The Rest of the Dharma - Part 2
Got on the bus cleansed and fortified, and in walked up an old, limping black man. No teeth, except for one golden one, which he wouldn’t shut up about. He had splotches of white gray in his hair and on his beard. His cane, with which he propped himself up, was crowned with a chicken skull, lacquered over with a yellow veneer. He sighed as he fell into his seat about eight rows behind me. About that time, in walked a figure larger than life. "My" (his name, I would later find out), swaggered down the aisles strewn with empty Dr. Pepper cans and luggage. He stood about 6’2, with arms like ebony cement, built by the yards in some jail somewhere, clad in a Terry Glenn Patriots jersey, mouth full of gold teeth and braids that scraped his broad shoulders. Bravado king with big thug eyes, he was a leader, lineage lines that stretched back, I would later find out, to the Black Panthers in Oakland. His father’s last name was Avery, as famous in Oakland ghettos as the president.
Immediately talking to St. Louis, My turned him into a disciple, submitting to the higher alpha male in the pack. It was some thug talk between them that I couldn’t understand, being a white boy, but I got the gist that he was legit with the matter-of-fact force words he spewed. That old black man, I’ll name him “Crack”, decided to challenge, like all old people like to do, to bring the young down a notch. But My called him out, challenged him on the history of the Panthers in Oakland, knowing names and places and dive streets Crack never heard of. Crack wouldn’t quit, told him he had no respect for old school mobbing, a type of ethics among gangsters before cocaine was released in the late 70’s, when any dude could make a killing selling white powder. It seemed to me a type of royal lineage that My was heir to, his father owning whores in five states, and facilitating second rate politicians in California and L.A. But his mom was queen. She knew the meal ticket. I wonder how it all worked under that roof. Voices started to rise, and My’s murderous eyes came out of hiding, threatening robbery and dumping Cracks’ body at the next station.
We pulled into the next stop and Crack climbed out first, probably the quickest he’s moved in forty years. My was behind him, never flinching his stare, making a target on Crack’s neck. Crack made a swollen stagger taunt to the uniformed rent-a-cop standing under the moth-housed lamp. My walked around him to get a Coke, bumping him with his eyes, cocky and sure of his confidence. Crack disappeared, never got on the bus, disintegrating behind the 7-11 next door. My, St. Louis, and me laughed all the way to Oakland, pouring Kentucky Deluxe in our Big Gulp cups, telling tales about the women we fucked and the flinch of Crack and the tight situations we always seemed to escape from. We all seemed to be born under a favorable sign, God smiling on us.
Oakland came quickly, and My had to go to the streets he called home. We touched fists and bullshitted, told him I was writing about this trip and he would be in it. He said he’d keep an eye out for it and up pulled his ride. All was true, the Mercedes poured into that stark night with diamonds for wheels, the bass quaking the asphalt. I’ll never forget him.
By now our numbers had dwindled to twelve. The night was spitting the beginning of a soft rain as I fell into my seat. A black whore brushed past me, filling my nose with a pungent smell of perfumed pussy. She had straightened hair with a pink and orange-flowered sundress and a gorge split exposing ample brown tits. St. Louis bugged eyes like fireflies on a moonless night. Sex filled the air, a young man burning and a woman who was willing. I sat to my side, put my feet on the seat and peered out the corners, waiting for the show. But a philosophy student from S.F.U. decided he needed a friend and droned for twenty minutes about the Democratic Party and how he was gonna' change the world. I wasn’t paying attention, watching scenes of pumping between his words. Staring, watching spontaneous horny on display, I imagined her split open, a young male dominating her well-traveled, weathered thighs. I kicked myself for missing this jewel pulp experience, and what made matters worse was St. Louis going on and on about how she smelled like flowers, and then the two tanned Mexicans who preached Christ to me five stops back had had their turns too. A perfect cherry topping to my melting sundae.
St. Louis, ripe with exiting, got off at the small restaurant that was camouflaged as a Greyhound stop. He had a thousand bucks waiting for him. Low on funds, eaten up by nachos and week old hot dogs, I bummed a pack of smokes and said good-bye to a kid who made more money than I did, with me approaching forty.
We pushed fifteen more minutes and then, Bam!, San Francisco appeared out of the large night, its lights beckoning a rest for all the misfits, a city, a utopic freedom with its brother the moon dancing off the bouncy rippletops of the bay. Like sirens in unison, singing come to me and lay a weary head, for this is the end of want, the edge of the United States, pushed city against the ocean’s end, where all the differents were in one outpost pasture, free, finally free. The world for a moment had become a large infinity as we rolled over the Bay Bridge, the parameters expanded, and I knew, and burned like I never did before, that this was the well of spring, heaven. A life of road and freedom was mine, a hook I could hang a gypsy dust cap on, an identity forever in God’s house.
