Confessions of an Ignoramus

Prologue

2005-11-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

(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 Sylvia Gandy 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 Sylvia 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.

Sylvia Gandy. 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!!!...."Sylvia," 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 Sylvia Gandy 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

2005-11-29T14:09:00.000-08:00

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 Sylvia Gandy 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

2005-11-29T14:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

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

Vancouver

2005-11-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

I got a room at the Y on Burrard. If you've never spent time in a Y let me confirm your worst, or best, suspicions. They're full of homos. I've been propositioned in Y's coast to coast. Before I caught on to the action I kept wondering why guys in the showers were always bumping into me. I don't know if it's still true but used to be you swam naked in Y pools. And I'm sure I musta had a cute wienie in my youth. Was it in the Regina Y where I spotted "turn around for a blow-job" scrawled above the urinal? Sure enough, after zipping up I turned to see a naked guy sitting in the stall right behind where I'd just relieved myself, the door wide open. But the Y's were a good deal. Economical, clean, the staff generally pretty helpful (Christian, I guess), and blow-jobs were cheap and plentiful. I persuaded the manager at the Vancouver Y to let me a have a room on the cuff, as I was completely broke.

Any value this memoir might have would be in the recounting of how I managed to do whatever I did with no money. It would be knowledge worth having now. Half the time I was broke. I spent many days or nights sleeping in parks and movie theatres or crashing on the various floors of both friends and strangers. A fifty-cent bed or two-dollar room in a cheap hotel was a luxury. Meals were elusive. But as far as I know I never starved to death and I can't say why. I almost never worked. Once in a while I'd get dayjobs through Manpower, which had offices in all the big cities. (Manpower was a private, day-labour outfit, an Office Overload for guys - not the Canadian government agency that came along to pretend to find jobs for the unemployed.) I'd show up at 7:30 in the morning. In itself a towering achievement for me, but that's when you had to be there. I'd sit, trying to wake up, in a hall with rows of hard wooden chairs with a bunch of my colleagues and every once in a while the guy in charge would yell out something like, "Okay, we need two guys to count ingots at the Munchhausen Ingot Works. You and you," pointing out the chosen people. No order, no seniority, just the whim of the boss. You had to get to the job on your own and, usually, within a half hour, no matter where the place was. They'd advance you the busfare if you needed it. Around nine or nine-thirty you'd give up and either go get a ten cent glass of beer with a couple of the guys, if you had a dime, or go home and catch up on some sleep. Once, in Toronto, the boss let me sit there till about 9:30. Everybody in the hall got work and I waited and waited till I was the last one there. Finally I got up to go and the boss calls me over. "I ain't sending you on no jobs till you get a fuckin haircut." What an asshole. He could have told me that right off the bat and saved me a sore ass. I could have gone home to sleep and thus had more energy for the inevitable partying later that night. But that was Toronto.

In San Francisco about a dozen of us got a three day job cleaning up one of the big downtown hotels after a major convention. They took us there in a van. A guy named Eddie sat beside me, bullshitting with me all the way to the hotel. When we got there he said, "Stick with me, kid." Eddie knew the ropes, for sure. He made me his partner and taught me more than a decade full of official, government approved professors could dream of. (Not grammar, though.) First thing, they took us to a basement room for instructions and handed us all green jackets so we wouldn't look like crooks wandering the hallways of the hotel. It took Eddie's brain a nanosecond to grasp the potential of those little green jackets.

