P.L. George
The Rest of the Dharma - Part 2
Got on the bus cleansed and fortified, and in walked up an old, crippled, limping crack black man. No teeth lest 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 an old limb, 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, 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 with a Terry Glenn Patriots jersey, mouth full of gold teeth and braids that scraped his broad power 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 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 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 coherent 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, cajoling 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, and bass quaking the asphalt. I’ll never forget him.
By now our numbers 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 she, I imagined she, split open, he a young male dominating her well-traveled, weathered thighs. I kicked myself for missing this jewel pulp experience, and what makes matters worse was St. Louis going on and on about how she smelled like flowers, and the two tanned Mexicans that 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 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 that made more money than me approaching forty.
We pushed fifteen more minutes and then, Bam!, San Francisco appeared out of the large night, it’s lights beckoning a rest for all the misfits, a city, an utopic freedom with it’s 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, 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 M.T.V. 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 at the rapid fire of materialism and class. Away from the madness of what we’ve become, and ugly spectacle with our cliché fashion and wanting a celebrity fame. To be real originals, pioneers of our true selves.
I landed in San Francisco, snatched my pack off the vacant, lonely 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 smeared 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 split 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 in 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 introduced himself. 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 that would exploit him. From the moment I set my pack down, he told me he had a Thai girl that 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, was a Michael Hutchison mirror bloke with Aboriginal black long hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, gregarious and about 6’2, put out his hand. 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, back breaking 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, and 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 OKC, but never saw.
Tom was the other I was bunking with. He was an American, in town for business, trying to get his father apples down from Washington into San Francisco. He incessantly talked 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 was 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 so 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 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 aimlessness 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 thinking it was his. 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 hallowing 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. Bur 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 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, the bar beginning to fill with guys in suits and women in business skirts.
She took me up to Pacific Heights, the streets like smooth cliffs, and in the clear night we stood at the peak of a street and peered at the Golden Gate lit of the moon, surrounded by the lights of the homes and flats embedded in the hills. This city is like no other on the planet, that scene still burns in my brain to this day. Then we hit a couple of dives around there, drunk off my ass, I couldn’t remember the streets, but one neon sign I remembered through my liquor-saturated skull was the Comet Lounge. As we entered at the top of one of the countless hills, there were only lava candles burning. Vampire types lined the booth along the walls. They were throwing dice in what I perceived was a craps game, with empty martini glasses strewn across the tables. When we walked in, everyone knew her name, Jasmine. Fuck. That was her name, I kept forgetting. We took our seats on the grooved, velvet stools, and I got the up and down hate glare from the young uppie type tending bar. He had that club hair and silk collared shirt that reminded me of my ex’s ex back home. I peered past him in the mirror behind the bar, past the bottles on tiers built into a pyramid form, and didn’t recognize myself. Four-day growth, still soaked from the morning rain, like a gruff cat that couldn’t find shelter for a week. Maybe he thought I was a tramp or something, but I really felt like Bukowski.
She leaned over, whispering in my ear, touching my lobe with her lip, that she had the hook-up. But I kept an eye on her through the mirror, her eyes fixated on him. I was the pawn in this game, but I was scoring drinks, so what did I care? She must have been a regular whore there, I suspected, with a history with him. She ordered Yager bombs, and I told her I didn’t have any money. She leaned over again, pressing lust in my ear, saying she used to fuck him and not to worry. With every drink that fucker poured, I could tell he was about to pour it out on me, all that pent up rage, not capturing the possession slut he wanted. The last was tequila, I always remember my drinks, even when hammered. But tequila was always an omen, car accident on graduation, dumped by a girl in a bar, and probably my own death. After shooting it I slammed the shot glass down. The last I remember was a shirt coming over the bar.
The day I woke up I was in a pink room, incense filling the air at a nauseous height, and the sun filling the room with a blinding light. Was this heaven? Had I died? My head was pounding like all the blood found one place to collect. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them to Jasmine’s face, her brown eyes locked on mine.
“Are you OK?” she said. “I thought you were dead.” I remember mumbling what happened. “You held your own,” she replied. I knew that was a lie because my face was on fire. I pulled my hand to the target hurt and felt the crusted, dry blood. She took peroxide from the medicine chest and sponged my face using eight of them. I felt the cut on my cheek. It was four inches long. I needed stitches, but she had butterfly bandages and that saved me money, being down to twenty-five bucks by now. Like I could afford a doctor anyway. Then I started to get pissed, this bitch putting me in this predicament. I was naked, so at least I must have gotten fucked out of it. Two days had passed I figured out later, but it was all good. A sweet memory experience that I could tell my grandkids at my knee about eighty. I thought eighty would be a good time to call it quits. I would have sucked all the juice out of life by then.
