanced technological paradise from which they'd embark upon their revision of the world. Some kind of new age. With them were Will Heinz and his wife, Margaret. (I've altered their names here.) Will and Maggie were a little older than the average Galley Bay visitor, probably in their forties and Will also sported a trim crew cut in an era of raggy heads, facts which had them pegged by some as probable "narcs" which, in time. proved to be damned ironic. They were pretty well ignored at first and, as for me, I pretty much ignored everyone that showed up, anyway.

Bob Carpenter was up there, too, and, as far as I could tell, was about the best musician on the place. He sang folk/pop tunes in a Dylanesque style, accompanying himself with solid, blues-inflected guitar chords. He played no complicated solos, but his singing had emotional strength, was in tune, and made up for the relative monotony of his guitar. Every day around mealtime everyone drifted back to the main house. Bob generally arrived first, setting up shop in the large living-room with his guitar, playing and singing. Often as not, a few others'd sing along or join in with flutes, recorders, or whatever. Half a dozen gals'd be in the kitchen cooking up whatever slop they could manage to find. Meals were fairly unimaginative and dreary unless someone had caught a salmon that day, in which case we feasted. Otherwise it'd be brown rice and a mess of vegetables from the garden. The babies got to drink fresh goat's milk.

Early on I took over the goatherd's job. Though I will no doubt remain ignorant till my dying days of the ways of natural, that is to say non-downtown, living, I became something of an expert on goats. We had a little herd consisting of a king billy and a few nannies and their kids. I was struck by the difference between the sheep and the goats and this difference served me well as an analogue for humans. The sheep produced wool without any idea that they were doing so and seemed pretty damn stupid about everything else, too. The goats produced milk and sold it to you. The sheep had to be pushed around because they could never figure out what they were supposed to do, other than eat. You had to win the goat's trust and then they'd follow you, if they felt like it. The goats were smart and even had senses of humour. I loved hanging out with them, as did my dog, Abie, who'd fool around with the youngest kid, Skipper, butting heads and whatnot.

After several weeks residence at Galley Bay I'd devised the following system: Before going to sleep I prepared the potbellied stove. Some crumpled paper on the bottom, followed by fine kindling, bigger kindling, and a couple of pieces of firewood on top. Then I prepared the one-cup espresso maker on top of the stove. When I woke up all I had to do was toss a match into the stove on my way out to the goat barn. After milking the nannies and letting them out to roam for the day I returned to my cabin just in time to hear the final burps of the steamed coffee erupting into the top chamber of the pot. Then a couple of smokes with my espresso as I sat on the front step and watched the glorious day begin.

It seemed like the perfect life. All I needed was to get laid ocassionally and I'd be set. I must confess now, in my old age, that though the lack of clothing seemed like a perfectly natural way to go, free and beautiful, in fact all those naked gals, many of them pretty damn voluptuous with their perfect tits glistening in the sun, had me as horny as old Jumbo, the king billy goat. Both of us jacked off every chance we got.

But, oddly enough, though I'm sure there was an amazing amount of fucking going on day and night, my only sexual event was on a trip to town where Marian, Wendy, and I got stranded overnight at the ferry landing at Earl's Cove. The only shelter was the solitary restroom which was just large enough to open up a sleeping bag on the floor. We made a mattress out of two of them and the third was our blanket. By now we were so used to nudity that we three stripped without forethought and got into bed. Though there was no actual fucking it was impossible not to grope a fair amount. I'm relieved to say that by the time we got to Vancouver Wendy and I were in a hot alliance that lasted about three days. I should also add that Wendy had the best tits in Desolation Sound.

It would be unjust to construe my tit fetish as only a male preoccupation. Once I overheard Marian and some of the girls debating the various alliances, or factions that had formed among the women. As'll happen in any large group of people sides had formed over various issues. Marian summed it up: "What it boils down to is the big tits versus the small tits."

