Mick Warren's imagination frequently ran wild, getting the best of him. His upstairs bed was wedged in a corner between two tall gothic windows. He would lay there looking up at the ceiling high overhead and then at the walls, several coats of mother-of-pearl enamel on ancient tongue-and-groove carpentry.
Below him outside the garden hydrangia moved toward the moon.
He could hear large insects beat against the screens.
Midsummer's Eve.
Her sibilant voice echoed through the halls of his throbbing brain.
Mick Mick Mick!
Tick tick tick. His Rolex watch.
He was afraid to look, afraid of what he might see. There! Writhing in the hydrangia, big as a python, but not a python. The woman---
Mick, invite me upstairs!
He heard the slap of her serpent's tail upon the stairwell wall.
He could still see her rising from the garden soil, breasts and belly moonlit, the black gash of mouth and the molten desire of eye.
Manhood fully aroused, he awaited her coming, and there she was, glistening in a silver mist at the bedroom door. Her bare feet were five-toed porcelain things. Yet she glided, not walked toward him, lithe arms outstretched, lips now ruby wet.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
Pilgrimage
A short story published in Red Bass 1983. Dedicated to Jay Murphy, editor.
The Trailways hurtled through the mountains, its headlamps probing the night.
A sudden tilt woke me. Emerging from the comforting placenta of sleep, I was disoriented and distantly aware of pain. Through the entire length of me rushed this angry river of needles, pumping from my heart and telling me the end of the remission had come. I was a dead man.
Since Memphis the trip had seemed like a descent in a bathysphere, down into the bowels of the darkest sea.
I needed a drink.
There was a pint of Jim Beam in my grip bag.
"Hey, punk. You awake?" A voice full of tobacco cough from across the aisle.
"Who the fuck wants to know?"
"Me."
It was the old dude from the streetcorner. He had a beard like Walt Whitman. His long, frizzy gray hair was tied with a red bandana. His Goodwill clothes, a blazing assortment of wool, cotten and polyester, stank of urine and sweat.
"Hey, Mister Whitman."
"Hey, yourself."
"How did you get on the bus?"
"I got money."
"Evidently."
"You never see me panhandling."
"You asked me for a smoke."
"Ain't the same."
"OK. No argument. Excuse me. I've got to take a piss and wash up."
I took my grip bag. Walking back to the WC, I survived two bends and a climb.
You develope seaman's legs if you ride the bus a lot. I rode the bus a lot.
Hitchhiking used to be a good way to get around. Even up north during the winter. But that was long ago, before things got wired. Folks on the road are crazy now.
My grip bag was for two items. A pint of Jim Beam and my Colt .45 automatic. Everything else was incidental. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, a couple of Bic razors, shave cream, towel, rubbers.
Be prepared. The scout motto.
Inside the WC I sat down and had a drink.
Rocking and jolting, with chemicals sloshing beneath me. Confined in a space not much bigger than a coffin, I eased my mind and felt loose. I was a million light years from home, with no direction home, like a rolling stone---
Oh shit.
I had another drink and counted my dough from the VA.
There was enough money for whiskey, dancing, steak-and-eggs, books, movies, yeah, all-night movies. I prefer to snooze in theatres. Not flopjoints, bus stations or alleys.
Sometimes I hike into the country and sleep under the stars. But too often I wake up thinking I am in the bush with Charlie all around.
Ach!
After Hendersonville I would not need money.
Would not need a thing.
So what the hell? Spend like there is no tomorrow.
I was down to one clip of ball ammo.
Enough.
My traveling days were done.
Someone was rapping on the door.
I opened the door for a corpulent middle-aged woman wrapped in calico.
"Smells like a distillery in here!" she complained.
"Oh, shut up."
Without further words she locked herself inside. I wondered if she would rat on me to the driver.
Walt Whitman was waiting for me.
"Hey, punk."
"Hey."
"Sit here."
"Want to talk? Sure. But I need an aisle between us. Can't you go to the laundry once a year?"
"Hah! Guess I am pretty offensive."
I squeezed his mottled wrist and asked with my hardest poker face, "OK. Now level with me. You're really Howard Hughes. Right?"
It was a mistake to make him laugh. His breayh was green with decay.
"I like you, punk. Tell me. How come you wear your hair like that? Makes you look mean. You're not mean."
"Naw. Not really."
He should have seen me in 1968, riding in the bay of a Cobra gunship, raking the bush with an M-60 with all the glee of a kid in a video arkade. Back then, I mixed whiskey with Dexedrene.
"That's what you call a Mohawk, isn't it?"
My hair was falling out. So I had given myself a haircut and dyed it white.
"It's a Mohawk."
"It's a sensation. You could get arrested for disturbing the peace."