They gave us a list of rooms. We had to go to each one and get the garbage into big wheeled cans. Conventioners are a messy bunch, believe me. I had a job one time where the bosses, all middle-aged Jewish family men, respectable, neat, captains of industry, bragged constantly about how much they drank and got fucked at various conventions of scrap-metal dealers. "Check the liquor bottles," Eddie explained. "There's gonna be a lot a booze left over." Every room had several bottles lying around and every bottle had at least enough to make a sloshing sound when shook. We're talking good stuff, here. Kentucky Bourbon, single-malt Scotch, Canadian Club. We shared all of it. By lunch-time I could barely find my nose. "If you see anyone standing around ask if they called a bellhop," he said. "You can carry their bags to the cab and get a tip." It was our green jackets that set up this particular trick. Bellhops wore some other colour but who knew? Certainly no hungover ingot salesman from Death, Idaho with a dose of clap he was taking home, a gift for the little lady. Lunchtime Eddie says, "We got a find the employee cafeteria," and we go find some chambermaids to follow. "We can't eat here, can we?" I muse. "Just follow me and do what I do." We get in the cafeteria lineup, barely able to stand and stinking of twelve different kinds of hootch. Eddie loads up his plate with everything in sight. I do the same. Near the end of the counter he picks up a pad, scrawls something on it, tears the page off and puts it in a small tray. My turn, I look at his chit and can make no sense of it, so I doodle some Pollockian lines and leave my chit on top of his. By the end of lunch we've crammed roast beef and potatoes and peas and carrots, unknown amounts of alcohol and collected a few bucks in illicit tips. We keep this up for three days while Eddie talks about cities and dames and riding the rods and time in various jails coast to coast.

So somehow, blind faith, native wit, lessons learned along the road, and probably a shitload of sheer stupidity got me by. And July 1963 found me in a room in the Vancouver YMCA, registered for the summer poetry seminar at UBC, and looking for a better place to live. I heard UBC had a housing office. Rooms to rent were posted out there so I went out and looked at a large bulletin board filled with index cards advertising rooms, apartments, and the like. No addresses made sense to me and I had no idea where to go. I chose a card, pretty much at random, and called the number. The room was still free so I got directions, got a bus, and got the room in the house on 37th Avenue near Arbutus.

Ellen Oliver was, and may still be, a sweet, gentle woman, widowed, who shared her home with her sixteen-year-old daughter Carol. Carol was young, gorgeous, blonde, amply breasted, and life on earth was a dream marred only by waking hours. Oh, well. I lay in my room listening to birdsongs I'd never heard before and thought, these must be westcoast birds. Ellen worked all day and, as school was out for the summer, when I got up, maybe 11 or 12, Carol would be home. We'd hang around the house. She had, among the usual teenage records, a single Ray Charles album, Yes, Indeed!, that we listened to again and again. I'd look at the paper and was amazed to see the Vancouver Sun had a regular jazz column. I'd never seen such a thing in Montreal. I was in the promised land! Carol'd make me something to eat and I'd go.

One of the places I went to most often was Jamie Reid's place on Pender Street where many of the poets hung out. The night of the day I rented the Oliver's room I met Peter for the first time. He was also signed up for the poetry conference. I told him about my room in that lovely house and the tree-lined street with the strange and lovely birdsongs and the nymphet daughter. He asked, "Is that the Oliver house?"

"Yeah."

"That's my mother and sister." Peter Oliver! This magic continued all summer and well into most of the remaining decade. Always the right place at the right time. Even when I was at the wrong place it was the right time. It also turned out that Warren and Ellen Tallman lived across the street from the Olivers. Carol babysat their kids. Warren had written a terrific essay on Kerouac and jazz that I'd read probably just a few months earlier. He taught poetry at UBC and was the one who had organized the poetry conference. So I got to hang out at Warren's, too, all that month. A house full of all the best minds of whoever's generation that was. Ginsberg, Creeley, Duncan, Olson, Whalen, et al.

Within a day or two of arriving in Vancouver I met Gil Pomeroy, probably at Jamie's. Gil was from Goleta, California and maybe a year or two older than me. We clicked instantly and spent a lot of that month hanging out together. One day at Joy Long's house in Kitsilano we'd had a few glasses of Joy's miraculous homemade wine and I got very drunk, but in some way that I'd never known. What the hell was in that wine? I went out in the yard, in the deep sunlit day and saw the grass and trees and sky and everything with a crystalline intensity so powerful I was dumbfounded.

Till then my marijuana dabblings had pretty tame results. Once, at Jamie's, a half-dozen or so of us sat on his living room floor passing joints around. At one point I said, "I dunno. I been trying this shit a while, now, but I don't really seem to get high."