One late afternoon, as mealtime approached, I was drifting over towards the main house when I was stopped in my tracks by the guitar music I heard seeping out through the chinks and cracks of the aging lumber. If this was Bob Carpenter he must have made a major musical breakthrough on the order of a chinchilla learning to cakewalk. I could not believe my ears. Charlie Christian chords and a flurry of boppish eighth and sixteenth-notes made my hairdo flip. I walked in to find that old "narc" man, Will, wailing on Bob's guitar as the hippies stood about in happy confusion. Minutes later the gals in the kitchen announced dinner and as everyone straggled away I uttered my first words to Will. "Shit, man... what the...?"

It wasn't till later that we continued that conversation. "Well, I used to play a little guitar."

"A little guitar? Jesus, that was hot, man, incredible. I've been dying to hear jazz for months. That was a shot to my soul."

In all the time I knew Will Heinz I never again saw him pick up the guitar. I must have begged him a thousand times. He always refused without explanation, as though there was some dark mystery behind it all; as though that one time I heard him he'd simply forgotten himself for a while. But in the course of the next couple of months (or was it only weeks?) we spent countless hours together, talking talking talking. When someone showed up with a portable battery-operated record player we requisitioned the thing and took it to my chicken-shack where I had, for some reason I've never recalled, only one record from the vast collection I'd left behind somewhere in the city, Coltrane's Lush Life. We played the thing endlessly through the night till the batteries finally croaked while we talked about Jazz, New York, and all the mad characters of the time, a couple of whom I knew , but all of whom Will knew. Will seemed to know everyone and everything. I don't remember where he was born but he showed up in New York sometime in the late forties, just about the time I was being born nearly four hundred miles to the north, in Montreal.

He knew the MacGuire brothers. They had at least a million bucks in family wealth, it turned out. Some of it they brought with them in cash to buy this land they were looking for. When they came up from California they sent airfare to Will and Maggie so that they could join them, get out of the City and kick their habits. Maggie came from Midwest wealth and once had a promising career as an opera singer but blew it all years ago when she got hooked up (and hooked) with Will in New York. She was slowly going mad and I almost never saw her. She seemed okay at first and I liked her well enough but gradually she took to hiding out and I saw her less and less.

The amazing thing for me was Will, veteran of bop city and bop life, was perfectly at home in this wild world of rivers, trees, and oceans. He loved to fish and sometimes I'd go out with him, leaning back in the dinghy or rowing a bit, while we talked. He told me about Lester Young, who introduced him to reefer sometime in the forties. It must have the beginning of his walk down the road to junk. This was just one of many incidental facts of his life that came up in conversation. He never made any kind of point of talking about the characters in his life's story though some of these names held powerful meanings for me. I know there were at least a couple of letters between Will and Allen Ginsberg at that time.

I was with Will when I met another character who was to make a huge impression on me, perhaps even to the point of having changed my life in some way. Nancy was a woman I'd heard tales of but had never seen. She lived down at the bottom of the Malaspina Inlet, alone except for about thirty goats. One of the tales I'd heard was about the night she was woken up by the sound of a cougar going after one of her animals. She grabbed a rifle and went after it, tracking it through miles of dense, sopping wet, night forest. I can't remember whether she shot the thing or not but, either way, she headed back home and went back to sleep. The next day she met Jim Cochuck, another loner whose farmhouse was a few miles in the direction the cougar had taken the night before. Nancy told him about it.

"Nancy, you must have been soaked and freezing. Why didn't you stop by for a cup of tea?"

"Oh, but I wasn't dressed properly for visiting."

This woman had chased a cougar in the dead of night through miles of rain-soaked woods with a rifle in hand but would never dream of paying a visit on a gentleman, no matter how cold and miserable she might have been, unless she was properly dressed for the occasion.

One day Will and I took the dinghy down the Malaspina. He wanted to do a little fishing and I remembered seeing a small island, more like a big rock actually, that was completely covered with wild rosebushes. I had this idea to make some rosehip extract. I'd read somewhere how you couldn't beat rosehips for vitamin C and I figured I had to do something agrarian. Will dropped me off on rosehip island. An hour or so later he was back with no fish. I tossed my bushelful of the rosehips into the dinghy and climbed in. It was starting to rain.

"Let's go down to Nancy's till this rain blows over. I been wanting to meet her, anyway," one of us suggested.