"I know. Hey now. That was some scene in Memphis, eh? I could not believe those guys. Stealing a live chicken and sneaking it into the bus station icking it into a microwave."
"Is that what the ruckus was all about?"
"The damned thing exploded."
"Some kinds of food will do that. I bet it was an awful mess."
"It needed to be hosed into a bodybag."
"You were in Viet Nam."
"Fucking mind-reader."
"I like to play detective. You know. Figure people out Not much else to do when you loiter. I figured you were in the war and got sick. I mean, with some disease."
"Agent Orange. I think it gave me leukemia. At any rate, something did."
"Terrible shame. Young guy like you. I'm sorry."
He left me alone with my favorite book.
I read from "Look Homeward, Angel," a dog-eared companion during this final stretch of travel. From a windy prairie, across the Mississippi, making it to Memphis for a month, then into these mountains---
There would be a gentle rolling fog through the sycamore and maple trees, down the lane past white fences and willows glistening with dew and up over swards of cold grass among the mullberry, blackberry and pine.
There would be the angel carved from Carolina stone, undramatic in that graveyard, dingy with age, no splendor or grace, no eyes turned toward God's heaven or fingers pointing the way.
I would lie there as Wolfe did so long ago, and I would breathe the autumn air and put into my mouth the blued muzzle of the .45.
Death, come swiftly!
The Trailways hurtled through the mountains, its headlamps probing the night.
A sudden tilt woke me. Emerging from the comforting placenta of sleep, I was disoriented and distantly aware of pain. Through the entire length of me rushed this angry river of needles, pumping from my heart and telling me the end of the remission had come. I was a dead man.
Since Memphis the trip had seemed like a descent in a bathysphere, down into the bowels of the darkest sea.
I needed a drink.
There was a pint of Jim Beam in my grip bag.
"Hey, punk. You awake?" A voice full of tobacco cough from across the aisle.
"Who the fuck wants to know?"
"Me."
It was the old dude from the streetcorner. He had a beard like Walt Whitman. His long, frizzy gray hair was tied with a red bandana. His Goodwill clothes, a blazing assortment of wool, cotten and polyester, stank of urine and sweat.
"Hey, Mister Whitman."
"Hey, yourself."
"How did you get on the bus?"
"I got money."
"Evidently."
"You never see me panhandling."
"You asked me for a smoke."
"Ain't the same."
"OK. No argument. Excuse me. I've got to take a piss and wash up."
I took my grip bag. Walking back to the WC, I survived two bends and a climb.
You develope seaman's legs if you ride the bus a lot. I rode the bus a lot.
Hitchhiking used to be a good way to get around. Even up north during the winter. But that was long ago, before things got wired. Folks on the road are crazy now.
My grip bag was for two items. A pint of Jim Beam and my Colt .45 automatic. Everything else was incidental. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, a couple of Bic razors, shave cream, towel, rubbers.
Be prepared. The scout motto.
Inside the WC I sat down and had a drink.
Rocking and jolting, with chemicals sloshing beneath me. Confined in a space not much bigger than a coffin, I eased my mind and felt loose. I was a million light years from home, with no direction home, like a rolling stone---
Oh shit.
I had another drink and counted my dough from the VA.
There was enough money for whiskey, dancing, steak-and-eggs, books, movies, yeah, all-night movies. I prefer to snooze in theatres. Not flopjoints, bus stations or alleys.
Sometimes I hike into the country and sleep under the stars. But too often I wake up thinking I am in the bush with Charlie all around.
Ach!
After Hendersonville I would not need money.
Would not need a thing.
So what the hell? Spend like there is no tomorrow.
I was down to one clip of ball ammo.
Enough.
My traveling days were done.
Someone was rapping on the door.
I opened the door for a corpulent middle-aged woman wrapped in calico.
"Smells like a distillery in here!" she complained.
"Oh, shut up."
Without further words she locked herself inside. I wondered if she would rat on me to the driver.
Walt Whitman was waiting for me.
"Hey, punk."
"Hey."
"Sit here."
"Want to talk? Sure. But I need an aisle between us. Can't you go to the laundry once a year?"
"Hah! Guess I am pretty offensive."
I squeezed his mottled wrist and asked with my hardest poker face, "OK. Now level with me. You're really Howard Hughes. Right?"
It was a mistake to make him laugh. His breayh was green with decay.
"I like you, punk. Tell me. How come you wear your hair like that? Makes you look mean. You're not mean."
"Naw. Not really."
He should have seen me in 1968, riding in the bay of a Cobra gunship, raking the bush with an M-60 with all the glee of a kid in a video arkade. Back then, I mixed whiskey with Dexedrene.
"That's what you call a Mohawk, isn't it?"
My hair was falling out. So I had given myself a haircut and dyed it white.
"It's a Mohawk."
"It's a sensation. You could get arrested for disturbing the peace."
