Desolation Angels (29 page)

In between those two sonatas we'd had our bloody pictures taken and had got drunk all as who would stay sober to have his picture taken and to be called “Flaming-Cool Poets”—Irwin and I'd put Raphael between us, at my suggestion, my saying “Raphael is the shortest, should be in the middle” and thus arm in arm all three we'd posed for the world of American Literature, someone saying as the shutters pop: “What a threesome!” like talking 'bout one of the Million Dollar Outfields—There I am the left fielder, fast, brilliant runner, baserunner, bagger of long flies, some over my shoulder, in fact I'm a wall-crasher like Pete Reiser and am all bruised up, I'm Ty Cobb, I hit and run and steal and flape them bases with sincere fury, they call me The Peach—But I'm crazy, nobody's ever liked my personality, I'm no Babe Ruth Beloved—In centerfield is Raphael the fair haired DiMag who can play faultless ball without appearing to try or strain, that's Raphael—the rightfielder is serious Lou Gehrig, Irwin, who hits long homeruns left-handed in the windows of the Harlem River Bronx—Later on we pose with the greatest catcher of all time, Ben Fagan, squat-legged ole Mickey Cochrane is what he is, Hank Gowdy, he dont have no trouble putting on and removing those shin guards and mask between innings—

I'd wanted to make it to his cottage in Berkeley, which has a little yard and a tree I slept under in the Fall starry nights, leaves falling on me in my sleep—In that cottage Ben and I had a big wrestling match which ended up me putting a splinter in my arm and him hurt in the back, two huge thudding rhinos we'd been wrassling for fun, like I'd done last in New York in a loft with Bob Cream, after which we played French Movies at a table, with berets and dialog—Ben Fagan with red serious face, blue eyes and big glasses, who'd been Lookout on ole Sourdough Mountain the year before me and knew the mountains too—“Wake up!” he yells, a Buddhist—“Dont step on the aardvark!” The aardvark is an ant-eater—“Buddha say:—dont bend over backwards.” I say to Ben Fagan: “Why is the sun shining through the leaves?”—“It's your fault”—I say: “What is the meaning of this you meditated that your roof flew off?”—“It means horse burps in China and cow moos in Japan.”—He sits and meditates with big broken pants—I had a vision of him sitting in empty space like that, but leaning forward with a big smile—He writes big poems about how he changes into a 32-foot Giant made of gold—He is very strange—He is a pillar of strength—The world will be better because of him—The world's
got
to get better—And it will take effort—

I take effort and say “Aw come on Cody you've got to like Raphael”—and so it's I'll bring Raphael to his house for the weekend. I will buy beers for everybody even tho I'll drink most of it—So I'll buy more—Till I go broke—It's all in the cards—We,
We? I
dont know what to do—But we're all the same thing—Now I see it, we're all the same thing and it will all work out okay if we just leave each other alone—Stop hating—Stop mistrusting—What's the point, sad dyer?

Arent you going to die?

Then why assassinate your friend and enemy—

We're all friends and enemies, now stop it, stop fighting, wake up, it's all a dream, look around, you dream, it's not really the golden earth that hurts us when you think it's the golden earth that hurts us, it's only the golden eternity of blissful safety—Bless the little fly—Dont kill anymore—Dont work in slaughterhouses—We can grow greens and invent synthetic factories finally run by atomic energy that will plop out loaves of bread and unbearably delicious chemical chops and butter in cans—why not?—our clothes will last forever, perfect plastic—we'll have perfect medicine and drugs to carry us through anything short of death—and we'll all agree that death is our reward.

Will anybody stand up and agree with me? Then good, all you have to do in my employ, is bless and sit down.

97

So we go out and get drunk and dig the session in the Cellar where Brue Moore is blowing on tenor saxophone, which he holds mouthpieced in the side of his mouth, his cheek distended in a round ball like Harry James and Dizzy Gillespie, and he plays perfect harmony to any tune they bring up—He pays little attention to anyone, he drinks his beer, he gets loaded and eye-heavy, but he never misses a beat or a note, because music is his heart, and in music he has found that pure message to give to the world—The only trouble is, they dont understand.

