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     Big Sur, Unmistakably Autobiographical, Big Sur,  Jack  Kerouac's Ninth
Novel,  Was Written As The "king Of The Beats" Was Ap-, Proaching Middle-age
And Re-  flects  His Struggle To  Come  To  Terms  With  His Own  Myth.  The
Magnificent And Moving Story. Of jack duluoz, a man blessed by great  talent
and cursed with an urge towards self-destruction, big sur is at once ker

     Unmistakably autobiographical, Big Sur, Jack Kerouac's ninth novel, was
written as the "King of the  beats" was approaching middle-age  and reflects
his struggle to come to terms with his own myth. The  magnificent and moving
story. Of jack duluoz, a man blessed by great talent and cursed with an urge
towards self-destruction, big sur is at once kerouac's toughest and his most
humane work.  JACK KEROUAC was born  in 1922 in  Lowell,  Massachusetts, the
youngest of  three children  in a French-Canadian family.  In high school he
was a star player on the local  football  team, and  went on to win football
scholarships to Horace Mann (a New York  prep school) and Columbia  College.
He  left Columbia  and football in  his sophomore year, joined the  Merchant
Marines and began the restless  wanderings that  were to  continue  for  the
greater part  of his  life.  His  first novel,  The  Town  and the City, was
published  in  1950. On the Road, although written in  1951 (in a few hectic
days on a scroll of newsprint), was not published  until 1957 -- it made him
one of the most controversial and bestknown writers of his time. Publication
of his  many other  books,  among  them  The  Subterraneans, Doctor Sax  and
Desolation Angels, followed.
     Jack Kerouac  died in 1969, in St  Petersburg, Florida, at  the age  of
forty-seven.

     My  work   comprises  one  vast  book  like  Proust's  except  that  my
remembrances are  written  on the run instead of  afterwards in  a sick bed.
Because of the objections of my early  publishers I was not  allowed  to use
the same personae names in each  work. On the  Road, The Subterraneans,  The
Dharma  Bums,  Doctor Sax,  Maggie Cassidy,  Tristessa,  Desolation  Angels,
Visions of Cody and the others including this book Big Sur are just chapters
in the whole  work which I call The Duluoz Legend. In my old age I intend to
collect  all my work and re-insert  my pantheon of uniform names, leave  the
long shelf full of  books there,  and die happy. The  whole thing forms  one
enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known
as Jack Duluoz, the world  of  raging  action and folly  and  also of gentle
sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye. JACK KEROUAC


        1

     The church is  blowing a sad windblown  "Kathleen" on the bells  in the
skid row slums as I wake  up all  woebegone and goopy, groaning from another
drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my "secret return"
to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums
and then  marching forth into North  Beach  to  see  everybody  altho Lorenz
Monsanto  and  I'd  exchanged huge  letters outlining how  I would sneak  in
quietly,  call him on the phone using  a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy
Pulvertaft (also writers) and  then he would secretly drive me to his  cabin
in the Big  Sur woods where I  would be alone and  undisturbed for six weeks
just  chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc., etc. --
But  instead I've bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at  the height
of Saturday night business, everyone recognized  me (even tho" I was wearing
my disguise-like  fisherman's hat and fishermen coat  and pants  waterproof)
and "t'all ends up a roaring  drunk in all the  famous bars the bloody "King
of the  Beatniks" is back in town buying drinks for everyone --  Two days of
that, including Sunday  the day Lorenzo  is  supposed to  pick  me  up at my
"secret" skid row hotel (the Mars on 4th and Howard)  but when he calls  for
me there's no  answer, he has the clerk open  the door and  what does he see
but  me  out  on the  floor among  bottles, Ben  Fagan  stretched out partly
beneath  the bed, and  Robert Browning the  beatnik painter out  on the bed,
snoring... So  says to himself "I'll pick  him up  next  weekend, I guess he
wants to drink for a week in the city (like he always does, I guess)" so off
he drives  to his Big Sur  cabin  without  me thinking he's doing the  right
thing but my  God when I wake  up, and Ben  and Browning  are  gone, they've
somehow dumped me on the bed, and I hear "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen"
being  bellroped so  sad  in  the fog winds out there that  blow across  the
rooftops of eerie old  hangover Frisco, wow,  I've hit the end  of the trail
and cant even drag  my body any more even to a refuge in the woods let alone
stay upright  in  the city a minute -- It's  the first  trip I've taken away
from home (my mother's house)  since the publication of "Road" the book that
"made me famous" and in fact so much so I've been driven mad for three years
by  endless  telegrams,  phonecalls,  requests,  mail, visitors,  reporters,
snoopers  (a big voice saying in my basemerit window as I prepare to write a
story: ARE YOU  BUSY? )  or the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom
as  I  sat there  in my pajamas  trying to write down a  dream  -- Teenagers
jumping the  six-foot fence  I'd  had built  around my  yard for privacy  --
Parties with bottles yelling at my  study window "Come on out and get drunk,
all work and no play makes  Jack a dull boy! "... A woman coming  to my door
and saying "I'm not going to ask you if you're Jack Duluoz because I know he
wears a beard, can  you tell me where I can find him,  I want a real beatnik
at my annual Shindig party" -- Drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing
books and even pencils...  Uninvited acquaintances staying  for days because
of the clean beds and good food  my  mother provided... Me drunk practically
all  the  time to put on a jovial cap to  keep up with  all this but finally
realizing  I  was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude
again  or die -- So  Lorenzo  Monsanto wrote and said "Come to  my cabin, no
one'll  know, " etc.,  so I had sneaked into San Francisco as I say,  coming
3000 miles from my home in Long Island (Northport) in a pleasant roomette on
the  California  Zephyr  train watching America roll  by outside my  private
picture  window, really  happy for the first time in three years, staying in
the roomette  all three  days  and three nights with my  instant coffee  and
sandwiches -- Up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago
and then the Plains, the mountains,  the  desert,  the  final  mountains  of
California, all so easy and dreamlike compared to my old harsh hitch hikings
before I made enough money to take transcontinental trains (all over America
high school and college kids thinking  "Jack Duluoz is 26  years old  and on
the road  all the time hitch hiking" while there  I am  almost 40 years old,
bored and  jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat) -- But in
any case a wonderful start towards my retreat so generously offered by sweet
old  Monsanto and  instead of going thru smooth and easy  I  wake up  drunk,
sick, disgusted,  frightened, in fact terrified by that sad  song across the
roofs mingling with the lachrymose  cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the
corner below "Satan  is the cause of your alcoholism,  Satan is the cause of
your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent
now"  and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in  rooms next
to mine,  the creak of hall  steps,  the moans everywhere Including the moan
that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by  a  big
roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.

     2

     And I  look around the  dismal cell,  there's  my hopeful  rucksack all
neatly packed with everything  necessary to live in the woods, even unto the
minutest first aid  kit and diet details and even  a neat little  sewing kit
cleverly reinforced  by my  good mother  (like  extra safety  pins, buttons,
special sewing needles, little aluminum scissors)... The hopeful medal of St
Christopher  even  which she'd sewn on the  flap... The survival kit all  in
there down to the  last little survival sweater and handkerchief and  tennis
sneakers (for hiking) -- But the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of
bottles all empty,  empty poor boys of  white  port, butts,  junk, horror...
"One fast move  or  I'm gone, "  I  realize, gone the way of the last  three
years  of  drunken  hopelessness  which  is a  physical  and  spiritual  and
metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in  school no matter how many books
on  existentialism or  pessimism  you  read, or  how  many  jugs  of  vision
producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up  with --
That feeling when  you wake up with  the delirium tremens  with  the fear of
eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders
weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being  a bent back mudman monster
groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden  nowhere,
the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up
to your waist in  a giant pan of greasy brown  dishwater not a trace of suds
left in it... The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression
of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for
a thing so ugly,  so lost, no  connection whatever with early perfection and
therefore  nothing  to  connect  with tears  or  anything: it's like William
Seward Burroughs" "Stranger" suddenly appearing in your place in the  mirror
-- Enough! "One fast move  or I'm gone" so I jump up, do my headstand  first
to  pump blood  back into  the  hairy  brain, take a shower in the hall, new
T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run
out  throwing  the key on the desk  and hit the cold street and walk fast to
the nearest  little grocery store to buy two  days of food, stick  it in the
rucksack, hike thru lost  alleys of  Russian  sorrow where bums sit head  on
knees in foggy doorways in the goopy eerie city night I've got to  escape or
die, and  into the bus station In a half hour into a  bus seat, the bus says
"Monterey" and off we go down  the clean neon hiway and I sleep all the way,
waking up amazed and  well again smelling sea  air the bus driver shaking me
"End of the line, Monterey. "  -- And by God it is Monterey, I stand  sleepy
in the 2 A. M. seeing  vague little fishing masts across the street from the
bus driveway.  Now all  I've got to do to complete my escape is get 14 miles
down the coast to the Raton Canyon bridge and hike in.

