Desolation Angels (25 page)

“And look inside,” I say, at back boxes full of white, “the thrashing doves—all the little doves'll die.”

“I dont want a world like that from God.”

“I dont blame you.”

“That's what I mean, I dont want it—What a way to die!” indicating the animals.

(“
All creatures tremble from fear of punishment,” said Buddha.
)

“They cut their necks over barrel,” I say, omitting the “s” in a typical frequent French way of slipping s'ses, which Simon also does as a Russian, both of us stutter a bit—Raphael never stutters—

He just opes his mouth and blasts “It's all the little doves'll die my eye would have opened a long time ago. I dont like it anyway. I dont care—Oh Jack,” suddenly he really grimaces to see the birds, standing in the dark street store sidewalk, I dont know if it ever happened before that somebody almost cried in front of Chinatown poultry storewindows, who else coulda done it but some silent saint like David D'Angeli (coming up)—And Raphael's grimace meaks me a leak-tear right quick, I see it, I suffer, we all suffer, people die in your arms, it's too much to bear yet you've got to go on as though nothing was happening, right? right, readers?

Poor Raphael, who's seen his father die in images of the rope-line, the buzz of his old home, “We had red peppers drying in the cellar on strings, my mother leaned against the furnace, my sister made crazy” (he describes it himself)—The moon shining on his youth and here's this Death of Doves looking him in the face, as you and me, but sweet Raphael it's too much—He is just a little child, I see the way he falls off and sleeps in our midst, leave the baby alone, I'm the old guard of a tender gang—Raphael will sleep in the fleece of the angels and all that black death instead of being a thing of the past I prophesy will be a blank—No sighs, Raphael, no cries?—the poet's got to cry—“Them little animals will have their necks chopped off by birds,” says he—

“Birds with long sharp knives that shine in the afternoon sun.”

“Yeah”

“And old Zing Twing Tong he lives up there in that pad and smokes opium of the world—opiums of Persia—all he's got is a mattress on the floor, a Travler portable radio, and his works are under the mattress—It's described as wretched mean hovels in the San Francisco
Chronicle
”

“Ah Duluoz, you're mad”

(Earlier in the day Raphael had said, after that outburst of hands-in-the-air speech, “Jack you're a giant,” meaning a giant of literature, tho earlier in the day I'd told Irwin I felt like a cloud, from watching them all summer of Desolation, I'd become a cloud.)

“Just I—”

“I'm not gonna think about it, I'm goin home and sleep, I dont wanta dream about wilted pigs and dead chickens in a barrel—”

“You're right”

We fall to striding straight for Market. There we hike to the Monster movie and first dig the pictures on the wall. “It's a nowhere picture, we cant go see it,” says Raphael. “There's no monsters, all it is is a moonman with a suit on, I wanta see monstrous dinosaurs and mammals of the other worlds. Who wants to pay fifty cents to see guys with machines and panels—and a girl in a monstrous lifebelt skirt. Ah, let's cut out. I'm going home.” We wait for his bus and he takes it. Tomorrow night we'll meet at that dinner party.

I go happy down Third Street, dont know why—It's been a great day. It's an even greater night but I dont know why. The sidewalk is soft as I unroll out of under me. I pass old juke joints where I used to go in and play Lester on the box and drink beers and talk with the cats, “Hey! Whatcha doin down here?” “In from New York,” pronouncing it New Yahk, “The Apple!” “Precisely the Apple” “
Down
City” “
Bebop
City” “Bebop City” “Yeah!”—and Lester is playing “In a Little Spanish Town,” lazy afternoons I'd spent on Third Street sittin in sunny alleys drinkin wine—sometimes talking—all the same old most eccentric bo's in America come cuttin by, in long white beards and broken coats, carrying little pittance paperbags of lemons—I walk past my old hotel, the Cameo, where Skid Row drunks moan all night, you hear them in dark carpeted halls—it's creaky—it's the end of world where nobody cares—I wrote big poems on the wall saying:—

The Holy Light is all there is to see,

The Holy Silence is all there is to hear,

The Holy Odor is all there is to smell,

The Holy Emptiness is all there is to touch,

The Holy Honey is all there is to taste,

The Holy Ecstasy is all there is to think …

it's silly—I dont understand the night—I'm afraid of people—I walk along happy—Nothing else to do—If I were pacing in my mountain yard I'd be just as bad off as I am walking down the city street—Or as well off—What's the difference?