Jamie looked at me for a minute. "Shit, man, you've been sitting there for half an hour with bugged-out eyes and a beatific grin on your face and you're tellin' us you're not high?"

At that moment I knew I really was stoned but you can see it was pretty subtle. In Joy's yard I reached a state of highness wholly new and miraculous to me, every sense hightened so that colours vibrated and edges were sharper than I'd experienced since I‘d lost my glasses in the eighth grade. Gil, I knew, was into all kinds drugs. I'd been reading De Ropp's Drugs and the Mind and discussing every chapter with him. He found me out in Joy's backyard counting the leaves on the trees, the blades of grass, but not with numbers then known to mathematicians. "Gil," I said, "man this is great, this is great. But, man, listen. I wanna get really high."

"Right!"

A couple of days later we went over to bill bissett's studio on York Street. Gil had a bagful of peyote buttons and another bagful of empty, large-size gelatine capsules he'd picked up at the drugstore. He mashed up the peyote, filled the caps with the brown mess, and divided them up among himself, myself, Bill, Bill's partner, Martina, and Neri Gadd. "Peyote tastes awful," he explained. "This is easier to take." I got fourteen caps but after swallowing the eleventh I thought to myself, maybe eleven's enough, I don't know what's gonna happen. I put three in my pocket. Then we all walked down to Kitsilano Beach to look at the sunset and wait. For what, I didn't know.

There was, and still is, a giant tree stump down on the beach there that must be twelve feet in diameter and maybe fifteen feet long, lying on its side. It's got to be about as old as the Hebrew children. I climbed up and sat looking out across the water as the sun went down. I thought the kind of thoughts I thought I should be thinking, waiting for the cactus to perform its magic. After a while we sauntered back to bill's. I felt disappointingly normal.

Bill's place consisted of two very large, long rooms. Paintings, books, and manuscripts were everywhere. The far room had a crib in which bill and Martina's newborn girl, Oolya , slept. I went in there and sat down, looked around, poked through some books and magazines while the others talked in the the other room. Someone went in the bathroom to throw up. I started to feel a little sick, myself. Soon I was feeling very sick. Soon after that I felt so sick I knew I was dying. And soon after that I died.

I was dead quite a while. But not so dead that I couldn't feel the cold. I was cold. My blood and bones and heart were cold. My mind and soul were sick and shivering. Martina came from somewhere and found me huddled in a shuddering, foetal heap. She placed a blanket over my shoulders and as it descended over me so, too, did a soft, rosy warmth. As though the inside of the blanket itself were composed of the radiant love of god. It glowed like a quilt made of an infinte number of infinitely small suns. I pulled it over my head, enclosing myself completely as I drew my knees tight against my chest. Wrapped in that blanket with my eyes shut, still I bathed in that reddish light. Soon I began to hear sounds that became voices, incomprehensible, like a strange music. I heard them but didn't listen. Then I listened and was drawn to the voices. Finally I got up, still cloaked in that angelic mantle, and moved towards the voices in the other room and sat down again. I listened for a long time but understood nothing. I poked my head out and drew it back. A while later I took another peek but was still not ready. The voices jabbered on and I stayed blissfully within my refuge. The third time I looked out I was beginning to understand that I had to come out. I let the blanket drop to my shoulders, exposing my head to the cooler air, and sat, still puzzled by the talk in the room.

It's hard to know what's duller. Other people's dreams or their drug experiences. Probably a tie. I'd rather watch oats cook than listen to either. But this trip is fresh in my mind after thirty-three years. And any birth reminiscence is worth a little reflection, I think.

Why did I let the blanket fall altogether? Did I have a choice? I sat awhile, chilled again, but longing for the company of these incomprehensible people, my family. Later we were in the other room, all but me yakking away about who knows what and by now I was understanding the conversation but had yet to master speech. Words and ideas were flying about yet I couldn't make myself utter a single syllable. Then I got an idea. I rolled a cigarette, knowing I'd need a match and would be forced to ask for one. But I wound up sitting there with my unlit fag, dumbstruck still. Bill noticed the cigarette in my hand and tossed a matchbook at me. "SHIT!" I blurted. Everyone stopped and stared at me as my face lit up with a big smile. I repeated "shit" a couple more times. "What's the matter?"

