Soliloquy 4a53i

Soliloquy

KURT CLINE

Copyright © 2017 by Kurt Cline. Back cover photo by: Lilian Yen

ISBN:

Hardcover Softcover eBook

978-1-5437-4083-7 978-1-5437-4082-0 978-1-5437-4081-3

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Contents

Chapter 1 The Long Distance Telephone Call Blues

Chapter 2 The Nervous Breakdown

Chapter 3 My Grandma Deckwa

Chapter 4 The Yellow Suitcase

Chapter 5 My Father

Chapter 6 The Grey Gargoyle

Chapter 7 My Uncle Alan And Aunt Darlene

Chapter 8 Modesto Redux

Chapter 9 Alta Eva Hortensia Hagberg Cline

Chapter 10 Somebody Becoming

Chapter 11 An Actor’s Life

Chapter 12 The Education Of A Poet

Chapter 13 Goodbye To All That

Chapter 14 Autumnal Crescent

Chapter 15 My Life Now

Chapter 16 The End, My Friend

1 THE LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE CALL BLUES

“Y ou’re crazy!” my wife exclaimed. Then the phone said bleep-bleep & went dead. Such are the vagaries of long-distance phone cards. Too psychically paralyzed to negotiate the bank of public telephone kiosks downstairs, I was left to wonder, was it true, was I really crazy? After all, it runs in the family. I have always been given to seeing existentially actual overlapping realities & perhaps deep down really did entertain the notion. Or it might have been Lily’s mind had been taken over by a certain Scorpio shadow sadist following her across the centuries, waiting for her to take him in. And I, the hero in the story, was all adither. Orpheus caught in the strings of his zither. I had forgotten Christ Tao Buddha Allah along the way, as can one forget the names of characters midway through Dostoyevsky novels. I had been having a long sequence of recurrent dreams, based equally on my hopes as well as my fears. In one, Lily really does come back, after all these delays, deceptions, the eight-hour long distance phone call I had to pay for the outcome of which was Lily canceling her flight on the next morning’s plane to Taipei. Yes it is really Lily, luggage & all, arriving at the door—just as I’m about to make it with some far-out chick I met on the beach. She never would let go. And I guess I never will be able to either, although I suffer greatly physically from the absence of said wife who perfect or not if nonexistent leaves me to ponder am I really crazy or not? And part of the answer to this must lie in the very same question about her—is she crazy or not? Or more precisely, one supposes, just exactly how crazy am I to suffer her errant longdistance phone-call that leaves me feeling squeezed-out into a mop-bucket. Just as the Modern Lovers used to play back when punk rock was not yet new wave that is before its gradual disintegration. And that’s back it all started and I didn’t know where I was headed but somehow got through it all: the drugs the drags the drag-queens the hootenanny-holler with the field hands I took this certain very eccentric route. I really did want to become a great poet someday. I still do. But my time being was spent in a (not always so) systematic disintegration of the senses, although it was progressive. I didn’t know anything. I had to ask somebody where Xanadu was. But somehow, in spite of all the booze & drugs I still kept writing. Or, to be sure, a lot of times I wrote because of them. But then that’s why cut out for tropical climes in the first place, now a college professor & who would’ve ever guessed? I learned something along the way but as I much as I learned I promptly forgot, which kept the balance even. Then there was this severance when I left my home and country, my cats & paintings & books. But most of all my wife, with whom I had been cohabiting with or

without or with benefit of clergy for about thirty years. There was inevitably that something that happened. That drove us apart. I fled the sanctuary of that apartment of Seneca Street the way a deer might flee the relative safety of the forest for the danger of a deserted highway. Oh that apartment! How I used to sweep long coagulated clots of cat fur across the hardwood floor down the stairs & over the porch into the street. It was really the only home I’d ever known, every other having been disrupted. It had been the longest I had ever lived anywhere. She drove me from my emergency sublet to the airport & a great blizzard snowed us in for two days in Syracuse where we lounged at the hotel & shifted to being a couple of carefree bon vivants which is how we would act whenever we visited somewhere. “Like a couple of swells,” Lily used to say. And with dipping in the pool three times a day, sauna, fish dinner & a makeshift tour of Syracuse University where Dick Gregory was a distinguished alumni we thought maybe this was the answer to the problem. Whoever gets a full time job first the other goes along & finds part-time work. This was our longstanding agreement. My wife had yet to finish her doctoral dissertation, upon which she had been laboring for over ten years. She’d always found a way to blame it on me but the fact of it nevertheless stripped her soul—she became alcoholic & had a very vague affair I was only to figure out the affair later, with the aid of a Tarot deck, in far Taipei, the strange island I ended up where my sanity was slowly to erode from cultural & personal isolation into a sort of functional insanity. But that is part of the longer story & will become apparent in due time since was & still is the grinding post of my heart. She promised then to come to Taiwan within the next three months. But time & distance still separated us & now I was in Puebla, Mexico, feeling the pyramid energy, the jaguar power, studying the Popul Vuh. In Chichen-Itza, at the site where the ball game descends into the Underworld, where the team captain is decapitated & his head kicked around, at the foot of the pyramid atop which the sacrificial victim’s heart was chopped out with an obsidian axe & held up to the sky I won’t say I didn’t feel a bit frightened. But I was in so much pain anyway not much more could hurt me. And by this time already so many years of Lily saying she would finish her dissertation & come to Taiwan to be with me. Always three months away. Until the next semester. Ended. Another dream in which I was held prisoner in some facility for 90 days. Little windows in the doors security wire running through them. A woman is in charge, but a man does her bidding. His job is to always make everything a little bit worse. If the light’s too bright to sleep, he increases its intensity. If it’s stiflingly warm, he turns up the heat. Later am physically tortured—skin cut into, nerves flayed. And such

has been the story of my life for at least the past ten years. During which I have lost everything—my friends, my temper, my self-respect, my sense of adventure —all except items to add to my CV, as I am productive researcher in spite of everything else & still a writer. Am & always will be & don’t need to promise because whenever there is nothing else taking my time I will automatically sit down and write. I don’t know why this is. Some people might sit down and draw, or plan bridges, or work out quadratic occasions. But I always write & the singular interest of my inquiry is unerringly myself & how I feel & why I feel the way I do. Of course, the world outside my skin-encapsulated ego is not separate from this. It’s more a blend of inner & outer, the subtle & intense. And there I was in Mexico as in Taiwan as always quite alone. And waiting for her to come on Valentines Day & the day after that had been Ash Wednesday. But that was another Ash Wednesday, wasn’t it? I sat all alone at the coffee-table in the palatial apartment a colleague’s wife had rented to me for next to nothing, practicing Mexican rhythms on a cheap guitar, writing in my journal, reading Philip K. Dick novels & consulting the Tarot with a Mexican deck I’d picked up in one of the innumerable Aquarian age bookstores endemic in Puebla. “El Diablo,” scowls from the deck. The Devil almost always means trouble for me because I do have a bad temper, particularly when this anger is fueled by indignation, probably my greatest sin. I have long noticed that that which is most sacred is also that which is most profane & am drawn inexorably, no matter how saintly my most inward intentions, towards life’s seamier side, where I take great delight in giving in to every temptation my pocketbook will allow. So I have always been lucky (or impoverished) enough not to get myself killed. Whatever far-accompanying curse had left with me for a strong predilection of selfdestructive behaviors, mangling my emotions into explosions, my ions into obsessions had counterbalanced my life by giving me the luck of El Loco, the Fool to always fall down but never get hurt. I had this mark of protection, according to the fortune-telling señorita, a diamond-shaped mark on the palm of my left hand. I had been born with this mark of protection. I would have a long life, she assured me, but there were troubles coming in the not-too-far distant future, difficulties I would surmount, but only with the greatest difficulty. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. I didn’t know how lucky I was. The intention underlying this sabbatical had been to travel back to Ithaca—to make good & sure Lily finished her goddamned dissertation once & for all. But, after all had been approved for my sabbatic-leave by the appropriate university committees, Lily began putting up resistance in her usual ive aggressive manner. Her reluctance to receiving my visit was almost indetectable but was

nevertheless ineluctable. It would mean her renting an apartment in town, & assuming the duties of the lease appended thereunto. Etcetera etcetera. Funny right now she lived in the house the guy who used to run the New-Age Bookstore in town. Lily intimated this gentlemen who used to pick her up regularly & inexplicably in a red pick-up truck when we lived together on Seneca Street would probably be inconvenienced by any visit I might make lasting more than a week at the most. Maybe this was so, maybe not. But the net result was I stayed on in Mexico, alone again. At this point I had been living alone for five years. I can’t help feeling I would’ve tamed that damned dissertation of hers & deep down she knew & feared this. If she ever actually finished she would have to change her identity. The way things were she would always say, “I’m a Professor at SUNY Cortland, finishing up my PhD at Cornell.” Of course she wasn’t really a professor, but a lecturer. And she wasn’t really finishing her PhD either, but rather & eternally working on it. Yet these half-truths held more weight in her mind than what reality might emerge in the emergence of some new possibility. In spite of my melancholia, I always seem to land on my feet. So there I was in that beautiful city of Puebla in the magnificent magic-land of Mexico. I had money in my pockets & a nice place to stay. What more could any man ask? During the day street-musicians played accordions, guitars and harmonicas but most numerous were the organ-grinders whose metallic tinkling gave the city center a carnivalesque air. After dark, in the many nightclubs around where I was staying one heard a curious mixture of Mexican cowboy tunes and Beatles covers. I would climb up on the roof & beauty would put her arms around me: the mountains the expanses of desert the pyramids. The transparent moon. The cupola & the obelisk ri out of the dawn. Jaguars mutating into eagles in the clouds. The only thing missing was my wife. And that was all I could think about, in spite of all the things to see. The lack of someone to share it with. I was spinning, spinning into the void. And I had never stopped loving her in spite of our lengthy legal separation & the fact that we lived on opposite sides of the world. Or, at any rate, she never stopped professing her love for me, her promises to come be with me always three months in the offing. We could have that child we were always planning, after she finished her dissertation, at which time she would also quit smoking. But she stayed where she was long enough & SUNY gave her a so-called “full-time parttime” position that might have been mine if I’d stayed there. But I never seem to be able to stay anywhere, except where I am. I can’t believe it! It’s as if Gatsby had been written by Woody Allen! Lives wrecked while I find success & my beloved—for twenty years it’s been at this point—fails to complete her schoolwork! And there was always something about her eternal evasions that set

off my latent paranoia fused with melancholia infiltrating my nervous system & made me one with swirling, refracted images of masked faces peering through holes in the sky. And wasn’t it all a subterfuge, a put off or put on? That woman had my head screwed on backwards. Hers were the words, “You have just been poisoned” etched at the bottom of that final, fatal cup of red wine. She was only one I ever dreamed of. Yet she led me to the abyss, never taking it amiss that every atom in my body had been rearranged. “Don’t blame me if you can’t get laid” she once said over the long distance phone-line as my own seemingly intractable middle-aged crisis took full bloom in a series of suicidal enactments, more or less ritualized, but at least one quite sincere. This was before I had the big idea of going back to Ithaca to bust Lily loose from her underground prison. For awhile, my daring plan had even rendered the destruction of my suffering self obsolete. I am reasonably good at formulating plans & then carrying them out, in spite of shifting circumstances. But this time I was stymied, trapped in an unstable paradise of peacocks & panthers. Of all emotional maladies, depression is certainly the most stupefying, the most stultifying, & because the most predictable, the least interesting. In spite of the fact that the ancients associated it with visionary states. But it was with me, as it had been with my mother before me, who was also both dreamy & moody. “But it’s all in your mind,” Lily would object. It is hard for others outside to understand what is going on inside the mind of a depressed person. Everyone has been depressed, but clinical depression is qualitatively different from sorrows brought on by the setbacks of life. Depression is not even about sorrow, as some might assume, but about physical, bodily pain. It is spasmodic, linked to nervous and neuronal systems quite beyond one’s mental power alone to dissolve. And this makes it all the worse because one also thinks one should be able to simply will oneself out of this seven year slump, during which time all of one’s energy reserves have been silently stolen away, leaving one like a jellyfish on the beach, poisonous to touch & slowly dying. So it doesn’t take much to set off a disaster in my thinking. I inherited from my mother a natural propensity toward emotional illness. (She had been diagnosed as paranoid-schizophrenic when I was about three years old.) Even until I was in first or second grade I was afraid of monsters in the dark. By third grade I could make myself afraid, which humble ability I attain to this day. Now I must learn to learn from it. What is it causing this feeling of not being right. And that is the grim part of it: that what was once (—and may yet still be again, for all I know, although I doubt it) beautiful, mystic, sexy, divine, is now “Hell.” But that was later, back (here) in Taipei. Now in Puebla, Mexico, five minutes from the largest pyramid ever built

by humanity I clutch the sandstone ledge, eight stories down. And think of her & how she was NEVER THERE. Or, conversely, has never left. Leaving me to my own delusions & to stave them off whatever debauchery for which I have the wherewithal. My sins so maudlin & so terribly unrewarding. Embarrassing really, this neurosis eating away my bones & tendons taking away my superpowers, most alarmingly the power of dream-flight. “It’s all in your head,” says my estranged wife, over the long distance connection. Seven years we’ve been apart & in that time I’ve attempted suicide four times. The first time was just a rehearsal: a collection of the ingredients: the portable bbq, the charcoal, the charcoal lighter. I just set it ablaze to see if it would catch fire. But I left the window open. I’d read about several families offing themselves en masse because they had become what the newspaper referred to as “credit card slaves,” in Taiwanese culture the bottom of the cider barrel. This seems weird to an American. Americans can set up a new identity for themselves simply renting out a new P.O. box. We do it so often we hardly know who we are or were or might be if only things had turned out differently. The second time I didn’t have sufficient sleeping pills so I just lay there in the mat in the smaller, tenantless bedroom (it had been intended for Lily) choking on the charcoal fumes, eyes fuming, staring at the ceiling, until I just got bored & thought to hell with it. But that first time was important because it was when I typed out my suicide note. This was important to me, as I have toyed with suicide now & again in my life & have written many practice suicide notes. After apologizing for the inconvenience to the poor stiff who discovered my body I gave instructions about who to call & who should divvy up my things. Obviously my erstwhile wife first, then my best friend Wolfgang. But since this would be such a public note, I remained taciturn on my exact reasons for my actions, but just flung in the mysterious “Lily & Wolfgang will know.” I entitled it “Suicide Note,” & thought it would be a good name for a band. And if the first aborted attempt gave the all-important note its basic form, the second time I really fine-tuned it. Now it was really polished, suitable to be a permanent if public record of the event. So the third time I could focus my energies more on the lethal work at hand. Really get the bbq cooker going. Really seal the windows and doorway with towels & take a whole prescription of sleeping pills washed down by a bottle of sake. Then I closed the door & the ceiling grew fuzzy & I felt a subtle energy form which was both me & not me (call it spirit or soul, unless you are intent on hounding such to death) ri out of my physical form, connected by a long tendril of ectoplasm & thinking ah I rise up rise up out of your dreams how far how far should I venture tonight. And I

thought back to it: “Just keep going—straight ahead—into oblivion—and snap the filament!” And I felt rather than saw it fly away away & I said goodbye farewell. Next time (if there is a next time) maybe things will turn out differently. And then I let myself go & might have been gone but for the phone ringing in the morning. I was in pain near paralysis; couldn’t even roll myself off the mat onto the linoleum floor. The phone kept ringing, but ceased. Still & all, morning had come my campfire had but a few embers remaining & I was still alive, though torturously so. I couldn’t even get to my knees so I dragged myself across the floor, like a soldier, on my elbows. My head was getting bashed in with a baseball bat every five seconds & my elbows were bloody by the time I managed to curl myself around the cool ceramic of the commode & from there crept my way to a seated position. My pee was ink-black. Then the phone rang again. Somehow I made my way across the room & lying on the floor spoke into the receiver, tendering my apology to the secretary and canceling my classes the rest of the day. “Probably something I ate last night.” The fourth time I didn’t even bother with the note. Fuck the charcoal, the grill. I just rather nonchalantly decided one evening to take every psychotropic medication I had collected over the last few years of treatment for depressive disorder. I took my entire accumulated stock of Lexapro, Mesyrel, Zolpidem, Duloxtine & other assorted anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications (God love them)—about 300 pills in all. Sakè made me sick now so I washed them down with barely able white wine from the 7-11 on the corner. You know what? I got a bit tipsy, that I’ll it, for about an hour or two & then ed out & woke up 6 hours later feeling perfectly refreshed. Was I crazy or what? And so far away. And no one to help me. Like I say, I always have this unwitting luck —like El Loco, the Fool, the innocence of whose ignorance protects him from the stupidity of his actions. And she calls me crazy! Little does she know just how crazy I really was & am. At the time rejected the notion but just a few weeks ago (& several years later) I came to the realization that she is/was correct. I am, in fact, stark raving mad. You probably would not guess it if you saw me on the sidewalk. I comport myself irably in a responsible professional position. I am lucid on the outside while on my inside I am eaten up with fear, anger, violence. I suppose it is the “quiet desperation” of which Thoreau writes. Only grown to Jekyll & Hyde proportions. I am doing things outside my body, things I would rather not do, and these seem to get steadily worse. But that is not what makes me crazy. I have an immeasurable capacity for suffering. I was born of a splitting rather than

a union. Sickened by the green stuff I was imbibing I had to get out of there, suffocating in the tentacles of an umbilical octopus. And then be placed in white isolation box I learned early, even before I could tell any different, the nightmare of separation, both deluding & denuding my life. My mother was a certified paranoid schizophrenic. I am finding in myself certain psychic abnormalities which compel me, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Epona, horse goddess of the Celts, to tell my story which is neither good nor evil to every er-by. The story of the circle things go in & how I went around & around it, to find myself measuring out my life in psychiatric medications. “BUT IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND,” says Lily over the long distance phoneline. And she should know, having lived with me for some 25 years, but that doesn’t help me any: this emotional paralysis is surprisingly tenacious. Acupunture and herbs offer the only surcease, so it’s lucky I’m living on this little tobaccoshaped island of the coast of China, Taiwan, Formosa, Beautiful Island, a legitimate and functional democracy, the most progressive country in this area of the world. It’s not China. That’s one thing people have to get straight although the government does confuse things by subtitling itself the Republic of China. I have a good job. I am a success at my profession. It’s funny: She was the one with great promise; she was the one with the Cornell scholarship & the awardwinning novel manuscript placed with a New York agent. I only just followed her there. We then did not realize that this little left-winged college town, Ithaca, New York, would just about do us in. True to its name, it does have a weird magnetic tendency. It’s where Nabokov wrote Lolita: I think that just about says it all. Lily has made several attempts but still can’t leave there; I struggled for years, got away a few times but always ended up back in zip-code 14850 until I made my final escape, but it’s not like got away entirely intact. Just the beauty of all this suffering to show for my trouble. I did find years of happiness & health there but at last my luck ran out there, as it has always run out everywhere, eventually. And how it ran out, that is the story, a story so long only spun gold could stretch thin enough to reach from beginningless beginning to an uncertain end. And now is now & then is now too & they say everything reaches everywhere. I don’t want to, but I could cast my life as a tragedy. A ragged childhood, a drunken coming to age, a few good years & then a plummet over the cliff. But there are many with worse stories to tell than mine. I’m still intact. My decline, though inevitable, seems slow & blind. The tragedy was everyone else’s. I was the survivor, the one who got what he paid for in the end. Solitude, oceans of

solitude. And it’s Tomb-Sweeping Day here in Taiwan of which the Tang poet Du Mu writes: Tomb-sweeping: the rains never stop. Travelers on the road shamble by like ghosts. “Excuse me, could you direct me to the nearest tavern?” The cowherd just jerks his thumb: that way. Centuries later another tomb-sweeping season arrives. There are no penitents in the alley. A few people buy snacks at the 7-11. But there is a sort of pall in the air so I climb the stairs up to my roof for an unobstructed view of the heavens and the moon, a razor’s slice shy of full, revolves in the clouds with ever altering faces, some bright with illumination, others with shadowed brow, some angelic, some diabolical, until at length disappearing behind a dark black mask and then reappearing as if wrapped in a shroud. And it so happens that this particular first day of tomb-sweeping falls on the same day as Ash Wednesday. And I notice the structural similarity between these two culturally-exclusive calendric markers. And the clouds look rather ashen & one can hardly stop thinking of T.S. Eliot so deeply is the collective memory of the emptying out of the tomb carved into the memory matrix. Maybe I relinquish control but never hope. I will become, am becoming. I will break these chains by Easter day or chop off my hands & feet trying.

2 THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

S he had been a poet of sorts—at least she used to write song-lyrics. “Divine Love” was her big hit. It was going to make her famous someday. Ah to be caught between “someday” and “if only.” She could have married someone whose name she used to intone reverently who later went on to become the District Attorney. Then she met this out-of-town sandy haired devil, a charming, handsome stranger with a future. And maybe she was just a little swept off her feet. All on of which she left home on a train as an Air Force bride but the same train brought her back to this little dusty valley town home of orchards & vineyards & canneries where the people thought only of the earth & only looked at the sky when the newspaper indicated rain. She got off that train with a baby in her arms & there was probably talk about how it had all come to nothing —that nothing being, of course, me. And her pride was devoured as if a puma in the desert along with the rest of her & the vultures were already circling overhead. And she tried it for awhile but then she just rolled down her windowshades & turned out the lights. She had what they used to call a “nervous breakdown.” This is all part of a story I do not believe is true but which arises in my mother’s voice, when it would turn from melodious to acrid when she drank. Anyway that is just the madness within me, and ignited by isolation went stark mad staring at the ceiling wondering how long it would take the small bedroom to fill up with carbon monoxide until I grew bored of this thought what a boring way to die so once again I opened the window. Without being too enumerative let us just say I’ve done immoral things in my life & acted in dangerous, self-destructive ways. “The Lord forgives 70 times 7,” my Mother used to tell me. Its really just attempt on my part to survive the St. Valentine’s Day massacre The Untouchables starring Elliot Ness. Watched it on there on the Murphy bed, in the stinking hot Modesto night, lying next to my mother. You understand the bed filled the entirety of our tiny quarters. During the day it folded into the wall. Sometimes my mother would play radio: Nat King Cole maybe Julie London. I especially loved Peggy Lee. Patsy Cline of course. “C-R-A-Z-Y, crazy for loving you.” Later I found my way to the philosopher’ stone yes and saw the rainbow serpent so different/no different from the iridescent cathode ray images engraved on my inner eye. But damn was it a long, hard fight & never leaves off. Separation feels serrated on the tongue. It is a twisted path, a labyrinth back to halcyon days when I would point up at toy & ask its price & the grocer would fetch it down with a long stick. A dime went a long way. A quarter could buy a

comic book & a ride on the mechanical horse outside, down which I might gamble the dusty roads of some cowboy Western sound stage. My mother was very generous with what money she had. A year from now from now,” she’d say, “we’ll never know the difference.” But when intoxicated she would launch a diatribe about how my father never paid his child & he owed her money because she had put him through school. Such long ago was my first undifferentiated paradise. Later on, when we moved to the one bedroom apartment in The Projects there were competitors for my mother’s affection: men who brought beer over. But in those old days we’d still sing that old song “Side by Side” & I’d soft-shoe my way along the curb in the failing light as the cars tossed their headlights over us & my mother would walk beside me, holding my hand so I didn’t slip. She was always smoking. We’d feast on TV dinners & watch a very small, square television set. Then, after we’d cleaned the smelly goop from between our toes to make ready for bed, she’d reprise for me the story of my birth, an oral epic unique to every individual, yet retold to every generation: the story of my birth. It’s odd. I definitely in my mother’s story it was a “crane” that brought me, rather than the more commonly used “stork.” Was it some sort of regional thing, hailing from her native Arkansas’ birth-stories of her mothers’ mothers’ mother’s? I this perfectly insignificant detail, because when she used the word “crane” I pictured at first construction machinery, complete with metal girders. But later I was given to understand that it was a bird, rather like a pelican. And it was a blizzard she navigated, that crane, my mother explained, a veritable tornado, which made me think of a gigantic tomato. And found its way to little prefabricated bungalow where my mother & father lived in the enlisted men’s housing at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois. The flaw in the story, or perhaps the mythic twitch that betrays true magic, is that the crane came directly through the kitchen window while leaving the glass intact where my mother sat drinking a cup of coffee like a shot in an Orson Welles film. It was unclear how all this bore on an ambulance ride to the hospital. It was a protracted birth. The most grueling the Air Force doctors had in their collective careers seen, my mother attested. I was born upside-down & slightly deformed: my feet were twisted inward & I had a weird scabrous birthmark on my arm. My mother was of an earlier generation whom they did not warn about the effects of cigarettes and alcohol on pregnant women & maybe my uterine memory of turning green & feeling sick (which was to come a very long time later & yet a long time ago) derived from this. I had to be placed in an incubator as I came in at “six pounds eight ounces,” as my mother used to say. I can only imagine the

isolation now as the precursor of everything that would follow. But the story of me was also the story of her, even as now I witness her story becoming my own being driven mad by loneliness. For the story extended beyond the confines of my own coming into becoming—it also concerned her own promise, fulfillment & slow, slow demise. The coming of her to be there in the first place, far from the Central Valley of California, in that frosty little village, in this little cottage (when she used the word “cottage” I pictured cottage cheese), where the neighbors used to look at her funny when she was hanging her clothes on the line. I closed my eyes & tried to imagine having to put on ones snowboots to go to the mailbox. My mother, with her green Celtic eyes was a bit of poet in spite of her being a madwoman. She wasn’t always the way she was after the shock treatments. She had been a long distance operator for the telephone company: complicated switchboard work that required concentration & a good memory. Now she came back, glazed & lonely with a baby to & got a job canning peaches. Who could avoid going off her rocker in such a place? “WATER WEALTH CONTENTMENT HEALTH” boasts a downtown archway. Yet the place is bone dry & its residents poor, surly, ignorant & obese. Glittering asphalt, my little fire engine. A bumblebee stings my plump bare knee. I my mother putting mud on it. Some old Arkie remedy I suppose. There were adventures out in the very bright sun. But mostly I loved indoors, and the TV world the decoding of black-and-white electric shadows. The world goes on. Now I’m in another dimension. Here is where everything is perfect and my solitude supreme & no one can get to me unless it comes out about my being an international criminal & all. And luckily enough, co-incident with the only few moments of peace God has given me, he has also spurned me as he did Job, and took away my home my possessions my family, friends & left me perfectly alone. As was my mother when my father left her. She drank Olympia beer & made phonecalls. She had lost her job at the Del Monte cannery. She couldn’t understand it anymore, the equipment. Her nerves shot & her mind given to delusions; they took her away & gave her heavy tranquilizers & shocktreatments. This was an epidemic among women at the time. I am having acupuncture & that has effectively stopped my suicidal impulses & there is a sort of structural similarity there. That the story should be told at all is only justified by its own utter absurdity. Such a tale told by (such!) an idiot. It’s a sort of obsession with me, or my shadow-self that seems occasionally to have taken over the telling. It’s possible I am only a fictional character here, so I am free to lie. Certain names have been changed, others included for historic significance. Events may be embroidered or purposely hidden from the panopticon’s ever-

roving eye. This is my way to fight off this make-believe, all alone, moan. All alone, all alone. Sounds like a song, doesn’t it? I could sing you a hundredthousand of ’em Over at my great-grandmother’s where we used to sometimes sleep it was in the early dawn hours came my first, as Jung might call it, “psychoid experience.” Built into the wall as if a diorama was this little puppet show of cartoon lumberjacks pounding on a mighty door & the door remaining closed & then a little Casper the Ghost mounting the steps of the porch & weeping so eloquently the doorway began to gradually to open until the whole scene burst apart by my own amazement /desire to see I f it was really real & so crawling from the couch where I slept to the spot on the wall where the little diorama had transpired & touching there & finding nothing. A puzzling moment. The devotional curios adorning walls & window-ledges swam together in the half light: luminescent figurines of Noah’s Ark & Christ’s crucifixion. As I think on it now I can see that I thought then as I have always that one must entice the door to open, one can never batter it down. But also that there is no door because there is no wall but merely a window in the sky one can dissolve through. I developed at an early age a rather unhealthy interest in our Gentle Savior. Granny Great played miraculous healings of the crippled & blind by Orrell Roberts on the radio while she made up an enormous pile of chicken & dumplings. “Praise the Lord,” my Granny-Great would say at the conclusion of grace. “Amen.” A whole heapin’ helping’o’ the holy spirit impinged on my senses, but still I wanted something more. I wanted to see the blind man regain his sight, the crippled man dance. My mother would tell the story of how this one time I disappeared. She couldn’t find me anywhere. She went all up and down the complex, calling my name, only to find me in the bushes in the front of the house. She asked me where I had been. I told her I was talking to Jesus. But I do not this occurrence. There was, however, the weird case of—what was it?—that struck me at my Granny Great’s one time. I went a little crazy, maybe just testing the waters but nevertheless swaggering like a demented dwarf with a carving knife. What was I going on about so? I wanted to see the power of God pouring down from heaven. But most of all I wanted to see Jesus Christ. Not in the form of my Granny Great’s omnipresent porcelains of Jesus. Because these were not Jesus obviously, but only His likeness. So I demanded that I should see Jesus in the flesh & screamed & picked up a butcher knife & threatening to kill myself or anyone else. “Land sakes,” my Granny-Great declared. “Lord have mercy.” You understand I was all of three years old at the

time, now a twisted diabolical dwarf. I’ve acted some crazy-assed ways so I can’t beg any forgiveness. I’m sure exceeded the limit of even the impossibly high 70 times 7. But what was this distorted homunculous? This was similar I suppose to one of my mother’s phantasmic spasms so it was hoped I might be quieted down. Somehow it came down to this: Christ did exist & could be seen late at night on television, which on a future date, if I was good, truly good, I could witness with my own eyes. I begged, I pleaded, I whined. I can’t whose place it was. A house with a thick carpet, a stereo console, the works. Maybe it something to do with Aunt Dolly, who was the only wealthy member on that side of the family, or maybe my mother had a boyfriend. Anyway, this was it: my chance to stay up & see Jesus. My mother instructed me to play close attention, as the vision would be a fleeting one, just before the station left the air. Then she retired discreetly & left me oh so alone with TV set & the late night show & commercials & an inspirational voice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance & then finally, just as my mother had promised, Jesus Christ. Or rather, no, not Him but another yet another image of him, appearing exactly as he did on all of Granny Great’s figurines, blue eyes, sandy haired, bearded. As my father later came to appear in earnest, during his hippy days. Then the mysterious mandala of the television test pattern, which became a white dot shrinking down to infinity. My own face reflected by lamplight on the dark screen peered back at me. It was the end of me. And there was nothing more on TV.