     3

     "One fast move or I'm gone" so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that
coast, it's foggy night tho sometimes you can see  stars in the  sky  to the
right where the sea  is, tho you cant see the sea you can only hear about it
from the cabdriver -- "What kinda country is it around here? I've never seen
it. " 'Well, you cant see it tonight -- Raton Canyon  you say, you better be
careful walkin around there in the dark. " 'Why? "
     "Well, just use your lamp like you say... "
     And sure enough  when  he lets me  off at the  Raton Canyon bridge  and
counts the money I sense something wrong  somehow, there's an awful roar  of
surf but  it isnt coming from the right place, like  you'd expect it to come
from "over there" but it's coming from "under there" -- I can see the bridge
but I  can see  nothing below it --  The bridge continues the  coast highway
from one bluff to another, it's a  nice white  bridge with  white rails  and
there's a white line runnin down  the middle familiar  and  highway like but
something's wrong -- Besides the headlights of the cab just shoot out over a
few bushes into empty space in the direction  where the canyon's supposed to
be, it  feels like being up in the air somewhere tho I can see the dirt road
at our feet and the dirt overhang on the side
     "What in the  hell is this? " -- I've got the  directions all memorized
from a little map Monsanto's mailed me but in my  imagination dreaming about
this  big  retreat back home  there'd been  something  larkish, bucolic, all
homely woods  and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the
dark  --  When the cab leaves I therefore turn  on my railroad lantern for a
timid peek but its beam gets lost just like the car lights in  a void and in
fact the battery is fairly weak and I can hardly see the bluff at my left --
As for the  bridge I cant  see  it  anymore except for  graduating series of
luminous shoulder buttons going off further into the low sea roar... The sea
roar is bad enough except it keeps bashing and barking at me  like a  dog in
the  fog down there,  sometimes  it  booms the earth but my God where is the
earth  and  how can the sea be underground!  -- "The  only thing to  do, " I
gulp, "is to put this lantern shinin right in front of your feet, kiddo, and
follow  that  lantern and make sure it's shinin on the road rut and hope and
pray it's shinin  on the ground that's gonna be there when it's shinin, " in
other words I actually fear that even my lamp will carry me astray if I dare
to  raise  it for  a minute  from the  ruts in  the dirt  road --  The  only
satisfaction I can glean from this roaring high horror  of  darkness is that
the  lamp  wobbles  huge  dark  shadows  of  its little  rim  stays  on  the
overhanging bluff at the  left of  the road, because to the right (where the
bushes are wiggling in  the wind from the sea) there aint no shadows because
there aint  no light can take hold -- So I start my trudge, pack aback, just
head down following my lamp spot, head down but eyes  suspiciously peering a
little up, like a man in the presence of a dangerous idiot  he doesn't  want
to annoy The dirt road starts up a little, curves to the  right, starts down
a little, then suddenly up again, and up By now the sea roar is further back
and at one point I even stop and look back to see nothing -- "I'm gonna  put
out my light  and see what I can see" I stay rooted to my feet where they're
rooted to  that road Fat lotta good, when  I put out the light I see nothing
but the dim sand  at  my feet. Trudging up and getting further away from the
sea roar  I get to feel more confident but suddenly I come  to a frightening
thing  in the road, I stop  and hold out my hand, edge forward,  it's only a
cattle crossing (iron bars imbedded  across the road) but at the same time a
big blast of wind comes  from the left where the bluff should be  and I spot
that way and see nothing. "What  the hell's going on! " "Fol-low the road, "
says the other voice trying to be calm so I do but the next instant I hear a
rattling to my right, throw my light  there, see nothing but bushes wiggling
dry  and mean and just  the proper high  canyonwall kind of bushes  fit  for
rattlesnakes too --  (which it was, a rattlesnake doesnt like to be awakened
in the middle of the night by a trudging humpback monster with a lamp).  But
now the road's going down again, the reassuring bluff reappears on my  left,
and  pretty  soon according to my  memory of Lorry's map  there she is,  the
creek, I can hear her lappling  and gabbing down there  at the bottom of the
dark where  at least I'll be  on level  ground  and done with  booming  airs
somewhere above -- But  the  closer  I  get to  the creek  as the road  dips
steeply,  suddenly, almost  making me trot forward, the  louder it  roars, I
begin to think I'll  fall  right  into it before I  can  notice  it...  It's
screaming like a raging flooded  river right below me  -- Besides it's  even
darker  down there  than anywhere! There are glades  down  there,  ferns  of
horror  and  slippery  logs,  mosses, dangerous plashings,  humid mists rise
coldly like the  breath of death, big  dangerous trees are beginning to bend
over  my head  and brush  my pack  -- There's a noise I know  can only  grow
louder as I sink down and for fear  how loud it can grow I stop  and listen,
it  rises up  crashing  mysteriously  at me from a  raging battle among dark
things, wood or rock or something cracked, all smashed, all wet black sunken
earth  danger  --  I'm afraid to go down  there -- I am affrayed  in the old
Edmund Spenser sense of being frayed by a whip, and a  wet one at that  -- A
slimy green dragon racket in the bush  --  An  angry war that doesnt want me
pokin  around  --  It's  been  there  a million years and  it doesnt want me
clashing darkness with it -- It comes snarling from a thousand crevasses and
monster redwood roots all over the map of creation -- It is a dark clangoror
in the rain forest and doesnt want no skid row bum to carry to the sea which
is bad enough and waitin back there -- I can almost feel  the sea pulling at
that racket in the trees but there's my spotlamp so all I gotta do is follow
the lovely sand road which dips and  dips in rising carnage  and  suddenly a
flattening, a sight  of bridge logs,  there's the  bridge rail, there's  the
creek just four feet below, cross the bridge you woken bum and see what's on
the other shore. Take one quick peek  at the water as you  cross, just water
over rocks, a small creek at that.
     And  now before  me is a dreamy  meadowland with a good old corral gate
and a barbed wire fence the road running right on  left but this where I get
off at  last. Then I crawl thru  the barbed wire and find myself  trudging a
sweet  little sand road winding right thru fragrant dry heathers  as tho I'd
just popped thru from hell into familiar old Heaven on Earth, yair and Thank
God  (tho a minute later my heart's  in my mouth again because  I  see black
things in  the white sand ahead but it's only piles of good old mule dung in
Heaven).

     4

     And in the morning (after sleeping by the creek in the white sand) I do
see what was so  scary about my canyon road walk --  The road's up  there on
the  wall a thousand  feet with a sheer drop  sometimes,  especially at  the
cattle  crossing,  way  up highest,  where a break in the  bluff  shows  fog
pouring through from another bend of the  sea beyond, scary enough in itself
anyway as tho one hole wasnt enough to open into the sea... And worst of all
is the bridge! I go ambling seaward along the path by the creek and see this
awful  thin white line  of bridge a thousand  unbridgeable sighs  of  height
above the little woods I'm walking in, you just cant believe it, and to make
things heart-thumpingly horrible you come  to a little bend in what  is  now
just a trail and there's the booming surf coming at you whitecapped crashing
down on sand as tho  it was higher than where you stand, like a sudden tidal
wave world enough to make you step back or run  back to the hills -- And not
only that, the blue sea behind the crashing high waves is full of huge black
rocks  rising like old  ogresome castles dripping wet slime, a billion years
of woe  right  there,  the moogrus  big  clunk  of  it right  there with its
slaverous lips  of foam  at  the base -- So  that you  emerge from  pleasant
little wood paths with a stem  of  grass  in  your  teeth and drop it to see
doom... And you look up at that  unbelievably high bridge and feel death and
for a good reason:  because underneath the bridge, in the  sand right beside
the sea cliff, hump, your heart sinks to see it: the automobile that crashed
thru the  bridge rail  a decade ago and  fell  1000  feet straight  down and
landed upside-down, is still  there now, an upside-down chassis of rust in a
strewn skitter  of sea-eaten tires, old  spokes,  old  car seats sprung with
straw, one sad fuel pump and no more people...
     Big  elbows  of  Rock  rising everywhere,  sea  caves within them, seas
plollocking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on
the sand, the sand dipping quick (no Malibu Beach  here) -- Yet you turn and
see the pleasant woods winding upcreek like a picture in Vermont -- But  you
look up into the sky,  bend  way back, my God you're standing directly under
the  aerial  bridge with its thin white  line running from  rock to rock and
witless cars  racing across it like dreams!  From rock to rock! All  the way
down  the raging coast! So  that when later  I heard people say  "Oh Big Sur
must  be beautiful!  " I gulp  to wonder why it has  the reputation of being
beautiful  above and  beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock
Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the  coast  highway  on a sunny
day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.