"Shit." My first word.

Poetry Conference

I can't say that I learned much about poetry at the Vancouver Poetry Conference. Most discussions were over my head, though I enjoyed the readings, over my head or not. I met a lot of great people and went to a lot of great parties. Isn't that what poetry's about, anyway? By crossing the street to hang out at the Tallmans I got to hobnob with several modern poetry geniuses, including Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and others I've forgotten by now. Of course the main attraction for me was Ginsberg who'd already been one of my heroes for some time. Now I was discussing running shoes with the bard, drinking beer with him at the Alcazar Hotel where we discussed Cuba (He asked me what they thought of him there and I said they thought his poetry was more or less irrelevant. How the fuck did I know that?) and he poked me with all his fingers, quoting Corso, You must feel. It's so beautiful to feel, and reading aloud from my secret notebook in the Tallman living-room where I was mortified, saying, "No, no, not aloud," and he said I must stand naked before all and, after reading my jottings, including "itch in asshole is most painful of pleasures," which he deemed Blakean and added, "Read more Blake." Which I did. I went so far as to steal two books from the Vancouver Public Library. Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and the Modern Library Selected Poetry and Prose of Blake. (Back in Montreal, months later, lousy with guilt, I mailed the price of the two books to the library.) Gil and I read each other stories from the Zen book and I got to know some of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The rest was beyond me.

The Readings. I knew exactly one Creeley poem. One I'd read in the Evergreen Review a year or two earlier. But for some unfathomable reason he asked me to select all the poems for his reading. No doubt the fact that I'd given the impression that I was a huge fan of his helped. What would I do? I knew fuck all about his poetry. Pick a bunch at random? Go home and read his book and see if I liked and/or understood any of them, and choose those? It was lucky, though I still felt like a fraud, that some key fans of his, including the Tallmans, Duncan, et al, got wind of this scheme and slipped me lists for days up till his reading. I compiled the titles, added the single poem I knew, and gave Creeley my list. The night of his reading the lights blew in the lecture hall. A candle was found and the magic of Robert Creeley reading poetry by candlelight before a couple of hundred devotees proceeded. He read every poem on the list but the single one I'd contributed. It probably was not a very good poem. And even when I read it now I have no idea what it means.

The Ginsberg reading was something else. A long, hot jazz solo. He read Kaddish which brought me close to tears. He read long sexy passages from his India journals, including many cocksucking scenes with Peter. This was where the two nuns in the audience politely, and apologetically, retreated to the night. People called for Howl but he was hesitant, then began, then stopped and said, "I can't read this, again. Fuck you." Who can blame him? He musta read it a million times. I saw him out in the hall when it was over I planted a big kiss right on his huge ginsbergian lips.

When I first saw Olson, on night one of the conference, I took him for a mountain man just down from northern wilderness to study modern poetry. I had no idea who he was but soon learned he was kind of a father figure to some of these guys. A giant in red plaid mountain shirt. To me he was the most impenetrable of all but a beauty of a man. That night I once again dragged out the battered New American Poetry and tried to fathom The Kingfishers, berating myself, "c'mon you ignorant punk, how hard can it be, it's in English, isn't it?" Well, mostly in English. I remember the night he started a class by writing "Polis is eyes" on the blackboard. By the end of the night I knew what it, and many other things, meant. It was heaven just to hear him speak. Every word was a poem. He introduced Margaret Avison's reading only by standing at the microphone and saying, "It's just such a pleasure to present you Miss Avison." There may be no reason to repeat those words here other than that after 33 years I still remember them perfectly. At the famous party I sat down beside Olson, sitting there with a beer in his hand surveying all with his powerful eyes. I started to tell him the truth, that I was in over my head, I knew nothing and would he explain to me, could he give me the key to unlock the mystery, of The Kingfishers and everything and everyone, and would he... he beamed at me so generously and fatherly. I knew that at any moment I'd be admitted to the wonderful understanding of all that was happening around me. He started to speak, I could feel the kindness in his soul like heat radiating from his skin, and at that very moment John Keys, the New York poet, butted his drunk way between us and said, "Charles Olson, I love you," and kissed him on his olsonian lips, a kiss that went on and on and on. I waited so patiently for what should be a normal conclusion to any kiss. I sipped my beer and puffed on my cigarette. I got up from my seat on the north side of Olson and sat down again on the south side of him and then got up again and circled the kissers a while, lighting another fag and sipping beer out of the long-necked brown bottle. To this day I neither know nor care whether these men, either of them, are or were homosexual. It never occurred to me. I think we should all kiss poets, every chance we get. I'd kissed Ginsberg, hadn't I? But this was turning into an eternal smooch and, besides, was the rudest of interruptions of what was surely to be the most important conversation I was ever to have in the world of poetry. Keys had lost himself, it seemed, in an osculatory coma but Olson sat cool and stoical and, finally, I just walked away, cursing Keys for snatching the rose from my green fingers.