3 MY GRANDMA DECKWA

S ometimes we visited my Grandma Deckwa. “Howdy,” she’d call in hardy greeting or sometimes, “Howdy-doo.” She’d come to California with her mother from Arkansas back in the dustbowl days: my mother had been born along the way. My Grandma told of the terrible windstorms they’d had back there. One time a cyclone had ripped a church right out of the ground, only to deposit it, whole & entire, in the next town over. Though she hadn’t a high-school education she read Reader’s Digest and the Modesto Bee fastidiously. My Grandma and Grandpa watched a lot of TV, mostly the cowboy westerns that were a notable achievement of the day, many of them televised versions of earlier radio programs like Have Gun Will Travel & Gunsmoke (“BLAMBLAM starring James Arness as Matt Dillon”). Because of my frequent exposure to these television shows & because my Grandma said things like “okie-dokie” & “hold your horses” & “sure as shootin’” I thought we were living in a television western. I wore a shiny black hat & sported a pair of sixguns. We would group in the living room—my Grandma Deckwa and my Grandpa Bud, my Mother & myself—on a series of couches & easy chairs arranged round the room, each with its requisite bank of television trays. My mother would tap long carmine fingernails on the steel surface on which had been imprinted a stagecoach in gold on a black background. There was something weird about that place. In fact in this little house I was to experience several psychic adventures venturing on hallucinogenic but no drugs involved. Further psychic forays, spectral ripples caused, I would theorize by morphic resonance laid down like tracks in a groove by my mother having gone mad here herself. That is, anyway, began to go mad here. Nobody quite knew when or where or how or why it happened. Worked her way free of the waxworks, only to become a wax dummy herself. She had always been odd, set apart from her step-sisters the same way I was from my step-siblings much later. Then there was the car-crash. My Grandma Deckwa was of the mind that mental illness must-needs be caused by a blow to the head. And my mother, when a senior in high school had been hit by a car driven by the father of the most popular girl in her school, whom my grandparents promptly sued. My future-mother lay in bed convalescing even after her bones had knitted because she feared the ire of the cashmere sweater set at high school. She had had a tutor during her senior year but never graduated high-school, a fact she kept secret but still a regrettable truth. It was at my Grandma Deckwa’s also that I had my first lucid dream, of a

rocketship. And that I wrote all over my entire body with a ballpoint ink-pen (my first literary undertaking) so they had to give me a milk bath I see now as a sort of sacrament. And then there was Grandpa Bud, who looked like Clark Gable in a photograph and my Grandma’s bureau but had suffered a stroke as a young man & so hobbled from the recliner, where he watched TV or maybe read the newspaper, to the kitchen where he would pour up a cup of coffee & pick up sugar crystals with the tips of his fingers so that all would remain as tidy as his hardworking wife had made it. He had a long cane & poked me sometime in jest. Or tickle me until I screamed. They had a neat little cottage & every year the newest Cadillac. They had a much nicer television set than my mother’s which only came in staticy. Soupy Sales! The Three Stooges! The Lone Ranger & coloring in my Huckleberry Hound coloring book. Later on they would be among the first to get a color TV. Meanwhile they just sat around & complained about everything & everyone that ever was or ever would be under the sun. After my Grandma Deckwa with characteristic supreme will power quit smoking my mother if she wanted to smoke would have to go into the kitchen. She sat there with her cup of coffee & her ashtray, carefully tapping the long slender cigarette ashes against the little curved metal indentations. Tap…tap…tap. Like that. Happy for the seclusion from the sedulous scandals being rehashed in the other room. Back in our little stucco apartment over in the Projects I always played alone, except when I could get my mother herself, or more infrequently my GrannyGreat to in. My mother had already been hospitalized a few times. She smoked L&M cigarettes & drank screwdrivers. She talked on the phone a lot, cursing my father for not paying his child . None of recipients of these often midnight phone calls particularly enjoyed hearing from this inebriated nuisance with paranoiac delusions. And the more she was rejected the more desperate she became & the higher & higher authority she would call, first my father, who would get her off the line as soon as possible, then my Grandma Cline, my father’s mother & finally she would be on the line with Judge Carter himself, the presiding judge at my parent’s divorce settlement, gotten out of bed at this untimely hour by the telephone operator. My mother praised the Solomonic qualities of this jurist till the day she died. But by this time the neighbors would be complaining & the police would come & they would try to cool things down & they were usually successful to a limited degree. My mom was always nice to me. Whatever my three year old heart desired was mine. Caps for my sixguns or little plastic put-together things from Crackerjacks boxes. “We’ll never know the difference a year from now,” she’d say. I liked this

about her, I really did. But I suppose she could go a little wild & spend up all her money on drink & become so excessive, even in the middle of the day, that one time I returned home from the corner store to find the police putting her under arrest, spread-eagling her, patting her down, cuffing her, shoehorning her into the police car. I suppose she had been given tickets & even placed under arrest before—this time, the time I saw her for the last time for a long time I watched Pluto’s charioteers dragging my mother—still a maiden, Persephone, in spite of me—into the underworld of the California Psychiatric System, from whence she would not escape intact. And I was the wailing lover, Gilgamesh or Inanna, uncertain what role I played in her all-but-lethal fatality, sitting on the steps watching them take my mother away.

4 THE YELLOW SUITCASE

M y Grandma Cline lived in a house of high ceilings & many windows, 3225 Wyman Street in the Oakland hills. I loved my Grandma Cline so much. My father probably would have been happy with leaving things as they were & going on with his life. But my Grandma Cline (for that is what I always called her, never by her first name, Alta) had too much pride to allow a grandson of hers to be brought up by an alcoholic mother on relief, or her goofy, hillbilly family. Many times she would listen to my mother’s midnight moan longdistance on the telephone, and then the next day would make the trek (3 hrs. back in those days, before they put in the new highway) from Oakland to Modesto. She later told me she would find flies buzzing at the screendoor & my mother ed out within with me in my crib with dirty diapers. But this part I do not . Only her coming down whenever things grew taut. She drove a pale green Oldsmobile. My mother would pack the small yellow suitcase my Grandma Cline had given me furnished me with. It is strange to think that all of my worldly possessions once fit into this 12x18x6 inch rectangular space manufactured by Kessler luggage, NYC with a little insignia on the handle depicting a bus, a train, a boat, and an old fashioned propellered plane. I still have it. It’s all, among all the flotsam & jetsam I lost along the way, that I retain to this day. It’s all I managed to hold onto, this yellow suitcase, the continuity of movement in the shuttles weaving my life the typical Sagittarius always the traveler, the loner, the thinker, ponderer, poet. And, of course, international criminal in-the making. The death penalty on my head if they ever found out. But for now such worries were far far in the future. Only on my grandmother’s premises did I actually feel safe. She had my father & uncle’s old toys & so I was played in old-time, leather football gear & pretended it was a space suit & I was alone in some gigantic ship, with all the universe a possibility for me. The bay windows one could swim out of, into the distant twinkling lights of not only Oakland but also over across the bay to San Francisco. San Francisco was & is my only home & I feel sorry that I had to leave there. As also I had later to leave Lily, the girl-woman I met there. And everything else because of a reason that I hope will function as stern warning against trying to do as I attempted, to live totally on the outside. But here was the very inside. Easter egg hunts, one in her Alice-in-Wonderland backyard garden and another indoors in my pajamas because I had the measles. Here Grimm’s fairy tales under a warm quilt. My grandmother was the only one who ever smiled at me, or sang me a lullaby, or tried to understand what I was going through. Which was even I didn’t know what but persisted into the time I lived with my Dad & Dorothy because there

was a kind of madness there too, although nothing certifiable, like with my mother—something both blind & manic. My inability to find a friendly face among the contingent at my father’s house I agree led to an ever-abiding bitterness. And one might say, as Lily has on multiple occasions, that all I have to go to get over it is look at it differently. But my hatred of them (yeah, and here is the little touch of paranoia) is also the source of my toughness. I don’t need them. Well I really do but would rather be dragged across burning cinders than it any hint of love for those playmates who used to taunt me in dreams for bringing my cowboy guns along when it wasn’t cowboys they were playing. Look what they did to me! I never got over it, it just transformed me. But even tough guys respect me & this is a surprise since I am very timid. But the way things are right now I would rather sleep. Dream the dreams of some past memory & realize even in the dream that it is all an illusion since none of this exists anymore. Except my friend Leibniz tells me it’s not time that moves through us but we who move through time in which case the entirety is always there & we just ride along its roller-coaster edges, its sharp curves, holding on for dear life. My favorite play-object was the little puppet theater my Grandma helped me fashion out of an elaborately embroidered bench. It is all like a scene from Alice in Wonderland in my memory, that house of high ceilings & many windows. I’d watch her put on her morning make-up in her infinitely reflecting beveled mirrors. On her mirrored vanity table was a mirrored tray with glass bottles that could take you to exotic lands. Sometimes she would take me over to San Francisco: we went to Children’s Playland long before it was just sand dunes, Fleischaker Zoo. We saw Buffalo in Golden Gate Park & a perennial favorite the ducks at Lake Merritt. Grandest of all was Children’s Fairyland where automated tableux & a voice reciting a nursery rhyme could be activated by a turn of the “magic key” and an impertinent peacock snatched my hot dog right out of the bun. One could slide down Alice’s rabbit’s hole and get lost in a maze of playing cards, or walk the crooked path up to the crooked shack & go inside where everything was crooked. There were puppet shows of amazing virtuosity. Living dioramas sheer imaginative joy, nothing less. Back home in time for a glass of Ovaltine I’d run my stockinged foot over the smooth varnish of the smooth coffee-table leg & watch Captain Satellite and Danger Man on television. Or else wait, suitcase packed, heart gulping in my chest—for my father to “pick me up.”

* * *

My earliest memory of my father is before his second marriage. I visited him at a swinging-singles style apartment complex in San Jose. He said: “I guess we’d better get that suitcase unpacked.” There was a pool in its central courtyard. Here I somehow slipped through the hole in the center of an innertube in which I was floating & plummeted to the bottom of the pool. I undulated my arms & glided as time stopped. I didn’t need to breathe. I wasn’t afraid of drowning. I was flying, in slow motion. There was a quietness, a loveliness, that I wanted to go on forever. Then I looked up & saw a slash of gold—my father’s arm, fishing me out. I would have been just as happy to stay under. He slammed me onto the pavement and applied artificial respiration. In this, as in everything between my father and myself, love & pain are intermingled. He was on the whole permissive, but there were just two things he could not abide. First & foremost was that I should not cry. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” he’d exclaim & give me a slap. This always seemed paradoxical to me. To stop me from crying he would want to cause me to cry more. Maybe it was a control thing. But didn’t he ever wonder why I cried? I suppose I didn’t know why myself. And it was in this same apartment complex that he demonstrated the second & even more severe commandment: That I must not poop in my underwear. My father held the unimpeachable evidence just inches before my eyes. It’s true, I it it now though it has always been my greatest shame. I shat my underwear, which reddish brown excrement my screaming father rubbed against my nose & face as a sort of ultimate rebuke. The way one might train a dog. Fifty years later I think back on this, & about how silly it was & about the role of underwear in the ensemble of one’s daily dress. Why does underwear exist if not precisely to catch those drops or flecks or even small chunks of waste products which might seep from even the tightest of assholes, firmest of urethra tubes so as not to soil our outer clothing? That was the nastiest he ever treated me, the nastiest I’d ever been treated: rubbing my nose in my own shitty underdrawers along with slapping me around & screaming obscenities. I don’t know why a person would act this way. But in my life I suppose I have done far worse, though nothing as graphically excremental. Then again, I have no children—& is it any wonder? During those early years I just did not know when or how or why to shit. I requiring medicine for constipation. But that was later when my father remarried this other woman named Dorothy.

Dorothy! My father married two women named Dorothy, my mother & this other, this sort of anti-Dorothy, who will always remain “Dorothy” to me. Except of course when my mother turns into the Judy Garland Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In which case, Dorothy—always & only Dorothy—becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. Unfortunately my mother was unreal (that is, not present) & no had one to help her, except a somewhat befuddled four year old, while the evil anti-Dorothy had a horde of flying monkeys at her command. On weekends and holidays, Dorothy’s kids—Lenny, Larry, Kelsie & Karen—would descend on the house like bad news—boys bragging how tough they were, the girls dreaming practical jokes the four of them enjoyed playing on me. Kid stuff, right? I had a hard time, let’s leave it at that. They lived with their father named Mr. Smythe on “The Ranch” the rest of the time. Attempting always to penetrate their older, wiser world, I was forever their fool. They scared me so badly I peed my pants when they peered through the bedroom window wearing nylon stockings over their faces. Kelsie, who looked like Patty Duke in her tomboy persona, was the mastermind of their gang. She terrified me by telling how many germs were everywhere, how an ill-used toothbrush would have to be boiled for an hour before it was safe. Lenny wasn’t so bad by himself. He explained the powers and secret identities of the entire Justice League of America to me. It was like a litany…Green Lantern Hal Jordan test pilot, The Flash criminologist Barry Allen. But when he got together with Larry, youngest & meanest of the lot, mischief was afoot. They shot me with their BB guns and locked me in a trunk (from which, Houdini-like, I nevertheless managed to escape). But even Larry offered me some advice I’ll always . “Don’t worry, Kurt,” he said to me, after some particularly malicious practical joke “Someday when you’re older you’ll be able to get us back.” I always wondered if that day would come back, but I guess it never will. It’s true they undermined my development according Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but somehow I always got free. I’m too tired to be angry now so I leave the sadistic bastards to their sadism: I have no need to “get them back.” Karen, the eldest, later said she had had a hand in some of this, which I never even imagined at the time. She was this red haired Celtic Goddess who had a soft voice & played the flute. Kelsie played the violin & the piano. Guitar too, I think. She was very talented I suppose. We sang a lot of the folk songs around the house, or driving home from the beach. So it wasn’t all bad. Only when they got me alone. Meanwhile, Dorothy, who had an even broader array of offences liable to corporal punishment than did my father, managed to give the old poopyunderdrawers situtation a truly sadistic turn. Any poopy underdrawers appearing

in the clothes-hamper would have to be scrubbed with handsoap in a cold water sink on the back porch in full view of my four step-brothers & sisters, who, occasionally tromping past, would whisper among themselves & make desultory comments within my hearing. I sometimes I would save up my shittier underwear & then dispose of it in tree-trunks or down storm-drains around the neighborhood. But hawkeyed Dorothy soon noticed the underwear shortage, questioned me but couldn’t prove anything. I suppose this is when I began to lie to those who held authority over me. And so it was I became the international criminal I am today. However, these two regulations, the one against weeping, the other against staining my tidy-whites by themselves might not have driven me to do what I did, alter my life so that I still feel repercussions today. The tears & stained undergarments were but contributing circumstances. The true cause of the schism that was to lay open my life originated in nothing other than the humble, 12-cent comic book. Although my Dad and Dorothy were hip, literate people, involved in social causes & under analysis, they forbade my two choicest forms of not only entertainment but Active Imagination, comic books & television. They (in accordance with the famous “vast wasteland” speech) did not own a television set—but television, you understand, had raised me from earliest infancy. It was my portal of reality. But perhaps I watched too much television. In Modesto people didn’t go outside, but sat around sipping iced tea with the television set constantly going. I was like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, tuned to the nuances of shadow, but afraid of the sun. Perhaps my Dad & Dorothy were doing the right thing in keeping me from becoming a troglodyte, but the lure of my old addiction proved too great. I would sneak out of the house at night to peek in neighbor’s windows to see what was on television. I skulking in the bushes alongside Jonathan Myrick’s house; peeks between slats in the windowblinds I could just make out the Myrick family seated in the living room— Jonathan, his older brother Alex, their sister Ann, his portly insurance salesman father and trim urban housewife mother. They were watching Daniel Boone. I could see Fess Parker’s lips moving but I couldn’t hear anything. It was almost too much to bear! What was worse, my four step-siblings lived most of the week on the Ranch with their father & knew all the latest shows, the premises of which they would tell us on long car rides. Dorothy praised them for their stories & told them hearing them tell the story of the television was more gratifying than if she had watched the show herself. I tell you, it was unbearable. As for comic-books, for some reason they forbade me these too. Dorothy thought their 12-cent cover price a waste of money. Chief among my childhood heroes was

Batman, the caped crusader of comic books. In the story of Batman’s origin I saw myself. Bruce Wayne was orphaned when his parents were brutally murdered. Estranged from my father & absent my mother I was an orphan too. The young heir to the Wayne fortune makes a sacred vow to assume the guise of a bat and spend his life warring on criminals. Rather than Batman’s morality, however, it was Batman’s position outside the law that intrigued me. For, most of all, Batman was subterranean, utterly hidden from the eyes of crooks & cops alike. He could blend with the shadows of the night & disappear. He was invisible, like me. As I yearned to be. I do a period in my life in which I would inwardly debate who was better, Superman or Batman. Superman could fly, had heat & x-ray vision, super strength & was invulnerable. And he too was an orphan. But Batman, with no super powers, with brains, skill & daring alone was Superman’s equal & had saved the Man of Steel’s life on many occasions. Even then I was tending toward the Dionysian Dark Knight, shielding my eyes from the garishly-attired, Apollonian Man of Steel. One day I would be able to say: from comic books I learned to read, & wasn’t that the seed of everything? They taught me to be interested in thinking, imagining. The humble funnybook (as my Grandma Deckwa called them) would influence much of my later. But for now my love of comics had to be kept under wraps. If Dorothy found one she would explode. The comic books I could purloin & secrete away were, consequently, holy writ. They fed my secret life. Which is why it came as a shock when I saw the promo for the new Batman television series over at Lynn Gustafson’s house. Lynn had a bohemian mother who played Simon & Garfunkel records. My Dad & Dorothy didn’t own a television or a record player. They listened to Bartok on the radio. They were hip, literate people, politically & culturally aware, involved with the civil rights movement & under psychoanalysis. But they didn’t understand pop culture. They thought television a vast wasteland & I suppose they were right. Still, it was the only wasteland in town & it wasn’t as bad then as it’s gotten, in spite of advances of special effects and acting techniques. I was of that first generation to have television from earliest infancy. Television’s early memories were my own, preserved in black & white on kinescope. I’m sure that I was avid viewer, even in the womb. Later my mother told me that my father used to watch Maverick in that little Air Force base cottage where they used to live. That kind of surprised me; I never

thought of him as the type of person who watched TV. I guess it was all just Dorothy’s being hip. But one of the last times I saw ever saw him he was actually watching a football game. I was as surprised as I was when I met the great Beat poet Bob Kaufman & gave him a copy of my first book in which there is a poem dedicated to him & he was watching football on television too. As for me, television raised me & I thank it for my erudition & wit. But sports always seemed a witless bore. In Modesto, the television was always on but for some reason there was not much sports. Grandpa Bud was a big fan of The Flintstones. Grandma Deckwa used to call cartoons “Micky Mouses.” I sitting crosslegged on my Grandma Deckwa’s carpet watching Bozo the Clown ride a unicycle. My back was straight, straighter than it is now, my eyes fixed to the screen. At that moment I heard my mother’s voice from behind me. “Oh look at the little darling,” she said to my Grandma Deckwa. I didn’t turn around, but felt her praise pour over me. Ever after, when I would watch television I would attempt to duplicate this same meditational posture, this same fixedness of concentration. It was in the middle of the new Batman-fad that my mother had her second or third nervous breakdown. She had done well at Heald Business College, but would never actually put the skills she learned to any use. They took her to Napa State Hospital but a few boxes of her things found their way into my father’s basement, among them my mother’ old brown metal television in a cardboard box with some kitchen utensils. This I found an especially egregious insult. To see my caretaker/nanny/portal between worlds left there to rust. My father told me something had to be done before it could be hooked up. But he was always putting things off, so I didn’t hope for much. The other kids would talk about he plots of Batman and Man from Uncle at recess in the yard at school. I was quite humiliated when one of the kids tripped me up by giving false plot details. Gradually I ingratiated myself into a few family’s living rooms to watch at least The Green Hornet and maybe The Monkees too. I was happy to sneak away one week night evening when the ogres, Dorothy’s offspring, were there to watch my favorite show at the home of Douglas Clark, a playmate of mine whose father was a chiropractor with bushy eyebrows. But when I returned Dorothy fairly cackled with the sinister sarcasm of the Joker, that evening’s guest villain: “The boys hooked up that old TV from your mother’s,” she said. “If you hadn’t disappeared after dinner you could have watched Batman with us,” she tells me, “like everyone else in America.”

5 MY FATHER

H e was under the walnut tree, muscles straining, pushing the mower like a scythe. I retreated back into my room. I had been told to mow the lawn but forgot. Actually I was just plain lazy. No actually it never occurred to me that I should actually do it. Now my father was down there, red & angry, mowing it himself. I stayed away from the window lest he see me. I had a disdain for all chores, no public spirit, a “bad attitude.” Lenny & Larry & Kelsie & Karen strung popcorn & pitted apricots till their gizzards bulged but I stayed in my room or patrolled the driveways of the neighborhood on my two-wheeler, looking for oil spots which I’d prod with my forefinger as if they were fresh blood. I’d drink from the gutter & walk down the sidewalk wiping my nose on my snot-encrusted sleeve. But what was it possessed my mind when I chased my best friend Bobby down the street when he wouldn’t “wait up” & caught up to him & sank my fingers into his throat & squeezed till he turned blue? Was it Dorothy who had put the image there? Exasperated she’d always scream, “I ought to strangle you!” My nemesis/anti-mom/personal evil stepmother had forbidden me to buy comic books, considering the 12-cent cover price exorbitant. So, as children will when denied something that they really want, I stole money from my father’s dresser & smuggled my secret stash into the house folded lengthwise down the middle & thrust down my pants-front. My father smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes. The dusky tang of Turkish tobacco filled his study where he would sit among shelves of books grading high school history tests with a red magic marker. On the packets his cigarettes came in I saw emblazoned the mystery which was my father himself. The golden pyramid & enigmatic dromedary in their nest of cellophane & foil were my father’s very symbols. That, a teddy bear tattoo on his left forearm & a sapphire school ring. As he sits engrossed in the papers, he draws his forearm, particularly the armhairs covering the teddy bear tattoo, back & forth across his upper lip. This mannerism, typically my father’s, is also a mystery. Is he smelling his arm? Is he feeling the tickle of his armhairs against his upper lip & nose? Once I asked him. “Try it,” he said, “& see.” I did. I didn’t quite. In the early days my father and I used to have what we called our “time together.” He read me The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse, Huckleberry Finn & Charlotte’s Web, and took me to see Island of the Blue Dolphins and a John Wayne picture in which the Duke throws a cowpoke through the saloon window. In the Sunday San Jose Mercury we perused the colored comics

section. Alley Oop—L’il Abner—Pogo—my father explained their humor to me. When he took me to my first swim lessons, he counseled: “Don’t fight the water.” He took me to a child psychologist, but never to a dentist. Doubtless I reminded him of my mother. Most often it was: “Must you always do everything the hard way?” And it’s true. Living on imagination more than reason, I have pursued every fantasy only to find myself quite lost &, like Dante, all alone in the woods late at night. My father was a lucky man. He seemed to glide effortlessly through life, never fighting the tide. But though he glowed with intelligence and even nobility, he did not show a glimmer of sentimental love, not around me anyway. Once I asked him about the “time together” we used to spend. “We’re spending time together now,” he said. And how do I know he hadn’t constructed the entire business psychically: the murder of his son but in the end he saves him. My father was the Hierophant a high-school history & social studies teacher. But as Crowley has observed, the Hierophant is also the sadist. He wants to whack all those co-eds’ backsides. Yes I have it in me too, the dark side. In my father it was all in these beatings, remnants no doubt of his own strict upbringing. It wasn’t the juridicious “point your bum in the air, boy, so we can give it a go with the hairbrush” like my Uncle & Aunt used to do, later on. My father always just said, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” WHACK! A slap in the face & a throwing around. A konking in the noggin, a quick mugging. I’m afraid I never got the message. One time I hit my head on the refrigerator, hard. He told me to get out of there & never come back. My return after a long bike ride with blood still in my hair brought a sort of agonized apology. I mean, he didn’t turn his back on me but he didn’t exactly help matters much. Back in those years anyway. Meanwhile he & Dorothy quietly morphed into moderate hippies: Unitarians who protested for civil rights & were active in left-wing politics. And their own children would be brought up under the new paradigm: “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Dorothy provided the brains & aesthetic sense, my father the wit & deep wisdom. I give them this. Still, what’s the idea of slappin’ around a four-year old kid, the Cagney in me says, the little bit of Cagney that is in everybody whose only sin is in trying to exist. It was mostly Dorothy but my father ed in & anyway implicitly approved the situation. This caused a short-circuit in my synapses somewhere. I have within me my father’s sudden wrath. Like something out of the Old Testament or Sigmund Freud. “This will give you something to cry about!” he used to shout. I suppose he did, not that I was in this in any way lacking. It is difficult to reconcile these early images of my father’s fury with the later bearded wise man & gentle humorist that he became. I wish I

could have known that man instead of just glimpsing him like a double-exposure fogged by sun. But it was all so many lifetimes ago. Sometimes he’d drive me down into the valley to visit my mother who was undergoing shock treatments at the hospital. This—a three-hour drive in those days, each way—was the only time we could really talk. We’d stop at a diner in Tracy for cheeseburgers, onion rings & milkshakes, even play the jukebox. But on one trip my father, angered by what I suppose to be my incessant blubbering, put me out of the car on the side of the highway by a cow-field & drove off. I just walked out into the pasture & would have kept walking. One of the cows mooed loudly. Then I heard my father’s voice shouting to get back in the car.