     5

     It was even frightening at the other peaceful end  of Raton Canyon, the
east end,  where  Alf  the pet mule  of  local settlers slept at  night such
sleepfull sleeps under a few weird trees and  then  got up in the morning to
graze in the  grass then negotiated the  whole  distance slowly  to the  sea
shore where  you saw him  standing by the waves like  an ancient sacred myth
character motionless in the sand -- Alf the Sacred Burro" I later called him
-- The thing  that was frightening was the mountain that rose up at the east
end, a strange  Burmese like mountain with levels  and  moody terraces and a
strange  ricepaddy hat on top  that I  kept staring at  with a sinking heart
even at first when  I was healthy and feeling good (and I would be going mad
in this canyon in  six weeks on  the  fullmoon night of  3 September) -- The
mountain reminded me of my recent recurrent nightmares in New York about the
"Mountain  of  Mien  Mo" with  the  swarms of  moony flying horses lyrically
sweeping  capes over their  shoulders as they circled  the peak  a "thousand
miles high" (in the dream it said) and on top of the mountain in one haunted
nightmare I'd seen  the giant empty stone benches  so silent in the topworld
moonlight as tho once inhabited by Gods or giants of some kind  but long ago
vacated so that  they  were all dusty and cobwebby  now and the evil  lurked
somewhere inside  the  pyramid nearby where there was a  monster with  a big
thumping heart  but also, even more sinister, just ordinary  seedy but muddy
janitors cooking over small woodfires...  Narrow dusty  holes through  which
I'd tried  to crawl with a bunch  of tomato plants  tied around  my  neck --
Dreams  -- Drinking  nightmares  -- A recurrent series of  them all swirling
around that mountain,  seen the very first  time as a beautiful but  somehow
horribly green verdant  mist enshrouded  jungle  peak  rising  out of  green
tropical country in 'Mexico" so called but beyond  which were pyramids,  dry
rivers,  other countries full of infantry enemy and  yet the  biggest danger
being  just hoodlums  out throwing  rocks on Sundays -- So that the sight of
that  simple sad mountain, together  with the bridge  and that car that  had
flipped over twice or so and landed flump in the sand with  no more  sign of
human elbows  or shred neckties (like  a terrifying  poem about America  you
could write), agh, HOO HOO of Owls living in  old evil  hollow trees in that
misty tangled further part of  the canyon  where  I was  always afraid to go
anyhow -- That unclimbably tangled steep cliff at the base of Mien Mo rising
to gawky dead trees among bushes  so dense and up to heathers  God knows how
deep with  hidden  caves  no one  not even  I  spose the Indians of the roth
century  had  ever explored --  And those big gooky  rainforest ferns  among
lightningstruck conifers right beside sudden  black  vine cliff faces rising
right at your side as you walk the peaceful path... And as  I say that ocean
coming at you higher  than you are  like the harbors  of old woodcuts always
higher  than the towns (as Rimbaud  pointed out shuddering) --  So many evil
combinations even unto the bat who would come at me  later  while I slept on
the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo's cabin, come circle my head  coming
real low sometimes filling me with the traditional fear it'll get tangled in
my  hair, and such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle
of the night and see silent wings  beating over you and you ask yourself "Do
I  really  believe  in Vampires? "...  In fact,  flying silently  around  my
lamplit cabin at  3 o'clock in the  morning as I'm  reading (of all  things)
(shudder) Doctor Jekyll and  Mister Hyde -- Small wonder maybe that I myself
turned from  serene Jekyll  to hysterical  Hyde  in the  short  space of six
weeks,  losing absolute control of the peace  mechanisms of my mind  for the
first time in my life.
     But Ah, at first there were fine  days and nights, right after Monsanto
drove me to Monterey and back with two boxes of a full grub list and left me
there alone for three  weeks  of solitude, as we'd agreed -- So fearless and
happy I  even  spotted his  powerful  flashlight up at the bridge the  first
night, right thru the fog the  eerie finger reaching the pale bottom of that
high monstrosity, and  even spotted it out over the farmless sea as I sat by
caves  in the crashing  dark in my fisherman's outfit writing down what  the
sea was  saying  --  Worst of all  spotting  it  up  at  those  tangled  mad
cliffsides 'where owls hooted ooraloo --  becoming acquainted and swallowing
fears and  settling down to life  in the little cabin with its warm glow  of
woodstove and kerosene lamp  and let  the ghosts fly their  asses off... The
Bhikku's home in his woods, he only  wants peace, peace he will  get  -- Tho
why after three weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange
woods my soul so  went down the  drain when I came  back with Dave Wain  and
Romana and my girl Billie and her  kid, I'll never know -- Worth the telling
only if I dig deep into everything.
     Because  it  was  so beautiful at  first,  even  the circumstance of my
sleeping  bag suddenly erupting feathers in the  middle  of  the  night as I
turned over  to  sleep on, so  I  curse and have to  get up  and  sew it  by
lamplight  or in the morning it might be  empty of feathers... And as I bend
poor  mother head over my needle and thread in the cabin,  by the fresh fire
and in the light of the kerosene lamp, here  come those damned silent  black
wings  flapping  and throwing shadows all over my  little home,  the  bloody
bat's  come in  my  house --  Trying  to sew a poor patch on  my old crumbly
sleepingbag (mostly ruined by my having to sweat out a fever inside of it in
a hotel  room in  Mexico City  in 1957 right after  the gigantic  earthquake
there), the nylon all rotten almost from all that old sweat, but still soft,
tho so  soft I had  to cut out a piece of old shirt flap  and patch over the
rip -- I  remember looking up from my middle of the  night chore and  saying
bleakly "They, yes, have bats in Mien  Mo valley'...  But the fire crackles,
the patch gets sewn, the creek gurgles and  thumps outside -- A creek having
so many voices it's amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the
little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other
singers  and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long  and  all
day long  the voices of  the creek  amusing me so  much  at first but in the
later horror of  that  madness night becoming the  babble and  rave  of evil
angels in my head  -- So not minding  the bat or the rip  finally, ending up
cant sleep because too awake  now and it's 3 A. M. so the fire I stoke and I
settle down and  read the entire  Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde novel in the
wonderful  little  handsized leather book  left there by smart Monsanto  who
also must've read it with wide eyes on a night like that -- Ending the  last
elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and  fetch water from gurgly creek
and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup And saying to myself "So why  fret
when  something goes wrong like your sleepingbag breaking in  the night, use
self reliance'... "Screw the  bats" I add. Marvelous opening moment in  fact
of the first afternoon I'm left alone in the cabin and I make my first meal,
wash my first dishes, nap, and wake up to hear the rapturous ring of silence
or Heaven even within and throughout the gurgle of the creek -- When you say
AM ALONE and the cabin is suddenly  home only because  you made one meal and
washed  your  firstmeal  dishes  --  Then nightfall,  the  religious  vestal
lighting of the beautiful  kerosene lamp after careful washing of the mantle
in the creek  and  carefuldrying  with  toilet  paper,  which  spoils  it by
specking it so you  again wash it in the creek this time just let the mantle
drip  dry  in  the sun, the late  afternoon  sun that  disappears so quickly
behind those giant high  steep canyon walls...  Nightfall, the kerosene lamp
casts a glow in the  cabin, I go out and pick some ferns like  the ferns  of
the  Lankavatara Scripture, those hairnet  ferns,  "Look  sirs,  a beautiful
hairnet! " --  Late afternoon  fog pours in over  the  canyon walls,  sweep,
cover the  sun, it gets cold, even the flies on  the porch are  as so sad as
the fog on the peaks --  As daylight retreats the  flies retreat like polite
Emily Dickinson  flies and when it's  dark they're  all asleep  in trees  or
someplace -- At high  noon they're in  the cabin with you but edging further
towards the  open  doorsill  as  the  afternoon lengthens,  how.  "strangely
gracious -- There's the hum of the bee drone  two blocks  away the racket of
it you'd think it was right over the  roof, when the bee drone swirls nearer
and nearer (gulp again) you retreat into  the cabin and wait, maybe they got
a message to come and see you all two thousand of em -- But getting used  to
the bee drone finally which seems  to happen like a big party once a week...
And so everything eventually marvelous.
     Even  the  first frightening night on  the beach in  the  fog  with  my
notebook  and pencil, sitting there crosslegged in the  sand facing all  the
Pacific  fury flashing on rocks that rise like gloomy sea  shroud towers out
of the  cove, the  bingbang cove  with  its seas booming  inside  caves  and
slapping out, the cities  of seaweed floating  up  and down you can even see
their dark leer  in  the phosphorescent  seabeach  nightlight... That  first
night I sit there and  all I know, as I look up, is the kitchen light is on,
on the cliff, to  the right, where somebody's just built a cabin overlooking
all  the  horrible Sur, somebody up there's having a mild and tender  supper
that's  all I know... The lights from the cabin kitchen up there go out like
a little weak lighthouse beacon and ends suspended a thousand feet over  the
crashing shore -- Who would build a cabin  up there but some bored but hoary
old adventurous  architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of
these days a big Orson  Welles  tragedy with screaming ghosts  a woman  in a
white nightgown'll go  flying down that sheer  cliff --  But  actually in my
mind what I really see is the  kitchen lights of that mild  and tender maybe
even  romantic supper up  there, in all that howling fog, and  here I am way
below  in the Vulcan's Forge itself looking up with sad  eyes -- Blanking my
little Camel cigarette  on a billion year old rock that rises behind my head
to a height unbelievable -- The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on
the end  of it,  behind it  the shoulders  of the  great  sea hound cliff go
rising up and back and seeping inland higher and higher till I gasp to think
"Looks like a reclining dog, big  friggin shoulders on  that sonofabitch" --
Riseth and sweepeth and scareth men to death but what is death anyway in all
this water and rock. I fix up my sleeping bag on  the porch of the cabin but
at 2 A. M. the fog starts dripping all wet so I have  to go indoors with wet
sleepingbag  and make new arrangements but  who cant  sleep like a log  in a
solitary cabin  in the  woods, you wake up in the late morning so  refreshed
and realizing the universe namelessly: the universe  is an Angel -- But easy
enough to say when you've had your  escape from  the gooky city turn  into a
success  -- And it's finally only in  the woods you  get  that nostalgia for
"cities"  at last,  you dream  of long gray  journeys  to cities  where soft
evenings'll  unfold like Paris but never seeing  how  sickening  it will  be
because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds
     ... So I tell myself "Be Wise. "