"I know. Hey now. That was some scene in Memphis, eh? I could not believe those guys. Stealing a live chicken and sneaking it into the bus station icking it into a microwave."
"Is that what the ruckus was all about?"
"The damned thing exploded."
"Some kinds of food will do that. I bet it was an awful mess."
"It needed to be hosed into a bodybag."
"You were in Viet Nam."
"Fucking mind-reader."
"I like to play detective. You know. Figure people out Not much else to do when you loiter. I figured you were in the war and got sick. I mean, with some disease."
"Agent Orange. I think it gave me leukemia. At any rate, something did."
"Terrible shame. Young guy like you. I'm sorry."
He left me alone with my favorite book.
I read from "Look Homeward, Angel," a dog-eared companion during this final stretch of travel. From a windy prairie, across the Mississippi, making it to Memphis for a month, then into these mountains---
There would be a gentle rolling fog through the sycamore and maple trees, down the lane past white fences and willows glistening with dew and up over swards of cold grass among the mullberry, blackberry and pine.
There would be the angel carved from Carolina stone, undramatic in that graveyard, dingy with age, no splendor or grace, no eyes turned toward God's heaven or fingers pointing the way.
I would lie there as Wolfe did so long ago, and I would breathe the autumn air and put into my mouth the blued muzzle of the .45.
Death, come swiftly!
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Roman a Clef
The lion stil rules the barrancas,
and the man there is always alone.
--SOUTH COAST
The Kingston Trio
Seamus took a greasy slug through the flab of his armpit, making a mess of his Armani greatcoat. A Colt .380 automatic.Inez Ibanez pulled the little surprise from a gilt party purse as calmly as she would one of her Prozac pills or her Dunhill lighter, and damned if it didn't go off.
Palid stone cold, her death mask sprouted terrible ropes of of Gorgon hair, shocked white. "You promised never to write about me!"
Bang!
At his age he was too existential to whine, but he sure felt like crying. What hurt the most was the ruin of an expensive and central part of his dress-for-success wardrobe.
*
Before donning the swishy Italian job, he practically lived in a black London Fog topcoat, going back 30 years.
I remember when he was a young man and most of his attire came from San Francisco's second-hand stores: good ol' flannels and denims, and boots needing just a dab of saddle soap. Comfort mattered, style didn't.
Thumbing down the Pacific Coast Highway or hiking into the Sierras, he was like a giddy drunk fool in a Kerouac novel, delighted with the wonderful minutia of life. He had bought yhe London Fog way back when folks still jabbered about James Dean in "East Of Eden." Seamus' red hair blazed high and wild against the gray Monteray sky. During his art history period at Berkeley, dating beatnik chicks in their Kansas Studebakers, he used the topcoat as a blanket on chilly wet oyster pirate nights.
After seeing an article in Rogue Magazine about Henry Miller and Big Sur, he thought: I should be writing. What got him going was the photo of the author, Hunter Thompson. Sitting at a small outdoor table with a pot of java and an Underwood-Olivetti portable typewriter, the future guru of gonzo journalism seemed to Seamus as the new ideal. Big Sur and Henry Miller were mere adjuncts to the thin balding man posing for the camera. The author was his own protagonist! What a concept!
Seamus knew one thing for sure. Any author trying such a stunt had better be pretty damned interesting. Otherwise he would be compelled to add fictions, trying to gain a subjectivity commonly found in novels. If he wasn't careful, he could easily become just another flakey dude reinventing himself, much like the Wizard of Oz.
Henry Miller's "autobiography," for example, would have you believe he was one of those lusty priapic chaps who fuck with their suits on, urging their penises, oops, pricks, into hot somnambulistic women during impromtu engagements of high opera. Ejaculations in the office, hall, elevator, etc. Spurting semen onto wool skirts and trousers.
Big Sur, as always, would be the place where the Unknown God created Symmetry and Chaos.
*
Seamus was too shy to talk to Ferlinghetti at the City Lights bookshop, but he bought a load of New Directions and Evergreen Review. He spotted Corso, but felt too intimidated to strike up a conversation. The guy seemed frail, but souped up.
He went to a jazzbar. A hipster blew heraldic raspberries through a conch shell. He scribbled on a napkin: "I dive into the Humboldt & swim with silver-finned women."
In those days he had a pale flat belly, hard like Paul Newman's in the new movie "Sweet Bird Of Youth." Erect, in a lotus position on pink bedsheets, he played to lovers on his penny-whistle a Celtic air, celebrating their dewy rose petals at dawn.
In espresso cafes his bait-and-hook book was "Being and Nothingness."
"L'etre et Neant. How quaint."
She spilled pinot noir. It soaked into the stuff he had arrayed, including a newly-bought lithograph of Feininger's "Halle Cathedral."