6 THE GREY GARGOYLE

A s a defense against the tricks and jibes of my older step-siblings, I developed an intense fantasy life. In my mind I was not really me, but only my alter ego. In the guise of young Clark Kent, Superboy, too, had to endure the slings and arrows of ignorant bullies. Unlike the fictional youngster though, who lived in fear that someone might discover his secret identity, I inwardly yearned that someone would discern mine. In my inner world I bathed in the luminous glow of Green Lantern’s light. My bed was a cosmic ship floating out into space. I’d wonder so longingly if these Utopias of the mind ever could be realized until my imagination would get the better of me, reassembling clothes on a chair into a radioactive swamp monster. I burrowed under the covers & imagined other me’s at other points in time. The other me’s were connected but also separate. They were really different me’s yet were the same. How could this be? The other me’s answered telepathically not to worry—that everything was going to be allright. But everything was not allright & so somehow I was driven, riven, unforgiven, forced from my home even as I was to be later on with Lily. Such events seem quite distant from one another in the space-time continuum. Yet they form the warp & woof of my own somewhat painfully singular existence. At least they constitute one memory cluster, one narrative thread. I identify it & as I do so I identify with it. But only provisionally: it’s not me either. The first time I ran away from home I carried with me my familiar yellow suitcase stuffed with comics. Fantastic Four. Spiderman. Green Lantern. I had no thought of food or protection against the chilly San Jose night. Just comics. Contraband Captain America smuggling the secret plans out of Nazi . What was I crazy or something? This is a rhetorical question. I lugged my burden through the damp night no further than Jonathan Myrick’s backyard. A fence plank moved aside to create a place of concealment. I stashed my suitcase in Jonathan’s trampoline-frame fort & paced in the long grass. This was the first long, dark night I’d spend out in the open, but it wouldn’t be the last! I fell asleep in the space between one backyard fence & another, an area we used to call our Legion of Superheroes Headquarters. My father found me the next day basking in the sun on the sidewalk. And it seemed almost like one of our old times together when he made me a grilled cheese sandwich back home. When my mother moved to San Jose to study to be a PBX operator she’d come by on weekends & take me to see a theatrical version of Pinocchio or to the circus, with special guest star Sky King. We’d spend hours in Woolworth’s my

mother at the lunch counter drinking coffee & smoking cigarettes & me at the comic book rack, reading. When we went to see Mary Poppins, she bought me a balloon that blew away across the street So she bought me another one because I was crying so hard. Back home in my room I missed her & wished for her & thought if I could only be with her, everything would be all right. My mother’s apartment, midway between my father’s South Sixteenth Street Victorian & Horace Mann Elementary, was right around the corner from the Orange Whipzit where I’d go for chili dogs. I could watch Batman in her world & so toward that world I gravitated. Jerry Lee Lewis & the Beatles played on the jukebox. Sun Ra had a hit with his jukebox version of the Batman theme song. I actually noticed that the jukebox version was different than the TV theme, was wilder, but only found out later that that was because it was the Sun Ra version that had been in distribution to the jukeboxes. So I was listening to Sun Ra when I was eight years old! Years later Lily & I would have the great good fortune to spend an evening in casual conversation with Marshall Allen & some other Archestra in a Harold Johnson’s Motel in Binghamton, New York. That’s another story. Just up the boulevard from my Mom’s was the donut shop, where day old donut holes were three cents apiece. I had every freedom, could come & go as I pleased. My mother might be ed out or gone, but she would leave me a few dollars to get something to eat. I whistled “Me and My Shadow” soft-shoeing home after seeing I Was a Teenage Werewolf & wishing & fearing that I might become the boy lycanthrope. I had a stack of comics in the pantry & a room where I sat & watched tv until my eyes fell out of my head. The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, Lost in Space—certain broadcasts seemed to provide instructions for living. The Jack Benny Program. The Abbott & Costello Show. But it was all too much. I’d stay up all night watching old gangster flicks & be too tired for school the next morning. My mother always wrote me an excuse. She was drinking screwdrivers & dating a jazz-drummer named George, who later burnt to death from smoking in bed. Gradually I stopped going to school altogether. I’d had enough of choosing sides at kickball & hopping around inside of white lines. Then one morning there was a knock on the door. Through the kitchen window I saw a red-faced man with sweat on his brow. I opened the door & asked what he wanted & then it hit me. It was the principal! Face flushed, head swirling, I invited him in—trying to make my voice sound as gravelly as possible. My mother, still in her bathrobe, talked

to visibly agitated educator, making every excuse. The next day back in school I felt very much like Dr. Richard Kimball, the nervous surgeon played by David Jansen in The Fugitive. Looking over my shoulder, even limping slightly in the manner of the TV actor, I made my way painfully through the day. Lynn—my pal since Mrs. Takata’s first grade—was my only confidant. Lynn & I used to walk home together singing, “Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.” I wish I had told her then that I would never see her again. I cry when I playing Johnny Quest together in her backyard, in the center of which was a small Japanese tea house. That was real fun! I wonder where she is today. I wonder where everyone is today as I am all alone now everyone has died in my family. My two half-brothers? It’s true I never reached out to them. I feel bad but am now too embarrassed even to do anything. I am “into” intolerable isolation. Isn’t that weird? Perhaps if I end up in the clink, as I fear I might (due to my criminal ways), they will come & go my bail as my friend Wolfgang’s estranged family did for him when he landed in Thai prison for charges that shall remain uninnumerated. But my father did not bail me out of jail when I was arrested in San Francisco one inglorious time for pickpocketing a cop. That was right after I dropped out of college. One time he told me he was proud of me, for the way I’d lived my life, but it seems like in the time I knew him I was mostly a bum with pretensions of literary talent, which has even yet to fully materialize. I walked the quick two blocks to my mother’s driveway as soon as school was over & found my father waiting for me. My mother, he told me, had been rehospitalized. We drove to the burger shop & he said we could start over—all of us, him, Dorothy, me, my two darling baby half-brothers. It sounded like a good idea over a milkshake & fries & might have saved me in the end but that very night, I snuck out like a cat-burglar, moving cautiously down the back stairs & out onto the street. At my mother’s apartment, the key wouldn’t work in the lock. So I pried back the screen, jimmied open the window & crawled in. No lights. I crept my way by feel to the pantry closet, which had shelves clear to the ceiling. Climbing up the shelves I reached a trapdoor which led to an attic crawlspace. Here is where I kept my comic books & superhero paraphernalia. Through a grimy window, in the meager light of a streetlamp one could just make out the gargoyles on the Catholic Church across the street. Here is where I’d live or die, either perish or become the superhero I’d always imagined myself to be underneath my mask. I

peered out the attic window & vowed I would stay on in my headquarters. Like young Bruce Wayne, I would perfect myself. I would become the Grey Gargoyle. I woke up in the morning in a pile of clothes hungry & having to pee. My apotheosis of the night before seemed a foggy memory. In the half-light I made my way among topsy-turvy tables & chairs & a few cardboard cartons—the remnants of my mother’s life there & my own. A pile of freshly laundered clothes. The refrigerator was empty & dark. A knock on the kitchen door hammered my heart against my ribcage. ing the principal’s visit, I decided not to open it. But then a key turned in the lock & in walked the apartment manager with a uniformed police officer. I tried my best to be charming, but policeman didn’t believe my story. He told me I was going to get to go for a ride in his police-car. As soon as we got outside, however, I made a break for it. But that cop was fast! He caught up to me before I could get past the clothesline. And boy was he mad! He handcuffed me and put me in the back seat the same as they had done to my mother. “You could’ve sat up here with me & worked the radio,” he chortled ruefully as we drove to the station house. At Juvenile Hall—what the tough kids called “Juvie”—they took my clothes & after shower, disinfectant & cavity search gave me other clothes that didn’t fit & coarse woolen socks. Were they trying to frighten me? Was there ever a chance to relent? I suppose there was, once. My father came to visit. He squeezed a pimple on my face & informed me I had been declared, at the age of eight officially incorrigible. But all I had to do was give the word & I could go back home. It was my decision. But I’d read the autobiography of Willy Sutton. I looked through the wire mesh & bars as if they didn’t exist. When I turned around my father was gone. Later, I was transferred to a place called The Children’s Shelter where they kept the less violent children. I was doing well here, taking to my institutionalized environment as my mother always had to her’s. Some other boys & I formed a mock rock combo called The Panthers. The name was my idea. I played tambourine & sang. We did “Louie Louie” & won the battle of the bands against the older boys. I assembled a big stack of Mike Mars books to read. But when the counselors took us bowling as a special treat I slipped away from the bowling alley & down Alum Rock Boulevard for many miles past car dealerships, supermarkets & gas stations, back to my old neighborhood. Another family had already moved into my mother’s apartment. A tricycle was parked in

the driveway. My father found me sitting on the steps of the Catholic Church across the street, underneath the gargoyles, shivering in my thin t-shirt. I could have gone home with him then & maybe that could have meant a normal life for me. But I wouldn’t go back. I wasn’t afraid of the occasional flare ups of parental violence, the beatings for pooping in my drawers, the compulsory washing out of shit-stained underwear in the sink. Or maybe that was it. At the time all I knew was I wasn`t going back, I didn’t even know why. So my father drove me to the Shelter where I’d missed dinner but was a hero among the inmates. Sometimes I do crazy things. I watch myself as from a distance my lips moving saying something I hear but do not comprehend. That is, the words extensions of the actions. Or the actions I observe as if they were in a movie. Without Lily as moral center I am a tourist in a seersucker suit & a lollypop over his head to everything I should stay away from. Behaving self-destructively once again. Killing myself slowly as God sees fit. It is not me, the person doing these things, does not wish to be me, but ultimately there is no one else to blame. Sick tortured pictures twist around in my brain. Lily says I should just have an affair. She doesn’t understand that affairs are only for the wealthy in this country. Meanwhile, although we’re legally separated, she stalls in the divorce I have begged her for on numerous occasions. Right now she’s the absence in my life. The abyss into which I’m spinning. Seven years & have only seen her at academic conferences. And I have sickened. Because I have been sick way too long. Because I had to cut myself off, again & again. Cut myself off at the . Cut myself off before I got to the past. Before there was any past to get to.

7 MY UNCLE ALAN AND AUNT DARLENE

S omething had to be done with me. It was costing my father a fair chunk of change to keep me institutionalized. There was talk of military school. At length I agreed to go live with my Uncle Alan & Aunt Darlene in Ogden, Utah. Anywhere else was better than where I was or where I’d been. When the day came, they gave me back my old clothes, now a size too small. My father picked me up. My little yellow suitcase was in the trunk of the car. I squinted like a convict just out of the hole as we slid by plum & almond orchards in the California sun. “You won’t see many of those where you’re going,” my father said, cheerfully enough. That was fine with me. Plums reminded me of prunes which reminded me of dishing up stewed prunes from a stinking vat of black sludge when I was on kitchen-duty for breakfast at the Shelter. My father whistled his tuneless little tune as we drove in to SFO. I guess we were both optimistic about the future. My Uncle Alan & Aunt Darlene met me at the airport in Salt Lake City. The young newlyweds were joyous over my arrival. They took me to their house at 1653 20th Street overlooking the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains. It was a brick house in a working class neighborhood. My uncle was tall but heavy, balding, wore horn-rimmed glasses & walked with a limp on of a motorboating accident on Lake Tuolome. He smoked Pall Malls. Like my aunt, he was an epileptic. He worked as an auditor for the IRS. He had been in an amphibious tank in the Marines in Korea, but hadn’t killed anybody that he knew of. He was a Republican and watched sports on weekends. He liked to go out to restaurants & was a generous tipper. He went to church with my aunt although he was agnostic. “I’m not saying there is no God,” he used to say, “I’m just saying I can’t see him.” He considered himself, finally, a realist. He was not a book reader, like my father. He only read tax manuals. He loved to hunt & fish. He started out working in a sandwich shop. He sold ties with my great-uncle George Corder. When he got out of the Marines, he managed an ing degree at Stanford. He made about $36,000 a year. My aunt was a huge, florid woman with a mole on the tip of her nose. She was young and vigorous & due to deafness in one ear spoke too loudly, like my Grandma Deckwa. She was a hugger & a big fat sloppy kisser. She drank Royal Crown Cola & prepared our foodstuffs with Crisco & salt. My aunt was the liberal wing of this extremely middle-class dyad. She was devastated when RFK was shot & could never bring herself to Hubert Humphrey. She was a

volunteer for the Head Start program in Ogden. She would have a petit mal seizure when she was upset. She was intensely emotional & always determined to ferret out my innermost feelings. At first I tried to make it work. I ate the peas they proffered me out of cans stockpiled in the basement, ed the choir in the First Presbyterian Church & even the Boy Scouts. My uncle and aunt were decent people: they played pinochle with Dean & Chandra Hart on Friday nights & bowled in the league. We’d play Aggravation, Cribbage & Tripoli. We had a dog named Stogie I’d take for romps in the backyard. I’d have tearful talks with my aunt and rousing games of catch with my uncle, who could move surprisingly quickly in spite of his mangled ankle. He had, after all, been a Marine. I was the son they could never have. Because they didn’t want to have an epileptic child, my uncle had been sterilized. But, in spite of the Leave It To Beaver exterior, my darker side was starting to awaken. Fantasies fed by lurid magazines kept next to the comics in the drugstore were starting to swallow me up. Tales of R.A.F. nurses captured & tortured by Nazis. I shoplifted one of these soft-core S&M rags & took it to the playground where I showed it to a little girl who ran home screaming. When my Mormon playmates disappeared from the face of the earth, as they did periodically for religious obligations, I was free to wander past the metal street barrier to a grove of slender trees & the surreal cliffs on the perimeter of what we called the Mud Flats. My Uncle & Aunt had a rule against my reading books indoors during the day. They wanted me to go outside & play, while they sat inside & watched sports on television. When the other kids were not at church I’d ride my bike down to the public library & check out books about UFO’s or carnival freaks or time machines & sit and read them in that mystical oasis of cypresses & pines growing out of red clay at the foot of the Wasatch mountains. On summer days, the Mormon children would ride their Stingrays on the hilly path surrounding the sacred grove & perform sundry indignities on grasshoppers & red ants. The bigger boys set fire to a cat. From inside the trees I observed them, like the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, protector of his jungle domain. In the pubescent ritual of ‘pantsing’ I saw a carefully regimented social hierarchy held in place by fear and blind superstition. I also saw Kelly Hart’s wiener. I was always the “Cry-baby.” But the cliché lines of these two bit players really meant little to me. I had already faced truly inspired torment at the hands of Lenny, Larry, Kelsie & Karen. What could these guys do? I was only a temporary apparition anyway. By the time I`d pedaled by bicycle down the street, I`d already forgotten what they`d looked like, not to mention their names.

Under the spell of a book I’d read—a romanticized biography of Harry Houdini —I put on a show in our knotty pine basement performing effects from a My Favorite Martian magic set my Grandma Cline had sent me for Christmas. Who should come to the show but Brian Bailey, the neighborhood bully. He lived directly across the street. His father owned a moving & storage company. I was afraid Brian would try to wreck things, but instead he told everyone they’d better shut up & listen. And he was top man among the twelve and unders. After that my esteem increased. I was even invited over to the Bailey’s to see their new indoor golf set-up. The evening ended with Brian’s older brother accidentally hitting their toy poodle in the head with a driving iron. He actually wept & screamed “Midge!” over the unconscious pet. I was friends with a boy named Erich, whose parents were Eastern European immigrants, whom the Bailey gang had singled out for punishment. They would perhaps make him chew urine-soaked sponge balls, rumor had it. I remarked to a playmate at recess that Brian Bailey wasn’t so tough. By the next recess, word was all over the playground of the big fight to take place after school. The big fight between Brian Bailey and me. 3:30 in The Field. When the final bell rang, with jellyfish knees I was swept bodily in an ocean of bloodthirsty children, Erich among them, & deposited in the vacant lot where such battles were traditionally fought. Children formed a ring of jeering faces. Brian detached himself from his retinue & advanced confidently. Without a word he popped me. Blood squirted from my nose & I charged, wailing away with all my might. I slugged him & slugged him. My fists made hollow thuds against his body. He never let out a whimper, but seemed to absorb all of my blows. When an adult came to break things up, my opponent simply reed his friends. I was the one crying in rage, with a bloody nose. I was the one staggering home, alone. Erich caught up with me. “You hurt him,” he said, “you really hurt him. He was in pain —I saw him wince.” Mostly I loved “make-believe” games: that is games in which the participant(s) pretend they are something—usually some superhero, spy, or detective—but the other children mostly liked sports. Kelly Hart & I pretended we were “teenagers” in broad branches of the old sycamore one summer but our fun ended with complaints from his parents. They didn’t like the strange effect our games were having on their son. He’d been neglecting his ball practice. So, my Uncle & Aunt, characteristically forbade me to play such games. This was right around the time our dog Stogie disappeared, perhaps kidnapped for lab experiments, so I was pretty depressed. I couldn’t stand it there anymore. I hiked

to the edge of Ogden where I imagined just taking off and hiking to the next town, like in the television westerns of my early childhood. Instead, I came upon a deserted homestead, housing starts extending up the mountain into nothing but rocks. I realized then & keep realizing. There was nowhere to run away to. Nothing but mountain & scrub. Felt like Number Six at the end of an episode of The Prisoner. Bars slam shut. Even Houdini couldn’t escape. When I received word that my mother had remarried & was going to court to get me back, however, I could hardly contain myself. As war protest, assassination & moonwalk flickered across the TV screen, I began to plot a revolution of my own. If my good-hearted but idiotic superintendants were, in my personal mythology, Martha & Jonathan Kent, Superboy’s foster parents, now I was Superboy under the influence of red kryptonite wreaking havoc on Smallville. I became surly toward my formerly benign caretakers who now turned nasty. My aunt, under the influence of some ladies’ magazine, had my uncle check my buttocks for the injection marks supposed to be characteristic of heroin addicts. As if! What was this, an episode of Dragnet? They didn’t understand. I didn’t belong to them. I’d already left them—at least in my mind. I suppose that’s why we all agreed it would be best if I were voluntarily committed to the mental ward of the Deseret Memorial Hospital. In the booby-hatch I languished in relative luxury, playing ping-pong & pool & having sing-a-longs with the other inmates. An alcoholic businessman with a penchant for Burt Bacharach tunes played the piano. A middle-aged housewife with obsessive-compulsive disorder & a teen-aged girl with bandaged wrists sang along. At night the screams of anguished schizophrenics echoed down the hospital corridor but someone had left a porno novel under my mattress & I was having interesting dreams. I was planning an escape attempt when my uncle & aunt appeared to tell me the court order had been signed & I was free to go live with my mother if that’s what I wanted. Is that what I wanted? Really? I told them it was, with no idea how betrayed they must have felt. On the day I left, my uncle called me into the living room, where he sat in his big orange recliner with footrest for his bum leg. “I thought,” he commented dryly, “you understood the meaning of family. I guess I was wrong.” And so it was & always has been. Which is why, I suppose, I don’t have one. A family that is. Well—there’s Lily and me & even after these many tragic years of separation, we are still, finally, inseparable, maybe even after death. We were a kind of family—had a total of six cats. Those were golden years. But I fled all that—

believing it might be able to come along behind me but never thinking I could go never go back. But as for family all I understood was that my mother burnt with the most ardent love: that was all the family I needed. Ours was to be the ultimate reunion, the way things ought to be. It’s true I sacrificed a much higher set of intellectual, artistic, philosophical & even ethical values to be with my mother, who, though dignified & well-spoken (when she could speak at all) was absolutely ignorant of everything about the world except Jesus; she drank herself to death & surrounded herself with poor, broken-down heroin addicts with prison records. It’s not like I was unaware of the disparities between the white trash ways of Modesto versus the conservative middle class values of my Uncle and Aunt. I just chose the one with (for me) more freedom. My Uncle Alan was wrong. It’s not that I failed to comprehend the meaning of family, but that for me family and my mother were synonymous. My Uncle & Aunt, though in a sense “better” people, were only caretakers in comparison. Only my mother burnt with the pure light. But then again, she elided life…

8 MODESTO REDUX

M y mother met the plane at the Modesto airport in the company of a giant in cowboy hat & sunglasses. She was weeping for joy. As he loaded the luggage— my little yellow suitcase & a box of books—into the cavernous trunk of his car, Jay, my new step-father, said: “I always cry like a baby at times like this—that’s why I wear these”—indicating the Foster Grant wraparounds. This was funny coming from a six foot six, 300 pound Texan. His full name was J.C. Walker. He always said the J.C. stood for Jesus Christ. Jay kept a constant string of jokes coming. “Hey mister, whatcha makin’,” he’d inquire through his windshield of a construction worker out on the highway, “besides a mess?” He called the Twentieth Century Apartments where we lived the “Penitentiary Apartments.” I thought that was so clever. My mother had met him, at the same place she’d met my father, the Arch Club. The Arch Club was just down from the train station. It had once been a classier t. Now broken-down welfare recipients nursed their draft beers by the hours & unemployed chicanos got mad & smashed their glasses on the floor. Jay tended bar there until he was fired for breaking a customer’s nose. He brought home the old jukebox 45s whenever he put new ones in. That is how I first came to listen to Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Chet Atkins on guitar. Roger William’s “King of the Road.” The very best of that early sixties country music became thus engrained in me. It was important not only for its sound, which was to influence my own guitar-playing style, but for its lyricism, its poetry. Nobody’s gonna tell me Johnny Cash was not a poet in his soul. But still he’s very down to earth. Of course, he’s up in heaven now. But this is when he was doing “Folsom Prison Blues.” We lived in squalid leisure. My mother collected SSI and AFDC. Jay collected unemployment. I grew fat eating Oreo cookies in front of the TV or pedaled my bike through the interlocking series of parking lots ading our apartment complex with absolutely nothing to do. I’d look at the dirty magazines on the rack at the liquor store across the street & prowl among the laundromats & car washes along Paradise Road, every bit as free as the dogs I’d see wandering in packs. And every bit as hungry. Jay & I used to play a lot of cards. He taught me how to riffle-stack & false-cut a deck. Also how to slide-roll a seven. He’d learned the mechanics of cards and dice in the Army, where he’d served considerable time in the stockade. He was an orphan who, as he told it, walked from the Texas panhandle to Los Angeles, eating out of trashcans along the way. He blew the harmonica with surprising

skill & claimed to have once played with the Sons of the Pioneers. One could never be sure with this nickle-&-dime con artist who spent his life trying to get his car fixed. Jay was always the hoaxster & he knew a hoaxster when he saw one. During the time of the great Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving hoax we saw Clifford Irving baldfacedly lie to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes. I believed him but not Jay. “That lousy son-of-a-bitch is lying,” he said. “Never believe a man who says, ‘I’m telling the truth.’” Jay counted among his friends & relations a rather scroungy pack of dope addicts, car thieves & welfare cheats. His teenaged daughters were hugely fat & always pregnant. His cousin Dave shot smack. Jay didn’t drink, but if he ever did he would beat my mother with his cowboy belt. He smoked Marlboros & sat around in his cotton briefs listening to Johnny Cash records. He had a belly like a pregnant woman & was missing his front teeth as a consequence of using them to open beer bottles in his youth, a habit he gravely cautioned me against. Shortly after the security guard at our apartment complex—I can’t his name anymore—shot himself in the head with the pistol he carried around in a holster at work (they said he’d had his testicles blown off in Vietnam). Jay & I were seated at the kitchen table, alongside my mother’s countless bottles of pills, playing a game of Monopoly. The evening was muggy, the front door open; Mexican music played from car stereos in the parking lot outside. It had been a see-saw battle, but now luck was running my way. Jay kept landing on my hotels. Exactly as in the real life circumstance (capitalism) this manufactured game mimics, as one of us got luckier the other got more unlucky. Jay was on a downhill slide, forced to sell his houses & mortgage his lands. Then I made a mistake. I let out a little chuckle of glee. I guess it was not right. Enraged, Jay scattered the play money & pretend deeds & ripped the game board in half. Then he grabbed me by my belt loops & threw me out the door onto the concrete walkway. He was yelling for me to get out & never come back & my mom was screaming & I was stumbling across the parking lot in the half-light of dashboard instrument s. I slept like an animal that night, in the bushes. After Jay’s rampage, my mother was re-hospitalized. I stayed with my Grandma Deckwa & Grandpa Bud in the month or so remaining until my graduation from junior high school, a humble feat which seemed to these country folk the very acme of academic excellence. So here I was living in the house, staying in the room, even sleeping in the bed in which my mother had gone insane. There was something weird about that place. Here I read Harry Houdini’s curious The

Unmasking of Robert-Houdin & John Lilly’s mind-expanding The Day of the Dolphin which entered my dreams phantasmagoria of automatons dancing & dolphins rocketing through outer space. Practically my entire academic career has evolved from what is contained, in embryo, in these two books. That, of course & poetry, my mother’s natural gift to me but was the flip-side, as it were, of her schizophrenia. I was haunted by dreams of a pumpkin-headed scarecrow man & woke up one morning repeating the words “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” over & over, like a mantra. Here—Grandpa Bud was watching the Mike Douglas Show at the time—I experienced my first bout of acute anxiety: suddenly my head was spinning, I could hardly breathe, my heart beating like crazy. Purple & golden polka dots swam through the air. I was beginning to realize the claustrophobia, the tension my mother must have felt when she had been cooped up there. Many years later I would become intimately acquainted with the symptoms of anxiety, & depression as well. This was just a taste of future bitterness. Graduation day arrived & once more my Grandma Cline drove her pale green Oldsmobile down from Oakland to get me. I had a lot more than just the contents of my yellow suitcase now. I had clothes on hangers, boxes of books & a photographic enlarger. But it all fit quite easily into the trunk of that mammoth automobile. We drove out along Paradise Road, past my old apartment complex, out beyond the liquor stores & gas stations & then I thought I saw my mother. She was wearing shorts & barefoot, staggering along that godforsaken stretch of road, obviously drunk. At least I thought it was my mother. But then my Grandma Cline said, with shock in her voice: “My God, is that Dottie?!” “No,” I said. “Just keep driving.”