     6

     Though there are faults to Monsanto's cabin like no screened windows to
keep the flies  out in the daytime just big board windows,  so that also  on
foggy days when it's damp if you leave them open it's too cold, if you leave
them closed you cant  see anything and have to light the lamp at noon -- And
but for that no other faults -- It's all marvelous -- And  at first  it's so
amazing to be able to enjoy dreamy afternoon meadows of heather up the other
end of the canyon and just by walking less than a half mile you can suddenly
also enjoy wild gloomy sea coast, or if you're  sick of either of these just
sit by the  creek in a gladey  spot and  dream over snags --  So easy in the
woods to  daydream and pray to  the local spirits and say "Allow me  to stay
here, I only want peace" and those foggy peaks answer back mutely Yes... And
to say to yourself (if  you're  like me with theological preoccupations) (at
least at that time, before I went mad I  still had such preoccupations) "God
who is everything possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream
of an impossible  task and you wake up in a flash, oops, No  Task, it's done
and  gone'... And in  the flush of the  first few days of joy  I confidently
tell  myself  (not  expecting  what I'll do in  three weeks  only) "no  more
dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even  enjoy it,
first in woods like these, then  just calmly  walk and talk among people  of
the world, no  booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks
and junkies and everybody, no more I  ask myself  the  question O why is God
torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only,  in fact,
in Milan,  Paris, just talk to  waiters,  walk around, no  more self-imposed
agony... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that
after all this whole surface of  the world as we know it now will be covered
with the silt of  a billion years in time.. . Yay, for this, more aloneness"
-- "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism -- sit on
curbstones, the hell with the  hot  lights of Hollywood"  (remembering  that
awful time only a year  earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a
third  time under the hot lights  of  the Steve  Alien  Show in  the Burbank
studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Alien
watching  me expectant as he  plunks the piano, I sit  there on the  dunce's
stool and refuse to read a word or open  my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A
R S E for God's sake Steve! " --  "But go ahead, we just wanta  get the tone
of your voice,  just  this last time, I'll let you off  the dress rehearsal"
and I  sit there sweating not saying a word for  a whole minute as everybody
watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it,  " and I go  across the  street to
get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show  by  doing my job
of  reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out
with a Hollywood starlet  who  turns out to  be a big bore trying to read me
her  poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)...
So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time  in the world
to just sit  there  or lie there  or walk  about slowly remembering  all the
details  of life which now because  a million lightyears  away have taken on
the aspect  (as  they  must've for Proust in  his  sealed  room) of pleasant
movies brought up at will and projected for further study -- And pleasure --
As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which
is us.
     Even when one night I'm so happy sighin to turn over to resume my sleep
but a rat suddenly runs over my head, it's marvelous because I then take the
folding cot and put a big wide board on it that covers both sides, so I wont
sink into the canvas confines there, and place two old sleepingbags over the
board, then my own on  top, I have  the most  marvelous  and rat free and in
fact healthy-for-theback bed in the world.
     I  also  take  long  curious  hikes to  see  what's what  in the  other
direction inland,  going up a few miles  along  the dirt road  that leads to
isolated ranches  and logging camps  -- I come to giant  sad  quiet  valleys
where you see 150  foot tall  redwood trees with  sometimes  one little bird
right on  the topmost peaktwig sticking straight up  -- The bird balances up
there surveying the fog and the  great trees --  You see one  single  flower
nodding  on a cliff side far across  the canyon, or a huge knot in a redwood
tree  looking  like Zeus"  face, or  some  of  God's little  crazy creations
goofing  around in creek pools (zigzag bugs), or  a  sign  on a lonely fence
saying "M. P. Passey. No  Trespassing', or terraces of fern  in the dripping
redwood shade,  and you think "A long way from the beat generation,  in this
rain  forest'... So I angle back down to the home canyon and  down  the path
past  the  cabin and out  to the sea  where the mule  is on  the  sea shore,
nibbling under  that one  thousand  foot bridge  or sometimes just  standing
staring at me with big brown Garden of Eden eyes -- The mule being  a pet of
one of  the families who have a cabin  in the canyon and it, as I say Alf by
name, just wanders from one  end of the canyon where the  corral fence stops
him, to the wild seashore where the sea stops him but a strange Gauguinesque
mule  when you first  see  him, leaving his black dung on  the perfect white
sand,  an  immortal and  primordial mule  owning  a  whole valley -- I  even
finally  later  find out  where Alf  sleeps which is like a sacred  grove of
trees  in  that dreaming meadow of heather --  So I  feed Alf the last of my
apples which he receives with big faroff teeth inside his soft hairy muzzle,
never  biting,  just  muffing up  my apple from  my outstretched  palm,  and
chomping away sadly, turning to scratch his behind against a tree with a big
erotic motion that  gets  worse and  worse till finally he's  standing there
with erectile dong that would scare the Whore of Babylon let alone me.
     All  kinds  of  strange  and  marvelous  things like  the  weird Ripley
situation of a huge tree  that's fallen across  a creek maybe 500  years ago
and's made a bridge thereby, the other end of its trunk is now buried in ten
feet of silt and foliage, strange enough but  out  of  the middle trunk over
the water rises straight another redwood tree looking like it's been planted
in the  treetrunk, or stuck down into it by a God hand, I cant figure it out
and stare at this chewing furiously on big choking handfulls of peanuts like
a college boy -- (and only weeks before falling on my head in the Bowery) --
Even when a rancher car goes by I daydream mad ideas like, here comes Farmer
Jones and his two daughters and here I  am with a 6o-foot redwood tree under
my arm walking  slowly pulling it along, they are amazed and scared, "Are we
dreaming?  can anybody  be  that  strong? " they even  ask me and my big Zen
answer  is "You only think I'm strong" and I go on down the road carrying my
tree  -- This has  me  laughing in clover fields  for hours... I  pass a cow
which turns to look at me as it takes a big dreamy crap -- Back in the cabin
I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves  skittering on the tin
roof, it's August in Big Sur -- I  fall asleep  in the chair and when I wake
up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly
remember  them  from  long  ago,  even  to the  particular clumpness of  the
thickets, stem by stem, the twist of them, like an old  home place, but just
as I'm wondering what all this mess is, bang, the wind closes the cabin door
on my sight of  it! So I conclude "I see  as much as doors'll allow, open or
shut" -- Adding, as I get up, in a  loud English  Lord voice nobody can hear
anyway,  "An issue broached is an issue smote,  Sire, "  pronouncing 'issue"
like "iss-yew"  -- And this has me laughing all  through supper  -- Which is
potatoes wrapped  in foil and thrown  on the fire, and  coffee, and hunks of
Spam roasted on a spit,  and applesauce and  cheese --  And when I light the
lamp of after-supper  reading, here  comes the nightly moth  to  his nightly
death at my  lamp... After I put out the lamp temporarily, there's the  moth
sleeping on the wall  not realizing I've put it on again.  Meanwhile  by the
way  and however, every day  is  cold and  cloudy, or damp, not cold  in the
eastern sense, and  every night is  absolutely fog: no stars  whatever to be
seen... But this too turns out to be a marvelous circumstance as  I find out
later,  it's the "damp season"  and the  other dwellers (weekenders)  of the
canyon don't come out  on  weekends, I'm absolutely alone  for  weeks on end
(because  later in  August when the  sun conquered  the fog  suddenly I  was
amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down  the valley which had
been mine  only mine, and when I tried to go to the beach to squat and write
there were whole families having outings, some of them younger  people who'd
simply parked their cars up on the high bridge bluff and climbed down) (some
of them in fact gangs of yelling hoodlums)... So the  rainforest  summer fog
was  grand  and  besides  when  the  sun  prevailed  in  August  a  horrible
development  took  place, huge  blasts of  frightening gale like  wind  came
pouring into the  canyon making all the trees roar with a really frightening
intensity  that sometimes built up to a booming  war of trees that shook the
cabin and  woke you up -- And was in fact one of the things that contributed
to my mad fit.
     But  the most marvelous day of all when I  completely forgot who  I was
where I was or the time of day just with my  pants rolled  up above my knees
wading in the creek rearranging  the rocks and some of the snags so that the
water where I  stooped (near the sandy shore) to get jugfuls  would, instead
of just sluggishly passing by  shallow over mud,  with bugs in it,  now come
rushing in a pure gurgly clear stream and deep too  -- I dug into  the white
sand  and arranged underground rocks so now I could stick a jug in there and
tilt the  opening  to the stream and  it  would fill up instantly with clear
rushing unstagnated bugless drinking  water --  Making  a mill race, is what
it's called -- And  because  now the water rushed so fast  and deep right by
the sandy stooping place I had to build a kind of  seawall of  rocks against
that  rush so that the shore would not be silted  away  by the race -- Doing
that, fortifying the outside of the  seawall with smaller  rocks and finally
at  sundown  with  bent  head over  my  sniffling  endeavors (the  way a kid
sniffles when he's been playing  all day) I  start inserting tiny pebbles in
the spaces between the stones so that  no water can sneak over to  wash away
the shore, even down  to the  tiniest sand, a perfect  sea wall, which I top
with  a wood plank for everybody  to kneel  on when they come there to fetch
their  holy water -- Looking  up  from this work of an entire day, from noon
till sundown, amazed to see where I was,  who I  was, what I'd done  --  The
absolute innocence like of Indian fashioning a  canoe all alone in the woods
-- And as I say only weeks earlier I'd  fallen flat on my head in the Bowery
and everybody thought I'd hurt myself-  So  I make supper with  a happy song
and  go out in the foggy  moonlight  (the moon  sent its  white luminescence
through) and  marveled to watch the new swift  gurgling clear water run with
its  pretty flashes of light -- 'And when the  fog's over and the  stars and
the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight. "
     And such things -- A  whole mess of little joys  like  that  amazing me
when I came back  in the horror of later  to see how they'd  all changed and
become sinister, even my poor little wooden platform  and mill  race when my
eyes and  stomach nauseous and my soul screaming a thousand  babbling words,
oh -- It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.


        7

     Because on the fourth day I began to get bored and noted it in my diary
with amazement, "Already bored? " -- Even tho  the handsome words of Emerson
would shake me out of that where he says (in one of those  little redleather
books, in the  essay on "Self Reliance" a man "is  relieved and gay when  he
has  put  his heart into his work and  done his  best') (applicable  both to
building simple silly little millraces and  writing  big stupid stories like
this) Words from  the trumpet  of  the morning  in America,  Emerson, he who
announced Whitman  and also said "Infancy conforms to nobody" -- The infancy
of  the simplicity of just being happy in the woods, conforming  to nobody's
idea about what to do, what should be done --  "Life is not an  apology"  --
And  when a vain and malicious  philanthropic  abolitionist  accused  him of
being blind  to  the issues of slavery  he  said "Thy  love afar is spite at
home" (maybe the philanthropist had Negro help  anyway) -- So once again I'm
Ti Jean the Child, playing, sewing  patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes
(always kept the kettle boiling on the fire and  anytime dishes needed to be
washed I just pour hot hot water into pan with Tide soap  and soak them good
and then wipe them clean after scouring with little 5-&-10 wire scourer)  --
Long  nights  simply  thinking  about the  usefulness  of that  little  wire
scourer, those  little yellow copper things  you buy in  supermarkets for 10
cents, all to  me infinitely more interesting than the  stupid and senseless
"Steppenwolf novel in the  shack which  I read  with a  shrug, this old fart
reflecting the "conformity" of today and all the while he thought  he  was a
big Nietzsche,  old  imitator of Dostoevsky  fifty years too  late (he feels
tormented in a "personal hell" he calls it because he doesnt like what other
people like! )
     -- Better at noon to watch the orange and black Princeton colors on the
wings of a butterfly -- Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the
shore.
     Maybe  I shouldna gone  out and scared or  bored or belabored myself so
much, tho, on that beach at night which would scare any  ordinary  mortal --
Every night around eight after  supper I'd put on my  big fisherman coat and
take the  notebook,  pencil  and  lamp and  start down the trail  (sometimes
passing ghostly Alf on the  way) and go under that frightful high bridge and
see through  the dark fog ahead the  white mouths of ocean coming high at me
-- But knowing  the terrain I'd walk right on,  jump the beach creek, and go
to my corner  by the cliff not far from  one of the caves and sit there like
an  idiot in the  dark writing down the sound of  the waves  in the notebook
page (secretarial  notebook) which I  could  see white in the  darkness  and
therefore without benefit of lamp scrawl on -- I was afraid to light my lamp
for fear I'd scare the people way up there on the cliff eating their nightly
tender supper -- (later found  out there  was nobody up  there eating tender
suppers, they were overtime carpenters finishing the place in bright lights)
--  And  I'd get scared of the rising tide  with its  15 foot waves  yet sit
there hoping in faith that Hawaii warnt  sending no tidal wave I  might miss
seeing in the dark coming from miles away high as Groomus -- One night I got
scared anyway so sat  on top of 10-foot cliff at the  foot of the big  cliff
and the waves are going "Rare, he rammed the gate rare" -- "Raw roo roar" --
"Crowsh'- the way waves sound especially at night -- The sea not speaking in
sentences so much as in short lines: "Which one?... the one ploshed?...  the
same, ah  Boom'... Writing down these fantastic inanities actually but yet I
felt I  had to do  it because James Joyce wasn't about to do  it  now he was
dead (and figuring "Next year I'll write the different sound of the Atlantic
crashing say  on the  night shores  of Cornwall,  or  the  soft sound of the
Indian  Ocean crashing at the mouth  of the Ganges maybe') -- And I just sit
there  listening  to the waves talk all up and  down the sand  in  different
tones of voice  'Ka bloom, kerplosh, ah ropey otter barnacled be crowsh, are
rope the angels in all the sea? " and such -- Looking up occasionally to see
rare  cars  crossing the high  bridge and  wondering what they'd see on this
drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below
in all that windy fury sitting in the dark writing in the dark -- Some  sort
of sea  beatnik, tho anybody wants to call me a  beatnik for THIS better try
it if they  dare  -- The huge black rocks seem to move  -- The  bleak  awful
roaring isolateness, no ordinary  man could do it I'm telling you --  / am a
Breton! I cry and the  blackness speaks back "Les poissons de la mer parlent
Breton" (the  fishes  of  the sea speak  Breton)  -- Nevertheless I go there
every night even tho I dont feel like it, it's my  duty (and probably  drove
me mad), and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem "Sea'.
     Always so  wonderful in fact to get away from that and back to the more
human woods and come to the cabin where the fire's still red and you can see
the Bodhisattva's lamp, the glass of ferns on the  table, the box of Jasmine
tea nearby, all so gentle and human after that  rocky deluge out there -- So
I  make an excellent pan of muffins and  tell myself 'Blessed is the man can
make his own bread" --  Like that,  the whole three weeks, happiness --  And
I'm rolling my  own cigarettes, too -- And as I say sometimes I meditate how
wonderful  the fantastic  use I've  gotten out of cheap little articles like
the scourer, but in this instance I think of  the marvelous belongings in my
rucksack like my 25-cent plastic shaker with which I've just made the muffin
batter  but also I've used it in  the past to drink  hot tea, wine,  coffee,
whiskey and even stored clean handkerchiefs in it when I traveled -- The top
part of  the shaker, my holy cup, and had it for five years now -- And other
belongings so valuable compared to the worthlessness of expensive things I'd
bought and never used -- Like my black soft sleeping sweater also five years
which I was now wearing in the damp Sur summer night and day, over a flannel
shirt in  the cold, and just the sweater for the night's sleep in the bag --
Endless use  and virtue  of it! -- And  because the expensive things were of
ill use,  like the fancy pants I'd bought for recent recording  dates in New
York  and other television appearances and  never even  wore  again, useless
things like a  $40 raincoat I never wore because it didn't have slits in the
side pockets (you pay for the  label and  the so called "tailoring') -- Also
an expensive tweed jacket bought for TV and never  worn again  -- Two  silly
sports shirts bought for Hollywood never  worn again and were 9  bucks each!
-- And it's almost tearful to realize and remember the old green T-shirt I'd
found,  mind  you,  eight years  ago,  mind you, on  the DUMP in Watsonville
California mind  you, and got fantastic use and  comfort  from  it  --  Like
working  to fix that new stream  in the creek to flow through the convenient
deep new waterhole near the wood platform  on the bank, and losing myself in
this like  a  kid playing, it's  the  little things that  count (cliches are
truisms and  all truisms are true) -- On  my deathbed I could be remembering
that creek  day  and forgetting  the  day MGM  bought  my book,  I  could be
remembering  the  old lost green dump T-shirt  and forgetting  the sapphired
robes -- Mebbe the best way to get into Heaven.
     I go back  to the beach in the daytime to write my "Sea', I stand there
barefoot by the  sea stopping to scratch one ankle with one toe, I  hear the
rhythm  of those waves, and they're saying suddenly "Is Virgin you trying to
fathom me" -- I go back to make a pot of tea.