I didn’t have, like other men, the burden of the day, the waking hour, with errands and family, the push of time, appointments, the all-consuming engine wheel, the overwhelming force to become something, an identity, a title that all my friends could be proud of. But I would know in the quiet hours to regret the path I had chosen, though I’d hold up all my possessions like some idol banner, so they would be happy and impressed. But in the secret mirror, away from the pressures to conform, to keep up, I would know, I would want a liberated self, apart from the locks of obligation and duty. I thought at that moment, spilling into San Francisco, what if all of us would have the courage to be what we truly are? Away from MTV. and the influences that are constantly at our door, just to be what our own genes and heart dictated. No environment that makes us lose ourselves with the rapid fire of materialism and class. Away from the madness of what we’ve become, an ugly spectacle with our cliché fashion and wanting celebrity fame. To be real originals, pioneers of our true selves.
I landed in San Francisco, snatched my pack off the vacant overhead bin, and rushed the expectant doors. I like to travel light. I read somewhere that only a philosopher could jet out of a burning city and not worry what was left. So I only pack my jewel essentials, the things I want in my casket. The list includes journals, pens, Thoreau’s Walden, CD hymns from Guthrie to Blink, and my trusty Let’s Go book for dives and tent locations off the well-booted path.
The salt saturation of the Pacific was in the air as I rushed the doors and fell over some bum in the lotus position with violets in his lap. Yeah, I was in San Francisco. He chanted in Hindi, some incantation of a past life wanderer. I got up and apologized. His eyes filled slowly with glances of fulfillment, like he had achieved the negation of surroundings, trekking deep into his inner consciousness, and achieved peace. Whatever. I wasn’t in a Buddhist mood, two days in a tomb missing 30 hours of potential sleep. I crashed to the phone. Seeking the lowest common denominator, I chanced the shelter, but it was full, being a frigid, wet night. Plan B was the Adelaide hostel, a bohemian home for wayward poets.
I huffed it there, three miles in a winding split through Chinatown, the market filled to the brim with bustlers. It was vibrant, a sea of red trinkets and gift shops, ducks hanging from their necks in the haggling markets, the smell of pastries mixed with boiling, exotic blends that I couldn’t quite divide effectively. But those Asian women, demure stealers of glances, passing me every five seconds, I imagined them in awe of the rugged gringo bouncing through like some nomadic Viking. Yeah, I’d be back for an Asian dip, but I was a pile of dirt. Got lost for about an hour, the directions probably right, me being a directionless navigator. I finally turned at a trafficated corner and there it was, hidden down a lonely alley. Rang the bell twice, and an auburn-crowned Kiwi girl answered, “Cheers”. Haggard and spent, I dragged my tired ass six flights to room 6.
I was bunking with two Europeans, one being Stefan, a Dane whose head was shaved and face plastered with welts. My eyes targeted to the scar on his forehead. I wanted to know the story, and he told me he had had a brain tumor, the operation leaving him a slow producer of words, but that he was set for life. The government gave him $1800 plus reduced rent of $200, which freed him to jet the world. So it was San Francisco this week, Bangkok the next. He spoke with the innocence of a child, which I think was there before the operation. He wanted to find love, which left him vulnerable to sinister women who would exploit him. From the moment I set my pack down, he told me he had a Thai girl who he thought he would marry, until he found her whoring in a hotel in Bangkok, and that was that. She took his savings, siphoning off thousands. He pointed to his blue eye, now in a fade heal, said the john she was fucking gave it to him, but he got his licks in. So bitter, when I mentioned my trekking through Chinatown, he blurted about twenty expletives, saying in the jumbled mess of words that he’d never go there. Yet twenty minutes later he asked me if I knew any Asian whores. Go figure.
