We were standing outside on the great steps of the hall high above the blue waters of San Francisco Bay, and they were there, the white ships on the tide, and all my love rose to sing my newfound seaman’s life. – The Sea! Real ships! My sweet ship had come in, no dream but true with tangled rigging and actual shipmates and the job slip secure in my wallet and only the night before I’d been kicking cockroaches in my tiny dark room in 3rd Street slums.
I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.
0 the pain of telling these secrets which are so necessary to tell, or why write or live.
I tingled all over; I counted minutes and subtracted miles.
I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we’ll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it’s been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.
Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angel had arrived and he was going mad again.
Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.
She looked exactly like the little girl she had been.
Occasionally bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poorchild Angel Dean to wake up again.
In fact at one point when Billie’s up leaning over a chair Dave goes behind Billie and playfully touches her and winks at me, but I’m not of all this like a moron and we could all be having fun such as soldiers dream the day away imagining, dammit – But the venoms in the blood are asexual as well as asocial and a-everything.
Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square;.
Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night.
Billie offers to dig the garbage pit but does so by digging a neat tiny coffinshaped grave instead of just a garbage hole – Even Dave Wain blinks to see it – It’s exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliott in it, Dave is thinking the same thing I am I can tell by a glance he gives me – We’ve all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there.
If this bores you it’s because you want bricks in your soup.
I love Allen Ginsberg – Let that be recorded in heaven’s unchangeable heart.
It was 3 children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries balooning in the dark before them.
The sea roar is bad enough except it keeps bashing and barking at me like a dog in the fog down there, sometimes it booms the earth but my God where is the earth and how can the sea be underground! –.
They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned – and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o’clock in the morning everybody – musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist – staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.
As for my mother, there’s no other like her in the world, really. Did she bear me just to have a little child to bless her heart? She got her wish.