     Summer afternoon...
     Impatiently chewing
     The Jasmine leaf

     At high noon the sun always coming out at last, strong, beating down on
my nice high porch where I sit with books and coffee and  the noon I thought
about the ancient Indians who  must have inhabited this canyon for thousands
of  years,  how  even as far  back as the loth century this valley must have
looked  the same,  just  different trees: these  ancient  Indians simply the
ancestors of the Indians of only  recently say  1860... How they've all died
and quietly buried their grievances and  excitements How the  creek may have
been  an inch deeper since logging operations of the last sixty  years  have
removed  some  of the  watershed  in the hills  back there...  How the women
pounded the local acorns,  acorns or shmacorns,  I finally found the natural
nuts of the valley and they  were sweet tasting -- And men hunted deer -- In
fact God knows what they did because I wasn't here -- But the same valley, a
thousand years of dust more or less over their footsteps of A. D. 960 -- And
as far as I can see the world is too  old for us  to talk about it with  our
new  words --  We will pass  just as quietly through  life (passing through,
passing through) as  the 10th  century  people  of this valley only  with  a
little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a
million  years --  The  world being just  what it  is,  moving  and  passing
through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to  complain about --
Even the  rocksof  the valley had earlier rock ancestors, a billion  billion
years ago, have  left  no howl of complaint -- Neither the bee, or the first
sea urchins, or the clam, or the severed paw -- All said So-Is  sight of the
world,  right there in front  of my nose as  I look, -- And  looking at that
valley in  fact  I also realize  I  have to  make  lunch and  it wont be any
different than the lunch of those olden men and  besides it'll taste good --
Everything is the  same,  the  fog says "We are fog and we fly by dissolving
like  ephemera, " and the  leaves say "We  are leaves and we  jiggle in  the
wind, that's all, we come and go, grow  and  fall" -- Even the paper bags in
my garbage pit say "We are man transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp,
we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but
we'll be  mush again  with  our sisters the leaves come rainy season" -- The
tree stumps say "We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes
by wind, we have  big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth'...
Men  say "We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make  paper bags, we think
wise thoughts,  we  make  lunch,  we look around, we make  a great effort to
realize  everything is the  same" -- While the  sand says  "We are  sand, we
already know, " and the sea says "We are always come and go, fall and plosh.
" -- The empty blue sky  of space says "All this comes back to me, then goes
again, and  comes back again,  then goes again,  and I don't care, it  still
belongs to me" -- The  blue sky adds "Dont call me eternity, call me  God if
you like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the tree
stump is paradise, the paper  bag is  paradise, the man is paradise, the fog
is paradise"  -- Can you imagine  a man with mar-velous insights  like these
can  go mad  within a month? (because you must admit all those talking paper
bags and sands were telling the  truth) -- But I  remember seeing  a mess of
leaves suddenly go skittering  in the wind and into the creek, then floating
rapidly down the creek toward the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even
then of "Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know
or say  or do" --  And a bird who was  on a crooked branch is suddenly  gone
without my even hearing him.

     8

     But there's moonlit  fognight, the  blossoms of the fire  flames in the
stove  --  There's  giving an apple to the mule, the big lips taking hold...
There's the bluejay drinking my canned milk by throwing his head back with a
miffle  of milk on his beak -- There's the scratching  of the  raccoon or of
the rat out  there, at night  --  There's the  poor little mouse  eating her
nightly   supper  in  the  humble  corner  where  I've   put  out  a  little
delight-plate full  of cheese  and chocolate candy  (for my days  of killing
mice are  over) -- There's  the raccoon  in  his fog, there  the man to  his
fireside,  and  both  are lonesome  for God  -- There's me coming back  from
seaside night sittings  like  a muttering old Bhikku stumbling down the path
--  There's me throwing my spotlight on a sudden raccoon  who  clambers up a
tree his little heart beating  with fear but I yell  in  French "Hello there
little  man" (allo ti  bon-homme)  -- There's  the bottle  of  olives,  4gc,
imported, pimentos, I eat them one by one wondering about the late afternoon
hillsides of Greece -- And there's my  spaghetti... with tomato sauce and my
oil and vinegar salad and my applesauce relishe my dear, and my black coffee
and Roquefort cheese and  after-dinner nuts, my  dear, all in the  woods  --
(Ten  delicate olives slowly  chewed at midnight is something no one's  ever
done in luxurious restaurants) --  There's the  present moment  fraught with
tangled woods  -- There's the bird  suddenly quiet on his  branch while  his
wife glances  at  him... There's the grace  of an axe handle  as good as  an
Eglevsky  ballet... There's 'Mien Mo  Mountain" in the fog illumined  August
moon mist  among  other  heights gorgeous  and  misty rising in dimmer tiers
somehow rosy in the night like the classic silk paintings of China and Japan
-- There's  a bug, a helpless  little  wingless crawler, drowning in a water
can, I get it out and it wanders and goofs on  the porch till I get sick  of
watching -- There's the spider  in the  outhouse minding his own business...
There's my  side of bacon hanging from a hook on the ceiling of the shack --
There's the  laughter  of  the loon in the shadow of the moon-There's an owl
hooting  in weird Bodhidharma  trees --  There's flowers and redwood logs --
There's the simple woodfire and the careful yet absent-minded  feeding of it
which is an activity that like all activities is no-activity (Wu Wei) yet it
is a meditation in itself especially because all woodfires, like snowflakes,
are  different  every   time...  Yes,  there's  the  resinous  purge  of   a
flame-enveloped redwood log -- Yes the cross-sawed  redwood log turns into a
coal and looks  like a  City  of the Gandharvas or like a  western butte  at
sunset -- There's the bhikku's broom, the kettle --  There's the laced  soft
fud over the sand, the sea -- There's all these avid preparations for decent
sleep like the night  I'm looking for my  sleeping  socks (so's not to dirty
the sleepingbag inside) and find myself  singing "A donde es me sockiboos? "
-- Yes, and down in  the valley there's my burro, Alf, the only living being
in sight -- There's in mid of sleep the moon appearing  -- There's universal
substance which is divine substance because where else can it be? -- There's
the family  of deer on  the dirt road at dusk...  There's the creek coughing
down the glade -- There's the fly on my thumb rubbing its nose then stepping
to the  page of my book-There's the hummingbird swinging his head from  side
to side like a hoodlum --  There's all that, and all my  fine thoughts, even
unto my ditty  written to the sea "I took a pee, into the sea, acid to acid,
and me to ye" yet I went crazy inside three weeks.
     For  who  could  go crazy that could be  so relaxed as  that: but wait:
there are the signposts of something wrong.

     9

     The first signpost  came after that marvelous day I went hiking, up the
canyon road again to  the  highway at the  bridge where there was a  rancher
mailbox where I could dump mail (a letter to my mother and saying in it give
a kiss to Tyke, my cat, and a  letter to old buddy Julien addressed to Coaly
Rustnut from  Runty Onenut)  and  as  I walked way up there I could see  the
peaceful roof of my cabin way below  and  half  mile away in  the old trees,
could see the porch, the cot where I slept,  and my  red handkerchief on the
bench beside the  cot (a simple little sight: of my handkerchief a half mile
away  making  me unaccountably  happy) -- And  on the  way back  pausing  to
meditate in the grove of trees  where Alf the  Sacred Burro slept and seeing
the roses of the  unborn in my  closed eyelids just as clearly as I had seen
the red handkerchief and also my own footsteps in the  seaside sand from way
up on  the bridge, saw, or heard, the words "Roses of  the Unborn"  as I sat
crosslegged in soft meadow sand, heard that awful stillness at  the heart of
life,  but felt strangely low,  as tho premonition of the next day... When I
went to the sea in the afternoon  and suddenly took a huge deep Yogic breath
to  get  all that  good sea  air  in me but somehow just got an overdose  of
iodine,  or  of evil,  maybe  the  sea  caves,  maybe  the  seaweed  cities,
something, my heart suddenly  beating  -- Thinking  I'm gonna  get the local
vibrations instead here I am almost fainting only it isn't an ecstatic swoon
by St  Francis,  it  comes  over  me  in the  form of  horror of an  eternal
condition  of  sick mortality  in me --  In  me  and  in  everyone... I felt
completely nude of  all poor protective devices like thoughts  about life or
meditations under  trees and the  "ultimate"  and all that shit, in fact the
other  pitiful devices of making supper or  saying "What I do now next? chop
wood? " -- I see myself as just doomed, pitiful -- An awful realization that
I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do
to  keep  the  show  going and  actually I'm just  a sick  clown and  so  is
everybody else... All  all of it, pitiful as it is, not even really any kind
of commonsense  animate effort to ease  the soul in  this horrible  sinister
condition (of mortal  hopelessness)  so I'm left sitting  there  in the sand
after having almost fainted  and stare at  the waves which suddenly  are not
waves  at all, with I  guess  what  must have been the  goopiest downtrodden
expression  God if  He exists must've ever  seen in His  movie career --  Eh
vache, I hate to write -- All my tricks laid bare, even the realization that
they're laid bare itself laid bare as a lotta bunk -- The sea seems to  yell
to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DONT HANG AROUND HERE -- For  after all the sea must
be like God,  God isn't asking us to mope  and suffer  and sit by the sea in
the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us
the tools of self  reliance  after all to  make it  straight thru  bad  life
mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope... But some miserables like me don't
even know it, when it comes to us we're amazed -- Ah, life is a gate, a way,
a  path to  Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and  joy and  love or some
sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH... but I ran
away  from the seashore  and  never  came  back  again  without  that secret
knowledge: that it didnt want me there, that  I was a fool  to  sit there in
the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.
     That being the first indication of my later flip -- But also on the day
of leaving the  cabin to hitch hike back  to  Friscoand see everybody and by
now I'm tired of my food (forgot  to bring jello, you  need  jello after all
that bacon fat and cornmeal in  the  woods, every woodsman needs  jello) (or
cokes)  (or something) But it's time to leave, I'm  now  so scared  by  that
iodine blast by the  sea and  by the  boredom of the cabin I take 20 dollars
worth of perishable food  left and spread it out  on  a big board below  the
cabin porch  for the  bluejays and the raccoon and the mouse and  the  whole
lot, pack up, and go  -- But  before I go  I realize this isn't my own cabin
(here's  the  second signpost  of my  madness), I  have  no  right  to  hide
Monsanto's rat poison, as I've been  doing, feeding the mouse instead,  as I
said -- So like a dutiful guest in another man's cabin I  take the cover off
the rat poison but compromise by simply leaving the box on the top shelf, so
nobody can complain -- And go off like that -- But during my absence, but --
You'll see.