For example: I'm sitting there on the edge of the bandstand right at Brue's feet, facing the bar, but head down to my beer, for modesty of course, yet I see they dont hear it—There are blondes and brunettes with their men and they're making eyes at other men and almost-fights seethe in the atmosphere—Wars'll break out over women's eyes—and the harmony will be missed—Brue is blowing right on them, “Birth of the Blues,” down jazzy, and when his turn comes to enter the tune he comes up with a perfect beautiful new idea that announces the glory of the future world, the piano blongs that with a chord of understanding (blond Bill), the holy drummer with eyes to Heaven is lilting and sending in the angel-rhythms that hold everybody fixed to their work—Of course the bass is thronging to the finger that both throbs to pluck and the other one that slides the strings for the exact harmonic key-sound—Of course the musicians in the place are listening, hordes of colored kids with dark faces shining in the dimness, white eyes round and sincere, holding drinks just to be in there to hear—It augurs something good in men that they'll listen to the truth of harmony—Brue has nevertheless to carry the message along for several chorus-chapters, his ideas get tireder than at first, he does give up at the right time—besides he wants to play a new tune—I do just that, tap him on the shoe-top to acknowledge he's right—In between the sets he sits beside me and Gia and doesnt say much and appears to pretend not to be able to say much—He'll say it on his horn—

But even Heaven's time-worm eats at Brue's vitals, as mine, as yours, it's hard enough to live in a world where you grow old and die, why be dis-harmonious?

98

Let's be like David D'Angeli, let's pray on our knees in privacy—Let's say “O Thinker of all this, be kind”—Let's entreat him, or it, to be kind in those thoughts—All he has to do is think kind thoughts, God, and the world is saved—And every one of us is God—What else? And what else when we're praying on our knees in privacy?

I've said my peace.

We've been to Mal's too (Mal the Namer, Mal Damlette), after the session, and there he is with his neat little cloth cap and neat sports shirt and checkered vest—but poor Baby his wife is sick on Milltowns, and all anxious when he comes out with us for a drink—It was I had said to Mal the year before, hearing him argue and fight with Baby, “Kiss her belly, just love her, dont fight”—And it had worked for a year—Mal only working all day as a Western Union telegram deliverer, walking around the streets of San Francisco with quiet eyes—Mal politely walks with me now to where I've got a bottle hidden in a Chinese grocery discarded box, and we toast a bit as of yore—He doesnt drink anymore but I tell him “These few shots shouldnt bother you”—Oh Mal was the big drinker! We'd lain on the floor, the radio fullblast, while Baby worked, with Rob Donnelly we'd lain there in the cold foggy day only to wake up to go get another jug—another fifth of Tokay—to drink it on a new outburst of talk, then the three of us falling asleep on the floor again—The worst binge I ever was on—three days of that and you live no more—And there's no need for that—

Lord be merciful, Lord be kind, whatever your name is, be kind—bless and watch.

Watch those thoughts, God!

We'd ended up like that, drunk, our picture taking, and slept at Simon's and in the morning it was Irwin and Raphael and me now inseparably entwined in our literary destinies—Taking it to be an important thing—

I stood on my head in the bathroom to cure my legs, from all the drinking-smoking, and Raphael opes the bathroom window and yells “Look! he's standing on his head!” and everybody runs over to peek, including Lazarus, and I say “O shit.”

So Irwin later in the day says to Penny “O go stand on your head on the streetcorner” when she'd asked him “O what can I do in this mad city and you mad guys”—Fair enough answer but children shouldnt fight. Because the world is on fire—the eye is on fire, what it sees is on fire, the very seeing of the eye is on fire—this only means it will all end pure energy and not even that. It will be blissful.

I promise.

I know because you know.

Up to Ehrman's, up that strange hill, we'd gone, and Raphael played his second sonata for Irwin, who didnt quite understand—But Irwin has to understand so many things about the heart, the sayings of the heart, he has no time to understand harmony—He does understand melody, and climactic Requiems which he conducts for me, like Leonard Bernstein with a beard, in huge arm-raising finales—In fact I say “Irwin, you'd make a good conductor!”—But when Beethoven listened to the light, and the little cross was on the horizon of his town, his bony sorrow-head understood harmony, divine harmonic peace, and there was no need ever to conduct a Beethoven Symphony—Or to conduct his fingers on his sonatas—

But these are all different forms of the same thing.

