Prologue


I lived for a time on Red Square in Berkeley. You may have heard of it. It was run by Von Rotten (that’s just plain Von), who was considered the Vladimir Lenin of the Foul Language Movement of Poetry (FLMP, pronounced “Flimp,” sometimes “Flump,” though never “Flamp!”) They even went so far as to have a statue of him erected on the waterfront in Berkeley, where he could be seen in thick fog and thin, lecturing to the poetic masses. But the truth is Von Rotten was really more of a Stalinist. Behind his back we used to refer to him as The Stalinista. More on that later. All you need to know for now is that I was in direct competition with Von Rotten for the heart of Penelope Martin, the Helen of our poetry world at that time. Penny, for short, who taught clairvoyant classes part-time, and modeled in the nude for art professors at the University of California the rest of the time. And that was where my problems began, though some wouldn’t exactly consider them problems.
And how exactly, and why, should that concern you? Well, we wouldn’t have half the poetry we have come to know and love today if it had not been for the outcome of the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars. Now, I invite you to consider just how different our world would be without all the Foul Language Poetry (sometimes referred to as FLIP) which, for instance, that young snot-nosed cousin of yours in Weehawken is known for in the East Coast branch of your family. No way could he or she have written half that stuff without the influence of said clan of poets running the world at poetic programs throughout the country today.
And I defy you to find one iota of “meaning” in that stuff. That’s because “meaning” was efficiently stomped out of all verse that was written at Red Square University (RSU, also known as old Rusty U.) It was essential to act and to speak like a Good Foul Language Comrade (GLC, pronounced “Glick”) at all times there. If one of them began to smell something even approaching meaning, or worse, EMOTION! – it was to be smashed to smithereens instantly and the bad poet taken out back and thrashed to within an inch of his or her poetic life. “Down with meaning!” was shouted in their whiny faces all through this procedure, and they were then squirted with a cold garden hose to drive home the non-point.
And Von Rotten cracked the whip over the Red Baby Diaper Factory there, as well, located on the infamous Red Square, which was how we survived in those days. There was simply no other work to be had, until the Rotten minions took over complete control of the academy throughout the country, with an eye toward spreading their influence even further and conquering the Known World of Poetry (KWP, pronounced “quip.”) The diapers at that factory were dyed with a mixture of beets and salamander juice. Salamander juice for reasons known only to Von Rotten personally. He would not relent on the reason why, even to Penny. He was quite anal in that way. I do know that salamanders were once plentiful in the Berkeley area and made a habit of overrunning every crawl space and basement in town. It used to rain a lot around there before the great drought of the 1970’s. Our stain was irremovable, and quite striking, though to my eye just a touch on the side of purple as much as red. But “red” was a popular term in those days among the young mothers stamped out of the mold of the University of California at Berkeley.
I’m going to go ahead and warn you right now that I’m a little bit fond of the technical term “in those days.” You can just tune it out whenever you encounter it, if you are so inclined.
Von Rotten had the chiseled features of a finely-honed weasel. He stood perfectly erect with his ass muscles drawn in as if he’d been raised on a flagpole, or as the misdiagnosed second-born twin of a drum majorette. They would have left him in the womb if his mother had not immediately started to complain of having a giant tummy ache after giving birth to his twin sister. It may have been luckier for us all if he’d simply been left in there to rot in the elder Mrs. Rotten, but unluckily he made his way to the door of the world and somehow kicked his Rotten self into existence.
Penny met Von Rotten when he decided to take a life-drawing class at the University when he was a student there, after one of his English Department professors told him he had to broaden his education and he had already run through every linguistics class at the University, as well as French. Now, Penny had a body, make no mistake. She was skinny with sharply pointed breasts and huge wine-dark nipples that could honestly make any man’s mouth water just looking at them. They swayed deliciously when she moved. It would just drive you to distraction. Nobody could concentrate when she moved through a classroom, before disrobing in front of the class. It took a while for the men to gather their thoughts. She really did put you in mind of Helen of Troy. Men would willingly ride the seas and fight pitched battles over her. I know. I was one, I was one.