     10

     With my  mind even  and upright and abiding nowhere, as Hui  Neng would
say, I  go dancing off like a fool from my sweet retreat, rucksack  on back,
after only three weeks and  really after only three or four days of boredom,
and go hankering back for the city -- "You go out  in joy and in sadness you
return, " says Thomas a Kempis talking about all the fools who go  forth for
pleasure like high  schoolboys  on Saturday night hurrying clacking down the
sidewalk  to  the car  adjusting their  ties  and rubbing their  hands  with
anticipatory zeal,  only to  end up Sunday  morning groaning in blearly beds
that Mother has to make anyway -- It's a beautiful day as I come out of that
ghostly canyon  road  and step  out on the coast highway, just this  side of
Raton Canyon bridge, and there they are, thousands and thousands of tourists
driving by slowly on the high curves all oo ing and aa ing at  all that vast
blue panorama of  sea washing  and raiding at  the coast  of California -- I
figure I'll get a ride into Monterey real easy and take the bus there and be
in  Frisco by nightfall for a big ball of wino yelling with the gang, I feel
in  fact Dave Wain oughta be back  by now, or Cody will be ready for a ball,
and  there'll be girls, and  such  and  such, forgetting entirely  that only
three  weeks previous  I'd been  sent  fleeing from that gooky city  by  the
horrors -- But hadn't the sea told me to flee back to my own reality?
     But it is beautiful  especially to see up ahead north a vast expanse of
curving seacoast with inland mountains  dreaming  under  slow clouds, like a
scene  of  ancient  Spain,  or  properly really  like a  scene of  the  real
essentially Spanish California, the  old Monterey pirate  coast right there,
you  can see  what the Spaniards  must've thought  when they came around the
bend in their magnificent sloopies and saw  all that dreaming fatland beyond
the seashore whitecap doormat  -- Like  the land of gold -- The old Monterey
and Big Sur and Santa Cruz  magic -- So I confidently adjust  my pack straps
and start trudging down the road looking back over my shoulder to thumb.
     This  is the first  time I've hitch hiked in years and I  soon begin to
see things  have  changed in America, you  cant get  a ride any more (but of
course especially on a strictly tourist road like this coast highway with no
trucks or business)... Sleek long stationwagon after wagon comes sleering by
smoothly, all colors  of the rainbow  and pastel at that, pink, blue, white,
the  husband  is in the driver's seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat
with a long  baseball visor making him look witless and idiot -- Besides him
sits wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering, even  if
he wanted to pick me up or anybody up she wouldn't let him -- But in the two
deep backseats  are  children,  children,  millions  of children,  all ages,
they're fighting and screaming over ice cream, they're spilling vanilla  all
over the  Tartan seatcovers  -- There's no room anymore  anyway  for a hitch
hiker, tho conceivably the poor bastard might be allowed to ride like a meek
gunman or silent murderer  in the very back platform of the wagon,  but here
no,  alas! here  is ten  thousand  racks of drycleaned and perfectly pressed
suits and  dresses of all sizes  for  the family  to look  like millionaires
every time they stop at a roadside dive for bacon and eggs -- Every time the
old man's  trousers start to get creased a little  in the front he's made to
take down  a fresh pair of slacks from the back rack and  go  on, like that,
bleakly, tho he might have secretly wished just a  good oldtime fishing trip
alone  or  with his buddies for  this year's vacation  -- But  the  PTA  has
prevailed over every one of his desires by  now, 1960s, it's no time for him
to yearn for Big Two Hearted River and the old  sloppy pants  and  string of
fish  in the tent,  or the woodfire with  Bourbon at night  -- It's time for
motels, roadside driveins, bringing napkins to the gang  in  the car, having
the  car  washed  before the  return trip --  And if he thinks  he wants  to
explore  any of the silent secret roads of America it's no  go, the lady  in
the  sneering  dark  glasses  has now become  the navigator  and  sits there
sneering over her previously printed blue-lined roadmap distributed by happy
executives  in neckties to the vacationists of  America who  would also wear
neckties (after having come along so far) but the vacation fashion is sports
shirts,  long visored hats,  dark glasses, pressed slacks  and  baby's first
shoes  dipped in  gold  oil dangling  from  the  dashboard  -- So  here I am
standing in that road with that  big woeful rucksack but also probably  with
that expression of  horror on my face after all those nights sitting in  the
seashore  under giant  black cliffs,  they  see  in me the very apotheosical
opposite  of  their  every vacation  dream  and of course  drive on --  That
afternoon I  say about five thousand cars  or probably three thousand passed
me not one of them ever dreamed of stopping -- Which didnt bother me  anyway
because at  first seeing that gorgeous  long coast  up to Monterey I thought
"Well I'll  just hike right in, it's  only fourteen miles, I oughta do  that
easy" -- And on the way there's all kindsa interesting things  to see anyway
like the seals barking on  rocks  below, or quiet old farms  made of logs on
the  hills  across the highway, or  sudden upstretches that  go along dreamy
seaside meadows  where cows  grace  and graze in full sight of endless  blue
Pacific  --  But  because I'm  wearing desert boots with  their  fairly thin
soles, and the sun is beating  hot  on the  tar road, the heat  finally gets
through the soles and I begin to deliver heat blisters inmy sockiboos -- I'm
limping along wondering what's  the matter with me  when I  realize I've got
blisters -- I  sit by the  side of the road  and look -- I take out my first
aid kit from the pack and apply unguents and put on cornpads and carry on --
But the combination of the heavy pack and the heat of the road increases the
pain of the  blisters until finally I realize  I've got to hitch hike a ride
or  never make  it to  Monterey at all. But the  tourists bless their hearts
after all, they couldnt know, only think I'm having a big happy hike with my
rucksack and they drive on, even tho I stick out my thumb
     -- I'm in despair because I'm really stranded now, and by the time I've
walked seven miles I still have seven to go but I cant go on another step --
I'm  also thirsty and there  are absolutely no filling  stations or anything
along the way
     -- My  feet  are  ruined and  burned,  it develops  now  into a day  of
complete  torture,  from  nine  o'clock  in  the morning  till four  in  the
afternoon I negotiate those nine or so miles when I finally have to stop and
sit down and wipe the blood off my feet -- And then when I fix the  feet and
put the shoes on again, to hike  on, I can only do it mincingly  with little
twinkletoe steps like Babe Ruth, twisting footsteps every way I can think of
not  to press too  hard on any particular  blister  -- So that  the tourists
(lessening  now  as the  sun  starts to  go down) can  now plainly see  that
there's  a man  on the highway limping under  a  huge pack and  asking for a
ride, but still they're afraid he may be the Hollywood hitch  hiker with the
hidden  gun and  besides  he's got a  rucksack  on his back as tho he'd just
escaped  from  the  war in Cuba... Or's got dismembered  bodies  in  the bag
anyway -- But as I say I dont blame them.
     The only car that  passes that might  have given me a ride is going  in
the wrong direction, down  to  Sur, and it's a  rattly old  car of some kind
with a big bearded "South Coast Is the Lonely Coast" folksinger in it waving
at me  but finally a little truck pulls up and waits  for  me 50 yards ahead
and I  limprun that distance on daggers in my feet -- It's  a guy with a dog
-- He'll drive me  to the next gas station, then he turns off -- But when he
learns about my  feet  he takes me  clear to  the bus station in Monterey --
Just  as a gesture  of kindness --  No particular reason, and  I've  made no
particular plea about my feet, just mentioned it.
     I  offer to buy him a  beer but he's going on  home for supper so  I go
into the bus station and clean up and change and pack things away, stow  the
bag in the  locker, buy  the bus ticket,  and go limping quietly in the blue
fog  streets of Monterey  evening feeling lights  as  feather and happy as a
millionaire -- The last time I ever hitch hiked -- And NO RIDES a sign.


        11

     The next sign is in  Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep
in  an  old  skid  row  hotel room I  go to see Monsanto  at his City Lights
bookstore and  he's  smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to
see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in
his expression  -- When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your
cat is dead. "
     Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most  men, a lot to fewer
men, but to me, and that cat, it  was  exactly and no lie and sincerely like
the  death of my little brother -- I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my
baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with  his little head
hanging down,  or just purring, for  hours, just as long as I held him  that
way, walking  or sitting -- He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I
just twist him around  my  wrist or drape him and he just purred  and purred
and even when he  got big I still held him that  way, I could even hold this
big  cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd
just purr, he had complete confidence in me -- And when I'd left New York to
come to my retreat in  the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him
to wait for  me, 'Attends pour  mue kitigingoo" -- But my mother said in the
letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! -- But maybe you'll understand me
by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:

     "Sunday  20  July 1960, Dear Son,  I'm afraid  you wont like  my letter
because I only have sad news  for  you right now.  I really dont know how to
tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke
is gone. Saturday all day  he was fine and seemed  to pick up  strength, but
late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he
started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him  up but
to no availe.  He was  shivering like he was  cold  so I rapped him up  in a
Blanket then he started to throw  up all over  me. And that was  the last of
him. Needless to say how I  feel and what I went through. I  stayed  up till
"day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized
at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket --
and at  7 A. M. went out to dig  his grave. I never did anything in my whole
life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as
you and I.  I  buried him under  the  Honeysuckle vines, the corner,  of the
fence. I just  cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him  come
through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest
thing  happened when  I buried  Tyke, all  the black Birds I fed  all Winter
seemed  to  have known what was going on. Honest  Son this is no lies. There
was  lots and lots of em flying over my  head and  chirping, and settling on
the fence, for a whole hour  after Tyke was laid to rest -- that's something
I'll never forget -- I  wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows
it and saw it.  Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell
you somehow... I'm  so sick not  physically but heart  sick...  I  just cant
believe or realize that  my Beautiful little Tyke is  no more  -- and that I
wont be seeing him come  through his little "Shanty" or  Walking through the
green grass
     ... PS. I've  got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant  go out there
and  see it  empty -- as is.  Well Honey, write  soon again and  be kind  to
yourself. Pray the real "God" -- Your old Mom XXXXXX. "