I was sick of Jasmine and the scene that went down two days ago. I went back to the hostel, sweeping and cleaning, working out a deal for four more days, licking my wounds. One day sitting in the common room watching club soccer with Niles and Jeff, I met a guy named Dave. He was about 5’7, a slightly overweight dude with shag-like hair and a three-day growth. He had asylum eyes, like he had a nervous breakdown at some point. I recognize that look because it was similar to my uncle Bob, a guy with six kids and a fat wife, Linda, who sat around all day watching Oprah. He was a bricklayer working for the city of L.A. One of the most haunting memories I ever had was one Christmas dinner, and no one could find him. He had a detached garage in the back of the house. The door had been open during the day but now was closed. I was about ten at the time. I looked through the side door window and saw him dangling from a rope. I never saw a suicide before, live, I mean, but knew what it was from television. I ran to the house to get my grandpa, the family still sitting around the table, candles lit, the smell of stuffing and turkey still wafting in the air. By the time I had found him the coroner said he had been dead for an hour. It’s a memory that’s burned in my brain. Bob was smart, a high IQ, my mom had told me. He always told my grandparents and my mother that he wasn’t going to make the same mistakes they did. My mom, divorced from her first marriage, had had my brother and me and was living in the two-story house of my grandparents. Bob went to San Diego State University that fall, and he had to come back. The dean had found him naked on the lawn in front of the student union, yelling crazy shit. I remember my grandfather bringing him home, debating with a priest if he should be checked in to a mental ward. They did. It was so secretive though. They, my grandparents, would always tell their friends that Bob was doing well at S.D.S.U. They had to keep up appearances, you know. I think he got a hold of some bad acid and tripped. Bob was happy for a time, he and I playing catch in the yard after he was released. He seemed to be a guy that couldn’t take too much pressure on him. I think that’s why he was swinging from the rope on Christmas Day. Six kids, two jobs, a blob for a wife. I’d be swinging, too.
Dave was nervous and twitchy, just till you get to know him. He had lived in San Francisco his whole life. He taught English in Russia and was about to go back in two months. He told me he had blown $1500 on drinks the week before I got there. His parents were well off, but he couldn’t go back, never gave the reason. He knew San Francisco like the back of his hand. He kept telling me he was broke, but if he was looking for a handout he was barking up the wrong tree. He knew I wasn’t biting, so he said he was gonna go to the gym to work out. In this town, he said, you had to keep in shape to get these sophisticated, high maintenance women. All the women in San Francisco are beautiful. I’d walk up and down Union Square and not see an ugly one. But they had these stone cold cosmopolitan faces with their black business skirts strutting in their heels. They were successful, up and coming, and independent. Success and money and beauty bring out a certain arrogance in women. In men, too, by the way.
I always surmised that we make way too much out of ourselves and the work that we do. When I see such scenes, I picture them in caskets,deteriorated, and I feel better about the path I’ve chosen.
Dave would be back in an hour but wanted to meet me at Barnes and Noble. He said he had a plan to hook up with women that never failed. He would sit in the chairs and read a Wall Street Journal. The women would flock like flies. He described his attire, rolled-up white shirt, tie, blue slacks, the only ones he had, nice shoes. He kept pounding the emphasis on shoes, women always judging your class by your footwear. He said he’d sit for a half hour and at least two would approach him. But where was he gonna take them, back to the hostel or the shelter? I decided against it.