"Sorry," she said with a malicious lilt, and raided his mental space like a cat, her aura pulsing mightily in his ears. "What's this?" picking up the scrolled lightograph, "some kind of cubist thing?"
"Seems so."
"Don't know Feininger. Have you seen Picasso's etching of Apollinaire, or Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase?"
"No." Apollnaire who?
"Check them out."
"I will. Do you like them?"
"Not especially. I thought you might."
She paused to torder a drink from their table. Then she continued: "The cathedral is a work of art, rising from the mundane earth, sweeping itself up spirituallly as high as it can, leading the imaginations of its people toward heaven. Tourists take photos of it. Then along comes your artist. Cubist, whatever. He takes it all in, and, through his sensitivity, he expresses himself thus!"
"Tell me something I don't know."
"Excuse me?"
"Our class just covered Picasso's reply to Gertrude Stein, who disapproved of his portrait of her. 'It doesn't look like me,' she said, and he said, 'It will in thirty years.' Hah! He was after her Essence."
And so Seamus met Inez Ibanez, who traced her ancestry to the hildagos of Old California. His folks, however, arrived with the Irish horde that settled part of the Barbary Coast. Whenever he met one of her kind he would be awestruck, like a digger finding something in amber. Her ebony hair flowed the length of her spine, reminding him of the dorsal stripe on a tabby cat. Her chocolate eyes tugged at him with feline magnetism. He thought of those rare cougars that haunt the remaining barrancas.
They laughed over his choice of the Sartre tome on phenomenology to attract women. (Evidently, it had attracted her!)
"Anthropology is the current rage out here," she said. "If you have a thing for French intellectuals, try a copy of Levi-Strauss."
"Hmm." Blue jeans?
"Just a suggestion."
"At the moment I can think of no better company than you."
Suddenly she was blushing. Milky smooth olive skin, ruddy on proud cheekbones. What beauty!
"Let's walk," she said, and they walked to her place.
*
Three wharf cats queued along the plank railing glowered at Seamus as he prepared the filets he had brought home from the seafood restaurant where he assisted the chef. Inez' upstairs flat opened onto a deck overlooking the bay. She had a credit account with Sears, and she shopped like any other bourgeois American. So, the deck had things. Redwood chairs, picnic table and benches, and a Spanish barbacoa grill. He forgave her that extavagance because he loved to use it. Unlike most people with grills, he didn't crave beef. His cuisine came from the sea. Grilled shrimp and fish, tangy with herbs, peppers and spices, got his waterworks flowing as no marinaded steak or burger could. Inez came home, smelled it, and joined the cats.
"That's new," she declared, acknowledging his baseball cap. "San Francisco Giants."
"Yes, ma'am," he saluted, hoisting an Anchor Steam beer.
She marvelled at his organizational skills when creating a meal al fresco. He ranged between fastidious and persnickety, and if something was going wrong, like a sooty pot with his pasta boiling over and dousing the coals, he could be downright combative. He wore an apron she had given him. Emblazoned: EL JEFE, THE CHEF!
He tossed tidbits to the cats and handed Inez a beer.
"Have plans for tonight?" he asked, knowing she was deep into a literary, possibly publishable, project.
She shrugged. "Depends."
"Let's go to a game."
Her visage collapsed like Nob Hill masonry in a quake. She reminded him of a little girl about to be deprived of a highly valued treasure.
"You don't want to."
"Well--"
"It's OK," he said, feigning neutrality when he knew that feigning anything with her would be moronic.
She regained her usual poker face. Inscrutably pleasant. "I didn't say I didn't want to. Baseball means nothing to me, but I would enjoy going out with you."
"You're sure?"
"Yes! Now would you please serve the salmon?"
*
Truly, baseball was not a big deal. He merely wished to fulfill this fantasy of fondling her breasts during a game at Candlestick Park, with the fog drifting in from the bay and covering the outfield. Intimate couples huddling and snuggling, sharing parkas and ponchos. Willy Mays knocking the hide from a long gone ball, only to have it soar up, stall, and fall back to second base. Seamus feeling Inez' nipples rising like minnows in a quiet lake and nibbling the palms of his hands.
On the way to the game they wore turtle-necks and jeans. She took her Navy peacoat. He took his London Fog.
*
One night while pussy-footing through the flat in search of a misplaced book of poems by Gary Snyder, Seamus espied Inez on the sofa of her library. A lamp illuminated her casually clothed nakedness. She was lounging like a centerfold, with a bottle of Dry Sack, and scratching away on a yellow legal pad with her ancient Esterbrook fountain pen. Seamus crept close. His scalp ed and the wispy curls on the nape of his sunburned neck bristled with electric alarm. She seemed to be in a trance. He had heard of his Irish cousins doing this sort of thing, afterwards claiming they were mediums writing messages from the sidhe. Charletans and mountebanks all!