     So when  Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with
happiness the way  all  people  feel when they  come out  of a long solitude
either in  the woods  or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank  in
fact  with  the  same  strange  idiotic  helplessness as  when  I  took  the
unfortunate deep  breath on the seashore --  All the premonitions  tying  in
together.
     Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile
that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the
solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly  Mona Lisa'ing at
the sight of everything)  --  He sees now how that  smile  has slowly melted
away into a mawk of chagrin -- Of course  he cant  know since I didn't  tell
him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with  my cat and  the
other  previous  cats  has  always  been  a  little   dotty:  some  kind  of
psychological  identification  of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd
taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on
our bellies and watch them lap up milk -- The death of "little brother" Tyke
indeed -- Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe  you  oughta go back to
the cabin for a few more weeks -- or are you just  gonna get drunk again" --
"I'm  gonna  get  drunk  yes"  --  Because anyway  there are  so many things
brewing,  everybody's waiting, I've been daydreaming a thousand wild parties
in the woods -- In fact it's fortunate I've heard of the death of Tyke in my
favorite exciting city of  San Francisco, if I had been home when  he died I
might have gone mad in a different way but  tho I now ran  out  to get drunk
with the boys and still once in a while that funny little smile of  joy came
back as I drank,  and melted  away again because now the smile  itself was a
reminder  of  death, the news made me go mad anyway at the end of the  three
week binge, creeping up  on me finally on that terrible day of St Carolyn By
The Sea as I can also call it -- All, all confusing till I explain.
     Meanwhile anyway poor Monsanto a man of letters wants to  enjoy big new
swappings with me about  writing  and what everybody's doing, and then Fagan
comes into  the store (downstairs to  Monsanto's old rolltop desk making  me
also feel chagrin because it always was the ambition of my youth to end up a
kind of  literary  businessman with  a rolltop  desk, combining my  father's
image with  the  image of myself  as a writer,  which Monsanto  without even
thinking about  it has accomplished at the drop of a hat)  --  Monsanto with
his husky  shoulders, big blue  eyes,  twinkling  rosy skin,  that perpetual
smile  of his  that earned  him the  name Smiler in  college and a smile you
often wondered "Is  it real? " until you  realized  if  Monsanto should ever
stop using that smile how could  the world  go on anyway -- It was that kind
of smile too inseparable  from him  to be believably allowed to disappear --
Words words words but he is a grand guy as I'll show and now with real manly
sympathy he really felt I should not go on big  binges if I felt so bad, "At
any rate, " sez he, "you can go back  a little later huh" -- "Okay Lorry" --
"Did  you write anything? " -- "I wrote the sounds of the sea, I'll tell you
all about it -- It was the most happy three weeks of  my life dammit and now
this  has  to happen, poor little  Tyke -- You  should have  seen him  a big
beautiful yellow Persian the  kind they call calico" -- "Well you still have
my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " -- "Alf the Sacred Burro, he  ha,
he stands  in  groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly  you see  him  it's
almost scarey, but I fed himapples and  shredded wheat  and everything" (and
animals are  so sad and  patient  I thought as  I remembered Tyke's eyes and
Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous  death comes also
to human beings, yea to  Smiler even,  poor  Smiler, and poor Homer his dog,
and all of us) -- I'm also  depressed because I  know how horrible my mother
now feels all  alone without  her little chum in the  house back there three
thousand miles (and indeed  by Jesus it turns out later some silly  beatniks
trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and
scared  her so much  she barricaded  the door with furniture all the rest of
that summer).
     But there's old Ben  Fagan puffing  and chuckling over his pipe so what
the hell, why bother grownup men and poets at that with your own troubles --
So Ben and I and his chum Jonesy also a chuckly pipesmoker go out to the bar
(Mike's  Place) and sip a  few beers,  at first I  vow I'm not going to  get
drunk after all, we  even go out to the park to have a long talk in the warm
sun that always turns to delightful cool foggy dusk in that town of towns --
We're sitting in the park of the big Italian white church watching kids play
and people go by, for some reason I'm bemused by the sight of a blonde woman
hurrying somewhere "Where's she going?  does she have a secret sailor lover?
is she only going to finish her typing  afterhours in the office? what if we
knew Ben what every  one of these people  goin by is headed for, some  door,
some restaurant, some secret romance" -- "You sound like you stored up a lot
of energy  and  innerest in life in those  woods" --  And Ben knows that for
sure because he's  been months in the wilderness too, alone -- Old Ben, much
thinner than he used to be in  our madder Dharma Bum days of five years ago,
a little gaunt  in fact, but still the same  old Ben who stays  up  late  at
night  chuckling  over  the  Lankavatara Scripture and writing  poems  about
raindrops -- And  he knows me very well, he knows I'll get drunk tonight and
for weeks  on  end just on general principles  and that a day will come in a
few weeks when I'll be so exhausted  I  wont be able to talk to  anybody and
he'll come and visit me and just silently at my side be puffing his pipe, as
I sleep -- The kind of  guy he  is -- I trying to explain about  Tyke to him
but  some  people are cat lovers and some ain't, tho Ben always has a little
kitty around his pad -- His pad usually has a straw rug on the floor, with a
pillow  "pon which he  sits crosslegged by a smoking teapot, his bookshelves
full of Stein  and Pound and Wallace Stevens -- A strange quiet poet who was
only beginning to be recognized as a big rosy secret sage (one  of his lines
"When I leave town all  my friends go back  on the sauce') -- And I'm on  my
way to the sauce right now. Because anyway old Dave Wain is back and  Dave I
can see him rubbing his hands in anticipation of another big wild binge with
me like we had the  year before  when he drove me back  to New York from the
west coast, with George Baso the  little Japanese  Zen master hepcat sitting
crosslegged on  the back  mattress of Dave's jeepster  (Willie the  Jeep), a
terrific trip through Las Vegas, St Louis,  stopping off at expensive motels
and drinking  nothing but  the best Scotch out of the bottle all the way  --
And  what better way to go back to New York, I could have blown 190  dollars
on an airplane -- And Dave's never met  the  great Cody and will  be looking
forward to that -- So me and Ben leave the park and  slowly walk to the  bar
on Columbus  Street and I order my  first  double bourbon and gingerale. The
lights are twinkling on outside in that fantastic toy street, I can feel the
joy rise in my soul -- I now remember
     Big Sur with a clear piercing love and agony and even the death of Tyke
fits  in with everything but  I don't realize the enormity of what's yet  to
come -- We  call up Dave  Wain who's  back from Reno  and  he  comes blattin
downto the  bar in his jeepster driving that marvelous  way he does (once he
was a cab-driver) talking all  the time and never making  a mistake, in fact
as good  a driver as Cody altho I  cant imagine anybody  being that good and
asked Cody about it the next day -- But old jealous drivers always point out
faults and complain, "Ah well that Dave Wain of yours doesnt take his curves
right, he eases  up and sometimes  even pokes  the brake a little instead of
just ridin  that old curve  around  on  increased power, man you gotta  work
those  curves" -- Obvious at this time now,  by the way and parenthetically,
that there's so much  to  tell about  the fateful following three weeks it's
hardly possible to  find anyplace to begin. Like  life, actually  -- And how
multiple it all is! -- "And what happened to little old  George Baso, boy? "
-- "Little  old  George Baso  is probably dyin of TB in  a hospital  outside
Tulare"  --  "Gee, Dave, we  gotta  go see  him"  -- "Yessir,  let's do that
tomorrow" -- As usual  Dave has no money whatever but that doesn't bother me
at all, I've got plenty, I  go  out the following  day and cash  500 dollars
worth of travelers  checks just so's me and  old Dave can really have a good
time... Dave likes good food and  drink  and  so do I...  But he's  got this
young kid he  brought back from  Reno called Ron Blake  who is a goodlooking
teenager with blond hair who wants to be a sensational new Chet Baker singer
and comes  on with  that tiresome hipster approach  that was natural five or
ten and even twenty five years  ago but now in 1960 is a pose, in fact I dug
him as  a con man conning Dave (tho for what, I don't know) -- But Dave Wain
that lean  rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie
to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an  abandoned  mining
camp, or  for blattin around  the  desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in
town  to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something
that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate  -- For one  thing is one of
the  world's best  talkers, and funny too  -- As I'll show --  It was he and
George  Baso  who hit on the fantastically  simple  truth that  everybody in
America  was walking around with a dirty behind, but  everybody, because the
ancient  ritual of washing with water  after the toilet had  not occurred in
all the modern  antisepticism -- Says Dave "People in America have all these
racks of dry-cleaned clothes like you  say on  their trips, they spatter Eau
de Cologne  all over  themselves, they  wear Ban  and  Aid or whatever it is
under their armpits, they  get aghast  to see  a spot on a shirt or a dress,
they probably change  underwear and socks  maybe even  twice a day,  they go
around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on
earth  and  they're walkin  around with  dirty azzoles -- Isnt that amazing?
give  me a  little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order
two  more,  I've  been  engrossed, Dave  can order all the drinks  he  wants
anytime, "The President of the  United  States, the big  ministers of state,
the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest
factory worker with all  his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great
engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts
and neckties and great  expensive traveling cases in  which they place these
various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades
and  perfumes are all walking around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is
simply  wash  yourself with soap and water! it hasnt occurred to  anybody in
America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you
think it's  marvelous that we're being called  filthy  unwashed beatniks but
we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles? "  -- The whole azzole
shot  in fact  had spread swiftly and  everybody  I knew and  Dave knew from
coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good
one -- In fact in  Big Sur  I'd instituted a shelf  in  Monsanto's  outhouse
where the soap must be kept and  everyone  had to bring a can of water there
on  each trip -- Monsanto  hadn't heard  about it yet, "Do you  realize that
until we  tell poor Lorenzo  Monsanto the famous  writer that  he is walking
around with  a dirty azzole he will be doing  just that? " -- "Let's go tell
him right now! " -- "Why of course if we wait another minute
     ... and besides do you know what it does to people  to walk around with
a  dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning  guilt  that they cant understand
all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all
that freshly laundered clothes and  Eau de Cologne  in the commute train yet
there's something  gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's
wrong they don't know just what! " -- We rush to  tell Monsanto  at  once in
the book store around the corner. By  now  we're beginning to feel  great...
Fagan  has retired saying typically  "Okay you guys  go ahead and get drunk,
I'm goin home and spend a quiet evening in a hot bath with a book" "Home" is
also where Dave Wain and Ron Blake live -- It's an old rooming house of four
stories on the edge  of the Negro district of San Francisco where Dave, Ben,
Jonesy, a painter called Lanny Meadows, a mad French Canadian drinker called
Pascal and  a Negro called  Johnson all  live  in different rooms with their
clutter of  rucksacks  and  floor mattresses and books  and  gear, each  one
taking turns one day a week to go out and do all  the shopping and come back
and cook  up a big communal dinner in the  kitchen -- All ten or  twelve  of
them sharing the  rent, and with that rotation of dinner, they end up living
comfortable lives with  wild  parties and girls  rushing in, people bringing
bottles, all at about a minimum of seven dollars a week say
     -- It's a wonderful place but at the same  time a little maddening,  in
fact a whole lot maddening because the painter Lanny Meadows loves music and
has installed his Hi Fi speaker in the kitchen altho he applies  the records
in a back  room so the daily cook  may be concentrating on his Mulligan stew
and  all of a  sudden Stravinsky's dinosaurs start  dining  overhead And  at
night there are bottlecrashing parties usually supervised by wild Pascal who
is a sweet kid but crazy when he drinks A regular nuthouse actually and just
exactly  the  image  of what the journalists  want  to  say  about the  Beat
Generation   nevertheless  a  harmless  and  pleasant  agreement  for  young
bachelors and a good idea in the long run  -- Because you can rush into  any
room  and  find  the expert, like  say  Ben's  room and  ask "Hey  what  did
Bodhidharma say to the Second Patriarch?  " -- "He  said  go  fuck yourself,
make your mind like a wall, dont pant after outside  activities and dont bug
me  with your outside plans" -- "So the guy  goes out and stands on his head
in the snow? " "No that was Fubar" -- Or you go runnin into Dave Wain's room
and there  he is sitting  crosslegged on his mattress on  the  floor reading
Jane Austen,  you ask "What's  the  best  way to make beef  Stroganoff? "...
"Beef Stroganoff is very simple, "t'aint nothin but a  good well cooked beef
and onion stew that you  let cool afterwards then you throw in mushrooms and
lotsa sour cream, I'll come down and show  way soon's  I finish this chapter
in this marvelous novel,  I wanta find out  what happens  next" -- Or you go
into the Negro's  room and ask if you  can borrow his  tape recorder because
right  at the  moment some funny things  are being  said in the  kitchen  by
Duluoz and McLear and Monsanto and some newspaperman -- Because the  kitchen
was  also the  main talking room where everybody sat in  a cluster of dishes
and ashtrays and  all kinds of visitors came... The year before  a beautiful
16 year old Japanese girl had come there just to interview me, for instance,
but chaperoned by a Chinese painter The phone rang consistently -- Even wild
Negro hepcats from around the corner  came  in with bottles (Edward Kool and
several others) --  There was Zen, jazz, booze, pot and all the works but it
was somehow  obviated (as a  supposedly degenerate idea)  by the sight of  a
"beatnik"  carefully painting the wall of his room and clean white with nice
little  red  borders around the  door  and  windowframes --  Or  someone  is
sweeping out the livingroom. Itinerant visitors  like me or Ron Blake always
had an extra mattress to sleep on.