And there's the old clock and the neons of the printing equipment building that remind me of my father and I say “Poor Pa” really feeling him and remembering him right there, as tho he could appear, to influence—Tho the influence one way or the other makes no difference, it's only history.

In the house Simon is out but Irwin is in the bed brooding, also talking quietly to Lazarus who sits on the edge of the other bed. I come in and open the window wide to the starry night and get my sleepingbag ready to sleep for the night.

“What the hell's you sad about, Irwin?” I ask.

“I'm just thinking Donald and McLear hate us. And Raphael hates me. And he doesnt like Simon.”

“
Sure
he does—dont try to—” and he interrupts me with a big moan and arms to the ceiling from his disheveled bed:—

“Oh it's all this beast!—”

Brutish division was taking place in his idea-friends, some who were close and some not, but something beyond my non-political intelligence was percolating in Irwin's brain. His eyes are dark and smoldery with suspicion, and fears, and silent wrath. His eyes bulge to show it, his mouth is set in a determined Path. He's going to make it at great cost to his gentle heart.

“I dont
want
all this fighting!” he shouts.

“Right”

“I just want classical angels”—he'd often said that, his vision of everybody hand in hand in paradise and no bullshit. “Hand in
hand
it's got to be!”

Sullen compromises were sullying his air, his Heaven—He had seen the God of Moloch and all the other gods including Bel-Marduk—Irwin had begun in Africa, in the center of it, pouting with sullen lips, and walked on past to Egypt and Babylon and Elam and founded empire, the original Black Semite who cannot be separated from the White Hamite by words or deductions. He'd seen Moloch's face of Hate in the Babylonian night. In Yucatan he'd seen the Rain Gods, glooming by a kerosene lamp in the jungle rocks. He broods off into space.

“Well I'm going to sleep good tonight,” I say. “Had a great day—Raphael and I just saw the thrashing doves”—and I tell him the whole day.

“Also I've been a little envious of you being a cloud,” says Irwin seriously.

“
Envious?
Wow!—A giant cloud, that's all I am, a giant cloud, leaning on its side, all vapors—yep.”

“I wish I was a giant cloud,” sighs Irwin utterly seriously and yet tho he poke fun at me he wont laugh about it, he's too serious and concerned about the outcome of everything, if it's gonna be giant clouds he just wants to know it, that's all.

“Have you been telling Lazarus about the green faces in your window?” I ask, but I dont know what they've been discussing and go to bed, and wake up in the middle of night briefly to see Raphael come in and sleep on the floor, and I turn over and sleep on.

Sweet rest!

In the morning Raphael's on the bed and Irwin's gone but Simon's there, his day off, “Jack I'll go with you today to the Buddhist Academy.” I've been planning to go there for days, have mentioned it to Simon.

“Yah but it might bore you. I'll go alone.”

“Na, I'll stay with you—I wanta add to the beauty of the world”—

“How will that happen?”

“Just by I do the things you do, to help you, and I learn all about beauty and I grow strong in beauty.” Perfectly serious.

“That's wonderful, Simon. Okay, good, we'll go—We'll walk—”

“No! No! There's a bus! See?” pointing away, jumping, dancing, trying to imitate Cody.

“Okay okay we'll take the bus.”

Raphael has to go somewhere else, so we eat and comb (and take off) but before I stand on my head in the bathroom three minutes to ease my nerves and heal my sorrow veins and I keep worrying someone'll crash into the bathroom and knock me over on the sink … in the bathtub Lazarus' got big shirts soaking.

90

It often happens I follow up with a fit of ecstasy such as I'd had walking home on Third Street, with a day of despair, owing to which fact I cannot appreciate the really great new day that has broken, also sunny with blue skies, with goodhearted Simon all eager to make me glad, I fail to appreciate it till much later in reflection—We take a bus to Polk and walk up Broadway hill among flowers and fresh air and Simon is dancing along talking all his ideas—I see every point he makes but I keep gloomily reminding him it doesnt matter—Finally I end up snapping “I'm too old for young idealisms like that, I ben through all that!—all over again I gotta go through all that?”