Not to worry, there were other lessons waiting in the wings.

A dozen of us crammed ourselves in the stairwell landing where Ginsberg was teaching the spiritual powers of chanting and, in particular the Hare Krishna chant, as yet unknown in the West and I suppose Ginsberg, just returned from India, was to first to import what was to become part of the soundtrack of so many downtowns and airports. But then it was a brand new idea to us and I was seduced by it on the spot, as were the rest of us jammed in the stairway chanting like spiritual lunatics. Hare krishna hare krishna, krishna krishna, etc.

A few minutes of this chanting and through the door at the bottom of the stairway came a handful of RCMP cops. Turned out their station house was directly beneath the apartment, amazingly. The chanting must have summoned some kind of magic because despite the din, the drugs, the jam-packed wild apartment, the cops backed out within minutes.

Back in Montreal that fall I taught it to my friends, like a Bodhisattva from o'er the Mountains, and when, a few years later, the Hare Krishna cult developed and opened one of the first North American temples on Park Avenue, I was a regular at their nightly feasts. I should add that I was there for the food. Every time I've been attracted to religious pursuits it's been for the food and my spirituality never extended to the main belief systems, especially when such things as a supreme being, a leader too holy to wear regular clothes, sitting around musty rooms listening to taped sermons, or any kind of rules were involved. In the final analysis, Jewish food's good enough for me and I'm happy to put on a yarmulke now and then to eat some.

Duncan I felt nothing for or, maybe, just a little antipathy. Although he did say, "At twenty the poet is twenty. At forty the poet is a poet." Probably a famous quote. Anyway, I'd never heard it before but it stayed with me and when I got to be forty I thought of it and decided I was a poet after all. Fifty, though, is something else, again.

Philip Whalen and I spent an afternoon walking about the UBC grounds, particularly the Nitobe Japanese garden, talking about Buddhism, Gary Snyder off in Japan, Kerouac, and a poem of his, Martyrdom of Two Pagans, that I read aloud with Gil on that peyote night. That poem shook me with great beauty and truth and the next day, when I looked at it again I'd lost my sympathetic insight. I was sure he must have written it while on peyote, himself, but he denied it.

These are a few of the famous , the celebrated ones who's lives and works have touched many people and maybe there's some interest, small as it probably would be, in my brief contacts with them. Some I met again, and others, too. But they're not the important ones for me, then or now. The main cats were the ones I hung out with, partied and got high with, talked talked talked with. Like Gil Pomeroy, who, a couple of years later I was desperate to find again, even walking up and down the beach of Goleta, California asking bikini beach bimbos and surfing hunks, California blonde every one, if they knew the name. Gil had given me a Goleta address when I last saw him. Well, no dice. I haven't seen him since, but you never know. And there was Easteregg. He might have had another name. I might even have heard it. But he was Easteregg then and we'd go to the UBC cafeterias and eat leftovers off the plates, we had no money or food. More than once the Chinese cooks and busboys, to whom we musta seemed truly pitiful, gave us bags of untouched buns and even chickens and pies and whatnot. Gil and Easteregg and others long since forgotten were either the last beats or first hippies or both or neither but they were the real ones for me. Hanging out in pure joy and the excitement of new times and poetry and art and high.