So I had two hours to kill, I decided to go to the Paris massage across from the hostel, the pink neon sign still blinking in mid-day. I went in and cliché French impressionist paintings lined the wall. It was skanky and dark with red velvet drapes and books by Rimbaud and Proust on the small, but ornate bookshelves. She split the beads that dangled from the doorway. A 40 year old, brown-haired, earthy, six footer at least. She had despondent, sad eyes that I could see even though the room was only lit with cherry candles. She smoldered in a sexy voice, “What can I do for you?” I told her I wanted a massage and how much was it. She said sixty, I said OK, though my dollars had left. She escorted me in the back room and told me to change behind this Japanese screen. I was naked and laid on my stomach on the bed, and she began to work my shoulder and lower back. Easily excited by anything woman, perfume, eyes, hair, feet, the way the walk, whatever, I got a hard on. I shifted to the side, and she knew what was going on. She removed my towel and began to rub my ass. An ass massage, I never had one of those before. I turned over, watching her lips, red with color, vibrant as fields of roses. She hiked her skirt up, climbing on top of me, never removing her dress. She was on top the whole time, never letting me fuck her on her back. After we were done, I stared at the splotchy mildew ceiling wondering what its eyes had seen through the years off this table. She said she’d be back in a minute, so I quietly gathered my stuff and sneaked out the door. I had no way of paying her anyway, but would have to hide myself walking down the street for the rest of the stay, the hostel being right across the street. She’d always sit in the window on the velvet-crushed couch, peering out for an Asian businessman or an Aussie tourist whose wife wasn’t with him. A good fuck, to be sure, but I didn’t protect myself. I always heard of French whores as dirty as a Paris gutter. She wasn’t French, but I think she wanted to be. So I told my brain that I’d be OK, though I knew it was really stupid. It was time for Dave to get back, so I sat outside on the front stoop counting the bricks off the opposing apartment house.
Soon Dave huffed down the narrow alley, sweating profusely and out of breath. A chain smoking drunk has no business working out, but he wanted to drop thirty. He went up and showered, so I hit the street galleries that lined Geary Street. I entered one about four doors down, and an aristocratic woman approached. I hadn’t shaved still, the cut healing but still burning. I could have been labeled homeless. I was, to a certain extent. If a pack on your back and a twenty in your tattered jeans meant without home, I was it. She knew I couldn’t afford anything but was kind anyway. She had a navy blue dress, proper and distinct, with a string of pearls lacing her neck. She asked me if I wanted to buy anything. There was what I surmised, a yuppie couple, young in marriage, negotiating the color painting that would go with the sofa. They should have gone to a Thomas Kinkade mall art gallery, all colors and cottages to match the mundaneness of their soon-to-be disgusting marriage as well as furnishings. But I loved the art. Early sketchings of Da Vinci and Manet. I always wished the talent to my fingers to paint. It is a romantic notion struggling in obscurity till Bam! Discovered only to go to an early grave before receiving a check. She showed me artists, unknown locals in San Francisco, mostly abstract. Abstract expressionism is my favorite, Pollock being the American father, a tormented, alcoholic genius seeing visions in the atmosphere like unique fingerprints that he could only construct. There’s something about art that gives me euphoric epiphanies. I guess seeing paint, the colors vibrant, the unique brain explosions slashing on canvas remind me of our life’s canvas, how we don’t use the colors lying on the palettes, dormant and soured. Through fear or voices of self-doubt, we cringe at the thought of being different. I waded through thoughts and ideas, spurred on by books, kept the ones that agreed with my spirit, threw out the ones that could not cement to my conscience. Art became my religion, the freedom in the brush, doing anything you want without a blueprint. This is true expressionism, not a pewed, one size fits all manuscript.
I wrote a little bit, but I couldn’t paint, was a little intimidated by her knowledge of art. But she had transferred over to the dark mountain, selling it, mortgages to pay, jewelry to buy, had head knowledge but no sweet spirit of life. Her son was a writer. She swelled with pride and gave me a card with his website. He was a guidebook author, which intrigued me at first, but only wrote of destinations and cheap places to stay. Bored, I left, giving her a couple of poems, which she didn’t understand, and left, slightly depressed at the conversation.
It was time to get back. Dave was on the stoop, red like a man that had worked in an Indian summer. He ran in to two lawyers at the gym who knew of an orgy place down by the docks. He had showered, dressed in black slacks and a black knit shirt, ready to get laid. I ran upstairs, still in tattered jeans, but had stolen a fresh shirt left by a Canadian bloke in the shower I had cleaned. He deserved to get it ripped off, leaving trash and urine all over the bathroom I was cleaning every day by now. I was trying to keep up with the class, giving blurry illusions to the people I was about to hang out with. We caught the bus to the wharf, meeting them at a swank fish restaurant, which I could not afford, cashed out by now. I was aware of my status and station, but I believed in my wing-it charisma and bluffing that could get me through most tight situations. We walked to the table, cigars lighting the neon way in the dim dark with candles giving the landing strip location. Two brown-haired men in dark suits with peroxide teeth welcomed us. I had known Dave for a couple of days and wondered how he knew these guys and why a basic homeless dude had a cell phone. Now the pieces seemed to fall. Dave was beginning to get close to the one on the right, sugar in the air. This orgy wasn’t going to be what I suspected. By the time the other one put his hand on my thigh, I said I had to go to the bathroom. Hooking as a job, wasn’t my cup of tea, so to speak, but this was Dave’s bread. I wasn’t about to bolt until “Craig” (aren’t they all named that?) began to talk about some paintings he’d bought. This fuck wanted to fuck me, trying to lure me to his place with art, but I, on the other hand, was scoring drinks, the prices elevating as the night wore. Playing innocent, but cunning as all get out, I told him I had to run to the bathroom. I stumbled to the urinal and rested my eyes, the tequila and Yager churning in my now tornadic stomach. I felt like throwing up but pushed it down. I opened my eyes to an old fart in a gray Fedora hat with a splash crimson feather at the urinal next to me. My brain sprung. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last relic of the beat generation.
