P.L. George
The Rest of the Dharma - Part 3
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 had gone 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 who 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.
The End
©2005 by P.L. George