I know it's inexcusable to interrupt a tale with such talk—but I've got to get it off my chest or I will die—I will die hopelessly—

And tho dying hopelessly is not really dying hopelessly, and it's only the golden eternity, it's not kind.

Poor Ehrman by now is supine with a fever, I go out and call his doctor for him, who says, “There's nothing we can do—tell him to drink a lot of juices and rest.”

And Raphael yells “Ehrman you're gonna have to show me music, how to play the piano!”

“As soon as I get better”

It's a sad afternoon—In the waning wildsun street Levesque the painter does that mad baldheaded dance that scared me, as tho the devil were dancing—How can these painters take it? He yells something derisive it seems—The three, Irwin, Raff, me, wend down that lonesome trail—“I smell a dead cat,” says Irwin—“I smella dead sweet Chinaman,” says Raphael, like before with hands in sleeves striding in the dusk down the steep trail—“I smell a dead rose,” I say—“I smell a sweet tat,” says Irwin—“I smell Power,” says Raphael—“I smell sadness,” I say—“I smell cold rose salmons,” I add—“I smell the lonesome bittersweet,” says Irwin—

Poor Irwin—I look at him—Fifteen years we've known each other and stared at each other worried in the void, now it's coming to an end—it will be dark—we must have courage—we'll make it by hook or crook in the happy sun of our thoughts. In a week it'll be all forgotten. Why die?

We come sadly to the house with a ticket to the opera, given us by Ehrman who cant go, we tell Lazarus to doll up for his first night at the opera in life—We tie his tie, select his shirt—We comb his hair—“Whatto I do?” he asks—

“Just dig the people and the music—it will be Verdi, let me tell you all about Verdi!” yells Raphael, and explains, ending up with a long explanation about the Roman Empire—“You gotta know history! You gotta read books! I'll tell you the books to read!”

Simon is there, okay, we'll all take a cab to the opera and drop Lazarus there and go on to see McLear in the bar—Patrick McLear the poet, our “enemy,” has agreed to meet us in a bar—We drop Lazarus among pigeons and people, there are lights inside, opera club, private locker, boxes, drapes, masques, it will be Verdi opera—Lazarus will see it all downed in thunder—Poor kid, he's afraid to go in alone—He's worried what people will say about him—“Maybe you'll meet some girls!” urges Simon, and pushes him. “Go head, enjoy now. Kiss them and pinch them and dream of their love.”

“Okay,” agrees Lazarus and we see him bouncing into the opera in his put-together suit, his tie flying—a whole lifetime for “Goodlooking” (as his schoolteacher'd called him) of bouncing into operas of death—operas of hope—to wait—to watch—A whole lifetime of dreaming of the lost moon.

We go on—the cabdriver is a polite Negro who listens with sincere interest as Raphael tells him all about poetry—“You've gotta read poetry! You've gotta dig beauty and truth! Dont you know about beauty and truth? Keats said it, beauty is truth and truth is beauty and you're a beautiful man, you should know these things.”

“Where do I get these books—in the library I suppose …”

“Shore! Or go down to the bookshops in North Beach, buy the little booklets of poems, read what the tortured and the hungry say about the tortured and the hungry.”

“It is a tortured and a hungry world,” he admits intelligently. I'm wearing dark glasses, I have my rucksack all packed ready to hop that freight Monday, I listen attentively. It's good. We fly thru the blue streets talking sincerely, like citizens of Athens. Raphael is Socrates, he will show; the cabdriver is Alcibiades, he will buy. Irwin is Zeus watching. Simon is Achilles grown tender everywhere. I am Priam, lamenting my burned city and my slain son, and the waste of history. I'm not Timon of Athens, I'm Croesus crying the truth on a burning bier.

“Okay,” the cabdriver agrees, “I'll read poetry,” and says good night to us pleasantly and counts his change and we run into the bar, to dark tables in the back, like back rooms of Dublin, and here Raphael surprises me by attacking McLear:

“McLear! you dont know about truth and beauty! You write poems and you're a sham! You live a cruel heartless life of the bougeois entrepreneur!”

“What?”

“It's as bad as killing Octavian with a broken bench! You're a mean senator!”

“Why are you saying all this—”