Inez, he knew, had been obsessed with a literary project: Shmuel HaNagid. Known to esoteric scholars as a Talmudist and a Hebrew poet, HaNagid was also a man of action, serving as vizier to the court of Granada and commander of its army in Moorish Spain. Her eyes gazed toward the center of her forehead. She did not see Seamus enter the room and examine the yellow legal pad. Nor did she hear him gasp.
The script was in Hebrew.
*
Early the next morning he hefted his big mug of java out to the deck. Ideas whirled in his mind like debris in a cyclonic wind. The moment felt right for banging out an article. He jogged back to the closet where he stowed his gear and pulled out his Underwood-Olivetti
Ho! Typing his thoughts, jamming the keys. Chugging java with noisy amounts of air. Shouting with joy.
Until Inez emerged from behind the veil.
"Good morning."
Wearing a turquoise Navaho necklace and nothing else, smelling of nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla, she belonged on the cover of a Mickey Spilane. The wildness of her pubic bush drove him crazy.
*
A year scudded by. Rogue Magazine rejected his article on the odd people of Venice, California. Dear Seamus, the subject has been done to death and, by the way, Hunter Thompson is somewhere working on a book about motorcycle clubs.
He was crushed. He'd had this dream of being awarded a column, joining hip science fiction writer Albert Bester and horror-meister Robert Bloch. He would be the, uh, Hunter Thompson-type guy.
Then one day the postman with a feathery crewcut and a dainty beard arrived early. Seamus stopped typing and hustled down to the mailbox. Instead of good news from Hollywood, he found a notification from the university saying he was being booted out as a no-show.
Bye-bye, Berkeley.
*
Inez and Seamus dropped acid the winter afternoon they reconciled after their first major spat. A weather system from the Pacific Rim finallt arrived, and they walked an hour in the rain. She wore a vaquero's slicker. He had his London Fog. Chinatown was a neon trip. They bought enough Take-ee Out-ee to feed a family of twelve. He picked up his paycheck from the restaurant, and joked with his boss about adding stir-fry to the mindset of mainstream America. McSlivers! Easy to chew beef cuts and crisp legumes in a tangy ginger sauce. Rice on the side. Sold with a goofy hero from Kung Foo.
"I think you're high on that new junk," the burly chef said. "Get outta here!"
They laughed, hugged, and broke, each with an enormous erection.
Meanwhile Inez was perusing occult magazines at a kiosk. Seamus caught up with her and squeezed her ass.
Up the hill homeward, they delighted in the way colors left traces.
"Promise you will never write about me."
He pulled away. "What?"
"Writers always betray the people closest to the them."
"Stop this!"
"Am I going read in the New Yorker that before we make love I take a vibrator into the bathroom?"
"Doubt it, " he replied, meaning he didn't write material suitable for the New Yorker. "You do WHAT?"
When they arrived they found that Nasruden, her Persian cat, had shat Day-Glo turds into the seething magic carpet. On a normal day the carpet was a synergetic shag thing that invited you to writhe on it like a snake. Seamus began to clean up Nasruden's mess. Then he pressed his ears into the blowing, waving, undulating fibers, and listened to the carpet. He was a teenager again, and the Monterey grass sighed in gusty commotions above his head, and Inez stalked him like a cougar, her golden tail swishing.
*
Seamus had sent a thunderous story to the Paris Revue. Alas, when the postman handed it back to him, the little fellow had tears in his blue eyes.
Pink elfin pug face. "I'm really sorry, Seamus. I know you were counting on it."
"David, do you have a moment? I'd like you to hear this."
"Sure."
The postman sat crosslegged. He listened to Seamus orate from the rejection letter: Your submission has a raw, dangerous quality. It reminds us of that Bo Diddley song
Seamus beamed. "Isn't that great?"
"It sure is."
The writer began to sing and bop around. David felt his wee cock swell inside his snug jockey briefs and secrete a drop of semen.
"WHO-O-O-O do ya luv, CHILE? Who do you love?"
Hoo-doo.
*
Inez split. Blythely tooling off in a VW Microbus to the Eselen Institute at Big Sur.
"She's sleeping with her hypnotist," Seaumus told David. "I'm sure of it."
The postman shared in his friend's agony. He asked, "Is there anything to this regression to past lives?"
"Doubt it."
The hypnotist taught Inez to travel the inner planes.
It was inevitable. She took a trip and failed to return.
Not to Eselen, anyway.
Hillbilly bourbon replaced the happy java.
Although Inez was gone, her fangs continued to shred meat from his frenzied bones.
*
When they greeted, their handshake consisted of a gentile fingertip exchange, mincing and delicate as the poetry of Omar Khayyam. The Moor welcomed Inez, his silver glance dipping into her fluid mind like a spoon. "Come this way."