        12

     But Dave  is anxious  and so am  I to see  great Cody who is always the
major part of my reason  for journeying to the west coast so  we call him up
to Los  Gatos fifty miles away down  the  Santa Clara  Valley and I hear his
dear  sad voice  saying "Been waitin for ya old  buddy, come on  down  right
away, but I'll be goin to work at midnight so hurry up  and you can visit me
at work soon's the  boss leaves round  two and I'll  show you my new job  of
tire  recappin and see  if you cant bring  a little  somethin like a girl or
sumptin, just kiddin, come on down pal... "
     So there's  old Willie  waiting for us down on the street parked across
from  the little pleasant Japanese liquor store where as usual, according to
our  ritual, I  run and  get  Pernod  or Scotch or anything  good while Dave
wheels around to  pick me up at the  store door, and I get in the front seat
at  Dave's right where I belong all the time like old Honored Samuel Johnson
while everybody else that wants  to come along has to scramble back there on
the  mattress (a full mattress,  the seats are  out) and  squat there or lie
down there and also generally keep silent because when Dave's got  the wheel
of Willie  in his hand  and I've got the  bottle in mine and  we're off on a
trip  the talking all comes from  the front seat... "By  God" yells Dave all
glad  again, "it's  just like old times Jack, gee old Willie's been  sad for
ya, waiting for ya to come back -- So now I'm gonna show ya how old Willie's
even improved with age,  had him  reconditioned  in Reno last month, here he
goes, are you ready Willie?  "  and off  we go and the  beauty of it allthis
particular summer is that the front right seat is broken and just rocks back
and forth gently to  every one of Dave's  driving moves -- It's like sitting
in  a  rocking chair on a porch only this  is a moving  porch and a porch to
talk on at that -- And insteada watching old  men pitch horseshoes from this
here talking porch it's all  that fine white clean line in the middle of the
road  as  we go flying like birds over  the Harrison  ramps and whatnot Dave
always uses  to sneak out  of  Frisco real fast and avoid all the traffic...
Soon we're set straight and pointed head on down beautiful fourlane Bayshore
Highway to that lovely Santa  Clara Valley... But I'm amazed that after only
a  few years the damn thing no longer has prune  fields and vast beet fields
like at Lawrence  when  I  was a  brakeman on  the Southern Pacific and even
after) it's  one long row of houses right down the  line fifty miles  to San
Jose like a great monstrous Los Angeles beginning to grow south of Frisco.
     At  first  it's  beautiful  to  just watch that  white line reel  in to
Willie's snout but when I  start looking around  out the window there's just
endless  housing  tracts and new  blue factories everywhere -- Sez Dave "Yes
that's right, the population explosion is gonna cover every  bit of backyard
dirt in America someday in fact they'll even have to start piling up friggin
levels  of  houses and  others  over that like your city  City CITY till the
houses  reach a hundred miles  in the air in all  directions of the map  and
people  looking at the earth from another  planet with super telescopes will
see a prickly ball hanging in space -- It's like real horrible when you come
to think of it, even  us with our fancy talks, shit man it's all millions of
people and  events piling  up almost  unimaginable now, like raving  baboons
we'll all be  piled on top of each  other  or one another or whatever you're
sposed to say -- Hundreds of millions of  hungry mouths raving for more more
more -- And  the sadness  of it all is that the world hasn't  any  chance to
produce say a writer whose life could really actually touch all this life in
every detail like  you always say, some writers could bring you sobbing thru
the bed fuckin bedcribs of  the  moon to see  it all even unto the goddamned
last gory detail of some dismal robbery of the  heart at  dawn  when no  one
cares  like Sinatra sings" ('When  no  one  cares, "  he sings  in  his  low
baritone but resumes): "Some strict sweeper sweeping it  all up. I  mean the
incredible helplessness I felt Jack when Celine ended his Journey To The End
Of The Night by pissing in the Seine River at dawn there I am thinkin my God
there's  probably somebody pissing in the Trenton River at  dawn right  now,
the  Danube,  the  Ganges, the  frozen  Obi,  the  Yellow,  the  Parana, the
Willamette, the Merrimac in Missouri too, the Missouri itself, the Yuma, the
Amazon, the Thames, the Po, and so and so, it's so friggin endless it's like
poems endless everywhere and no one knows any bettern  old  Buddha  you know
where  he  says  it's  like  "There are  immeasurable  star misty  aeons  of
universes more numerous  than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a
billion lightyears of  multiplication, in fact  if  I were to go on you'd be
scared and couldn't  comprehend and you'd despair so much you'd drop dead, "
that's what  he just about  said in one  of those  sutras  -- Macrocosms and
microcosms  and  chillicosms  and  microbes  and finally  you get  all these
marvelous books a man aint even got  time to read em all, what you gonna  do
in this already piled up multiple world  when you have to think of  the Book
of Songs,  Faulkner, Cesar Birotteau,  Shakespeare,  Satyricons, Dantes,  in
fact long stories guys  tell you in bars, in fact the sutras themselves, Sir
Philip Sidney,  Sterne, Ibn  El  Arabi, the copious  Lope  de  Vega and  the
uncopious  goddamn Cervantes,  shoo, then there's  all  those Catulluses and
Davids and radio  listening skid  row sages  to contend with because they've
all got a million stories too and you too Ron Blake in the backseat shut up!
down to everything  which is so much that it is  of necessity dont you think
Nothing anyway, huh? " (expressing exactly the way I feel, of course).
     And  to corroborate all that about the  too-much-ness of the  world, in
fact, there's Stanley  Popovich also  in  the back  mattress  next  to  Ron,
Stanley  Popovich of New York suddenly arrived in  San Francisco with  Jamie
his Italian beauty girl but's going  to leave her in a few  days to  go work
for the circus, a  big tough  Yugoslav kid who ran the Seven Arts Gallery in
New York with big  bearded beatnik readings  but now comes the circus and  a
whole big on-the-road of his own -- It's too much, in fact right this minute
he's started telling us about circus work -- On top of all that old  Cody is
up ahead with HIS thousand stories -- We all agree it's1 too big  to keep up
with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it,  so  we
center  it all in by swigging  Scotch from the bottle and when it's  empty I
run out of the car and buy another one, period.

     13

     But on the way to Cody's my madness already began to manifest itself in
a  stranger  way,  another one  of those  signposts  of  something  wrong  I
mentioned a ways back: I thought I saw a flying saucer in the  sky over  Los
Gatos --  From five miles  away -- I look and I  see this thing flying along
and mention  it to Dave who takes one brief look and says 'Ah it's only  the
top  of a radio tower" -- It reminds me of the time I took a mescaline  pill
and thought an airplane was a flying saucer (a strange story this, a man has
to be crazy to write it anyway).
     But there's old Cody in the livingroom of his fine ranchito home sittin
over his chess set  pondering a  problem  and right by the fresh woodfire in
the fireplace his wife's set out because she knows I  love fireplaces -- She
a good  friend  of mine too... The kids are sleeping in the back, it's about
eleven, and good  old  Cody  shakes my hand  again  -- Havent  seen  him for
several  years because mainly he's just spent two years in San Quentin on  a
stupid charge of possession of marijuana... He was on his way to work on the
railroad  one night and was short  on time and  his driving license had been
already  revoked for  speeding  so he saw two  bearded  bluejeaned  beatniks
parked, asked them to trade a quick ride to work at the railroad station for
two  sticks  of  tea, they complied and  arrested him -- They were disguised
policemen... For this great crime he spent two  years in San Quentin  in the
same  cell with a murderous gunman  -- His job was  sweeping out the  cotton
mill room -- I expect him to  be all