I whispered, “I know who you are”. He introduced himself as Lawrence, a noble name, reminding me of deserts in Arabia, like Olivier. I told him I wrote and traveled. He told me he’d like to see my stuff, the ceiling fan circling, turning on and off his face like electrocution. I pushed it further, told him I could drop it off tomorrow at City Lights. He thought quiet for what seemed like a minute and whispered yes at ten o’clock sharp. I was alive, fated to meet a god in a urinal in San Francisco. Was I dreaming? What are the chances, the gods finally smiled on me.
I climbed out the small, black-framed window, leaving the prison bathroom into the dark illuminous night, the sky clear, cluttered with bulging white stars, the moon as vibrant as I had ever seen. If I lived to be a thousand years, I’d never get a glow like that. The world was mine as I hurled down the street cliffs, darting in and out of yellow alleys and parked Jaguars. I needed some weed and knew the ample stash that was in the pillowcase of Phil. He didn’t mind, told him the dream story and lit up on the stoop to celebrate.
About that hour, up strolled two French girls, one gave me a force aura, locking on me. Ivory skin with a clean smell fresh, ready to get dirty. They wanted to smoke, Phil taking the red-haired one by the hand up to the higher step on the porch. I had my hand in my back pocket, looking down, beaming, my brain in another world at the luck or fate or God of my chance meeting. She asked me what I did. I burst with life out of my mouth, “I am a writer”. I blew the dream into the reality of the atmosphere that night. If I ended up fucking her or not it didn’t matter. Words were my girl, my sex, my life. I could take on anyone or anything at that time. I was a vibrant, alive conqueror.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I’d take any morsel from Lawrence’s table. I packed my shit together, took my notebooks, and got the hell out of there the next morning, huffed it to City Lights by 10:10, stepped on the wood angled stained stairs leading to his office jetting off the poetry room. I tapped, and an old “come in” answered. I heard a cough from piles and stacks behind an old oak desk. I was on the corner frontier, a new thought. I had written enough now not to be in the valley of hero worship. Maybe it was protection against the fear of rejection, but I was casting the dice by opening my secret door. I didn’t genuflect anymore, content with a strong chest in a blade wind. Whatever he said, I wasn’t quitting, giving up the flame for the cold coals of practicality. I had traveled too far exorcising tradition and upbringing to turn back. He took my notebooks and checked with his red pen, making a defilement on the paper, my heart dropping to a new low cavity. His glasses were perched on his nose like an old school marm on a judgment throne. I wanted him to knight me. Instead he told me not to be so careful with words. To free flow, like jazz, blowing through a shiny sax. He said he’d keep three out of a hundred, which gave me a burn flicker. It was a quick fifteen minutes, I think, but I was content to enter the inner sanctum. I could take a critique from him, a legend. To keep three was a small hill to hang a flag. I couldn’t take the black words from local poets that ripped my naivety of the obscure words, wanting to be Shelley or what Rimbaud. What I lacked in diplomas I made up for in philosophical passion. They couldn’t touch me. I’ve never read in public, poetry readings becoming a side show comedic circus, Bukowski writing once that men that read in public were out for vagina, bohemian mounters enamored with girls that look like Anais Nin.
I gathered my now crimson stained notebooks, put on my nomadic pack, and stepped out into the sun. The day had cleared. I was done with this small chapter, I was ready to go home and wait for this food to dissipate like it always does at home, and wait for a new destination, a churning, to start another famine, then answer it with the road.
...to be continued...
©2005 by P.L. George