9 ALTA EVA HORTENSIA HAGBERG CLINE

M y Grandpa Cline had had a series of strokes & heart attacks back when I was in Kindergarten. My only memory of him was when he was on his deathbed. Was I summoned? I being alone with him. He was a tall, bald man like Eisenhower & had worked most of his life for the Crown-Zellerback corporation, whatever that meant. He had a lot of hats in his closet, each wrapped neatly in plastic. Yes, he said he wanted to talk to me. He said he had been following my activities with some interest. He said I had better “shape up.” I was not trying to be insolent when I asked him what that meant. He grew more agitated, actually got out of bed & sat in a chair by the window. He said I knew what he meant. He asked did I know what would happen to me if I didn’t, shape up that is. “No,” I said. He drew his forefinger across his throat & made a sound like a jugular squirting. After he died, my Grandma took me to Disneyland. Now she lived as a perpetual widow in an apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland. She’d been swindled out of her house on Wyman Street by red-lining real estate agents. She worked at Providence College of Nursing. I slept on a couch that made into a bed. My Grandma & I would share a good laugh over a filet mignon & asparagus dinner & maybe play a game of Scrabble. She’d been born in 1900, which meant every year was the same as her age. Her earliest memory was of the 1906 earthquake. She looked across the Bay & saw San Francisco in flames. Her parents were Swedish emigrants. She used to conjure her father as reminding her proudly: “You’re a t’ouroughbred—don’t ever forget!” She took the ferryboat into the city to work back before the Bay Bridge was built; then she took the streetcar across. She attended many parties. She didn’t get married right away, she used to say, because she loved to dance so much. She was a huge fan of Lawrence Welk. I liked All in the Family. It stirred her blood to hear the “Star Spangled Banner”; I was reading Camus & questioning life. She thought Nixon did the decent thing by reg; I ed George McGovern. In spite of our ringing arguments we still loved one another. She always materially ed my creative endeavors although it must have been difficult for her sometimes. She probably regretted the phonograph she bought me. I played John Lennon’s Imagine over & over. Dylan had just come out with Blood on the Tracks. Black & white photographs I took at the time (gone to me now, in the cardboard box like all the others) show my gloominess & melancholy. The Tribune Tower looms up above a parking garage, the sky a

matted grey. A forlorn sun goes down over Lake Merritt. But these photos are not uniformly somber. There are shots of leaping killer whales & dolphins in mid-flight from Marineland, of lions, monkeys, elephants and sea otters from visits to the zoo, a landlocked boat next to a bent streetlamp & fireplug at Jack London Square & my grandmother herself, in pearl necklace & earrings, standing on the ledge by Coit Tower overlooking the city. All the places we used to go! I started writing on my grandmother’s old portable typewriter, tip-tapping away into the night. I wasn’t writing poems, but just words. Through the magic slot, conveyed by rubber roller. Worlds of words, mostly image conveyances of how depressed I was on long thin slips of paper. I believed transcribing such verbalization of the concourse of my emotional life would, by some obscure magic, make everything allright. I still believe this. I wrote then same as now, because I have to, because it gives me hope. Because it hurts not to. My Grandma, though, when she read some of my pile of papers was a little alarmed. She didn’t like all that talk about death. I told her it was just part of a story I was working on. Although my home life was somewhat more serene, I was a nervous wreck in school. I was articulate in my classes & excelled in English and social studies, but, as a consequence of moving about so much, I had absolutely no idea of either what to do or how to do it when it came to making friends. My first highschool friend was Rodney, a born-again Christian. We played chess & argued the existence of God. The crappy plastic items he bought on sale at Payless crowded the stuffy, dark quarters he shared with his mother, who worked in a picture framing shop. It didn’t seem possible to me that one religion could be right & all others wrong, but Rodney was as obdurate as he was fat. Walking home from one of our chess games with my ears ringing, I offered a prayer to God: “God, if you really do exist show yourself here & now or I will cease to believe in you altogether.” I looked around. The world was just the same. Cars parked along the curb. Birds on the telephone wires. God didn’t seem to care. “God,” I continued trying to provoke Him, “if you really do exist destroy me here & now.” Still nothing. It was a big step for me. I’d always believed in God up to that point. I was afraid of Him. But now I had to realize God was not watching over me like some gigantic superego in the sky. I was free to think or do anything I wanted. At school, I spent my noon hours writing suicide notes which soon were thick at the bottom of my locker. “To Whom It May Concern,” they all started out.

Mad with adolescent ion, I tried to imagine a life for myself. I desperately wanted someone to love, someone to love me. Every chance meeting with the opposite sex gave way to a pornographic fantasy. I’d meet my perfect lover in my dreams & the promise of her frank gaze when I awoke. Someday we would be together. The first live girl I ever kissed was Tabitha Miller. She took me to a vacant lot near her house in East Oakland. I saw her years later at a bus stop in San Francisco. She was pregnant & looked happy. The first girl I ever had sex with was named Lee Ann. She wrote poetry & gave me a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The first poem I ever wrote was dedicated to her. I don’t it anymore, but I thought it most delicate at the time & showed it to Lee Ann. We were lounging on a swingset in the park. She took a long time perusing the single typed page. “This reads,” she said finally, “like a scream for help in the middle of the night.” Despite my pent-up rage & existential angst, my short-term fortunes improved. I was acting in school plays. Lee Ann & I got to go to a special writing seminar, along with another friend of mine named Josh. Josh was a hip, Jewish, intellectual. He was, in fact, cooler than me. Inevitably, Lee Ann started seeing more of Josh. This was a hard fact for me to grasp. I was sitting with Lee Ann on the lawn of Oakland High & I said, “It’s not the same anymore” & she said “No it’s not—it’s different.” I walked down the hill & back home. My grandmother was away at some luncheon. I copied out the lyrics of “Positively Fourth Street” in their entirety & sent them in a letter to Lee Ann. Then I went to the kitchen cabinet & took out the pill bottle holding my Grandma’s heart medication. I fixed myself a glass of Ovaltine & lined up the little ovals along the varnished edge of the coffee-table. While I took them one by one I composed a note to my grandmother. “Dear Grandma,” I wrote. “It’s nothing that you did. I just can’t stand to go on living anymore. Love, Kurt.” Funny, after all those practice notes I didn’t have more to say. Then I went for a last walk down by the lake—past the tennis courts where Lee Ann used to play—to a grassy prospect where I lay me down to sleep fully expecting to wake up dead. I was just drifting away when my grandmother’s voice ripped through me. “Kurt oh Kurt honey, why Kurt honey why?” I felt her hands shaking me, but couldn’t move, couldn’t open my eyes. “My God,” she cried, “my God! Can you help me?—my grandson needs an ambulance—can you help me?” Her sobs kept tugging me back from the fog. I tried to speak but no words would emerge. “Why, Kurt honey, why?” She rocked me in her arms just like when I was little & she’d sing “Lullaby & goodnight, may the sweet angels bless thee.” Then I

heard a siren & felt my body being lifted up. After they finished pumping my stomach they strapped me to a gurney yet somehow Houdiniesque I uncinched the straps & staggered down an underwater hallway. I was inching along the wall & had gotten just about as far as the electrical socket when they caught up to me. Where did I think I was going? I couldn’t form coherent sentences. I woke up three days later back at my Grandmother’s. My father was there, with my two half-brothers. My things were packed & in the car. This one time he didn’t give me a choice. I was going to Santa Cruz with him. My Grandma Cline was ashen. I suppose she thought she had failed me somehow. Oh, who knows why people do the things they do? I suppose I was dying for love. And, no, it wasn’t that girl Lee Ann. I never missed her. I was moving away & taking everything with me. My mouth stuffed with wool, I mumbled an embarrassed goodbye to my distraught grandmother. Would I ever learn?

10 SOMEBODY BECOMING

T he Big House, as it was known locally, was a Victorian mansion on the cliffs just down from Lighthouse Point where my Dad & Dorothy ran a boarding house for students. They had leased the property from a doctor who sold extract of apricot pits as a cancer treatment in Mexico. When we rolled down the gravel driveway dinner was in progress. Dorothy sat at the end of a magnificent dining room table, ladling polenta into bowls. My old nemesis appeared almost benevolent. She cautioned me not to eat too heartily & assigned me a room on the second floor. She’d seen a lot of messed up kids come through her door. It was at her instigation that my father & I began therapy together. We’d drive from Santa Cruz to Carmel twice a week to visit a Gestalt psychiatrist. I didn’t exactly hit it off with this disciple of Fritz Perls. “How do you feel?” he’d implore. “Stupid,” I’d say “talking to a chair.” But Dr. Fritz was able to articulate my father’s neurosis, since he’d worked with my Dad & Dorothy. My father, according to Dr. Fritz, was afraid to express his feelings, due to a repressive upbringing. His mother thought he had gone astray with his beard & his sailboat & his leftist politics. And he felt guilt that his father had died while the two of them were still on the outs. Dr. Fritz’ theory about me was that I blamed myself for my mother’s insanity. But I wasn’t so sure. Probably him just mentioning it took away some burden I’d been carrying, I will it that. Better than the therapy for bringing my father and son closer was the drive through the artichoke fields on the rural roads around Salinas. It was like our old drives to the psychiatric hospital to visit my mother. We talked about the Wobblies, John Steinbeck & Cannery Row. My father knew a lot of history. “History,” he used to say, “is written by the victor.” He taught me to drive stick. And midway our journey we would still stop off for a snack—in Castroville—at a restaurant shaped like a giant artichoke. On an archway leading into town Castroville proclaimed itself “The Artichoke Capital of the World.” “Wouldn’t it be better,” my father said, “if it were ‘The Artichoke HEART of the World’ instead?” You’d think I would be happy. But suicide is a hard habit to break. I took the old green Ford pickup to the Golden Gate Bridge, climbed over the railing & gazed down into the choppy, turquoise water. And then I looked around & realized this was my chance. I was free to jump & end my life. No one cared. God didn’t care —probably couldn’t even peer down through the fog, it was so thick. There were no guards, no witnesses. Why not do it? But then I thought, wait a minute, as

long as I’m alive I can always kill myself, but once I’m dead, that’s it. Suicide is the decision to end all decisions & the choice to end all choices. This being the case, I might as well wait. One might as well put off death as long as one could. I could always kill myself tomorrow, or the next day—whenever things got really bad—until of course the day I couldn’t. But that day wasn’t yet. I climbed back over the railing to discover I’d had a single spectator the entire time. Expressionless in a rain slicker he watched me walk away. I took the truck back up Highway One through the fog at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, laughing till I cried. But my father was not amused when I tried to tell him the cosmic joke. He said it was great I had given up contemplating suicide, but I still should have asked permission before taking the truck. Nevertheless, I had to it, it was getting better. I swam in the ocean once a day. I read deeply from my Dad & Dorothy’s library & listened to the Beatles’ White Album over & over in my room. I drank chamomile tea & conversed with the graduate students & wealthy hippies who were Dorothy’s chief clientele about Life, Art, Philosophy, Miles Davis & James Dean. Barton & Bruce & I slept in a tee-pee in the yard & snuck into the pool at the Dream Inn down West Cliff Drive. We sometimes held seances in the basement, during which I conjured for them the illusion of the ectoplasmic form of a certain Amos Furgsley who would answer questions for us, like a Ouiji board. Amos had died in that house, or so we used to fantasize. At school I began to meet girls, always my heart’s fondest hope. Michelle, so delicate, who later married a sailor. Dawn, blonde, I wonder what happened to her, with her crazy father & all. And then there was auburn haired Salina. We acted together in John Millington Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen. Synge put melodious Irish brogues in our mouths. I felt the creaminess of her cunt on my fingers as we lay on my bed, discussing our roles. That is another thing I miss about Lily. We used to have a magic act. I guess it was kind of a “double,” as they used to say in vaudeville, which I imagine myself to have been in a previous lifetime. And now I have to do a single & I’m as hollowed out inside as George Burns must have been when Gracy died. Magic in performance (that old show-biz pizzazz) needs those male & female energies intermingling with one another, puzzling another, harmonizing, setting one another askew. I still have a few of my old magic things & sometimes practice before the mirror. I was doing magic back then too. The neighbors, a couple who had a big furry dog named Pushkin invited me over to do a show & were so nice to me I could scarcely believe it. I exerted some kind of crazy charm over them or something. Or

maybe they genuinely liked me. That was a new one on me. That I might have some value on earth to anybody besides my mother or Grandma Cline. And I mean even including myself. My friends Frank & Paul first turned me on to Mr. Sharky. We were up in my room listening to David Bowie. At first I didn’t feel any effect. I went downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water. But then I couldn’t what I was down there for. I couldn’t anything. My mind was swept clean. Everything that had been bothering me for all those years just vanished in a twinkling. Now the only problem was ing the simple task of…what was it again?…oh yes…getting a glass…reflecting in the windows of the kitchen a multiplicity of selves…but first…waving the glass…the water, yes, first the water…back upstairs I lapsed into hilarity on the couch in the candlelit darkness. “This glass of water…” I stammered out between guffaws. “And…we’ve got… the whole… goddamned… ocean out there!” I set to writing then & long after my friends departed I continued to scribble away. The next day, however, I could only look with consternation at the pile of papers I had produced. Much of it was illegible, still more was incomprehensible. Even what obtained some shred of clarity remained a mystery. “Over the neon veldt/” I had written, “the falcon glides electric.” I can still see the line scrawled in blue ball-point pen in my mind’s eye. Such was my first experience of writing without conscious control. The falcon glides electric. What the hell was that supposed to mean? I don’t know—something Egyptian about it, I suppose. Later I would understand that poetry taps into the Jung’s Collective Unconscious. I didn’t go to my high school graduation. Instead I left town, zig-zagged up & down the California coast. Smelt the fumes of mighty diesels. Felt the rain coming down the back of my neck. In L.A. the signs in the sidewalk chicken stands read “No Sleeping.” In tenement hotels, nailed up above the washbasin would be a coffeecan lid for a mirror. If the bedbugs bite, bite ’em back, my father used to say. I floated from one crashpad or campsite to another. Slept among the dunes of Big Sur & in an abandoned chicken coop in the hills above Malibu. A circus parade of speed freaks, prostitutes, fledgling screen writers & transsexuals with runny mascara. Pushing 90 on the Santa Monica freeway with an Australian actor, who, to take the edge off the meth, would swig tequila out of a liter bottle. I don’t seem to meet people like this anymore. Suzanne & her husband who picked me up in Big Sur. She had the same name as the Leonard

Cohen song which she sang & gave me some windowpane acid. They wanted to have a threesome but I ended up walking down the creekbed to the main road & hitchhiking a ride clear back to Santa Cruz. I suddenly saw what I must do. It was clear in my mind as a divine vision. The only answer: a final confrontation. I got back to Santa Cruz at dawn & walked along Ocean Beach toward West Cliff Drive. My father was freshly awake; I hadn’t slept in days. There was something important I had to tell him. We had some coffee & I explained that the problem from the beginning was that he didn’t really love me. He hadn’t wanted me around because I’d always reminded him of my mother—that was the truth wasn’t it? And the toughest part was he couldn’t deny it. He said he didn’t appreciate me guilt tripping him & I said no no—he didn’t understand—I was trying to explain. We were standing out in the circular driveway by the carriage house, where the primal scream therapy people used to have their sessions, when we came to blows. Even Dorothy got into the mix. She tried to grab me with her claws & I thought of all those times she’d slapped my face or hit me over the head with a vacuum cleaner tube & yes I slapped her back & my father boxed my ears & once more I cried with rage how it just wasn’t fair—how it just wasn’t god damned fair. It was a horrible conflagration. But later on, I ended up with one of those sisters of mercy you hear about who lived in the carriage house attic. I don’t even her name. I was embarrassed by what had happened but she said I reminded her of James Dean. She was a drama student. She had a quilted bedspread & played Lou Reed’s Transformer. She slept with me that night, emotional train wreck that I was. I was too numb coming down from amphetamines & hallucinogens to really put up much of a show. I would never hear from her again, but when I left the next day I took our encounter as a propitious sign. But where to go? The road crooked an elbow & pointed me the way. By Volkswagen Van, Chevy Impala & Mercedes Benz I hitched to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, a motley six block stretch of bookshops, restaurants & cafes crowded with students, street people & drug dealers. I’d been accepted for classes at the University & my Grandmother had given me money to get started. I ate at the Hare Krishna Temple & found an inexpensive room, but too soon my finances dwindled to nothing. My Grandma had been buying savings bonds for me for the past twenty years, but I managed to run though their proceeds in less than a semester! Bad enough to spend money on drugs—

but on the promise of drugs that never materialize? I was too trusting of unscrupulous individuals. Never give anybody your money without holding in your hand the merchandise first. That’s a lesson I learned—more than once. I lasted less than a semester at the University & instead of the Great American Novel I only managed to write a string of bounced checks across town. By day I worked as a busboy at the Buttercup Bakery but at night hung out with the bums over bonfires in People’s Park, drinking muscatel & smoking, on one particularly good night, a t laced with hash oil. Only among these winos had I ever felt accepted. It was a pleasure to give out cigarettes & bum them back— the Great Universal Transformation & Cigarette Exchange.

11 AN ACTOR’S LIFE

U p on the Avenue I’d drink Ranier Ale with Jimmy Lee a speed freak street corner philosopher who wore mirrored sunglasses & strummed his guitar to the strains of “Chantilly Lace” & “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Jimmy had this rap about how crazy everything was. The cars on the street, people on the pavement, always in a hurry. Everyone running every which way. “You have to transcend,” Jimmy would say & at that moment it seemed possible—in the still center of the whirling universe propped against the brick storefront alongside the plate-glass window of the Meditereneum Cafe. Debbie & I lived in a $100 studio apartment in a basement near People’s Park. She was from New Jersey & wanted to become a singer. Her hero was Lady Day. We loved & fought & fucked in every conceivable position. She worked as a nurse’s aid & was just naive enough to believe that I might make a go of it as a writer. I was trying to write a novel, but each day seemed to bring a new style, depending on who I was reading at the time. Was I Joseph Conrad or Kurt Vonnegut? When people would ask me what kind of novel I was writing, I’d say science fiction. But there was neither science nor fiction. There was one page & then another. But for awhile we played that I was the great writer. I, who had perhaps five decent pages to my name! One time I took some extremely righteous Mr. Natural & washed it down with a fifth of Jim Beam. That was the brand my Grandma Cline always used to have in her liquor cabinet in her apartment near Lake Merritt. After puking my guts out I found myself lying on the hexagonal tiles of the bathroom. As I pressed my flushed cheeks against the gritty coolness I saw myself from a distance, twisting straining, struggling to be born. It was the sort of re-birthing hallucination that John Lilly describes. I saw myself strangling on my umbilical cord green & reptilian needy & naked & spasming for air. I was the hatchling songbird bleating for food, hungry, dying for love. My stomach convulsed & gave forth bile. Debbie was asleep in bed the whole time. She had to get up & go to work in the morning. I do not know what possessed us when we decided to get married. But the next thing I knew, Debbie’s parents had flown out from Morristown. Her mother was a fading beauty who wore pedal pushers & smoked menthols. Her father, ostensibly in the brick layers union, was the classic Italian gangster replete with cigar & flashy jewelry. He had a very dry sense of humor. “Hey diddly-dee,” he

sang upon seeing our basement love-nest, “an actor’s life for me.” He told me if I ever needed help I could go to the Colombo family. Debbie & I were married on a sunny day in Santa Cruz. It was like a Robert Altman film. My Grandma Deckwa wolfed down cake & wondered aloud how long our union might last. My mother clutched her purse & though refraining from drink, swayed nervously, astonished by the vivacity of her ex-husband’s lifestyle. My half-brother Bruce, later to become a policeman, got so drunk on champagne that he spun around like a gyroscope & puked. Debbie complained to me that Larry was coming on to her. High school chums I’ve never seen again waved goodbye as the bride and groom drove away to misery, each feeling suddenly trapped & with no idea of what might lie ahead. Our marriage ended, a few months later, in bitter tears, exactly as my Grandma Deckwa had predicted. I met Leticia in the Eucalyptus Grove. She was playing her guitar & offered me a t. We went back to her place. She was from the east coast, studying psychology. I became her term project, narrating for her the story of my life, exactly as I am doing now, who raised me & when & where. I was a mental case & she was studying to be a therapist, so it was a perfect match. She really did help me too. She taught me transcendental meditation, even giving me the secret mantra given her by the TM people. But she’d been raped the year before & hadn’t gotten over it. She had to drop out of grad school because her nerves were shot. I guess it didn’t help when I smashed her Linda Ronstadt record & chased her down the sidewalk waving a package of tofu. She said she was afraid of me. Leticia gave me a notebook to record my dreams. That is one thing I still have today. The first dream, written in watery blue is dated September 1, 1977. “Go to see Timothy Leary at YMCA. He is at the end of a long, burnished table, blue savior eyes flashing, but my view of him is eclipsed by two sweaty fat ladies making exhaustive love…” (Later on, in real life saw Leary speak in an intimate space at UC Berkeley. It was much the same: the guy was shining with pulsating globs of pure energy, paisley shapes and diamonds swirling ’round his head.) In my dreams I was forever the fugitive from the law the escaped convict hunted by the Fat Detective a pack of dogs or the Persian Drunkard like Ivan in The Harder They Come making my last stand. I was drinking too much Southern Comfort & losing consciousness on a regular basis. In my dreams, gasoline splashed against tenement walls. School children walked around with dynamite sticks ’round their necks. ing the costume drama inside my skull was everyone I’d ever known—& everyone I’d never see again, a shifting repertory company of bit

actors & celebrities, including Sir Thomas More, Charlie Chaplin & the Green Hornet, who enacted tumultuous dramas inside my skull, old friends, ex-lovers & always my forever estranged relatives my constant companions. Family in particular would recur. This was amazing to me since I really didn’t think about them all that much when I was awake. In one dream, Grandpa Deckwa takes me to his shed out back & tells me how he regrets having wasted his life. In another my mother & Grandma Deckwa are parked in my grandmother’s Cadillac next to the projects where I spent my earliest childhood. They are smoking dope in a pipe they have fashioned from an old tin cup. “What’s this,” I say, looking at the holes they have punched in the metal. “How will this hold water?” A lot of these early dreams are set in the Big House. In one of them, I’m back at Dorothy’s dining room table again, talking with two schoolgirls. They compare me to my father, who steps from behind a curtain. His features are foolish, his gestures monkeylike. They say I don’t look like him but I insist I do. I lived in a room on Dwight Way. I was all alone now; Leticia had left me. I spent a lot of time up at Moe’s Bookstore from which I stole the collected works of Arthur Rimbaud. Monday nights La Salamandra Cafe was an open poetry reading attended by alcoholic day laborers, drug addicts on SSI, street tramps, transvestites, porno queens & prosititutes who drank beer from pitchers & regaled one another with poems inspired by Bukowski, the Beats, 60s rock & the blossoming punk movement. Presiding over the festivities was a biker poet named Paladin. Just Paladin. He carried a jackknife in his boot. “A huntress is she,” he used to intone “all in virginal white.” It was cadenced like Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night.” In spite of his lyric delicacy, Paladin was a tyrant who would call readers to the stage in order of his personal preference. I waited, that first time, for my name to be called, my stomach churning, folding & refolding the pages of the 3-page epic I’d typed, “The Swamp.” But when I finished reading it into the microphone, the few remaining hard-core alcoholics & waiters stacking chairs on tables applauded sincerely my accumulated pain & it felt like I’d found something that had been missing from my life. I cornered Paladin at the bar & asked him what he thought of my poem. “Too long,” he summarized. How did one get started in poetry, I continued. He said, “Dig what’s going around you—and then plagiarize like Hell! Listen—you can’t make any money as a poet but if you’re lucky…if you’re really, really lucky…” He paused for effect. “You just might get laid.” He did an elaborate martial arts move with his walking stick. “Later,” he said.

Who did I think I was—Charles Baudelaire? Perhaps I imbibed the waters of inspiration a little too deeply. Dragging oneself through hell each week in order to produce a poem—I knew of no other method of creative composition—takes its psychic toll. Congential paranoia began creeping in. I could no longer tell where the audience left off & where I began. I could hear them out there, thinking. Brian Dragon—who brought out a gleaming dagger for his monologue of Sid Vicious killing his girlfriend—LeRoy Doyle, who insulted the audience & got away with it—Julia Vinograd, the Bubble Lady—I believed they all could read my every thought. Observing this crowd of poets from within folds of cigarette smoke I discerned in every chance action a coded message, a cipher indicating probably some kind of joke of the type that used to be played on me by my step-siblings. No one knew the gradual disintegration I felt. I was seeing double, had to close one eye to read the typed page. Then I climbed down off the stage & made my way through a corridor of balloon faces into the alleyway & tried to bum a cigarette from a gang of bikers who smashed my head against the wall & left me on the cement bleeding. I staggered back to my rooming house, my face a mask of encrusted blood. I took the corrugated box, repository of all my poems out to the driveway & set its contents aflame.

12 THE EDUCATION OF A POET

I was living in San Francisco in an apartment above Lambo’s Giant Chili Dogs at the corner of Powell & Ellis right above the cable car turnaround. Through my window I could see the tourists congregating. The elevator stank of urine. There can’t be any rats, we’d console ourselves, or they’d have eaten all the mice. Tenants could borrow the tank in the office to spray for cockroaches. I worked as a dishwasher at a snooty eatery on Polk Street. Down the hall Byron had an obsession with Grace Slick. He carved her name on his forehead, a horizontal slit above the “i”. He watered his carpet to encourage the vermin. He thought he was Jesus Christ & he was very Christly. All night long he would get jumbo togo cups of coffee from Lambo’s downstairs & play Jefferson Airplane. I told him what I thought was his problem. “You drink too much coffee,” I said. I lay in my narrow bed at night listening to symphonic traffic chimes. My window opening out on the street six stories below seemingly dissolved away as gears meshed along the cable car line. Above the Woolworth’s I seemed to see a gigantic metal rose blooming, shedding its petals in endless profusion as new petals appeared. The petals were faces, human faces, falling to the street. A writhing Arabian carpet of radio waves & murmurs. Each face had a halo around it, like a streetlamp in the fog. It was this metal rose vibrating which shook the wind which blew the skyscrapers through the clouds which formed the mist clinging to the halos of ten thousand saints who carried in their minds, as the source of their light, just this rose, this clockwork rose, kaleidoscopically opening… Did I write this Dantesque vision, or did the experience emerge from the writing? The two alternatives blur together. Somewhere along the line, writing had become my spiritual practice. I wrote because I had to, with little regard for the finished product. Someone pointed that little problem out to me once. The spiritual systems about which I was reading—Taoism, Buddhism, and Christian Mysticism—helped me to feel that I wasn’t alone. But it was through writing that I was able to actualize my understanding of the mutual interpenetration & intersection of subtle dimensions with our own so-called reality. In Berkeley I had seen the obverse side of the writing process. Nightmares can come true when visionary experience becomes too reified in its age from individual perception to finished work of art. I had ended up here, don’t ask me how. The ways of love are many & tortured.