He led her through a dark, cool hall of geometric tiles. It opened onto a sunlit courtyard with a tall date tree and an odalisque of shade palms. All was exactly as she had envisioned it. Scholarly men in Eastern finery were discussing Seneca of Cordoba and Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle and Heraclitus, the Kabbalah and Moses de Leon, employing mathematical concepts, talking airily of atomic matter and angelic worlds, mentioning now and then the prehistoric black stone from space, enshrined in the Kaaba.
The Moor introduced Inez to Shmuel HaNagid, a gap-toothed man who smiled with robust cheer.
"My dear Inez, at last we meet!"
-30-
and the man there is always alone.
--SOUTH COAST
The Kingston Trio
Seamus took a greasy slug through the flab of his armpit, making a mess of his Armani greatcoat. A Colt .380 automatic.Inez Ibanez pulled the little surprise from a gilt party purse as calmly as she would one of her Prozac pills or her Dunhill lighter, and damned if it didn't go off.
Palid stone cold, her death mask sprouted terrible ropes of of Gorgon hair, shocked white. "You promised never to write about me!"
Bang!
At his age he was too existential to whine, but he sure felt like crying. What hurt the most was the ruin of an expensive and central part of his dress-for-success wardrobe.
*
Before donning the swishy Italian job, he practically lived in a black London Fog topcoat, going back 30 years.
I remember when he was a young man and most of his attire came from San Francisco's second-hand stores: good ol' flannels and denims, and boots needing just a dab of saddle soap. Comfort mattered, style didn't.
Thumbing down the Pacific Coast Highway or hiking into the Sierras, he was like a giddy drunk fool in a Kerouac novel, delighted with the wonderful minutia of life. He had bought yhe London Fog way back when folks still jabbered about James Dean in "East Of Eden." Seamus' red hair blazed high and wild against the gray Monteray sky. During his art history period at Berkeley, dating beatnik chicks in their Kansas Studebakers, he used the topcoat as a blanket on chilly wet oyster pirate nights.
After seeing an article in Rogue Magazine about Henry Miller and Big Sur, he thought: I should be writing. What got him going was the photo of the author, Hunter Thompson. Sitting at a small outdoor table with a pot of java and an Underwood-Olivetti portable typewriter, the future guru of gonzo journalism seemed to Seamus as the new ideal. Big Sur and Henry Miller were mere adjuncts to the thin balding man posing for the camera. The author was his own protagonist! What a concept!
Seamus knew one thing for sure. Any author trying such a stunt had better be pretty damned interesting. Otherwise he would be compelled to add fictions, trying to gain a subjectivity commonly found in novels. If he wasn't careful, he could easily become just another flakey dude reinventing himself, much like the Wizard of Oz.
Henry Miller's "autobiography," for example, would have you believe he was one of those lusty priapic chaps who fuck with their suits on, urging their penises, oops, pricks, into hot somnambulistic women during impromtu engagements of high opera. Ejaculations in the office, hall, elevator, etc. Spurting semen onto wool skirts and trousers.
Big Sur, as always, would be the place where the Unknown God created Symmetry and Chaos.
*
Seamus was too shy to talk to Ferlinghetti at the City Lights bookshop, but he bought a load of New Directions and Evergreen Review. He spotted Corso, but felt too intimidated to strike up a conversation. The guy seemed frail, but souped up.
He went to a jazzbar. A hipster blew heraldic raspberries through a conch shell. He scribbled on a napkin: "I dive into the Humboldt & swim with silver-finned women."
In those days he had a pale flat belly, hard like Paul Newman's in the new movie "Sweet Bird Of Youth." Erect, in a lotus position on pink bedsheets, he played to lovers on his penny-whistle a Celtic air, celebrating their dewy rose petals at dawn.
In espresso cafes his bait-and-hook book was "Being and Nothingness."
"L'etre et Neant. How quaint."
She spilled pinot noir. It soaked into the stuff he had arrayed, including a newly-bought lithograph of Feininger's "Halle Cathedral."
"Sorry," she said with a malicious lilt, and raided his mental space like a cat, her aura pulsing mightily in his ears. "What's this?" picking up the scrolled lightograph, "some kind of cubist thing?"
"Seems so."
"Don't know Feininger. Have you seen Picasso's etching of Apollinaire, or Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase?"
"No." Apollnaire who?
"Check them out."
"I will. Do you like them?"
"Not especially. I thought you might."
She paused to torder a drink from their table. Then she continued: "The cathedral is a work of art, rising from the mundane earth, sweeping itself up spirituallly as high as it can, leading the imaginations of its people toward heaven. Tourists take photos of it. Then along comes your artist. Cubist, whatever. He takes it all in, and, through his sensitivity, he expresses himself thus!"