I came out to San Francisco in a Pepsi van that was red, white and blue. We drove that van out of the great Midwest, our hungry souls looking for life at the edge of the continent. To escape the enormous and vacant soul that inhabited the White House in the form of King Richard Nixon and that also inhabited and ate away at the enormous bloated body of the Midwestern mentality that had voted this man into office. How could they have done that? We fled the Midwest to the edges of the continent, hoping to find solace and comfort among like souls who lived and breathed poetry from their every pore, day upon living day and night after night. We thought we would be saved from the savages in the Midwest who had nearly throttled us with their flat and even and straight-forward minds and hearts. The ultimate chicken pot-pie of everything that was there.
In those days everyone ate poetry for lunch. It was considered essential for your good up-bringing and mental health. We would skip a meal in order to satisfy our hunger for words. To hell with a meal. To hell with dirty politics and meaningless wars on other continents, it was enough to feed upon the poetic battles of the moment, and who wrote what and who read what at last night’s reading at the bookstores and cafés, and who went home with whom after the inevitable late night parties that followed. It was the beginning of the end and we all lived as if we knew it was going to end any minute, which was why we found it so hard to keep it while we had it. It was that lust for life that was crucial to the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars. It has been said of us: For a small glassful of laughter we would kill. Yes, kill. And it was all true. Every word of it delicious and dirty and true.


1


“Write it, Bancroft!” Greg Penn was yelling from under the kitchen table. “Exactly as I said it. Go ahead and put it on the sucker’s paper, will you? Chrissakes, just write it! Write it!”
Steve Bancroft was holding his head in his hands with his elbows on the table, where there were stacks of student papers scattered in disorderly piles. “Okay, what?” he asked. “What? Go ahead and repeat it, would you? ‘At first… At first I thought…’”
“Okay. You’re ready now? Jesus, you pussy! ‘At first I thought you were putting your foot in either my mouth or yours. Now I realize you were using both feet.’ Write it. It’s perfect. Perfect!”
“You can’t go putting that on somebody’s precious little essay about their childhood,” Steve complained.
“Just write it, you little turd.”
We walked into the kitchen. From his outlook under the kitchen table, Greg Penn could probably only see so many feet. He was on all fours, all six and a half foot of him, bumping up against the underside of the table like a Shetland pony. These were my two best students at Whitebread College. They were grading papers for me while my assistant Allison Sheffield and I went out drinking at Jack’s Bar on the town square, because tomorrow’s big inquisition was coming fast and I didn’t really care anymore what was going to happen to me. And both of them, Greg Penn and Steve Bancroft, were completely soused on two six-packs of beer I’d left for them as payment for grading my students’ papers, which I simply could not bring myself to do anymore. My short-lived career around that town and that precious little college was all but over.
“Who is that? Janov, that you? How many feet do you have now? We’re out of beer, by the way. Who in hell’s that with you? Sheffield? Sheffield, is that you?”
“What exactly are you doing under the table, Greg?” Allison asked.
Greg snorted, then let out with a massive, long otherworldly belch. “I’m up to my elbows in vomit and oblivion,” he said, and belched. “Obviously.”
Just before going back out to Berkeley, I was teaching at this small college in the midst of the cornfields of Illinois. It was late in the spring of 1971, near the end of the semester, and it was the perfect end to the idealistic Sixties deep in the cornfields of central Illinois at a liberal arts college known for the fact that its students ran the entire campus except, of course, for the teaching and the administration. That was left for dummies like us.
The town had an actual town square, around which a shell-shock case from World War II named John Fox still walked every day. Around and around the square he walked since returning home from the landing at Normandy Beach. And running the only bar on the square, Jack’s Bar, was a man with an enormous nose who was the exact spitting image of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who’d been hounded out of office by our protests to the war in Vietnam. Everyone called him Jack. It was very spooky and very weird to have the ex-president of the United States asking what you wanted to drink. He had the extraordinary habit of staying focused on you, probably to establish that you were old enough to be ordering a drink. His nose was so red and enormous, he looked like he should be sitting on a stoop with his shoelaces untied in the Village in New York, chomping on a cigar butt and feeding pigeons out of a paper bag.