My heart was a shattered husk. I was patrolling the sidewalks looking for chance encounters. The poetry scene was a million miles from my mind. I thought I had gotten away from all that. I had moved away from Berkeley to be rid of the selfimposed torture that the poetry readings had become for me. I had merely jumped the greasy griddle into the jet of blue gas. San Francisco was a hotbed of poetic activity, increasingly split into two camps, the street poets & the academic poets. Although it must be added that neither camp knew much about the other. This was a kind of exclusivity. One time I summoned up the temerity to ask Jim Hartz at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State for a job—I had only that day been fired from agonizing part-time work as a night watchman at a condominium complex for the very rich. It’s true I used to nap a bit in the early AM hours. Anyway, lo & behold Jim gave me a job putting together a series of student readings, which I did with a certain panache even if I do say so myself. Only one time I got into trouble. That’s when I invented Jeff Grossman, then the rising star among the street poets centered in North Beach to read with this denizen of the university poets who went by the single name “Gordon.” Gordon really blew her stack & Jim called me into his office to tell me that this was strictly a university & outsiders should not be invited—even though the Poetry Center was itself quite renowned for having in poets from all over the world. That whole hip vs. square thing is very rectangular. But don’t misunderstand me. The neo-Beat street poets, even the Beat poets themselves, were just as guilty of constructing this same paper dog to take their frustrations out on. I had fallen back into the poetry scene by coincidence & proximity. I’d been sitting in the park & eating French bread. Then I went looking for a little liquid refreshment & wandered in on Bob Kaufman improvising on Prufrock at an Italian bar & restaurant named Peta’s. Ralph LaCharity showed me his magazine and invited me to contribute. After that, I felt a renewed desire to write. I read Artaud in the basement of City Lights Bookstore. In my room I pored over the Portable Blake. It was a copy given to me by a girl named Wind that I used to know in Berkeley. Her real name was Janice. She lived everywhere & nowhere & had mastered the art of living off of nothing but the contents of her backpack. She stayed at my place but we never had sex. Once, when she left on her seasonal pilgrammage to Eugene, Oregon, she left me this book with the inscription: “To my Little Boy Lost so he’ll find himself someday soon.” Anyway there was this inscription in the book. But it was a used book, probably from Moe’s around the corner & the inscription might have been written in before Wind purchased the volume. But in any case I found its inclusion meaningful. I pondered that volume for a long time. I understood Blake’s early

lyrics, but was baffled by the prophecies. How was Milton “of the devil’s party without knowing it?” I had to find out what Blake meant, but here I was stumped, since the works of John Milton made no sense to me whatsoever. I had shed several identities already. I enjoyed acting in plays in high school but didn’t want to devote myself to becoming an actor. I knew I would be relinquishing too much control & placing myself in the need of the service of too many other people. When I see the horrible degradations that professional actors must endure I am certainly not sorry for my choice. My Grandma Cline thought I would make a wonderful magician. She used to take me to the magic shop on Chestnut Street in the Marina District of San Francisco. But although I enjoyed employing my skills with cards, magic began to feel empty to me. I could never limit myself to doing tricks. What would be the point? But these were naive views: later I drew upon my background as a magician to create many performance art shows, in this way shirking off the role of the writer as well. Now I write & perform songs too. But for then the only thing was that as a poet, any & every experience was part of my artistic (and increasingly spiritual) work. As a poet I was entirely independent. I could carry on my work in seclusion, with only pen & paper. And no one could tell me what to write, or how, or when, or why. As I was to find out, these were naive views too. Hoping to find the answer to Blake’s riddle, I enrolled at San Francisco State University. One of my first classes was a graduate level course in John Milton. The teacher, who recited Milton quite dramatically, had a flaming red beard. He laughed when he read the draft I had written of my final paper, a study of Lucifer. He laughed & laughed. I studied literature, ancient mythology & creative writing. Nanos Valaoritis, the Greek Surrealist poet gave lectures on Beckett, Apollinaire & Post-Structuralism. He’d once spent a summer in a castle with André Breton. In a film-script writing class I had my eye on a girl with spiked, black hair who never said much. When I saw her the 26 Valencia bus was filling up fast but there was still a seat next to her. “It’s now or never,” I told myself. I slid easily into the contour plastic. “ me?” I asked. She wasn’t sure, but I jarred her memory. Oh yeah. The film class. We’d both enjoyed Hiroshima Mon Amour. Her name was Lily. She asked me where I was going. “Nowhere really,” I said. Little did I know! Did I want to stop by & see her place? “Well—” I said, “why the hell not?” She asked me if I had any weed. She lived in a Victorian flat in the Mission. We climbed a wooden flight of stairs & sat on her couch listening to Tom Waits sing “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” Lily asked if I wanted a drink “Oh sure,” I said, “what’ve you got?” She

rummaged in the cupboard, pouted disappointment. “Just this Tanqueray,” she said. “That’ll be fine,” I said, “just fine.” We used the gin to wash down a few secanols & went for a walk through that neighborhood of taquerias & thrift stores, finally stopping at a little Spanishspeaking Catholic Church. We sat in a pew & listened to the prayers & let the symphony of car alarms & screaming babies wash over us. When we get back to her place the world was spinning faster than a playground merry-go-round—the kind pushed by the child-riders. Centrifugal force kept spilling us sideways across the sidewalk. We wavered on the stairs & when we kissed our tongues mingled. She peered at me through bloodshot eyes. “Well,” she said, “so you wanna fuck or what?” And so it began. The city was our playground. We rode horseback on public statues, climbed at night out onto the tourist ship in the Bay. She wore a silk slip as a nightdress & was afraid of the dark. She was a writer too—knew all about Arthur Rimbaud & Lou Reed. She had a voice like Patti Smith & translucent angel wings when we made love. We took the Greyhound to Monterey & climbed over the fence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s old house & prowled around at midnight on his terrace. In the hotel room we painted watercolors & I enacted the strange case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde for Lily’s amusement. We missed our bus home because of making out in the parking lot so spent the night playing rummy in the taxi shelter. In Taos, New Mexico, we made love in the graveyard where Kit Carson is buried. The clouds were so close & puffy we felt certain we could construct gigantic snowshows to walk on them. One had only to distribute the weight over a wide enough area. Within a couple of months, Lily & I moved into a railroad flat, 2263 Market Street Apartment #4, and adopted a kitten from the SPCA black with white paws, who we named Burma Shave. “Sitting watching the cat catch a bug—that must be what I’m here for,” I typed on my old electric which was perched atop a backless chair in lieu of a table. We used to have so many breakdowns. We used to have so many breakthroughs. Every drunken bout, every tuinol or mushroom cap we took we were doing it to find the secret of writing, which for us was the alchemical transformation of the self. Were we wheeling with the seagulls or were we merely dreaming? We played The Clash & The Sex Pistols & heard the news on the radio of John Lennon’s assassination on my birthday in 1980. Lily was cooking a leg of lamb. Burma Shave knocked over the garbage.

Lily & I used to go to the Spaghetti Factory readings. Bob Kaufman was there, his voice damaged by emphysema. Jack Hirschmann read Mayakovski translations. Gregory Corso—drunk off his butt as usual. But it didn’t matter who you were—only the poetry mattered. We’d snort lines of coke off the lid of the toilet-tank & huddle around the stage, eyes closed swaying slightly. Dionysus had us at his mercy but also under his protection. I said to my friend Darrell that the more coke you did, the more wine you could drink. Darrell maintained that the converse was true—that the more wine you drank, the more coke you could do. Cokehead & communist, he’d been badly damaged because of the color of his skin. He was pretty skeptical about poetry & poets but even he had to it it was funny when I got so drunk that I fell off the stage. Lily’s old roommate Tom had made his way to San Francisco from Richmond, Virginia as soon as he was old enough to think. He’d been a street-hustler in Houston but now worked in an insurance company. He was a David Bowie freak & there do seem to be several clues in Bowie’s lyrics pointing to Tom. “Major Tom to Ground Control,” Bowie sings in “Space Oddity.”. “Major Tom’s a junkie” he sings in Fashion. And the part about boys waiting at traffic lights. Tom knew Bowie was singing about him. He was pissed when Bowie denied being gay. “That miserable liar,” he griped over sake at the sushi bar. “What else are the songs about?” Sometimes Tom would go with us to the reading. Once at the Spaghetti Factory he got so drunk he had to lie down in the alley outside. Between retches, he shouted words of encouragement through a tiny steel-meshed window to the poets within. Tom would come over with a lover of his named Mario a former stand-up comedian, into S&M. Mario told a lot of funny jokes but bemoaned his days of lost glory as a club comic in New York City. We were drinking chartreuse & smoking golden-tipped cigarettes when we decided to enact Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Lily & I played George & Martha. Tom played Honey with a slight southern drawl & Mario was divine as the muscle-flexing biologist Nick. Method actors that we were we drank along with Albee’s late night revelers & the next thing we knew it wasn’t theatre anymore. We were living our parts. The apartment was our set. We were roaringly drunk & hysterical as Albee’s neurotics. After a rousing second act, we’d just begun the quieter scene between Martha & Nick when there came on the door the unmistakable pounding of a policeman’s flashlight. There were as many cops as would fit into the hallway outside our apartment & a half dozen more straggling down the stairs. It took us some time to convince them we were

only acting. Long after our friends had departed, Lily & I continued arguing. Not about anything, just arguing. There I was, foaming at the mouth as usual, endlessly circumlocuting, belaboring, qualifying, reiterating & forgetting my point as drunks do, finally losing my train of thought entirely & breaking a Jack Daniels bottle for dramatic effect. We were ready to kill one another but were too fucked up to stand. Lily crawled off to the bedroom; I ed out on a piece of foam rubber that served as our couch, covered with an old corduroy coat. Dawn sun burned flares under my eyelids, as I became aware of Burma Shave kneading my chest her urgent meows clawing at my dreams. When I cracked open my eyes, it still took me awhile to realize that that cat was giving birth right there on my chest. I slid out from under the coat, picked my way through the broken glass & got Lily. We smoked a t to help with the hangovers & watched six kittens being born. We were astonished. We didn’t even know the poor cat was pregnant! Things began to fall apart for the first time with Lily in 1984. A journal I was keeping at the time finds me New Years day sitting writing in the blue room off the kitchen. Lily is on the couch with two of the kittens we’d kept, Machine Gun & Cosmic Wonder watching a Gregory Peck movie on television. An idyllic scene & yet there’s a hint of foreboding. “Happiness can die in a moment’s flame,” I note. By year’s end Lily would move away to Portland, Oregon to attend a posh college & I would be left to the tender mercies of the graduate creative writing program at SFSU & once more contemplating suicide. There began again to be no point anymore. Without Lily, my center crumbled. It felt like I’d been plummeting down a long elevator shaft since the day I was born. I was on a steady diet of apricot brandy & Andre champagne but no amount of drinking could assuage my pain. I was writing but no longer knew why. I had fallen in with a bad crowd of 2nd generation language poets. Ronald Reagan was re-elected, casting a sickly pall over the entire nation, indeed the planet. And to top it all off, My Grandma Cline died. I was there when they packed up her things. The doctor had told her her heart was going & so my Uncle Alan & Aunt Darlene were taking her with them to Fresno to live out the remainder of her life—a grim prospect by any reckoning! She was giving away all the beautiful things accumulated over her lifetime. She gave me the little teak chest where she once stored her silverware, wrapped in

blue flannel. My Dad took away the exquisitely carved dining room table & her charming vanity table, where once I used to sit sniffing perfume. My uncle & aunt packed up her gigantic mahogany buffet. The movers finished stripping her apartment while my Uncle Alan ate a slice of lemon meringue pie on her patio. I suppose that was the last pie my grandmother ever made. Then later, when we heard she was on her deathbed “waiting for us,” my Dad & I drove down to Fresno to see her one last time. This was just like our old days together—down, down into the valley, the same brown California hills speeding by through the windshield. When we got to my uncle & aunt’s tract home, I was surprised that, while I had changed so much, my uncle & aunt were exactly the same. The same furnishings, except for the mahogany buffet, everything. The same Pyrex coffee pot on the stove. We took turns at the dying woman`s bedside. My Grandma squeezed my hand. “I love you so much,” she said & lapsed into delirium.

Here’s a dream I had shortly after:

It’s in the future, on another planet. I’m with my Grandma Cline in an historical garden, known to visitors from across the galaxy as the Eternal Resting Place. “Anything’s possible if you try,” my Grandma says & pats me on the cheek. Alien creatures stand along the hillside of this gigantic cemetery holding their loved one’s corpses. It is the burial custom here that the mourner cradle the beloved in arms, fins or tentacles & strike a pose of deep melancholy for all eternity. This, an art form on this planet, strikes me as incredibly beautiful.

“This is a dance with death & that’s all it is,” I muttered as I awoke. I wrote a poem about it later. Actually a whole book. Death was in the air & the corpses were mounting up. When my step-father Jay died of cancer (that is, of everything: lungs, bones, stomach, intestines, brain) I drove to Modesto to help my mom. In spite of her emotional disorder, she’d managed to care for this impossible man in his last years as he’d been reduced from a hulking giant to a walking skeleton, with a bald head scarred like a

wrecking ball. By the time I got down there, Jay’s no good daughters—now 350 pounds apiece!—had stripped the apartment of all his earthly possessions while my mom sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes & drinking coffee. We hadn’t even had the funeral yet! Soon Tom, who had tested HIV positive about five years before, developed fullblown AIDS. His slow but steady demise was given an air of unreality by the tincture of opium he shared with me. “They’re giving me great drugs,” he said, “but look at what you have to go through to get them.” It was my friend’s belief that the disease had been engineered by the Reagan istration to kill off gays. He gave me his collection of news reports of paranormal occurrences— cattle mutilations, cases of spontaneous combustion & UFO sightings. His favorite news item involved a man visited by aliens who handed him a plate of pancakes & left. The pancakes, according to the item were normal human pancakes made of terrestrial flour. He gave me a Lovecraft first edition but said I would have to return it someday. In this he was being overly optimistic. He used to so fondly his old days of puking in the Spaghetti Factory alley. That was when he really felt alive. He died in a hospice in Richmond, Virginia. It was the Ides of March. He ripped the I.V. needle from his arm & said, “That’s enough.” Tom was only the first of my friends to die this way. Many others would follow. I sometimes would wonder if it wasn’t a hoax—if the Reagan istration wasn’t using the disease to kidnap young men & force them into secret labor camps. If this were true Tom might still make his escape. Around this time I wrote probably my most paranoiac work, Strange Occurrences. This was a book-length prose-poem collaged together from the bundles of newspaper clippings about paranormal events that I had inherited from Tom. I mixed together various Fortean anomalies: eyewitness descriptions of UFO’s & encounters with alien beings, newspaper s of spontaneous combustion, cattle mutilations & falls of foreign objects from the sky. The result is, I’m afraid, rather confusing. Secret messages are hidden in the silences between words, in the disparities between descriptions. The physical world is but part of a larger dreamscape. Frogs fall from a clear blue sky; plagues of anacondas, wasps & spinning jennies blacken the hillside. Alien beings speak in an unknown language. A vague, Lovecraftian terror lurks just beneath the surface of an illusion generated by these alien beings specifically to fool us. Finally, all I’m able to offer is that “at the outermost edge, it’s the innermost

thought that matters. Until some great giant comes in the night, sweeps us all away.” It was my Master’s thesis. Nanos said, “Now you are a master.” I wasn’t so sure. Lily and I had a difficult time when she returned to San Francisco. We both had had disastrous affairs. I had suffered a serious concussion in a car accident & its effects were heightened by my many indulgences, but, meeting with a psychologist once a week, still somehow managed to quit smoking & drinking. Now Lily & Joie Cook had a t birthday party in Lily’s North Beach studio apartment. Joie was in a punk band, Little Death. She was a wild one, having shot, swallowed or smoked every drug known to humanity. She had a lot of friends. She was the life of the party, high-strung as an ill-tuned violin, given to hysterical crying jags or hilarious satires, endlessly reeling off stories of the bands she’d fucked or the hoddoo priestess whose tit she’d sucked while living down in New Orleans. Lily & I had created a monster of sorts; Joie’s band had broken up & punk rock was dead so naturally Joie needed a new venue. The “poetry scene” was the sort of wild game she was accustomed to devouring, bones & all. So, in one corner you had the North Beach crowd: Jack Hirschman, Jack Mueller, Jack Michelline, and all the other Jacks and Jills. In another corner, strangely enough, was the old Berkeley contingent, at least as it was currently reconstituted, with the eternally sarcastic Julia Vinograd at the helm. Paladin wasn’t there though; he had died in a motorcycle crash. His brains had been bashed out on the pavement. This seemed ironic when one ed Paladin’s sermons against laws forcing bikers to wear helmets. But better to go that way than wear a helmet & be paralyzed for life, Paladin would no doubt have argued. The Berkeley poets eyed the wall decorations as if searching for a hidden ageway. They, formerly on the inside, exclusive & underground, were now on the outside, looking to get in. And in their eyes I, who had formerly been outside, was now inside, the one with the interesting friends. And it’s true. Not just Joie. My friends all had fire. Diana Saenz a Latina playwright from L.A. We discussed Brecht & Almodovar. She was a communist but never doctrinaire. “Communists are homophobes,” she would say. “I happen to be a heterophobe.” You could always count on Diana to have a witty remark about dialectical materialism & a little of that you-know-what-I-mean. Oh & there was Calhoun, looking smart in a yachting cap. “Just don’t call me captain,” he said to me. He was black man but his family had emigrated from Trinidad & had never known slavery. He lived in a hotel on Broadway. He wasn’t bullshitting like a lot of street performers, but really loved poetry. He turned me on to the Romantic poets & Coltrane. “I’m not a schizophrenic, I’m a Surrealist,” he’d say. And Ronn

Rosen, Dada poet & painter who lived on Judah Street. He put on kooky salon parties & recited Hugo Ball poems in an operatic voice with John Cage music playing in the background. He had a big, black mustache, tinted glasses & wore a derby. I was among my best friends & nothing could harm me, even when Corso’s roommate (don’t tell me his name—I don’t want to ) was ing out hits of windowpane. When it turned he was into Hitler & Pound I got really sick & couldn’t stop puking. Poised over the toilet bowl, I kept hearing this guy’s egomaniacal voice going around & around in my head. Finally, Lily had Brian Ping throw the guy out & I was okay. Leibniz was Ronn’s roommate. He had an obsession with the JFK assassination & would play the Zapruder film over & over. He’d visited the Dallas Book Conservatory with his family when he was six & had a picture of himself & his sister smiling side by side in front of the building. But Leibniz’s sister was killed in an automobile accident when still a teenager & Leibniz had never gotten over it. Pictures of little girls adorned his walls. Nothing smutty, mind you. Publicity shots of Hayley Mills or the girl who played Penny on Lost In Space. But his interest in pubescent females was not devoid of an erotic content. His girlfriend Damian, though in her mid-twenties, looked & dressed like a Catholic school girl. She had been born hermaphroditic & autistic. She was a musical & mathematical genius but only interested in who had the cocaine. She delighted in snapping the twig of poor Leibniz’s heart. She’d be off with her nose to the mirror & he’d be sitting by the phone wondering. Weeks later she’d call from the psychiatric hospital in Marin wanting him to bring her a carton of cigarettes. Leibniz & I figured out a way to synthesize opium from common household ingredients. Many long evening we spent sipping our special tea & looking through kaleidoscopes into strobe-lights. We took long walks through the city, talking gibberish to pry loose the prison-bars of language, envisioning a Utopian society in which, under Leibniz as President and me as Drug Czar, temples of drug education & distribution were instituted across the land. Under our plan, in order to take a given drug one had to obtain a license insuring that one understood changes in consciousness & possible side effects which might result from the drug in question. There would be separate licenses for alcohol, hallucinogens, opiates & cocaine. The drugs were free & a serene environment in which to take them was provided for all licensed participants. Once, Leibniz & I went up a windy mountain path. There were skull eyes in the leaves of the trees. The packed ground beneath our feet felt spongy. The path we took wound past a gigantic cross & it seemed that my friend & I were trudging

along the slopes of Mount Purgatory. I leaning against a cyclone fence under a sign that said High Voltage & looking up into the sky where the stars were dancing turbans unwinding inside my skull. Were the stars falling or were we falling into the sky? We held on to the ground with our fingers & toes to avoid flying off. And I saw the flickering of eons. The Three Stooges in Roman togas, speeded-up Keystone Kops riding hook-&-ladder trucks around corners, spasmodic pyramids & skyscrapers rising & falling & rising again. In the dawn sky I saw the symbol of infinity interpenetrate the yin-yang & understood all at once everything I’d ever read in the I-Ching. Indeed “these things are the same, but change in name as they issue forth.” I was astonished. The universe was pure consciousness. The “things” of this world differed from light only in their vibratory frequencies. There was no difference between the top of my skull & the rim of sky. Everything grew curvy & melted together—melded—beginning & end—source & conduit. “No need to fly to the mountain,” a voice told me. “Bring the mountain to you.” “One is only given to know what one is capable of understanding,” another voice said. I turned to my friend to see if he was ing all this. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, rocking back & forth slightly. “Seahorses,” he mumbled.

13 GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

A nd so time—unbelievable inconceivable irreversible incontrovertable— spurred me ever onward to new adventures or misadventures as the case might be. It never even entered my conscious mind that in following Lily, as we say in California, “back East”—where she had been accepted with full-funding at Cornell University—I was mimicking my mother’s following of my father to Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois. I never really even questioned whether I ought to go or not but just assumed it would work out. I would find a job somehow, although I had only the slenderest of leads for some possible parttime work. Before I left, I had a few friends over for dinner—Diana & Darrell & Leibniz & Ronn. I never realized that though it was new beginning, it was also very much & forever a hard ending. Penny Voorhies warned me in a letter from Atlanta where she’d been swallowed up by a job offer that San Francisco was a very difficult place to get back to. Boy was she right about that! Penny. Of all the co-eds with whom I slept indiscriminately, I had the most respect for her. I mean she was the most un-phony. We were lovers only very briefly. In spite of adequate provisions my guests—whom I could not imagine I might never see again—were glum & left early. Now I see why. Because there’s no going back, there’s only going forward, and under. And no one knows what the future will bring. Time casts us all asunder. I never reckoned on the terrible power of time. I was giving up everything I had for a chance at happiness with Lily. These few friends were all I had to lose. Oh & my reputation as a cafe poet which I held in no particular esteem. I crossed America in my Mustang just as the country became rabid with war fever. Gulf War I. In Texas, cowboys in pickup trucks shot off their shotguns in excitement. Yellow ribbons & flags hung from every car aerial. I visited Wolfgang in Tuscaloosa where he was writing a novel as part of an MFA course. Wolfgang is like me a Sagittarius and is somewhat doomed to wander on far journey like Odysseus. We had both worked at the Student Union Building together— Laurel & Hardy repair team holding that monstrous edifice together with duct tape & glue guns. He was a boxer when I met him & a former wrestler. He was a great big but gentle guy who’d grown up in a slum in South San Francisco & had learned to fight out of necessity. I turned him on to Jack London’s Martin Eden, and he began writing in earnest. He far outstripped me in his capacity for story-telling & had a cult of craft to which he sacrificed himself, that craftiest of mortals, Odysseus far wanderer returner with wrath Hercules in the stars but you yourself asleep in the bushes. When I first met him he asked me if the word poetry came from “Poe.”

“Poe”—“poetry”—there is a certain logic. I said this wasn’t too likely, but stopped short of correcting him. Wolfgang & I worshipped old Edgar. We both make use of Poe poet’s musicality & in his storytelling the enigma the transduction of energy one form to another: glowing bones. Cats eyes, glimmering. And I don’t offer this tale out of school, this naïve conflation of Poe with poetry itself, to show up my friend as a fool, but to extol him as a person with curiosity and ion. He would transcend (to whatever extent) those disadvantages with which he had been gifted at birth. And his name would not go away, if I have anything to say about it. And it was funny when he called me oh so many years later and said, “You that thing about Poe and Poetry?” And I said yes. And he chuckled and said, “Well I was right.” And I think he was! It cannot be regarded as a random freak of nature that “Poe” and “poetry” have similar word-roots. Poe’s poetry is not as highly regarded as his prose works by many critics (if one wants to artificially separate the two) but its highly performatory content plays out on the American soundstage with the increasingly conscious reading of poets’ a own work perhaps culminating for all time in the Beats or later the Language Poets’ Poet’s Theatre. Most of all, I hear Poe in poets like Jack Spicer and Nat Mackey. So you see my friend’s question led toward a deeper understanding. And maybe this is where everything turned around and went backward. Things have a way of doing that. My friend changed his life & became a respected writer. And maybe I flatter myself that I was in on the moment when a change in his destiny occurred, so that he has found a greater intensity in life & most importantly of all continues to write. But I still say “YAY!” for the human spirit. When I was in that car accident & suffered retrograde amnesia, I only ed a phone number, not even a name to go with it. It turned out to belong to this guy, old broken-nosed Wolfgang, one of the few human being ever who had been born with two hearts, who came in his silver Camaro to pick me up. What exactly had happened to me? My entire graduate school experience had been blessedly erased from my mind. My friend was intrigued. Didn’t I the fight I got in at Thoreau Lovell’s party? What about getting kicked out of the concert for heckling Lydia Lunch? His girl-friend, a social worker from Rochester, expressed her despair at trying to stem the tide of suffering there in the deep South. She took me out to look at endless rows of roofless shacks with human beings, her clients, crawling among them. In another month, she would pack up & leave. Wolfgang was writing a novel at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Not bad for a boxer from the slums of South San Francisco.

He said that he knew he’d always be a writer. I wasn’t so sure about myself. Writing was just something I did. I’d learned the hazards of thinking of it as one’s profession. I always had been writing, it seemed—from those first sad letters to my mother to my suicide notes in high school & then poems later on— but I was willing to give it up if necessary. Let me be what fate intends me to be, I said. One has no say in the matter. One does whatever one can. But in my foggiest recesses of my mind I must have known that I would never stop writing. For if I had stopped writing, I would never have written this. Just as if I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Lily, when we took up separate residences in San Francisco, I might never have found her again. I was testing fate, trying to find what was essential, but gambling everything on the enterprise. Doing it the hard way, my father used to say. I wish I could say it was entirely a thing of the past.