"Yeah, me too. Let's go."

First thing to say about Nancy is she has to be the most hospitable woman on earth. Two dingy strangers show up at her door without warning and she lays out a spread of hot coffee, and fresh-baked cakes and strawberry tarts. I was ravenous by now and kept stuffing myself with tarts. More kept appearing while Nancy told us her life story. She'd never married, had no kids, and her only living relative was a nephew who'd show up now and then to make sure she was still alive. I'm guessing she was about sixty and had lived on this place half her life. She showed us around and I got to meet some of her goats. This was a real treat for me as I'd become quite a goat afficianado by now. I told her that I was in charge of the Galley Bay goats, that there were only five of them and that it was my only chore. She had close to thirty plus an immense vegetable garden and all the other work that goes with running a house a small farm.

"Must be an incredible amount a work running this place alone," I noted.

"Yes, it is."

I wondered how she could ever get away from here, what with animals and all to care for.

"You ever take a holiday?"

"I haven't had a holiday in twenty-five years. My nephew keeps offering to look after the place so I can have a couple of weeks vacation. Maybe one of these days I'll take him up on it."

"Where would you go?"

"Go? Why, I'd stay right here. I don't know of any place I'd rather be."

I was floored! I thought Nancy must be the happiest person alive, to be exactly where she wanted to be and whose idea of a holiday was to take a break from all her work for a few weeks to enjoy where she was even more. I thought of everyone I'd known who slaved day after day for something other than what they had, for a place other than where they were. Things and places that would never exist.

The rain, though light, kept falling and now, too, the sky warned of darkness. It was late afternoon and we knew we had to leave at once. Back in the dinghy we fired up the old Seagull five-horsepower motor and aimed ourselves for home. The sea was against us as was the rising wind. Ten, fifteen minutes later we were almost halfway home and the sky turned black, the wind and the sea swelled. Will was getting nervous but I was getting terrified. Soon we vanished into total darkness, just barely able to make out the shore as we danced up and down in the growing swells. It seemed like we were hardly moving, though we knew we were because soon the land on our left disappeared completely as we emerged from the strait. Out in the open everything got even wilder. Howling winds, raging seas, the works. I knew I was a dead man. Will and I faced each other in the boat as he handled the motor, desperate to steer us in what seemed like it might be the right direction. Suddenly I saw his jaw drop and his eyes bug out. "Hang on tight," he yelled. I grabbed my seat. All of a sudden we were in midair. In that instant my life flashed through my mind, just like they said it would. Then we fell, slamming into the water as my seat was rammed against my ass, sending a shockwave up to my terrified brain.

I don't know why Nancy's tarts weren't in my underpants by now. The land's edge that would lead to home and safety kept vanishing and reappearing till, finally, we could make out the faint glow of kerosene lamps as we passed into the bay and up to the wharf. I heard Bob's voice and guitar, the loveliest music I'd ever heard. He was aboard the steel-hulled tub that belonged to some recent guests and in a matter of minutes Will and I were in their cabin smoking cigarettes and gulping hot coffee. A joint was passed around and Will acted perfectly calm, as though nothing at all unusual had happened. I sat quaking in my water-logged jeans, holding on to the coffee mug for dear life.

I loved Galley Bay. Often I lay, even went to sleep at night, atop the Bounty because the view of distant mountains was best there, and the gentle rocking of the boat was pure heaven. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such splendour. I knew in my heart I'd never leave. But it wasn't the first, nor the last time, my heart deceived me. In my bones I remained a city boy. I never passed up an opportunity to go to Vancouver.

Margaret got crazier and crazier. Some kind of paranoia with maybe some other manias thrown in for good measure. She had nothing good to say for anyone and thought everyone was out to get her somehow, including Will. She stayed out of sight and when you spotted her she was usually spying on you from behind a wall or some furniture. Maybe that's why Will decided to leave, to go back to New York. The visitors with the steel-hulled tub gave up on their Alaskan fantasy and were heading back to Oregon. Both Will and I were on that boat and after arriving in Vancouver we said goodbye to each other for the last time.