And home where I got up late and Carol floated gorgeous through the days, so young, even for me then, and sweet but untouchable. Coffee in the kitchen, wander in the yard, or lie on my bed alone with some book or letter and listen to crazy Vancouver birds chirping out in the yard, in strange new trees. I sat in the livingroom, sun streaming through the blinds and drapes, listening to the one Ray Charles album, Yes, Indeed, with her and talk about our lives which, then, were worlds apart in age and place, time and space, but, decades later are not far apart at all. I've had girlfriends much younger than her. She was about three years younger than me. That's it. Three years, and she catwalked through the summer while I looked on mouthwatering and virginal. One morning in 1965 I woke from a Lolita dream of her in which we lived together and I wrote about us in a book which began, "Car-uhl, light in my darkness, bulb in my socket." Honest to god.

Some of the poet guys had eyes for Lisa, whom no one knew. She came to the conference of the bards alone, every class and reading, spoke to no one, and left alone. Tall, lissome blonde, in her late twenties, astonishingly lovely and mysterious. Even the famous, the handsome, the heterogenius, followed her sexy moves with hot eyes, hopelessly. At the famous party two guys sat beside me, interupting a fiery and sophisticated discussion I was having with Jamie Reid about what I saw as an infinite network of events that linked every thought and deed in the universe, which I thought was a bright idea at the time but is, of course, old hat by now. Regardless, I got the idea from a Theodore Sturgeon novel and it's ramifications were obsessing me at the time. I needed some deep thoughts and this seemed like a good one. But these two guys, Bill Klein and his pal, accosted me and said I looked Jewish. I couldn't see how this fit in with my theorem, but I played along. Basically, I don't think I look very Jewish but a couple of times in my journeys I've been spotted by lonesome jews in goyishe cities, desperate for brethren. Yeah, okay, I'm Jewish. We chatted about two minutes when they said, "We're having a barbeque on Sunday. Why don't you come?" I was here, in Vancouver, hanging out with authors and bohemians, to expand my social milieu. I was not especially keen on Jewish barbeques, at the time, though these fellows seemed nice enough. At that moment Lisa walked by, alone, with a beer in her gorgeous hand.

"Yes, I'll come if I can bring my girlfriend."

"Yeah, sure. Who?"

"Her."

She stopped. She just stood there smiling while I got the address and then I told her we were going to a barbeque on Sunday. "What time," she asked me.

Sunday afternoon I picked her up at the house where she roomed. A green house with lace curtains and the smell of furniture polish and old landladies. Tea, incense, bath oils. We followed Bill's bus instructions to a house in Kerrisdale where Bill and his friend were partially drunk and a couple of others sat glumly in the yard waiting for the burgers to cook. I was with the most beautiful woman in Western Canada as far as I was concerned. I knew that on this night my virginity would expire and, at the same time, I knew it would not. Lisa was happy to chat with the dopes and eat burgers and drink beer. I was anxious to leave right after eating. This was the first place I'd been since my arrival in Vancouver where no one had marijuana, so I got a little drunk and, as the sky turned a deeper blue than I'd ever seen, we left, Lisa and I.

It could be the romantic imagination fired by new places that makes things appear so differently than they did before. For example, the colour of fire, I'm sure, is different in the east and I supposed that it was something in the local atmosphere that caused this. It wouldn't be hard to find out if this is true but why not just humour myself? It'd be even easier to figure out if summer days are longer in Vancouver than in Montreal or New York. Latitudes and all. But to me the days of that summer were amazingly long. The birdsongs could have belonged to Martian birds for all I knew. And strangest, loveliest of all, I'm walking in the evening down maple-lined Western streets with a woman so angelic and elegant that some of the best poets lusted vainly for her.

Hair

2005-11-29T14:02:00.000-08:00

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.