I was drinking myself into oblivion, as much as you can do that sort of thing, trying to forget exactly where I was while still trying to make a living of sorts, at the same time trying to keep from getting fired for neglecting to show up for my 8 a.m. class and holding the class at my house at 8 p.m. instead. Every one of my students showed up at the night class at the house. Everyone except one old lady from town. And that was where my troubles with the Dean and the President of that fine institution began.
That night we took out a tall ladder and wrote one of my poems with a magic marker across the 12 foot ceilings of the college-owned faculty house where I was staying. Allison Sheffield was short with luscious curls of reddish-brown hair, and a burst of baby fat and freckles in her cheeks. Freckles scattered themselves over her arms and chest, stopping just below her breasts. There was something childlike about her. She was definitely not a woman of the world yet. She came from a farm outside St. Louis where her father raised horses for riding and lambs for eating. She’d been riding horses more or less from the day she was born. She had lambs for pets.
Then suddenly from out in front of the house I heard voices that sounded real familiar. I put my beer down on the coffee table in the living room and went out to the front porch to see who it was, the screen door slamming shut behind me. A large moth kept flying around the porch light, hitting it over and over. It was still hot outside, though it was pitch black already. It must have been past 10 p.m. There at the curbside, beside a dinged-up Buick sedan that smelled of burning oil, stood Warren Jeffries, one of my previous students from my graduate teaching gig back at U.C. Irvine from the year before. He was standing beside this short, tightly-wound surfer buddy of his named Kent. It wasn’t that long ago I’d left the state of California to begin what might have become my teaching career in the Great Midwest. Fat chance!
Warren and Kent were standing stiffly beside Kent’s car like chauffeurs, Warren Jeffries a good foot taller. He eyed my assistant suspiciously. Allison’s abundant chest stood out even in the darkness that surrounded us. The fat stars were dripping out of a bright Van Gogh night sky. It was so fresh and clear out there that you could more or less reach up and put your hand right in the Milky Way. The odor of earth drifted in from the cornfields surrounding the town on all sides. About the only sound was coming from the constant high-octane crickets in the bushes and lawns around the house.
“I have a gift for you,” Warren said. “Come around to the trunk of the car. So, tell me, who’s the wench with milk above her lip?”
“Oh, come here, Allison. Sorry. Allison, Kent. And this … is Warren.”
Warren held out his hand, formally, and nodded. He pulled me toward the back of the Buick. “Boy,” he said. “She could almost be your daughter. And, well … she’s got some cleavage!”
“Some?”
“Cleavage scares me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he giggled, “it just does. It makes you think before speaking, I think. I don’t know. It just scares me, that’s all. Makes me act dumb, and I hate that.”
He inserted the key, opened the trunk, and out popped Kirk Dayton like a jack-in-the-box, his dirty blonde shoulder-length hair looking every bit the spitting image of Curt Cobain, who was still probably in the 3rd grade or something at that time. Kirk made a rolling gesture with his hand, pointing in the trunk where he’d just been riding curled up in a fetal position. There sat a full case of Coors beer, my favorite, which they had purchased directly from the factory in Golden, Colorado, as they passed through the Rocky Mountains.
“Damn, Dayton!” I said, grinning, shaking Kirk’s hand vigorously. These guys were the best of my class of students from my days back at Irvine, and they knew my fondness for Coors beer and that I probably couldn’t get any there stuck in the Illinois cornfields.
Warren was eying me closely. I didn’t notice, as it turned out, how closely. I thought he was enjoying the moment intensely. This really was the best joke possible.
“How do you like your gift?” Warren asked. “Your favorite, right?”
“You couldn’t have made a more perfect night. Is it still cold?” I noticed Warren choking up. “You meant the beer, right?”
Warren must have blushed a deep red in the Illinois night.
“This is so awkward,” he said. He knew how much I preferred the pure energy and nerve, as well as the writing, of Kirk Dayton. I had said as much too many times really. As a teacher, I was a sonofabitch. Too mean, I think. Or maybe just not politic enough to be effective. I was becoming more aware of that since I’d landed in the middle of the Illinois cornfields and began trying to lead some of those poor students out of the delusions of childhood.