* * *

In Ithaca, time stopped. The humid air so still above the inlet. Water without a ripple. Train whistle. Rattle of a shopping cart. Ravens on the telephone wires. Here I learned to hear myself think. “My mind is thinking about the world,” I realized. “It is its perception.” I’ve learned the importance of meditation. Training in tai chi & kung fu has helped to actualize my realization with Leibniz that night on Mount Purgatory, to tap directly into the swirling figure-eights of energy that makes up the entire cosmos & every individual entity in it. There’s a great void, out of which all the poetry in the world comes. I’ve fallen into that void. There’s no way to think oneself out. One can only be it, can only see it as it takes shape. It’s just the way things are. Even in solitude, I still kept writing, but fewer poems would appear. It was just writing with no purpose, no end in sight. And living in virtual exile in that charming college town in central New York state I had the chance to become nobody, so that I could become somebody again. I spent a lot of time pondering the connection between individual & collective poetic experience, as time slowly but surely ed me by. The only moral I have to offer is: just keep writing! But I was very far out of the loop. I scooped out a precarious existence for myself as a part-time English teacher—perhaps the lowliest of all of God’s creatures—& that’s all, traveling in my car from school to school, pedaling

illumination like hair oil. It’s a liminal existence—I’m there and I’m gone, some new variety of Invisible Man, blending into the snow & fog, keeping an eye out for errant deer who sometimes bolt onto the highway & then freeze in the center of the lane. Who even knows I exist? I lived there in Ithaca for over fifteen years. God, I felt like a fossil or something. That’s even longer than I lived in my true home, the city of Saint Francis. The first five years, Lily was attending Cornell University. During that time she wrote her second novel The Meaning of Relativity & won a prestigious writing award. But then, as her funding ran out, Lily found herself unable to begin— much less to finish—her dissertation. She would sit at her desk for long hours, never actually writing anything, a little bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. This didn’t seem possible to me. I was always trying to steal the time I needed to complete my various ill-starred literary compositions. I was going out of my mind with long distance driving from campus to campus to campus & was beginning to contemplate other lines of work, although I really love to teach & am a thoughtful & creative instructor. When I went back to school to get a Ph.D. it was to get a better job & have more time to write. But mostly it was out of my exasperation with Lily’s plight. I thought, there must be a way & I will find it. I will find the way to extricate Lily’s soul from its academic Hell. I turned myself over to the same tortures that had claimed my wife, in hopes of ferreting out the secret of her infernal prison, finding the key that would free her. Winters in Ithaca can be long & brutal. One has to be indoors five months out of the year. And in the summer there’s no sea breeze to cool things down. I missed the ocean a lot. The Atlantic coast is mostly all bought up by developers. Cops in speedboats patrol the private beaches of the rich. I became/have become a different person really. And the whole world has changed. Now it’s another war. My mother’s paranoia looks naive in comparison to what’s going on these days. “The threat is real,” the Department of Homeland Security tells us in its radio spots—but a threat is not yet an action. People know their lives got smaller when “G.W.” stole the Presidency & plunged the nation into a protracted, impossible war. People know they’ve been lied to by kiss-ass journalists & government newspeak. Any effort to change things is an uphill battle & everybody and everything’s getting old, breaking down. Is this a new war or the same old war against the imagination? We’re either cannon fodder or we’re agents of change. There is no peace for anyone. I’m hanging on by a slender thread. Sometimes I wonder if I was made for this

world. I don’t drink & take drugs like I used to—nor can I. On the other hand, I don’t, as is currently fashionable, foreswear my youthful indulgences. I’m not swayed by their threats of a coming apocalypse. I’m fighting to break free. I think about moving back to San Francisco, although the truth is the San Francisco I used to know isn’t even there anymore. A lot of the poets I used to know have moved away or lost their jobs in the computer industry. But I don’t even care. I can hear those lonesome foghorns blowing. Someday I will return. In the meanwhile, who was I? Could I call myself a poet if I wasn’t writing poems? If we are what we do was I not more of a brusher of teeth, a watcher of old movies, a pacer of floors, a knocker upon doors, a driver of automobiles over highways of an alien land in which I was born? I was the one ing by on the road to a junkyard of dreams. Past churches and tenements, trailer parks & auto parts stores, with their gigantic Santa Clauses and colossal Frosty the Snowmen, going bumpety-bump over railroad tracks in the dark, falling apart along the roadside like an old rusted-out car. Through wheelruts frozen-over along crucifixion roadways. Past tumbledown shacks & ramshackle towers, cemetery flagpoles, the County Courthouse, heaps of snow, chickens pecking. Who was I? One might well ask. I’m the teacher, the singer, the magician, the cardshark, the lover of beautiful women. I’m the poet in disguise. Maybe you might catch a glimpse of me in your own eyes. That’s what I would reply. I’ve taken the train back & forth across the U.S. many times, still with that little yellow suitcase, nestled in the overhead rack, it’s lining a little torn, but other than that quite intact. I enjoy long train rides because then I have a chance to write. Long after everyone else on the train is asleep & snoring, even until dawn comes up, I’ll be writing. In the creaks, grumbles & groans of the Southwest Chief I hear a voice speaking. I try to write it down verbatim. At night, factories, freeways, tunnels & signal lights fly by & my own face looks back at me as the darkened window becomes a mirror. During the day rusty auto wrecks stretch out as far as the eye can see. The endless cornfields of Nebraska, Ohio’s aweinspiring junkyards, the Rocky Mountains, the California desert, it’s all quite beautiful really. The only problem is everything’s been bought & sold & the people brainwashed. Crossing the great plains one cannot help but think of the massacre of the native tribes which was necessary for this train line to be built. I imagine a dying brave, clutching at the dust, his last words a dying curse, condemning us to our success, which is our failure. When Lily & I were married after 22 years of living together it seemed

inconceivable that our action might signal for us the beginning of the end. And the final end far far in the offing is still being determined even as I inscribe these words, this moment, one of so many & already gone. We rode the Amtrak train to the Bay Area for the wedding ceremony. The first place I went when I got back into town was Washington Square Park, where I did tai-chi by the statue of Benjamin Franklin, then walked down to Vesuvio’s for an Irish coffee. I felt very much at home again. The night before the wedding, I went for a walk with Leibniz to the bottom of the sea & came back home with seashells & charred nitrous oxide tubes with which to adorn the cake. All our old comrades came one last time—Leibniz & Ronn & Marsha Campbell & even Joie, although she was drunker than usual even, which is really saying something. It was another bittersweet occasion. My father came up to the wedding with my half-brothers Bruce & Barton. In photos taken at the wedding my father & I shake hands like diplomats at a summit. Time flows by not smoothly but trundles by in chunks. Something happens & someone gets lost along the way. I’ve always been a shaman without a tribe, I’m used to that. Meanwhile I just keep writing, although producing mixed results. Oh, the mistakes made, the blind alleys gone down! And it’s probably true that, back in the seventies, I took a little too much acid. Things other people find quite commonplace—such as Walmart stores, tourist traps & computerized action movies—are to me the very epitome of a bad trip. Sometimes I would accompany Lily to the local shopping mall but if I stayed too long sweat would burst out on my brow. The huge windowless space, horrible lighting, omnipresent Muzak, security cameras, one way mirrors, sickening consumerism, everything given over to a pointless utilitarianism, to the supreme question: HOW MUCH CAN YOU GET FOR IT?—it all spins around before my eyes, sucking me into a whirlpool of doubt. Abandon hope all ye who enter. I see the lifeless eyes of the shoppers. The occasional husband, like myself, marooned on some bench, lost & empty & waiting for his wife. And I see how I’m out of phase. If all the drugs I took rendered me more permeable, more susceptible to subtle influences, more open to experiencing non-normative states of consciousness, they have also left me feeling despair over what is being done to the human spirit. But then right around dawn I sit up next to Lily in bed with the feeling that everything is okay, that I haven’t wasted my life. That I’m doing what I should be doing, loving whom I should be loving. That I’m not stealing time, I’m spending it. It only lasts a moment, but during that brief period I experience an

incredible inner-peace. We had this cat, Cosmic Wonder. She’s buried in the yard. She was one of the two of Burma Shave’s kittens we kept. Little did we know she would live for twenty-two years—almost the length of time that Lily & I have known each other. We didn’t think anything could kill her. She had been shot by a pellet gun, set on fire & attacked by a wolf. But she was too tough to die. Even when she was quite elderly she would lie in wait by the garbage can for dogs to by the driveway. Then she’d leap out, grabbing their snouts with her claws. We received quite a few complaints. But she finally did go the way of all household pets. She just couldn’t get up anymore. Sometimes I think my love for Lily is as fierce & determined as that cat. I was given a second chance for love—not everyone has been so lucky. Living the peripatetic life of part-time English teachers, Lily & I had surprisingly numerous unusual adventures. We smoked grass with the Sun Ra Arkestra in a Howard Johnson’s in Binghamton, raced Lily’s father’s Jaguar down old Route 66 just outside of Flagstaff. We had whiskey at the bar in the Ritz in New York City like a couple of real swells. We got drunk with John Ashbery, shot pool with a man with only one hand. Everywhere we met helpful strangers. We lived in Boulder for a couple of years while I attended The Naropa Institute. Here I took poetry workshops with Kenward Elmslie, Amiri Baraka & Leslie Scalapino. Kenward was definitely the funniest, although he was also the saddest, having recently lost his lover. Anne Waldman was magnificent in her flowing scarves with her rugged beauty & her chainsaw voice. Bernadette Mayer performed Memory with slide show in a darkened trailer. Cecil Taylor danced naked in the lobby of the Hotel Boulderado. Allen Ginsberg was the best performer of poetry that I have ever heard. He sang quirky blues lyrics in his rich contralto voice & gave lectures based on maxims he had collected. “Notice what you notice,” was one of them. The present work is really based on that. I am ing what I can & then trying to figure out why. On the 25th anniversary of Naropa’s founding, Allen was interviewed by a roomful of reporters. One of the reporters asked, “Mr. Ginsberg, do you have any advice for the youth of today about drugs?” Allen didn’t bat an eye, but suggested in deep schoolteacherly tones that anyone taking drugs should also engage in some sort of meditational practice. What he understood was the necessity of placing poetry within some sort of meaningful context of life beyond the purely intellectual but

also including it. Allen connected poetry with the larger human arenas of both social struggle & individual spirituality. That is a defining feature of the Beats. Poetry is not about form, it is about examination. Gradually, perhaps through osmosis, I began to learn how to write. By how I mean the actions a writer must take to develop material, to make it weave in & out. I had misunderstood the writing process back when I was living in a basement apartment in Berkeley & struggling with my non-existent novel. I thought that one conceived an idea for a text & then wrote that idea down from beginning to end. I didn’t know that the writing itself determines what will happen once the idea hits the page. I used to imagine writing a 200 page book twenty pages at a time, in ten weekly installments. When the first five weeks went by without any pages to my credit, I revised my anticipated completion date, or the number of pages required per week. Writing is an intersection of interior & exterior worlds. It cannot be forced. It’s not about pages, or words even—it’s about insight. Boulder itself was an illusion. A virtual reality such as could be experienced in the arcade at the Boulder Mall. About the time I was there, the liberals, enflamed in equal parts by desire & fear, were ing laws to drive the winos out of town. Anyone walking along the nature path was assailed by roller-skaters, skateboarders, bicyclists, joggers & even an occasional wheelchair racer. Boulder Creek was choked with rowing enthusiasts in wondrous contraptions right out of Jules Verne. My best friends were the winos. Boulder has a superior class of wino. Most winos that I have met are actually quite mercenary. But the Boulder winos not only forgave me for not having money to give them but smoked a t with me & shared their bottle of Thunderbird. I met Sarge in the park. He showed me some martial arts he’d learned in the Army. “Always move from your heart,” he said. Poor pale-eyed Brian had an obsessive compulsive disorder that prevented him from entering into any building without elaborate purification procedures. He was fighting having his mind taken over by a new age cult from which he had narrowly escaped twenty years before. These lovable lunatics reminded me of the street people I hung out with in my Berkeley days. Although Buddhist dignitaries routinely ed though Naropa & I made an earnest effort to meditate, I never attained a high level of illumination. When the time came for Lily & me to leave town, our landlady threatened to keep our

deposit. She was standing there, blocking the doorway as I was trying to cart big boxes of books down two flights of stairs. “Get the hell out of my way,” I screamed; “you’ve got snakes growing out of the top of your head!” Infuriated, the wasted old broad summoned two policemen, landlord lackeys who wrote me out a ticket. Evidently it’s against the law in the state of Colorado to tell somebody to get the hell out of your own house. And to this day, I am a wanted criminal in the environs of Boulder for—get this—“Use of fighting words.” I had no idea it was illegal! Whatever happened to, “Sticks and stones may break my bones”? But I learned here once again the lesson I’ve learned my whole life long. It’s not enough to be right. This world is ruled by forces beyond one’s control. Even though an injustice was done to me, I had to let it go. I had to play their game just to get out of there in one piece. I was impotent to scream my rage into the ears of the walking dead. And it wasn’t good enough to sit on a cushion with a head full of hate either. To finally come to see everything as mental phenomena, I had to learn how to meditate with every breath. (Amen brother!) Lily & I rode the train to San Francisco one Christmas. I felt a certain amount of trepidation but called my father anyway. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t seen or called him since Lily & I were married, ten years before. His voice on the phone sounded more gravelly than I ed it. He insisted that we drive down— that very day—& so we did—& had turkey with mashed potatoes at my Grandma Cline’s old dining room table on her old blue & white china & handcrocheted tablecloth. Over glasses of Cabernet my father told another story of my birth—one I hadn’t heard before. While my mother was under anesthetic from her protracted labor the Air Force doctors had sent my father home to get some sleep. When he woke up in the morning he discovered that an ice-storm had covered tree branches & power lines with a shiny filigree of frozen crystals. “It seemed like a new beginning,” he said. My father also told me about two deaths in the family. My Uncle Alan after years of by- surgeries & artery decloggings had at last succumbed. The more shocking news was about my step-mother Dorothy. She’d gone in to the hospital for a routine hysterectomy. The surgery was a success but the doctors neglected to remove a sponge. Dorothy, the scourge of Santa Cruz, died of massive infection. When I asked why he’d waited so long to tell me he said, “We’d just about written you off.” He thought I was rejecting him. God & how screwed up I was inside. Lily & I stayed at my Dad & Linda’s for a few days & visited the Monterey Aquarium with them. My dad loved the ocean & had seen, while rowing in the bay, otters floating on their backs & cracking open clamshells. On

the drive back from the aquarium we stopped off in Castroville & got a big bag of french fried artichoke hearts at the giant artichoke restaurant we had visited years before. A few months later, my father, at the age of seventy and in perfect, even athletic condition collapsed due to a congenital malformation of blood vessels in his brain. I hopped a plane & drove the rental car down Highway One to the hospital where he lay quite still. Linda, his wife since he had freed himself from Dorothy’s talons ten or more years before, found him on the floor of the bedroom in the morning. He never regained consciousness. At the hospital were those half- and step-siblings I hadn’t seen for decades. They were all grown up but quite recognizable. Larry, the childhood sadist, was a contractor. He made a fortune building houses in San Jose. He looked strong, handsome and rich, but there was something in his eyes I still didn’t like: EVIL. Lenny (looked like a cleaned-up junkie to me) led substance abuse groups at the prison & was a devotee of the Promise Keepers. Karen had followed in my father’s footsteps & become a schoolteacher. Only Kelsie, their former mastermind, was absent. She was raising pigs in Missouri. In my step-sibling’s faces I saw not the monsters I’d fantasized but simple neurotics. Their real father had never loved them. They thought my father was the ideal. Now, in the same hospital where their mother’s life had ended, they rallied round my father’s widow & were even solicitous of me. They gave me a little time alone with my father’s unconscious body. I read him a little Lao-Tze but couldn’t tell if I was getting through. And I said I was sorry but I didn’t know what for & I cried the tears he could never abide when he was alive & then I thought to myself, Yes I guess that was our “time together.” After we made the decision to end life & thus terminate my father’s life & after his strong heart had stopped beating we went out for pizza. Karen told me she’d talked to Kelsie on the phone & the two agreed they were sorry. “We did kind of give you a hard time back when we were kids,” she said.

14 AUTUMNAL CRESCENT

S carcely can October peep her autumnal crescent over the transom then I think of her. October nights of the moon in various phases the falling leaves the cats all of it seemingly seemingly looming larger than itself. Winter already turning ’round the corner. That jack-o-lantern candle a single light against the thick & ever thicker darkness. This was before the solid rock of circumstance determined the course of events. Ithaca, Ithaca, Ithaca—city of eternal returns. I wonder how many human lives you’ve ruined & can that number ever be off-set by your flashier successes. There was a special edition of the free paper when Lily & first hit town God it must have been thirty years ago now. It told of the great writers who had taught there: Vlir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon. A few others of lesser repute. Another section listed local parks & gorges & also warned that newcomers should beware of falling prey to the depression, alcoholism, spousal abuse & infidelity to which this town was given. We laughed at the time. All that TV movie stuff. Little did we suspect. Lily had brief moment of glory at Cornell. She had a New York agent & everything. But soon enough she was swallowed by all the up-&-coming other students, whose writing was very well-crafted but ultimately workshop stuff. Neither Lily nor I ever considered writing a career but more like a gigantic field to run around in, so we were easily run down in the quest to reach the end of the dragstrip by even those whose life experiences paled against our own. The cult of the well crafted story or verse was (and remains) adverse to our natures. While the workshop crowd gained ascendancy, Lily’s agent failed to sell her book. I continued to publish sporadically while meanwhile prowling the snow-slickened highways of the Finger Lakes region going 30 MPH in a 55 MPH to avoid smashing into the semi in front of me. At the Chanticleer Bar we played a lot of eight-ball. I began to notice that drunkards really annoyed me. They talked too much & never ed what they said or promised. I began to shy away from bars, while Lily developed a wicked game of pool. But there was still something wrong because I had a terrible fight with Lily one night ended up drinking cheap sweet white wine when the bar opened at 6:00 AM the next morning. I feeling somehow quite unably desperate—to be stuck in this berg with no one but Lily, who had a tendency, as The Stones quoting Robert Johnson have it, to “keep breaking down on me.” Noontime found me still enflamed but through some instinct I walked to a nearby art gallery & amazingly easily talked them into

letting me start up a new poetry-reading series. This was just like when I asked Jim Hartz for that job with The Poetry Center. And this is an example of that one thing I have which is called in the classic self-help book Think and Grow Rich the “millionaire mentality.” It is a wonder I am not a wealthy man, so gifted am I with this one quality: the ability to visualize. This is the same intuition that led me years later to propose on a grand magic show at the State Street Theatre, an old vaudeville house that had been refurbished by the city council. In the latter show I combined poetry with my old hobby prestidigitation to create a much more theatrical performance art than anything I had previously attempted. I’m not saying it was the greatest magic show in the world but there were 5000 people in the audience & Ithaca’s sole newspaper did make a big deal of it. I felt like Harry Houdini when I walked into the newspaper office to be interviewed by the reporter. My friend Hilby encouraged me to go on the act & he, a renowned professional juggler & aficionado of street performers, told me I had something special. This from a guy who could juggle five lighted torches & a bowling ball while riding a unicycle on a highwire. Still & all, my day-job as a part-time teacher left me mentally, physically & spiritually depleted. And there was always the deeper down magnetic pulse of Lily with her eternal dissertation to finish. And so we never returned to San Francisco, but did as best we could there on the East Coast in what would turn out to be paradise compared with what I was to face later. And we’d walk down the street of the town & pick out the houses we might find acceptable to live in like tramps in an O. Henry story. Oh the books we read, the music to which we jumped up & down in joy. How can I cast this aside, merely for a life of my own? Once it’s written down it stays written. Oh how can ever erase these words which have fallen from my mind like droplets of blood upon the page. And I think about slitting my vein lengthwise instead of crosswise which definitely doesn’t work. The blood’s too slow in coming. My mother would call once a week & tell me about a world I that was as burning as Drain-o poured into my ears. I felt powerless to protect her from such filth, such living cockroaches as descended upon her as soon as Grandma Deckwa’s influence waned. My mother’s so-called friends. Those bloated people who absorbed her, drained her of her life force. Her sometimes-boyfriend Harley who wants to (and probably does) sleep with his sister. Her other sometimesboyfriend Bud, same name as my Grandpa my mother’s step-father, a stone alcoholic, whose minimum daily supply is a liter of vodka & a 24-pack of malt liquor. Bud could have been a doctor, my mother tells me, but lost his home, his car, his business when he took to drink. “Too bad he had to wreck his brand new

Cadillac,” she says. The poor guy’s dying of liver cancer, but still keeps drinking. He was supposed to have died years ago. My mom is in love with him although he is a cross-dresser & parties with his old cellmates from the prison. And then there’s Emma, Harley’s wife, a heroin addict with cancer who drives a cab. She’s big & fat & smokes & eats potato chips & fatty meat & drinks & just never dies. She’s a useless speed-freak who steals my mother’s money, cigarettes & even psychiatric medications. They invited my mother over for Thanksgiving dinner & she paid for the food. And don’t forget Aunt Phyllis, years in a neck brace trying to sue a carpet outlet over a fall she supposedly took, & her husband Skip, who makes a career out of getting laid-off of his job at the dairy. I love my mother but she drives me crazy with her obsessive, convoluted stories. She sees all too well the mendacity of unscrupulous friends & relations who routinely swindle her out of cigarettes, pills, clothing, jewelry or cash. And she with nothing to her name but a coffeepot & an ashtray. My poor mother! She’s in her seventies yet still thinks she might get back her old job with the phone company. Her face is frozen into a strange position by the pills she’s taken. Who would have thought she would outlive my father? She hasn’t had a lot of happiness & her mind gets caught in endless loops. Yet she’s the only one of three sisters who goes regularly to the convalescent hospital to visit my Grandma Deckwa, now in a second childhood. One time, my mother tells me they’re starting a newsletter in the retirement community where she lives. She wants me to type up her old poem “Divine Love.” She’ll tell it to me over the phone. “No problem,” I say. I that tune. I used to practice it on my clarinet in the basement when I lived with my Uncle Alan & Aunt Darlene. My mother wrote the lyrics & sent away to a mail-order house to have music written. Later on I made up a version on guitar. Divine love blesses you. It thrills you through & through. It makes you prosper & makes your dreams come true. Divine love establishes & brings birth to the new Providing a way of life for you… This was the song upon which my mother chiefly based her hopes of fame as a songwriter. Her dream although deferred was never totally crushed. Her poem proved to a hit among the ladies who sat on the benches downstairs in the lobby. Every couple of weeks after that, my Mom would recite another of her poems to

me on the phone & I would type it up, thrilled to be part of this resurgence of talent. Her unaffected, simple rhyming poetry has a surprising edge to it—kind of a cross between Cole Porter & Emily Dickinson. We had put together a sheaf of half dozen poems, however, when disaster struck. My mother’s unscrupulous friends & relations began stealing from her again. This time they were stealing the copies of the poems I sent her. I told my mother not to worry & mailed her twenty more copies of each poem. But this did nothing to blunt her distress. The copies kept disappearing. Were her friends hiding the poems because they didn’t want my mom to talk about them anymore? Soon she’s calling me up at 3 A.M. with full blown paranoia, certain someone at the Christian music station is going to steal “Divine Love” & make a hit out of it. Another time she calls to tell me she has had the most peculiar feeling. She was very affected by the news of my father`s death. She recalls her old days with uncanny distinctness. Living with my father in their cottage in Belleville. How he brought home a puppy that tipped over the basinet. She laughs when she re. And, back in the Projects, the time I tipped over Granny Great’s flower pot. She used to wash out my diapers in a stationary tub in the garage— whatever the hell that means. She worked in a laundry in a hospital. She fed me Gerber’s baby food—the larger cans of mixed vegetables. It was shortly before her first nervous breakdown. She’d go across Robertson Road to the store every morning & buy a six-pack of Olympia & a toy for me. She’d watch The Loretta Young Show on television. The divorce had just gone through. She was thinking about the lump on my arm. There were pins on the floor, she was worried I would step on one…

And there it is again. The story I’ve carried around with me my whole life long. The story of me, which is not me. The story that I could never get rid of, that I now consign to the trashheap of history. Like all stories, it was made up. I imagined it as I went along. It was never about me. It was gone & I was gone too. I am gone that is. Having lived till I died. Having stumbled & fallen. Having had a troubled vision of wastelands of prisons & factories. Having walked along in a rainstorm that never seemed to end. The story of my life the strangled whisper of a madwoman with curly brown hair. The story she tells. Has told, is telling. The story I gotta claw my way out of. Past memories like drugstores. Nightmare five-and-dimes. She and my Grandma Deckwa would drive me in my Grandma’s Cadillac to see this man—a very tall man—Doctor Kelley was his

name—it is emblazoned on my memory—who had a glass tube as thick around as a half dollar with prongs at the end. He kept it in a special box. He would ask me to extend my arm, whereon my birthmark, a kind of purplish lump extruded. He would press the prongs of the crystal cylinder into the lump. I would scream out in pain. He would always give me a lollipop at the end. He was trying to freeze off my birthmark. I guess there was always something about me that was never quite right. I was the product of everything I’d done & had been done to me, of everything I’d gone beyond. Of my mom & her story which was nothing other than what couldn’t be helped & shouldn’t have cried over like spilt milk. And I’m sitting in a chair with the receiver in my hand & I’m wishing there was anything I could do to change it.

What’s left? A sheaf of poems that I assemble of the “songs” my mother dictates to me over the phone. That box of old photos & curios (a “magic key” from Fairyland) I still had with me then, which seemed to represent however a tenuous relationship with the past & with whatever I could call “family.” An award of merit from the California State Automobile Association issued to my mother when she was twelve years old for exemplary service as a school crossing guard. Here I am sitting on Santa’s lap or smiling for a grade school photographer. My Grandma Cline saved all my grade-school photos. She used to have the pictures arranged in a booklet so that I grew progressively older. In the last one I’m looking a little bleary eyed—it’s my college graduation. Were these many different me’s the same me? Was I ever free of my past & future selves? In my mind too there are pictures of memories I move among as if they were things. But memory is not a thing, but a dynamic. Not photos arranged in an album but strewn across the bed, each frame discontinuous. Here my mother in green pedal pushers holds a string of trout. Here my Grandma Cline expertly balances in one hand a glass of tea & plate of hors d’oeuvres at a bridge luncheon. Here my father stands in a wood-ed kitchen with a glass of cabernet in his hand, or poses with his extended family, with the bonsai tree I gave him that Christmas placed prominently in the shot. Here I am, somber in grey sports-jacket & sunglasses, at my father’s memorial service on the rugged cliffs overlooking the surf he loved so well. The last time we were together we went to Arroyo State Beach, where the rocks have been eaten away like Swiss cheese. As we gazed out over the roaring Pacific, my father told me about gigantic waves that can lash out suddenly & had been known to spirit away unwary sightseers. Their origin was thought to lie in slight tremors of the ocean

floor thousands of miles away. “Old greybeards,” the mariners called them. I guess it was an old greybeard that got my dad, my dad the Ancient Mariner. Most of the photographs, which now I can only dream of, are of Lily, with whom I spent almost half my life. Lily is quite a good subject. Here she is peeing in an alley in Berkeley. Sitting in the back seat of a bus or kneeling in that cemetery in Boulder that Burroughs writes about. Leaning against the Wisconsin Central or shooting pool in a polka dot dress with her cigarette in her lips. In a paper hat with a glass of wine, in a fur stole or a leather dress. Nude in front of a fire or riding a carousel in a big straw hat. This amazing woman who taught me how to love. Here we are looking like movie stars at our wedding. Here we are at the corner of Frank Sinatra Avenue & Bob Hope Drive in Palm Springs, the spot where Ernie Kovacs crashed his car and was killed. Here we are kissing on a rooftop or putting on a magic show, or sitting at a table in a cafe or in bed with our cats. Just these scattered memories are all that are left. Nothing else exists, except the here & now. And even that is gone forever. And Joey Ramone died. In our photos we look joyous but later we suffered our share of disappointments. One internalizes the culture’s devaluation & commodification of artistic experience. Our hearts have been broken so many times, it’s hard not to get ground down. Lily took to drink to assuage the pain of a crippling writer’s block that left her unable to finish her doctoral dissertation. As for me, years went by without my writing a single poem. And though it’s true that nowadays nobody knows me, that I am the invisible poet, rarer than radium & that the few dozen poems I have written are buried away in small press magazines & forgotten, I’m still more determined than ever. I want to write & I want to share what I’ve written with the rest of humanity, I really do. And I would like to think that I have something to offer, but to whom? One has to be part of something or one is all alone. One stops writing at all, as Lily did, or retreats like me into writing as a mystical practice. But one never gives up. After all, writing is only part of seeing. The larger concern is authentic being. I’m sitting here & writing this like there’s no tomorrow. I who was taken in but never led astray. You may not even my name. I came here because I had to. I never intended to stay. I who walked a road both long & windy, whose cowboy boots echoed down the streets of a dying town. Who slogged through swamps, crossed deserts, waded rivers, climbed barbed wire fences overgrown with vines. Who made my way along the hard streets of my own mind, though the hell of my own imagining, past grocery stores & wooden porches littered with children’s playthings, past car washes & bars, gas stations & convenience stores. Over bridges past civil war memorials,

railroad cars & freight yards, nothing more than consciousness taking it all in, the eye seeing cataclysmic visions in the glass. Golden spires in the haze. Faces in the clouds. Or in the hell of bus terminals, train stations, airport linoleum & a pigeon with only one toe on one foot & two toes on the other. Boots & shoes in endless twos. I who’ve wandered these halls in search of a body & walked down the sky to the world. Past race tracks & trailer courts, grey trees, brown earth, clumps of snow. Past houses of wood & stone, tenements of stucco & broken glass, mud huts. Flocks of birds flying over luminescent church steeples, filling stations, sandwich shops. I saw the earth rise up. I saw the trees bend down. I saw angels in the skins of human beings, whores with the hunted look of wild animals. I who fell out of the sky & landed on my feet, who fell off the roof the world & kept falling. I who walked through the darkness, wondering. Somehow I just know. There’s a network of energy that everything’s a part of. There’s a voice of being that is doing the talking. One only has to listen. And so I offer this prayer to an anonymous god & follow the sun over the hill. About ten years ago—I was still living in Ithaca at the time—I met my old friend Calhoun in New York City. We stayed together for a couple of days in a hotel room off Columbus Square Park. We both looked a little older since our heyday in North Beach, but it was heartening to see my comrade again. If you looked deeply into my friend’s eyes you could see he was totally cool. Now times had changed. There was no more acid on the street. It was a rainy New Year’s Day, 2003 & the whole town had a hangover. We drank mimosas & lit some incense in our room. It was as if the universe had decided to give me something back, if I could only make use of it. When I first met Calhoun, I was on the inside. Poetry was all I knew. I didn’t care about anything else, except maybe women a little too much. Calhoun came on the scene with visions of glory that seemed to some incompatible with his schizophrenic demeanor & his tiny, dank room at the Golden Eagle Hotel. He had come from L.A. to find poetry & spoke of founding a new school called Zoom-Bop. Now the student was ready & the teacher had come. We walked along in a rainstorm that didn’t ever seem to end, watching the occasional squirrel dodge for cover & headed over to the big poetry reading at St. Marks, he, like Virgil, leading me, Dante, into a ed hell of my own dashed hopes & drowned desires. I love poetry readings & festive occasions, but because of all the times I’d been kept back, I felt bitter. Why wasn’t I up there reading with them? To the same degree that formerly I had been elevated on of being on the inside I was made abject by the realization that the world was going on perfectly well without me.