"Tell me something I don't know."
"Excuse me?"
"Our class just covered Picasso's reply to Gertrude Stein, who disapproved of his portrait of her. 'It doesn't look like me,' she said, and he said, 'It will in thirty years.' Hah! He was after her Essence."
And so Seamus met Inez Ibanez, who traced her ancestry to the hildagos of Old California. His folks, however, arrived with the Irish horde that settled part of the Barbary Coast. Whenever he met one of her kind he would be awestruck, like a digger finding something in amber. Her ebony hair flowed the length of her spine, reminding him of the dorsal stripe on a tabby cat. Her chocolate eyes tugged at him with feline magnetism. He thought of those rare cougars that haunt the remaining barrancas.
They laughed over his choice of the Sartre tome on phenomenology to attract women. (Evidently, it had attracted her!)
"Anthropology is the current rage out here," she said. "If you have a thing for French intellectuals, try a copy of Levi-Strauss."
"Hmm." Blue jeans?
"Just a suggestion."
"At the moment I can think of no better company than you."
Suddenly she was blushing. Milky smooth olive skin, ruddy on proud cheekbones. What beauty!
"Let's walk," she said, and they walked to her place.
*
Three wharf cats queued along the plank railing glowered at Seamus as he prepared the filets he had brought home from the seafood restaurant where he assisted the chef. Inez' upstairs flat opened onto a deck overlooking the bay. She had a credit account with Sears, and she shopped like any other bourgeois American. So, the deck had things. Redwood chairs, picnic table and benches, and a Spanish barbacoa grill. He forgave her that extavagance because he loved to use it. Unlike most people with grills, he didn't crave beef. His cuisine came from the sea. Grilled shrimp and fish, tangy with herbs, peppers and spices, got his waterworks flowing as no marinaded steak or burger could. Inez came home, smelled it, and joined the cats.
"That's new," she declared, acknowledging his baseball cap. "San Francisco Giants."
"Yes, ma'am," he saluted, hoisting an Anchor Steam beer.
She marvelled at his organizational skills when creating a meal al fresco. He ranged between fastidious and persnickety, and if something was going wrong, like a sooty pot with his pasta boiling over and dousing the coals, he could be downright combative. He wore an apron she had given him. Emblazoned: EL JEFE, THE CHEF!
He tossed tidbits to the cats and handed Inez a beer.
"Have plans for tonight?" he asked, knowing she was deep into a literary, possibly publishable, project.
She shrugged. "Depends."
"Let's go to a game."
Her visage collapsed like Nob Hill masonry in a quake. She reminded him of a little girl about to be deprived of a highly valued treasure.
"You don't want to."
"Well--"
"It's OK," he said, feigning neutrality when he knew that feigning anything with her would be moronic.
She regained her usual poker face. Inscrutably pleasant. "I didn't say I didn't want to. Baseball means nothing to me, but I would enjoy going out with you."
"You're sure?"
"Yes! Now would you please serve the salmon?"
*
Truly, baseball was not a big deal. He merely wished to fulfill this fantasy of fondling her breasts during a game at Candlestick Park, with the fog drifting in from the bay and covering the outfield. Intimate couples huddling and snuggling, sharing parkas and ponchos. Willy Mays knocking the hide from a long gone ball, only to have it soar up, stall, and fall back to second base. Seamus feeling Inez' nipples rising like minnows in a quiet lake and nibbling the palms of his hands.
On the way to the game they wore turtle-necks and jeans. She took her Navy peacoat. He took his London Fog.
*
One night while pussy-footing through the flat in search of a misplaced book of poems by Gary Snyder, Seamus espied Inez on the sofa of her library. A lamp illuminated her casually clothed nakedness. She was lounging like a centerfold, with a bottle of Dry Sack, and scratching away on a yellow legal pad with her ancient Esterbrook fountain pen. Seamus crept close. His scalp ed and the wispy curls on the nape of his sunburned neck bristled with electric alarm. She seemed to be in a trance. He had heard of his Irish cousins doing this sort of thing, afterwards claiming they were mediums writing messages from the sidhe. Charletans and mountebanks all!
Inez, he knew, had been obsessed with a literary project: Shmuel HaNagid. Known to esoteric scholars as a Talmudist and a Hebrew poet, HaNagid was also a man of action, serving as vizier to the court of Granada and commander of its army in Moorish Spain. Her eyes gazed toward the center of her forehead. She did not see Seamus enter the room and examine the yellow legal pad. Nor did she hear him gasp.
The script was in Hebrew.
*
Early the next morning he hefted his big mug of java out to the deck. Ideas whirled in his mind like debris in a cyclonic wind. The moment felt right for banging out an article. He jogged back to the closet where he stowed his gear and pulled out his Underwood-Olivetti
Ho! Typing his thoughts, jamming the keys. Chugging java with noisy amounts of air. Shouting with joy.