“But it's real, it's truth!” yells Simon. “The world is a place of infinite charm! Give everybody love and they'll give it right back! I seen it!”

“I know it's true but I'm bored”

“But you cant be bored, if you get bored we all get bored, if we all get bored and tired we all give it up, then the world falls down and dies!”

“And it's as it should be!”

“No! it should be life!”

“That's no difference!”

“Ah, Jacky-boy dont give me that, life is life and blood and pulling and ticking” (and he starts tickling my ribs to prove it) “See? you jump away, you tickle, you life, you have living beauty in your brain and living joy in your hort and living orgasm in your body, all you gotta do is do it!
Do it!
Everybody loves to join arm-in-arms in the walk,” and I can see he's been talking to Irwin—

“Ah lousy me I'hse tired,” I have to admit—

“
Dont!
Wake up! Be happy! Where are we going now?”

“Right up this hill to the big Buddhist Academy, we'll go in Paul's cellar—”

Paul is a big blond Buddhist who is janitor of the Academy, he grins in the basement, in the Cellar nightclub when there's jazz he'll stand there eyes closed laughing and bouncing on both feet so glad to hear the jazz and crazytalk—Then he'll slowly light a big serious pipe and raise big serious eyes through the smoke and look right at you and smile around his pipe, a great guy—Many's the time he'd come to the shack on the horse-hill and slept in the old abandoned room in back, on a sleeping-bag, and when big gangs of us would bring him wine in the morning he'd sit up and take a slug anyway then go walking among the flowers, thinking, and come back to us with a new idea—“Just as you say, Jack, it takes a long tail to make a kite reach the infinite, I just thought now, I'm a fish—I go swimming through the trackless sea—just water, no ways, no directions and avenues—by flapping my tail however I move right along—but my head seems to have nothing to do with my tail—s'long as I can” (he squats to demonstrate) “flap those backfins, aimless like, I can just go on ahead without worryin—It's all in my tail and my head's just thoughts—my head's flounderin in thoughts but my tail's wigglin me right along”—Long explanations—a strange silent serious cat—I was coming to see about a lost manuscript, that might be in his room, as I'd left it in crates for anybody, in fact with the instructions:
If you dont understand this Scripture, throw it away. If you do understand this Scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom
—and now I realize Paul might have done just that, and I laugh to think and that's right—Paul had been a physicist, a student of mathematics, an engineering student, then a philosopher, now a Buddhist with no philosophy, “Just my fish-tail.”

“See?” says Simon. “How great a day it is? The sun shining everywhere, pretty girls on the street, what more do you want? Old Jack!”

“Okay Simon, let's be angel birds.”

“Be just angel birds here step aside m'boy angel birds.”

We come into the basement entrance of the gloomy building and come to Paul's room, the door is ajar—Nobody in—We go in the kitchen, there's a big colored girl who says she's from Ceylon, real svelte and pretty, tho a little plump—

“Are you a Buddhist?” says Simon.

“Well I wouldnt be here—I'm goin back to Ceylon next week.”

“Isnt that wonderful!” Simon keeps looking at me to appreciate her—He wants to make her, go to one of the upstairs bedrooms of this religious university and bang in beds—I think she senses that to some extent and cuts out politely—We go down the hall and look in a room and there's a Hindu young woman lying on a mattress on the floor with her baby and big shawls and books—She doesnt even rise as we talk to her—

“Paul's gone to Chicago,” she says—“Look in his room for thee manuscript, it may be there.”

“Wow,” says Simon staring at her—

“And then you can go ask Mr. Aums in his office upstairs.”

We tiptoe back down the hall, almost giggling, run up to use the toilet, comb, talk, come down to Paul's bedroom and search around his things—He has left a gallon jug of burgundy which we pour drinks from into delicate Japanese tea cups thin as wafers—

“Dont break these cups”

I sit leisurely at Paul's desk and spin him a note—I try to think up little funny Zen jokes and mysterious haikus—