But then the thought occurred that I might be able to write my way out of this mess. It wasn’t over until I couldn’t write another world. As writing to me is praying, even the dirt of the street is holy if it contributes to the transformation of consciousness. It’s true I’d lost my way, wandering like a ghost in a city of stone, but I hadn’t been abandoned. I who am nobody, who lost my ego along with my kingdom, who plays teacher, who plays God, I could still turn my despair into dissent, my melancholy into a candle burning in the sun. That, indeed, my despair defines my glory. That I’d been asleep for awhile but now it was time to wake up. I who am all alone, who am one of many, who walked along in the darkness thinking “how empty.” Nameless but not voiceless. Writing blind, but still writing, this story told in the untelling. Who ed once and then forgot. Who sought & found & then lost once more. Everything I left behind. Eternity in a thimble. Boxcars tumbling like dice. I who walk until my feet are swollen & bleeding if only to escape from myself. I who turn to face my fear & laugh. All I had to do all along was pray a little more fervently & once again to love death. “Did you ever notice that your life seems shorter if you add up the days than if you add up the years?” Calhoun asked later in a tea shop on Bleecker Street. I asked him what he meant by this & he went through the math with me. I was 46 years old at the time. That seems, while not positively ancient, still a respectable age. But how many days was that? A mere 16,790. That`s not long, to get it wrong or get it right. One`s days can be easily numbered. My friend Tom only got to live out maybe 12,000 days. So much has happened in the 4 or 5 thousand days since his death. We went to see Patti Smith at her annual New Years gig at the Bowery Ballroom. That was the time Patti actually shook hands with me I could feel the pulsation of rock`n`roll energy shooting up my spine and strangely enough after that I could write songs, which I never could before. It was like some kind of miracle. Like all miracles it had been prophecied a few months earlier in a dream I had of meeting Leonard Cohen on a park bench in Central Park. We chatted awhile and then he composed a song for me: an entirely new song. One I had never heard him sing on any of his records. An amazing song, a long ballad full of twisted surrealistic imagery. So when I woke up I thought, but wait, this is in my mind. I had composed that song, not Leonard Cohen. Or maybe Leonard Cohen & I were tuned into the same wavelength. Regardless, it seemed that if I could compose a song in my dream I could compose a song in life. So maybe there was hope & resurrection & time wasn`t over yet. Patti gave me that final blast. That, combined with seeing my friend really shook off my lethargy & I wrote my first blues on the bus back home. It`s called “Graveyard

Blues.” It’s got that Robert Johnson thing going for everything I`ve left buried behind me.

15 MY LIFE NOW

S o who am I? You’ve every right to know. You who are really me who is really you. I who wouldn’t presume to theorize. I who gave up trying long ago, who never gives up. Who collects a drawerful of rejection slips trying. I’m in my room looking into the mirror. I’m not sure I like what I see. The dark circles under my eyes make me look like Poe on a bender. What little hair I have left is sticking straight up in the air. I’ve got that little yellow suitcase of mine out again. Now the hinges are coming off. The leather trim has been worn away along the edges & baggage tags hang from the handle. The interior was splattered with blood years ago when I slit my wrists after my first marriage. This really is the story of my life. I’m sorting through the wreckage, through the detritus of all my years & deciding what to take and what to leave behind. I had imagined other endings for this work, more glorious departures. Epiphanies etched on the window with a frosty hand in some snowbound December, or rising in steam from the hot street in a rainy day in July. No, it’s 1:33 A.M. Sunday August 31, 2003: a gloomy Labor Day weekend. The country’s at war with an invisible enemy & it’s something like the end of the world for me. And yet I know I’ll be allright. I love Lily. I really do. But after she’s had a few too many brandies she’s impossible. She tells me she wants to kill herself. She points out, in the minutest detail, every last one of my faults. Is this the same woman I married? It’s almost too much of an irony really. My mother destroyed by insanity and liquor and now my wife, my Euridice, likewise dragged down into Hell. It’s almost as if I planned it that way. Long have I cast myself as Orpheus, braving every depravity to redeem the soul of the beloved. Suffering so thoroughly nauseates me because I’m so bored with it. It’s not, as my father’s psychiatrist Dr. Fritz theorized, that I blamed myself for my mother’s insanity. But I did want to free her from her prison. I wanted to understand it from the inside. Why else the suicide, drinking, drugs and acute melancholia if not to retrieve her soul from its prison? I wanted to see if I could go mad as my mother had. I tried everything, but madness was never my consolation. Even in my most despairing hour, there was always some part of me looking on with wry amusement. When she flails her arms & shouts “Kill me now! I want to die!” it seems so unreal. I who once attempted suicide, who now would do anything to prolong my life even a day, were that possible, which I doubt. I walking down Sixth Street in San Francisco in the rain one early morning. There was some wino standing there, stubble on his cheeks, blood in his eyes, just standing there

in the rain with his hand held out. There would be no salvation in the quarter I handed him. He never even hit bottom, but just a bottomless space into which he kept tumbling. I can hardly believe Lily is headed for that level of catastrophe but, after all, there is no permanence. I tried my best to make it work & I at least I haven’t been possessive, that’s the best I can say. I learned so much—how to love, & how to be loved—whatever happens between us. Even if I have to go now, even if I have to say goodbye. Lily says we’re like Jack Lemmon & Lee Remick in The Days of Wine & Roses. He was the alcoholic to begin with & started her on booze. He quits drinking at the end of the movie but the audience knows she never will. It is the same with us, she says. Before she knew me, Lily never drank but only took barbiturates. Everybody used to take a lot of drugs back in those days—it didn’t mean anything. I’ve taken my fair share of drugs & even faced addiction, but can, and have, lived without, albeit to my discomforture, when I had to. That is all I can say for now because the panopticon is watching. I always considered both of us beyond all that TV movie stuff. But time makes cowards of us all. And I can’t help but wonder if this is truly despair we feel, or merely boredom.

I’m quite prepared to pack my bag & go but tarry at my desk, writing copiously in my journal. Then, just at dawn, Lily appears again, looking radiant, quoting Rilke: She will ‘change her life.’ For now, I let myself believe it. I must think of all those noble souls who had to put up with me when I was drunk or otherwise under the effects of psychoactive chemicals. One must always believe that a person is capable of change for the better, even in spite of ones doubts. I should know. My soul’s been burnished by every misadventure. I offer this prayer to the streetlamps of the moon, to the flesh and steel of every human possibility, I who traveled through the mirror & over the brook in a drunken boat. I who am both whisper & curse. Who flees through a maze of parking lots, pursued by old memories turned sour. I could always escape everything except myself. I thought I’d gotten out of this particular Hell. But once again it is just my mind creating it. I who am called to another infernal descent—into the very labyrinth of suffering into which my poor Euridice has disappeared. Will I be able to extricate my most lovely? At the mouth of the abyss I pause. Is she still with me? Is she following close behind? The muscles of my neck engage as I turn my head to take a look…

How many hundreds of pages later nothing surprises me anymore. I’m lucky if I have 7200 days left. Everyone seemingly on the other side of a closed door but using tarot cards to come to this decision. El Ahorcado the Hanged Man old compadre—forever you accompany me to my most humiliating of failures. Suspended in the air, hung out to dry with my hands bound. It all happened so suddenly, after a very long time. But I had to go: Lily’s lies made physically ill & in-line with my mother’s schizophrenia—in reverse—I became obsessed with her drunken intake, trying always to gauge it, to determine how much of her personality was due to Korbel brandy & how much her true self. But regardless of the constant bio telling me to go, leaving was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I would miss the companionship, the sex, the peachpies & most of all the cats, Las Estrellas, Li Po & Tu Fu, poor little guys. I gave it all up because Lily triggered within me this clinical depression which still clings. She sho’ nuff had my buttons pressed, I’ll tell you that. The alcohol La Luna Deceit Voyage to the Underworld with Malcolm Cowley in the front & Charles Bukowski bringing up the rear. The jellyfish light slinking. The face in the clouds returning me to who I am. Recurrent dreams. Most anciently is the “can’t get through on the telephone” dream. My mother worked on the switchboard—long distance her speciality. Now the phone calls don`t go through—or message machine ignored. As if she knew: I have nothing to say except goodbye. Goodbye mother with your insane asylums and electroshock therapy and how I was unable to help because it was my misfortune too. I never knew what ordinary is. And Lily, equally long-distant with her long blonde hair and her hands small and slender also like my mother`s except my mother had permanent yellow nicotine stains. It was just how she was; I never thought there was anything I should do about it. These two women and long distance phonelines have cross-hatched my heart with concertina wire. All the painful humiliation of a tar and feathering. Which is not to say Lily is my mother. My mother was a certified schizophrenic; Lily is just a little uptight. Or maybe I’m the uptight one. It’s all been intermixed for so long it’s difficult to tell the difference anymore. The exchanges, the past for the future, future for the past. Leaving a little half-ruined colonnade sufficient for execution by firing squad. I am glad she will never read this. Like some genius-imbecile she will already have forgotten the broken promises, missed opportunities, unanswered calls. She (or I!) will already be on another level.

But this splitting part splitting apart itself took two years before I even realized there was a problem a cognitive dissonance so I had to write everything down to make sure I was not simply imagining these arguments with Lily. Arguments I could not argue against. They always had the lure of truth in them. They kept me at the desk while Lily disappeared, only to reappear the next day to tell me she had been gravely mistaken—that none of it had been true. First this happened every month or so, then every couple of weeks, then every week, then every week two or three times. After each occasion I found myself weary. A heedless nervous exhaustion dogged my days & nights with dognaps of increasing length & profundity. I was falling apart keeping company with an emotional shapeshifter. Still my beloved wife when she would make biscuits or we would talk about literature or films we`d recently seen. But even this seemed undermined by even the littlest drink on her part which made my head swim so that I began sleeping on the floor of my room. Sleeping bag, alarm clock, many, many books stacked up this was during the time I was working on my dissertation. Sometimes the books would fall over and clobber me on the head. Sometimes an enraged Lily would thrust open the door of my room and toss in a book or article of apparel I had left in the living room. A couple of times I recorded her fits of temper on tape. There was plenty that hacked at the chest with Lizzy Borden`s axe. Her yelling was bitchier than even Dorothy’s had been. And in mock-imitation of Dorothy’s violence, she’d every now & then ineffectually try to punch me or throw something at me across the room, but this only hurt my feelings, not my body. Worse than the event itself Lily`s staunch denial of ever having had a temper tantrum the night before only led to a further sense of unreality, the queasy feeling in my stomach that I couldn´t tell the difference between truth and reality any more. As I began my long deterioration which continues to this day if I let it. Even when she heard one of the microcasettes I made she would deny her part in it & accuse me of spying on her. And further asserted that I was hanging onto the past, since she had already quit drinking anyway. People to whom I unburdened myself—the few friends I had left in that town—explained that this was not all that unusual. The worldfamous juggler Hilby—who traveled the world on cruise ships but made Ithaca his home—once worked as an alcoholism-counselor. He was a gentle lovely extraordinarily-talented man with whom I put on a few magic shows. Before everything started falling apart. When I was at the height of my strength. Lucy who was a nurse at the psychiatric intake unit at Tompkins-County Hospital also told me this was all very clearly that this was happening because of an illness called alcoholism. Of course I had a special susceptibility to all of this since my mother’s schizophrenia & her drinking went together, as the Campbell’s Soup

commercial used to sing from the radio, like a “soup & sandwich,” a “horse & carriage.” Don’t get the idea I’m trying to put the whole thing off on a boozehound wife & an abusive childhood. And if I’d kept with that my life might have gone a certain direction but I was always one to shuck it all, even though this often meant uncertainty & sometimes personal pain. Like with leaving the apartment on Seneca Street. I broke away, found another apartment, but I was still suffering from battlefatigue. I was happy to be away from Lily, but didn`t yet know the seriousness of the situation. And then leaving the country to take a teaching post in Taiwan. It’s true: Lily connected my nerves to an electric fence, rang the alarm, swept searchlights to find me crouching against base of the cement wall. But we`d play cards, you know, and Scrabble. And there were the cats. I left Li Po and Tu Fu with her, with the feeling (which turned out to be true) I’d never see them again. Our original intention had always been to move back to San Francisco. Once I expelled from my home, my cats, the dinners & TV there was really no reason for me to stay in Ithaca. If Lily could only finish her dissertatation. If Lily could only finish her dissertatation. If Lily could only finish her dissertatation. My dissertation adviser at Binghamton University, the angelic Gale Whittier told me women had a lot more difficulty in finishing their dissertations than men, and I tried for a long time to bear this in mind as I watched still-lover fight against fear itself, the fear of not being able to finish—this—school exercise. I mean, c`mon: it doesn`t have to Hegel. It`s just a temporary thing. But she was doing this with brandy which placed around her even in the specific hours and minutes she was not drinking, an impenetrable emotional forcefield. Impenetrable because if penetrated becoming much more intense, losing it entirely. And so I finally said FUCK IT ALL & departed. Rousing myself slightly in my environs, I hit the job market at a bad time. However. I managed to rise from my habitual slumber and fill manila envelopes with stacks of photocopies, to try to prove I was somebody with meanwhile all this incredible competition waiting to devour me like luncheon meat. The envelope-licking a foul-tasting holy host. Mockery of the sweet juices of her cunt. But I was determined. “I`ll go anywhere,” I told Lily. But after one-hundred applications it came down to Taiwan, which apparently was not a military dictatorship anymore, although some say it is moving back in that direction. And with all my tai-chi study a journey to the east seemed inevitable. And then, the last few weeks before I left, Lily and I became closer. Or were we only saying goodbye by promising to come back together again some time soon? At that point, it seemed that her coming to live with me in Taiwan at the end of two months was certain. But this was only the beginning.

The beginning of the end. The end never ceasing slicing like a coil of barbed wire wrapped around my torso. Because I do love her, even now, even while she is forcing me to do the saddest thing a man has ever been called upon to do— short of shooting his dog—“cut her loose and cut yr losses” says the good angel —“you`ll never amount to anything without her” the devil disputes. The ravens clickity-clack in telegraph “disregard previous message it was a nest of mirrors black wings slashing silver hammer out of hands in the direction of the dog barking.” But it seemed like I had crossed some line. That I had lost the capacity to lie about myself. Maybe it was only a dream. Could we call it that? Would that suffice to take away the disgust of Jekyll and Hyde persona twisting like some fearsome viper inside me? It`s just my version of the story I call mine but really it`s anonymous. Yes, let`s pretend that. Because what else was I thinking? Seven years. Seven years. And every night the same nightmare: HER. Or the sound of her, apparently in the next room, as I lay in bed thinking to myself wait this can`t be her: she doesn`t live here, but it sure sounds like her. And I’d hear other echoes of my old life: the cats meowing, cans of food being put onto shelves, Lily`s distinctive cough. Until I just couldn`t stand it anymore, and I`d call out “LILY” and thereby wake myself with sometimes an anxiety-spell, my head spinning heart arrhythmically throbbing 200 B.P.M. shoulder heavily weighted as if, yes just exactly as if, burdened by a cross. This dream is truly spooky to me like that time my Dad left me at the amusement park all day by myself. Some pervert asked me if I`d ever been fucked. This seemed like a weird idea to me at that time… As I was given to understand the term “fucked” seemed to preclude two men doing it… But I`ve got it now too—the corruption—my old agile length into a spine crooked with despair. Twisting into an inside-out porcupine of pain. Because they gave me time enough & said do what you will. Of course, I will be writing. This is one thing that was back before Lily and even ever after, and the beginning of consciouness-creating-itself. Which is really the more interesting subject. And then the pain leaves me. But then presently it comes back because the next moment brings me back to myself, and this some might say predates consciousness creating itself and even, in the short run, eclipses it in interest. Like worrying about pocket-change but then falling through a plateglass window. And I driving out one Easter to visit my Mom and Grandma Deckwa, at that point probably the most secure my mother had been in her life, although she had to contend with Grandma Ruby’s constantly contentious remarks. Always some way she should change herself. An example of someone else who tried it. On & on my grandma would go; it was difficult to tell precisely when

senility actually set in. Most people put it down to her deafness & the usual uselessness of her hearing aid. And the TV set was blaring as usual. She just left it set on the country music station from the time she awakened until the time she went to bed. The country music was really horrible now—Randy Travis & all— but sometimes they played a vintage hit. There was Glen Campbell doing “Witchita Lineman.” My Grandma insisted as she had since my childhood that I looked just like Glen Campbell & ought to become a famous singer like him. Yeah, I wish I could play guitar & sing like Glen Campbell. But back when my Grandma first said this Glen Campbell was not so very cool. He was just another country singer on the television. This was way before I learned to play guitar & write songs, so I didn’t appreciate his skill, nor his Arky roots in the old fashioned blue-grass singing for the glory of God of folks like Bill Monroe. I was mainly concerned with becoming a poet, making myself a visionary, which means nothing except to those few who can dig it. Now I dig down deeper & find the voices inside me that were hid there all along. My Grandma Deckwa’s cradle song: An’ if that mockingbird don’t sing— Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring And now old Grandma Rube rubbed her hands in glee when certain of her favorite musical numbers would be reprised on the Nashville Station. This was the only time I ever recall her listening to any thing or any one. She expressed deep satisfaction for Charlie Pride, and even some of the Latino bands. “I like all kind of music,” she said to me. “Don’t matter whose singin’ it—I just love it.” She was probably still afraid of most black people—but not on TV. I took this as a sign she had made some progress. At a certain point in the cannonade of tedium, my Grandma & I left my Mom in the garage smoking & went for a walk through the housing development wherein she now resided. It was very quiet. All the houses looked exactly the same, or like mirror images of one another. The sidewalk had few pedestrians which was good; my grandma was a little unsteady with her cane. The mile hike she swore to be her daily minimum of exercise was more like going around the block. She showed me this edifice, the community meeting center established for this section of the greater subdivision. In the middle of a meadow, it had a porch along three sides made of antiqued wood. My Grandma told me she had had a dream. She said they were holding a dance over at this community center—“& Bud was there, only young now—the way he was before his stroke. He was so handsome then—just like that movie

star. And we danced & we danced up into sky &—we was a-flying up in the stars.” She waved her four-pronged cane in the air so vigorously she had to grasp me by the elbow & righten herself before we could continue our journey on down the glittering sidewalk to her doorway.

16 THE END, MY FRIEND

T ransfiguration. Which is all I`m here. Sleeping, waiting, as underground noiselessness of bells ringing. Hollow recalcitrance of language at all. Only to get me out of the fix I am in. The flux in time. No. Not time. Yesterday looking into tomorrow. The curtains rippling in the wind, a constant dinging or donging near or far. I who am nothing. As phony as the Easter Bunny. A sailor looking for the sea. A blacksmith under the electric horse. Rainbow-snake burnishing the dreamware. The comedian whose punchline is life. Baffled I even made it this far. Make it my epitaph: “Died for Art.” Or so I wrote it in a poem somewhere. This thing that Lily can`t let go of just holds onto as a kind of other side of the equation. No this is not another day wasted. The dream phantasmagoria elongated rainbows. Believe me, I`ve read a lot worse. Of course everyone`s doing the best they can. I`m just another writer: haven`t accomplished anything great. This is an experiment. I`m letting the wind tug at my sleeve, waiting for fate to take shape. Amorphousness contours into ampules, word capsules. The journey already underway, even though I don`t know it. The sleepless town the bells ringing all night long in the wind. And even the next morning, after a slight downpour more bells, sadder now and slower. And thinking of Lily and the Easters we used to have, modeled after the one devised by my Grandma Cline. Lily knew my Grandma Cline. She is a continuation of my family. I have nothing but love for her. And yet our jobs hold us apart—at opposite ends of the earth! Jobs! Like who wanted one anyway? One must make ones way in the world, true enough. But I never thought my emotional life could be so ransacked because of the bullshit capitalist system. All of this is just the pain ri in me, the despair. It has nothing to do with the true possibilities. This tells the truth. I am unable to tell a lie. Even the lies are true. Even as the story continues, expands into utter nothingness where everything is going anyway, sooner or later, one way or another. But am I really sure of this? This is just me. As we`ve seen, I’ve had some problems. Is this a literary text? Is this poetry, or prose? The gap between the words. Trance inducing. The long, slow gathering. The ocean itself, imagining. He was part of that tradition. “Caw caw caw,” quoth the raven. Three ravens, there on the cliff which over the encroaching surf where once I

had scattered my mother’s ashes. Soluble homunculi where words take effect. Never was the road so ripped up. Never was the highway so rainy. Between worlds I am a moment of bodily movement. Extending knowing, but at the cost of always. And the sea, deep down, troubled. The earth torn apart at its core because two lovers are being held apart! And this planet will explode! Meanwhile I sleep the days away, waiting for you, for you, to come get me. I will work it out. It just takes more discipline. But for now, I`m taking it easy. I wouldn`t say I almost lost my mind, because in actual fact I did. Lose my mind. In there. Outside. And then it happened again & just kept happening. Became something other, watched & watching from afar, from within a spinning vortex. Pressures vexed me, even at my job, which I guess I love too much or I`d have quit & moved back the U.S. Because of some fucking asshole making a power play. Or another. Or possibly all as now I sound as paranoiac as my mother and my eyes look a lot like her do in the glass except hers were green while mine are ocean-blue with just the faintest greenish tinge. But here where I am right now everything is mellow. That is to say, in the writing. In the writing there is hope, there is refuge there is the possibility of emerging from the whirlpool calliope the natural symbol unto itself. It was about page 90 and I began to get a little surly. The yellow moon shrinking to a sliver. Sure, sure, there`s trouble out there, brewing. The sea is troubled, deep down. Seismic shock, Old Grey Beard. Trouble trouble boil & bubble. Saturday the evening before my old age & aware that I`ve already placed all my money down on the table now it`s time to turn the cards. And I`m hoping for the best but I`m saying goodbye anyway. The lady’s in the green scenery, paint peeling off the adobe walls. She`s afraid to move away, to really embark on the journey underway. Her dreams of conquest are now excuses for defeat. When I could be playing the guitar or becoming more physically fit instead I`m ruminating over how much it hurts everything was splintered apart, everything I never had anyway. How to find the secret heart? All I see are devil`s eyeholes staring at me in the mirror. And neither can I live without her. This town don`t give up its dead so willingly. To punch a hole in my own story, sometimes seen as a speeded-up cartoon. Mercy whipped our cries, worshipped the transformation. So that`s why—could be the only conceivable reason why (why?—probably not). Because there was a greater unwrapping of understanding. I`ve been going through all that so that I could write this. I am only writing this because I have to. I`m alone, it`s quiet, at night, an occasional motorcycle. What the hell else would you expect to find me doing except writing something? The sea knocked me down. I that time. Was that when the catastrophe began? There was something going on, all along. Symbolic of

immersion in baptismal fount Ocean Beach San Francisco and now Puebla, Mexico Easter placing less emphasis on Easter Bunny & more on blood spurting from His wounds. And me, I am wounded. I am wounded & I cry out & there is no one and nothing to hear me right now except that mosquito flickering across my computer screen. And that, if I may be so bold, is what they call the blues. That`s why this is absolutely blue. And that`s how I know it`s true. The sea knocked me down. Those oceanic blues. Slightest green. She asked a good question. The sky would never empty for me. I was too honest or not honest enough. Since now have the chance to set this out in writing, all this crying inside. About God, she asked. Boiling, bubbling, inside-out, outside in, rightside up, upside down. And who are you really, voice-on-the-telephone? Do you know your lineage? My mother was a telephone operator at a time when such a task required great concentration. ing numbers, operating a circuit board, that sort of thing. And she always thought, bless her heart, that she might get her old job back, at the telephone company, even sixty years later. When she could scarcely count out change in a grocery store. And I should have seen that she was failing and done something about it. But what? One time I thought she might come live with Lily and me but she was too paranoiac impossible to be around. I saw her maybe a dozen more times after that. After I moved to Taipei I made it out to the Bay Area maybe once a year. My friend Wolfgang would loan me his car & I would go down and see her. I should have protected her more. I just never imagined she could die. I thought she would live forever & in a way maybe she does because from within me flows her story intermixed now with my own in ways I never really wanted it to be but there`s nothing I can do to go back & change what led to all this. “Numbskull,” that`s what I am. Dorothy was right. And numbskull again for spending seven years of my life in pain when all I had to do was change my attitude a little. Yeah, so you try it. Seven years of useless searching for something that wasn`t there. Or at any rate isn`t here. That is, before me so that I might apprehend it. Here where I am right now bird twitter 4:00 A.M. a solitary bell still I`m alone & a little depressed but I breathe I sigh of relief, to have done something, even something not breathtakingly noble, so that might at least stave off temptation cruel thoughts the collective immorality of the entire human race simply by typing these words. Stave off, that is, for a moment. Before desire aimless & pointless drags me to the next whipping post. While I can still feel the greater magic of the mackerel clouds the roofs red & yellow still a few lights twinkling out one by one. The now to which you brought me. The now which doesn`t need you. Domes of white, clothes fluttering. Mountains slowly emerging. The moon-canoe sails away & a few birds traverse my picture window. Stop time now & keep going.