Phil, the other guy I was bunking with, was a Michael Hutchison mirror bloke with Aboriginal black long hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, gregarious, and about 6’2". Aussies are cool, masculine men, lineages stretching back a century, being jailed by Brits, pushed to that isolated land. Everywhere I traveled, I never met an Aussie that was a dick. They have that laid-back surf culture, killing sharks, knives in their mouths, looking for alligators to wrestle. They were the laid back slackers, hating the stifling, colonizing, cultured, collared Brits, always looking down thin, haughty noses. Same with the Irish, all those outpost mutt races that didn’t fit the manored, proper families. They were manual labor jewel men, the gruff steamers, backbreaking angels, the dudes you could have beers with and talk about the women you fucked. Good blokes, hearty drinkers, men’s men. One was Niles, an Irishman with a tan mowhawk who lived at the hostel. Wearing an army jacket with an Irish flag cemented on the back, drunk by two and smoking weed on the stoop in the moon fog nights. His friend, an Irish mute, always with a turtleneck, who had a noble, aloof education about him, smoking a cigarette out on the steps, always around midnight. These were the scenes I hungered for in Oklahoma City, but never saw.
Tom was the other I was bunking with. He was an American, in town for business, trying to get his father's apples down from Washington into San Francisco. He talked incessantly of fruit and the fruit business. By this time it was midnight, and my eyes were beginning to fall. The drown of his sedative words were like warm milk, but as I listened to him, I wondered what he really wanted to be. I was ornery and wanted to challenge his nicely bowed life he had created. I asked him what he went to school for. Literature and music, he replied. My heart sunk at his demise. I asked him why he’d given it up. His father’s business was making money, and there was no practicality in writing, it now being an MTV generation. His father was a pusher, giving a quiet, invisible nudge to him. At that point I said a prayer, thankful that my father left me at six years of age. I didn’t have that pressure to be him, for me to become the hope of his regretful life. Raised by a single mom who was just surviving, I didn’t have a domineering person to pull me to expectation. I was left to my aimless freedom, and a shiftless way. I could make up my own mind as to what direction my life could turn, be my own captain with my own ship and sails, not riding on someone else’s. That to me is a blessing and not a curse.
My system was craving alcohol, but figured San Francisco would be there in the morning. I slept till two a.m., but woke up with Niles bursting through the door. He did it every night I was there, you could set your clock by it. I got up at seven. I always rise early, never wanting to miss anything, plus it’s a good time for contemplation. I stole a scone and some coffee from the kitchen and went out to Union Square to catch a cable car. The rain was running sideways, and all the seats in the inside glass were taken by Asian women and their children, so I stood on the outside, getting pummeled by the cold, and watched the way the conductor worked the brake. But I kept falling forward off the yellow line, and every time I did I’d get a sneer. I got off early to escape his vibe and walked through the deep puddles and intermittent honking cars to the ferry for Alcatraz. The rain running sideways still, I bought my ticket, the boat not taking off for another thirty minutes. I lit a smoke and overheard three British guys discussing how they were gonna get drunk and find some whore in Chinatown.
The day was ugly, foggy storm clouds as low as the black bay, just the way I liked it. I entered the boat with tables and chairs lining the walls, the windows full of fog and steam from the hot breath of the other riders, and sat next to a father and son from Georgia. The father had that death look, the shallowness of the eyes, the sunken cheeks. This was his last trip, the end. I could see the sorrow in his son’s voice, unable to let go, trying to recapture a lost relationship or too much time wasted away at work, away from each other.
We bumped and swelled and rolled and arrived at Alcatraz. Pelting rain still, listened to the ranger tell us the history of the prison isle, and took the common tour. The walls of the cells told the story, a strip stench green, the mildew colors knowing your were doing time. I listened to the first half of the tour in Japanese, because the recorder was busted. It told of the torment the inmates faced, peering through the blurry windows. Boats would anchor outside, parties and women laughing and drinking was a tormenting reminder of the free life on the outside. But was life really free on the outside, or do we only perceive it to be? There was liberty to be found here, if you looked with different eyes. Three squares a day, no work, or very little, and time to think and push the world away for a time.
I’d had enough of Alcatraz, and crossed the bay on the next ferry, cutting the tour in half. It was time for whores. My money was burning, but maybe I’d run into some luck. But first I had to hit City Lights and Vesuvius, a Kerouac church bar. The legend goes that Jack got drunk off his ass and liked to go to Big Sur up the coast. I huffed and climbed to the top of the narrow stairs and took a table next to an artsy girl with red hair, luscious, about shoulder length. She peered out the windows, but turned suddenly to catch me staring. She pushed the chair out and told me to join her. She ordered us some whiskey sours and asked me where I was from. Being a transplanted Okie, I always hesitate to say where I’m from, with stereotypes of dirt roads and pickup trucks with gun racks. So I told her from New York. I’d been there so many times, trying to get published, that I thought I could wing it. She was a poet laureate, which I thought was bullshit, because all her poems were about birds, trees, and absinthe. She was high, and wanted to take me around the city, and I was ready to go.
...to be continued...
©2005 by P.L. George