Until Inez emerged from behind the veil.
"Good morning."
Wearing a turquoise Navaho necklace and nothing else, smelling of nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla, she belonged on the cover of a Mickey Spilane. The wildness of her pubic bush drove him crazy.
*
A year scudded by. Rogue Magazine rejected his article on the odd people of Venice, California. Dear Seamus, the subject has been done to death and, by the way, Hunter Thompson is somewhere working on a book about motorcycle clubs.
He was crushed. He'd had this dream of being awarded a column, joining hip science fiction writer Albert Bester and horror-meister Robert Bloch. He would be the, uh, Hunter Thompson-type guy.
Then one day the postman with a feathery crewcut and a dainty beard arrived early. Seamus stopped typing and hustled down to the mailbox. Instead of good news from Hollywood, he found a notification from the university saying he was being booted out as a no-show.
Bye-bye, Berkeley.
*
Inez and Seamus dropped acid the winter afternoon they reconciled after their first major spat. A weather system from the Pacific Rim finallt arrived, and they walked an hour in the rain. She wore a vaquero's slicker. He had his London Fog. Chinatown was a neon trip. They bought enough Take-ee Out-ee to feed a family of twelve. He picked up his paycheck from the restaurant, and joked with his boss about adding stir-fry to the mindset of mainstream America. McSlivers! Easy to chew beef cuts and crisp legumes in a tangy ginger sauce. Rice on the side. Sold with a goofy hero from Kung Foo.
"I think you're high on that new junk," the burly chef said. "Get outta here!"
They laughed, hugged, and broke, each with an enormous erection.
Meanwhile Inez was perusing occult magazines at a kiosk. Seamus caught up with her and squeezed her ass.
Up the hill homeward, they delighted in the way colors left traces.
"Promise you will never write about me."
He pulled away. "What?"
"Writers always betray the people closest to the them."
"Stop this!"
"Am I going read in the New Yorker that before we make love I take a vibrator into the bathroom?"
"Doubt it, " he replied, meaning he didn't write material suitable for the New Yorker. "You do WHAT?"
When they arrived they found that Nasruden, her Persian cat, had shat Day-Glo turds into the seething magic carpet. On a normal day the carpet was a synergetic shag thing that invited you to writhe on it like a snake. Seamus began to clean up Nasruden's mess. Then he pressed his ears into the blowing, waving, undulating fibers, and listened to the carpet. He was a teenager again, and the Monterey grass sighed in gusty commotions above his head, and Inez stalked him like a cougar, her golden tail swishing.
*
Seamus had sent a thunderous story to the Paris Revue. Alas, when the postman handed it back to him, the little fellow had tears in his blue eyes.
Pink elfin pug face. "I'm really sorry, Seamus. I know you were counting on it."
"David, do you have a moment? I'd like you to hear this."
"Sure."
The postman sat crosslegged. He listened to Seamus orate from the rejection letter: Your submission has a raw, dangerous quality. It reminds us of that Bo Diddley song
Seamus beamed. "Isn't that great?"
"It sure is."
The writer began to sing and bop around. David felt his wee cock swell inside his snug jockey briefs and secrete a drop of semen.
"WHO-O-O-O do ya luv, CHILE? Who do you love?"
Hoo-doo.
*
Inez split. Blythely tooling off in a VW Microbus to the Eselen Institute at Big Sur.
"She's sleeping with her hypnotist," Seaumus told David. "I'm sure of it."
The postman shared in his friend's agony. He asked, "Is there anything to this regression to past lives?"
"Doubt it."
The hypnotist taught Inez to travel the inner planes.
It was inevitable. She took a trip and failed to return.
Not to Eselen, anyway.
Hillbilly bourbon replaced the happy java.
Although Inez was gone, her fangs continued to shred meat from his frenzied bones.
*
When they greeted, their handshake consisted of a gentile fingertip exchange, mincing and delicate as the poetry of Omar Khayyam. The Moor welcomed Inez, his silver glance dipping into her fluid mind like a spoon. "Come this way."
He led her through a dark, cool hall of geometric tiles. It opened onto a sunlit courtyard with a tall date tree and an odalisque of shade palms. All was exactly as she had envisioned it. Scholarly men in Eastern finery were discussing Seneca of Cordoba and Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle and Heraclitus, the Kabbalah and Moses de Leon, employing mathematical concepts, talking airily of atomic matter and angelic worlds, mentioning now and then the prehistoric black stone from space, enshrined in the Kaaba.
The Moor introduced Inez to Shmuel HaNagid, a gap-toothed man who smiled with robust cheer.
"My dear Inez, at last we meet!"
-30-
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