There was this woman I knew; I didn`t know her very well but I did write a poem to her after reading her doctoral dissertation on T.S. Eliot & the Decadents. She was a colleague of mine in the English Department at the University where I work. Her name was Hsin-Yi and she had long black hair. In her fishnet stockings and short dresses was by far the most attractive of any of the women in the department, yet there was something jagged to her face, as if the two sides did not coincide. We had a few energetic conversations—one I about our respective dissertations. We even exchanged our mutual cumbersome hardbacked books, promising to read each others`. I don`t think she ever read mine but I read hers and I was favorably impressed. The poem I wrote inspired by the book—it wasn`t exactly a love poem but it didn’t exactly exclude that possibility either. One time, in saying goodbye at a faculty luncheon, she fingered the cuff of my vintage sharkskin jacket, like she understood the fabric, that it meant something to her. The poem she never mentioned. But there were other times, perhaps while making a point to me about something, that she would sort of draw me to her although I was too old for her, and already starting to put on weight, even back then, which was early in my tenure. Now in far off Mexico I get the e-mail informing me this woman Hsin-Yi was dead. Dr. Yu, our department chair, seemed a little unforthcoming about her death. My intuition told me there had to be something behind all this. I hadn’t yet come to understand how truly Mandarin in every way this/that culture is/was. Always one thing behind another: variation based on imitation. Anyway I had a foreboding. I thought perhaps the silence was occasioned by simple discretion, politesse. But only the day before I had consulted the Spanish tarot deck and the future had been: Desconsulo, Grief. I thought it was just one more discouraging turns of the cards, warning me, although Lily is coming to visit for a three-day weekend I am still caught in a downward spiral of sorrow. She comes and she goes like the karmic repercussions of everything I`ve ever done or left undone. That I my child-self chose my mother over my father. That my recklessadolescent self had chosen death over life & inflicted great pain on the one person who loved me, who could love me, my Grandma Cline. That my youngman self became a yelling, screaming, chair-kicking, window breaking alcoholic. That my middle-age self has loved but lost, all because of a crummy career I was never interested anyway but only embarked upon to have more time to write. Is that what it meant when my secret-self knelt in the closet & saw the future selves & saw that everything would be allright. It`s like Black Elk, given the vision that he would save his people, yet always disturbed because his vision never came true. So anyway this woman, Hsin-Yi…

Something told me something was not right so I wrote to a former student of mine who is also a friend & an artist & works in the office. He e-mailed me back she had committed suicide. Something to do with an unhappy marriage. Committed suicide! Hey, I wanted to say, I`ve been there too come to that edge & still hanging on. I wondered how Hsin-Yi pulled it off. Had she just watched herself preparing the scene of her own assassination, crucifixion, last hope, whatever it had been, or had she been fully there, in control of her actions? The only difference between her and me is that for some reason is that she succeeded while I failed or vice-versa since I guess I am enjoying existence to be writing this, practicing my guitar, playing tai-chi. Anything positive. But there is still this negativity lingering here even in the magic land of Mexico. It leads back to the edge of not being in control of what I am doing. I think of the Wolfman played by Lon Chaney, Jr. in the Universal pictures. He was, I have always thought, the most melancholy of those old time movie monsters. Cursed the day of the full moon to become his own shadow. It was the full moon last night. I felt it ing over me. Lily calling long-distance to tell me she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer. After all this time! Now the ultimate delay! No, I can’t even think of me now but only feel the warmth of the love that we shared & realize our love is not over yet, even after these seven long years. Lily`s words whispering as if at the edge of a far sea—how to comprehend them? My head my mind the snake jumping the devil laughing the fool rattling coins in his tambourine. Oh but High Priestess you whose absence is always present even as it is lost to me, beyond the veil, the very veil, you rend. And such was & is the Curious Case of the Delayed Dissertation. How it ate a life away—or who knows how many? Was it that I really loved her in spite of everything? Or was I just too weak not to crawl away? When she’s with me in spirit I feel glad but she’s been so long away I’ve become bitter. But now I see we’ve never been apart & probably never will be, even in spite of death’s encumbrance of one or the other & finally both of us. She is still young & otherwise healthy so there is every chance the treatment will be successful & the cancer will be eliminated. But there is a slight chance that no matter what she does the cancer might multiply & she would be beyond help & die. She is very frank about all this. She is not afraid to die. And I who have sought death—how craven! While others go through these horrifying regimens of chemotherapy, radiation & worse, just to stay alive maybe a year & a half longer. But that is not Lily. Lily has a bit of the Fool’s luck adhering to her, too, in spite of her noble bearing as the Empress & her secret life as the High Priestess, invisibly everything together even as she rends the veil. And so that dissertation has taken her life away, at the very least changed her DNA. Then there’s the ritualistic dismemberment, not the threat of a

mastectomy, which probably will not be necessary, but even the slicing through the flesh to get at the tumor. “Very aggressive,” the doctors had categorized it. It’s like a David Cronenberg film an added sexual appendage. Something from which I cannot part but which drives me on with a desire that can never be satisfied. And so even in magic paradise the poison still writhes in my veins. It writhes oh it writhes allright. And here the sickness lay upon me thick. It was my down fall this “need to get high,” as Lily would say. I vulturized the Taiwanese medical systems supply of tranquillizers and anti-depressants. You’re ONLY DIGGING YOUR OWN GRAVE, I should have that engraved on my forehead. As I nurse some paranoid delusion in my spare time. Now the thing with the ampules, the photographs, the rumor secretly true. And this money I’ve hidden in an old money belt like Rimbaud to return to my poetic homeland—where best to keep that hidden? Meanwhile the oracles tell me “Failure,” “The Hanged Man,” “Restraint.” I am totally freaking out that the cops will break in here any moment & go through the contents of my house, perhaps amazed at the plentitude of entheogens in its cabinets and drawers, looking for something, I don’t even know what. Lily’s phantom form in my dreams so many dreams teaching me to be away from her that I could never be away from her. That she was with me always, even in her disappearing act as I turned my eyes to apprehend her. And me, with only 7200 days remaining—if things go well. A few months after I returned to Taiwan I had another dream which although a classic nightmare was odd for not being unsettling. I was back in the little ½ duplex in The Projects where my mother & I used to live. It was night & was staggering around in the bushes outside. Close on my tail, though invisible as always was the inscrutable “Boogey-Man” my mother used to tell me was out there in the darkness outside the window waiting to get me. His way was to slash, kill, taunt & tempt & I could smell the hot beer on his breath & I knew I had to get away. In a panic I ran inside the bungalow where, true to form, the light switches all failed to function. I was trying to find the toilet because I had to pee, when I accidentally stumbled up against a figure asleep in the bed, deep under the covers. She wakes up, pulls back the bedding—it’s Hsin-Yi! I tell her of the Nightmare Man on my neck. She tells me yes she’s seen him, but his only thing he’s very proud. Always wanting to put somebody down. And understanding the nature of the monster brings me a degree of relief & to have discovered someone who has shared my experience. Only later did I realize I had literally awakened the dead, calling upon the suicided Hsin-Yi to comfort me in a place from which there is neither escape nor return. And her body dissolves, falls…

Here I am though still back in Mexico bird twitter 4:00 A.M. a solitary bell. I won’t ask for whom it’s ringing. Still I`m alone & a little depressed but I breathe a sigh of relief, to have done something, if not breathtakingly noble, still might at least stave off temptation cruel thoughts the collective immorality of the entire human race simply by writing. Stave off, that is, for a moment. Before desire aimless & pointlessness drags me to the next whipping post. While I can still feel the greater magic of the mackerel clouds the roofs red & yellow still a few lights twinkling out one by one. The now to which you brought me. The now which doesn`t need you. Domes of modern Xanadu, clothes fluttering. Mountains slowly emerging. The moon-canoe sails away & a few birds traverse my window. Stop time now & keep going. Sorrow is the signature of yesteryear; I now sink into the concrete like a dumptruck. If they only gave a damn, as time diminishes like the woofing of a far off dog. I who lived through it thinking it was with me forever, like it was when I was a child. Just this series of mutually exclusive worlds, swiftly ing by. But now there`s a crack in the concrete egg, that hermetically-sealed skull of mine, and into it enters the sound of music from a club down the street, this beautiful other world, Mexico, and her mired in her other beautiful if blizzardy world Ithaca, New York. Another thing I lost when I moved away. Not the blizzards just the fact of my having a home. I told her, “I think my luck has run out in this town.” Did she understand what I meant? Does she even me saying it? Her own remote reality so charming so impenetrable. So I knew I had to go, even then. Why not just be happy where I had so much I now mourn? To lead me to this question to which I don`t know the answer. To follow my tail around like a flea-bitten hound. To rip my heart and lungs out in public. Isn`t that the job of the artist? Only also, somehow, to live through it & write about it & that`s the part I cannot forget or I`ll never be back, my life is already over, lasted as long as a very long—yet nevertheless finite—love affair. And now that`s it? A duel to the death via telephone with someone who nearly killed me, who loved me to death, who taught death to love me. Is that all there is, my friend? As Peggy Lee used to implore! The signs were there I just didn`t see them. The shattering of the blue glass. That it was BLUE. The tattered yellow suitcase. That it was TATTERED, spattered by blood another time I tried to slit my wrists. Again, the idiot, El Loco, the Fool, I did it crosswise, instead of the much more efficacious lengthwise. Man, I couldn’t commit suicide to save my life! Until one afternoon in the swimming pool I asked God to kill me. Time it’s time to run away again, only now nowhere

to go, no one to take me in. Not even Lily, who lives in a house in the country where there is paradoxically nowhere to walk, except maybe down the road apiece, & that all muddy or dusty or full of weeds. There’s still some future part of me, lost in the past, along with all the hats I left in taxicabs and all the novels that mysteriously disappeared from my backpack just as I was approaching the final chapter. But I ended up so far west I’m in the East (or vice-versa), out in right field where they used to put me in baseball games in sixth grade in Ogden, Utah, Taiwan, the Republic of China. My mother who always used to think I lived in China & had a phonecard that, to my mild annoyance, allowed her to speak with me for mere pennies, called for hours at a time. I sent my mother some cigarettes. I guess that`s the last nice thing I ever did for her. Except for when I scattered her ashes. It was all I had to do to bring her story to a close. What else did anybody know? Borrowed my friend Wolfgang`s car & it was 75 MPH past the dry scrub hills here & there a gas station scattered. The windmills of the Altamont . Johnny Cash on the c.d. player, going down into that dusty little valley town. That’s truck-driving music. My mother liked more the sophisticated ballad… Mel Torme, Julie London, that sort of stuff. One time she told me she had collaborated with Nat King Cole. “No Mom, you didn`t,” I said just to inject a little sanity into the conversation, but the comment is indicative of her taste. Now however she was a square plastic box, sealed by the coroner. Lily had flown from New York for the San Diego conference to play the role of the professor’s wife & then, as if our marriage had never been interrupted, continued her wifely duties accompanying me & interceding to some extent with my Modesto relations, whose staggering stupidity I could only tolerate for perhaps fifteen seconds at a time. After driving to the crematorium, I took her back to her step-sister Phyllis`s, set the box containing her remains on the coffeetable and sang and played her song, her life`s dream, “Divine Love” only realized in the in-between worlds. I thought how it wasn`t much different than when she was alive, she was still there, in the chair, saying & doing nothing. Exuding a kind of saintliness, yet also finally & completely inert. And I felt forgiven, shriven. She really seemed to be enjoying the proceedings. I knew that she forgiven me, & knew somehow that I was sick too, just as she had been, & so was given to unwise decisions. I didn’t know any better at the time. I thought I was obliged to attend some big-shot conference to which I’d been invited & could drive to Modesto easily enough when it was over. I missed her death by a few days, it’s true, but we loved each other while she was alive. We never stood on ceremony, she & I. Death was nothing because our spirits were ed. My mother’s

blessing became even more evident later, when the paper I had delivered at the conference while she was dying was later accepted in the organization’s very prestigious journal which also counted Ralph Krippner & Marlene Dobkin de Rios among its contributors. Thinkers way out of my league, but also fellowvoyagers. So it was a miracle of sorts. I took that parcel of ashes & drove back up out of that valley to San Francisco, where, after dropping Lily off at the motel, I cruised down the Great Highway to one of the beaches just outside the city where Leibniz and I used to launch our undersea explorations. The wind was stinging my face. I found this sort of makeshift crucifix made of driftwood and seaweed on the beach. This rude cathedral was so cunningly contrived that I couldn’t tell if it was the work of some early morning beach-comber or had been tossed up whole by nature. I said a prayer, I sang her song acapella. Then I unsealed the box with my Swiss Army Knife & took the plastic bag out of the box. These containers are not easy to get open. But I finally did slice through the thick plastic & I waggled the bag in the wind & the ashes flew out & went galloping over the hillsides like a whole herd of laughing, gamboling wild horses. She was happy, happy to be free. A small pile of gleaming ashes fell out of the bag near my feet. Iridescent glowing bone fragments made rainbow bubbles as they were slowly inundated by the ocean. I guess life counts as a success if there`s somebody—anybody—to scatter your ashes when you’re done. And that`s really the somewhere over the rainbow way up high. I don`t care about success I just want to move forward. I just want freedom to say goodbye to this old world I loved it so much, although it made me cry. I didn’t know why. And I said aloud into the surf, “Mother [the first time I had ever used the word], forgive me. I could not get you free of that horrid little rathole during your lifetime. But now by God I have the power & you’re free.” But moving forward am I also not causing my distress which leads to my lighting bbq grills in the bedroom and laying down & sleeping for a very long time gone. Sleeping myself to death, not even brushing my teeth. And if I just accept things the way they are everything will be okay, or will it? You see, that`s the problem. Everything`s fine in theory. But the actuality is another matter. Maybe Lily doesn`t really want to finish her dissertation: she wants her life to be this: waiting for all that promise to burgeon forth. Smarter than me, as she always used to say. A better writer, I agree. But a one legged-man blows a sad, slow harmonica on the sun-splattered sidewalk of Puebla, Mexico. In

Amsterdam rose petals are strewn across the spring sidewalk. In autumn, dark leaves cluster. Not as many people around. In California there are already wildflowers on the hills even while Ithaca lies chained beneath the boulders of rock-hard snow & ice which imprison it until mid-April. If Lily could only… But what about me? It gets mighty lonely living the life of an emotional derelict. Can one have a soap opera with so few characters? In the journals I`ve kept over the past seventeen years there`s always something to do with Lily. Something of a torture, a torment of desire mixed with mad animal need for escape. That ring I wear but sometimes secretly slip off. God, I should`ve thrown that thing into the Pacific Ocean years ago. No, no, it’s a holy relic. I kicked the psychiatric medication they’d given me through recourse to a powerful hallucinogen & traditional Chinese medicine. C’mon, I thought, I’ve kicked cigarettes, booze, Nembutals & even opiates. Certainly it should be no problem to get off of this stuff, which cures your depression by ravaging your soul. But it was not so easy; white man’s psychiatric meds are far more insidious than anything else I’d ever encountered. I’d rather kick H, I swear to God. So I had these secret agents you must mix up in a certain way sent to me through the mail. It was a bitter brew, this stuff from the rain-forests of Brazil. At first I tried dilute forms, then something with the consistency of Turkish coffee. I held my nose & poured it down my throat in three horrible gulps. It was an extended voyage. The first few days I felt only positive effects. A silenced voice within me was now bubbling up with suppressed information. Not all of it made sense. Like how was the painful corn on the bottom of foot, surgically removed three times before but always growing back tenaciously was somehow mysteriously linked to my overall emotional health. About three days (and this is without sleeping) in I began to feel tense & queasy. The world grew most peculiar, I most of all as, with my eyes open I saw the spiraling snake of yin-yang forces. This was the Great Rainbow Snake the shamans tell about. But these intertwining yin-yang forces contained, as much as anything else, evil. I saw Old Satan himself, with stumps where his horns had been surgically removed. I could see in the mirror the scars on my forehead. “Thank God,” I muttered into my pocket tape recorder, “that I am not responsible for the morality of the rest of mankind!” A tapestry of sun & shadow swirled before my streaming eyes. I could not close my eyes or I would get nauseous again & thence began a long session of pissing and shitting, either alternately or simultaneously. I’ll it, this kind of thing is not for the neophyte. But I had to break free (a common theme) & like they say a fool is very brave. Seven days & nights I struggled, never sleeping, twisting with the disparate coils of the intertwining snakes within

me probably related to the cauda pavonis or peacock’s tail of the alchemists. I saw also incandescent angels, spoke with the books of the ages & fell in love with Lily, with whatever remnant of our former life together I could recall. But she was very sleepy when I called her long-distance & did not quite understand how the 1950`s situation comedy Our Miss Brooks linked in with all the love and sorrow that holds the universe together. This was about the third or fourth day, and I thought my experience to be, if not over, at least somewhat subsided. But I was wrong. For the complete seven days I went on pissing & shitting & vomiting & laying down but unable to close my eyes. ‘NO SLEEPING ALLOWED.” I ed those signs on the walls of the chicken-shacks in LA by the bus station. Man, I was gonesville. I was seeing Jimi Hendrix in the sky with diamonds. I started to get some deeper realizations that I cannot describe because they are in a frame of reference that is not readily communicable. I paced around on the roof, even tai-chi made me sea-sick. That is the blockage my working against the flow. A Monday finally came and I went to my first appointment with a traditional Chinese doctor. She was able to work with the corn on my foot & simultaneously with my depression & anxiety. That was the first time I began to feel any relief from my emotional distress. And it’s not like I don’t undermine my own progress, fall back. A book I read about depression said that healing does not always proceed in a strictly linear fashion. But overall I`ll be goddamned if I don`t it that that the traditional Chinese medicine (initiated by the psychedelic) had a most efficacious effect! I`m not cured yet but I`m not ruminating suicide either. Well maybe a little, but only as a last resort. Anyway I am writing this which means I am proceeding forward with something. Just a life that hasn’t turned out yet. As time seems an interlude, a perturbation in the usual fabric of disintegration, I might yet make good my escape. Not a sure thing, not by a long-shot. It still depends on Lily. It still depends on that goddamn dissertation. If I wanna have a career, or if I`m willing to turn recalcitrant in the not too distant dog barking future. In Mexico, the air hums of buried secrets, the police with machine guns guarding the bank. In I saw a picture of Martin Heidegger with an Adolph Hitler mustache. I later heard Hitler was trying to imitate Charlie Chaplin. Here I am, in the imprint of everything I`ve never attained. I guess I needed a mommy to help me make sense of things. My own a paranoid schizophrenic. I have a woman comes in now & looks after me, I really do. Kind of a nurse. Women have been good to me. I Salina, back in Santa Cruz. We were always planning to go to Mexico but I hadn`t the wherewithal for that and anyway Salina still had another semester to finish in high school. I cried in front of her. That was a humiliation when I realized our dreams were just fantasies. I wonder if she ever made it to

Mexico & if it was a romantic experience for her. In spite of everything I suppose it is for me: ravishingly psychedelic. But everyone needs someone or something except those that don`t. And I can become that person. Put myself back together again, just have the desire to do so. The domes the cupolas the cathedrals built by slave labor. Everyone seems to be having a good time, except maybe the beggar without a leg, the woman with a child wrapped up in blankets in a doorway, holding out a plastic basket. But the land the sky the barking dog the honking of a horn someone trying to get somewhere. That stuff I took. I cannot even say its name because of the panopticon. But anyone who needs to know about it eventually will. And my only advice in that regard is: three quick gulps. Three quick gulps is all you need and all you will ever need and anything less will not bring you to the edge of the cosmos and anything more is pointless. You only get to see the Great Snake one time on this plane of existence. But only once, because, after all, one is pretty far out. I hallucinated both visually and aurally for seven days without sleeping. That far exceeds any previously established record. When Wolfgang and I did Frisco speedballs in his eighth-floor walk-up in NYC we were high for about 48 hours but a lot of this time we spent nodding off. And one time Leibniz and I mixed substances we didn’t even know what they were & saw the strata of the universe for about 12 hours. And a first-class ride on Dr, Hoffman’s magic choo-choo train lasts about 8, with plenty of after-images. But three quick gulps & there’s nothing more to be. And ever afterwards one receives quiet messages in ones mind as from some intergalactic control center, expressions of ones deep instinctual knowledge of oneself that allow one glimpses into oneself as it were from the mind of some ancient one beyond space-time, beyond the limits of cognition. My friend Leibniz visited me & I gave him some & he said that he spoke with John Coltrane on a space ship & saw dancing unicorns. But that time, because it was my second time & I could only bear to gulp once, I only heard the voices of instruction & had a hypnogogic visitation by strangely sterile mantieople from (one would hope) another planet—(since if they were hanging around here, only invisible, that would be scary). This stuff I’m talking about is not even illegal, because they know that no human being on the face of the earth (without special training) could possibly endure more than three quick gulps anyway. At which point they are vomiting for days incapable of challenging the surveillance mechanism which lives to feed itself only much worse than junk a thousand times worse & there is no coming down off it. You want to come down, you beg to come down, you promise Lord Vishnu himself you will never ask for anything ever again. So there is no danger & ultimately there is a sort of

wisdom that arises from the activity since it activates a certain morophogenetic field of pure consciousness realizing itself. Of course, it’s also possible to construct a nightmare from a Philip K. Dick book, if one doesn’t mind freaking oneself out unduly. Is all this really necessary? Aren’t I really just destroying myself & every chance I ever had. If I were smart, if I really had the “millionaire mentality” I tout, shouldn’t I be trying to sell myself a little harder? No one wants to touch a book in which the hero just takes a bunch of drugs. Well, maybe Bukowski but then there’s more than a grittiness there’s a griminess that people love to roll around in. A sliminess that is not what I’m talking about. Or they’ll take Malcolm Lowrey, who sets himself up as an unfortunate example. Even DeQuincy must suffer. But I say that Lenny Bruce is never dirty. One time Paul Krassner asked Lenny why he was stuck on heroin. Lenny said there just was nothing else, it was “like kissing God.” He’s just so honest! And that’s why I say the only Western medical doctor who really did anything for me was Dr. Albert Hoffman. And there are other things I regret but that is not one them. And oh no there goes my career up in smoke! And listen, there are monsters in woodwork. Cops in the porno racks, slimy bastards who’d spit on you as wink. But that don’t mean that there’s no such thing as Saint John of the Cross. Sure, there are things I leave out, things that disgust and appall me. Sure there are things I don’t want to it. I don’t tell the whole story but I don’t leave anything important out. Which is nothing. Everything filled itself in & I transcended myself. I am not a comedian, actor or prestidigitator. Nor a magician, philosopher or priest. I’m not a successful singer-songwriter although I still entertain rock’n’roll dreams. I guess what you might call a washed-up poet, wished on the shore. They return my poetry submission with the droll: “This batch of poems is not for us.” Easier to publish a thirty-page paper on Leonora Carrington and Giordano Bruno than one page of poetry. Hey, some people respect me. Yet even this only masquerade. Sure, I gathered a few scraps from under the table as a professor but look what it’s done to me! Still, every now & then I give one or another impossible attempt a try. Just to prove that Alice was right. To smuggle a thought-bubble in in spite of myself. Everything I’ve ever tried to do is basically impossible anyway. And everything else happened as it came along. Love is the only choice there is & autobiographies have no end but must begin with the sun coming over the mountains and through the curtains into my eyes seeking shapes in the emerging. The cool numbness of absolute numberlessness. Cantata in the wind. Finally switched horoscopes with me. And so I’m gonna

leave here too. Of the wretched of the earth I been blessed with the dazzling sunlight. The singer becomes ME. Man, I was THERE. And this could be a momentary aberration who knows? And that was then & then is now. But for now I’ve got it all: uncountable buildings the clothes wiggling in the wind to dry. Shadowless fragments of color. The hillside bursting with life. Zigzagging labyrinth of the edges of rooftops. Whether to ponder the coming into being or the lumping together of the proletrariat flesh. As one always brings ones rubbertired carriage to ones funeral. The cars and buses signaling to one another like lost dogs. As I would later have to realize. Pants and shirts, red, blue, pink, waggling windily. If this moment could only last forever then I could relax. It can, if you let it. That is, if one can manage to be dignified yet hilarious. There are intersecting lines of energy. Chain link fence. Smeared rectangles. A blue balcony. And then there is the everything about which one is worried. And then there is this. The wind wiggling. The dome the spire. The clotheslines a shadow of infinity, the numberless codex of the ever-more faint cantata. And Lily`s optimism is like a drug in itself, so I allow myself to hope. But so much to hold myself to if I hope to survive. Now it is I who must make amends. All the damage I`ve done. All those doctors, trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I just lost it, that`s all. I fell apart. But do I have to now?— continue, that is, the spiraling out-of-control? Where will I go? When will I listen! How can I fail? Numberlessness mumbles a wish-dream into the trafficnoise, but somewhere the record is written an invisible tattoo upon ones body. Time ticks its wish-dreams love only imagined. But is that really an end to all this oblivion? Obviously not. Being pulled apart. Thinking, wandering, losing mooring. Spinning down, down, down into the deeps of life. Fulfilling deathwishing brainwashing. As this is the story not of some great literary psychotic—Count Lautreamont back from the dead—but a mere neurotic with only loneliness to keep me company. Have I chosen this self-imposed cruelty out of valor or cowardice? My sorrow a kind of victory or a capitulation more certain than gravity? A something anyway I cannot at present name. Am I really ever alone? I brush my teeth I sweep the floor I look outside the window at the sun. I pull the blinds I lay me down to sleep in the middle of the day. Sweat drench like Murphy bed Modesto 3 years old my mother before her first nervous breakdown. Only no schizophrenia here, let alone paranoia (what exciting lives paranoiacs must lead) but like a broken time-piece mutely melancholic diagnosed severe depressive suffering replete with anxiety fits like some Woody Allen character. Only now it`s not so funny. My flesh turning creepy-crawly. My dream-hallucinations: daymares in which her absence is always present. Who?—

Lily? My mother? The general fucked-upedness of either or both situations. Both evolving into nothing other than my being alone. Me & all the hundreds of millions in my same boat & nothing between us but common courtesy. And now the moon is not-quite full; the clouds draw neigh. In the nowness of forever my flesh rots off my bones. While awaiting this common end, I type another page, still and forever crying inside, because I cannot cry. Was forbidden to. Superego injunction. Ego unable to negotiate the whatever I become whenever she`s not t/here. The bestial metamorphosis into television zombie / fantasy potentate. And the real illness is that I feel that I am sick but this is just an excuse not to live. So suicide? That will teach the world a lesson it will soon forget. Dead is dead. The question is how one lived while alive. Happiness is not the only thing. Feeling very sad is something I am good at. There is always plenty lends itself to a melancholy state of mind. So that little cluster feeds itself, like The Blob starring Steve McQueen. And I am the frightened townsfolk running for their lives down Main Street. Life slowed down so far it snapped off in my hand like a pencil. Only deeper puzzlements evolve. Like the phone ringing at midnight. No one on the line. Just the wind whissspering the secrets of the inner-cavern as I once heard echoing from inside the Aztec pyramid or across the marble expanse of the Chicago Central Train Station. All gibberish—impossible to copy down. The essence of language but not language itself yet. The longing for utterance. Silent my voice. Eyesight growing dim. The telephone asleep in its cradle. The moon a perfect zero & failing fast. It all adds up to nothing. Yet all the lights, the apartments, the convenience stores. Everywhere else is somewhere. Here is only the sound of me scribbling God’s wound. My glasses sliding down my nose. The moon sliding down the window. In Puebla when morning comes the families will put on their best clothes & parade down the streets to the ringing of church bells. In Amsterdam white lilies are sold by sidewalk vendors along the canals. Back in my personal past my Grandma Cline puts chocolate Easter eggs out in the garden of her lovely house in the Oakland hills. Here the sky is full; the tomb is empty. Raindrops slither down the windowpane. A dog barks. That was another time & place. Here is only the sound of me thinking. A muddy sun coming up over the apartment buildings. Early morning birds tweeting. The final day of Tomb Sweeping and Easter, some Easter, is here.