“Oh, for Chrissakes!” Kirk grunted. “We just drove this stuff in from Golden, Colorado, pretty much non-stop, and he asks if it’s still cold! Fucking-A! Here.” He took out a bottle, positioned it against the edge of the car bumper and knocked off the cap. The beer shot out of the bottle. He sprayed my face with it. “We’re here, man! We just drove all the way from Califuckinfornia. Fucking A, B and C! Now drink your beer.”
We did. It was very warm, and we drank warm beer all night long.


* * *

While we were drinking that warm beer from Golden, Colorado, a girlfriend of Allison’s strode into the house, saying, “Okay, Janov, tomorrow’s your trial. So, what are we going to do about it?” Everybody called this girl Creamcheese.
“Your trial?” asked Warren Jeffries. “Your trial?”
Kent immediately went and stood behind Creamcheese, who was even shorter than he was. He touched her bare shoulder. She had more flesh showing than clothing. Creamcheese wasn’t her real name, but that’s what everybody called her, because she wore either granny dresses or close to nothing at all and acted like a flower child. She was pretty much willing to sleep with anyone. She’d been with Jed upstairs until Peggy bumped her out of the way. Creamcheese was a groupie to us, even though we weren’t exactly a group of anything in particular. She just liked hanging out, since student life around there was otherwise pretty boring.
“You’re on trial, Janov?” Kirk Dayton asked. “For what?”
“Yeah,” said Bancroft. “The dean and the president are trying to get him fired.”
“And what are we going to do about it?” asked Creamcheese.
“What are we going to do about it?” Steve Bancroft sneered. “Why don’t you shut it, Creamcheese? You aren’t going to do anything and you know it. He’s going to get his ass fired tomorrow, and we’re going to burn down the campus, and you’ll run home to Chicago to your lawyer Daddy and you know it, so just shut it, little fucking daddy’s girl Susie Creamcheese-Creamcheese.”
Kent moved out from behind Creamcheese and stood in front of her, facing Steve Bancroft.
“Now, just you wait a minute,” he said.
“Ah, sit down and relax your little biceps,” said Bancroft. “Here, have a beer, why don’t you.” He held out his hand. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just Creamcheese, man. Relax. I’m Steve, by the way.”
“Kent. I’m a Foul Language Poet,” he announced.
“You’re a, you’re a, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m a student of the infamous Von Rotten, of Red Square fame, in Berkeley.”
“Well, who gives a big rat’s ass?” said Steve.
“Oh, you certainly will, some day.” Kent was one smug sonofabitch.
“Great. Okay, let’s haul the twelve foot ladder in here,” said Greg Penn. “We’re going to write one of Janov’s poems all the way across this here ceiling. Who’s up for the second or third line? I’m good for one, maybe two.”
We all looked up. The ceiling was twelve or fourteen foot high. We were real drunk. There was one of those Victorian era ornamental plaster moldings around the light fixture right in the middle of the ceiling. A large dusty moth was consistently hitting its head against one of the six or eight light bulbs, throwing flickering shadows against the walls.
Greg began climbing the ladder. “Hold on to the damned ladder, will you, ass-wipe?”
“I’m next,” Warren Jeffries chimed in.
I made a motion, but Steve Bancroft stopped me. “Look, why don’t you two go into the bedroom and leave the driving to us?” he said, motioning toward Allison. “Go ahead and get some while you can, because we’re all going on such a long trip. We’ll take care of business here. You’re going out and buying that Pepsi van we talked about tomorrow. It’s already been decided, and we ain’t taking no for an answer, so get some rest.”
“A Pepsi van?” asked Warren.
“Yeah. The electric cool-aid Pepsi van,” said Steve. “It’s real cool. It’s red, white and blue, and costs only five hundred bucks. We’re all going out to California in it after he gets his ass shit-canned tomorrow and we burn down the campus.”
“Well,” said Warren, turning to me, “it sounds like these guys have your life all planned out for you, don’t they?”
“Pretty much,” Steve said, nodding. “Yeah.” He took a long pull on his warm Coors beer, then held it off at a distance, looking at the label. “Not bad. Not bad. Beats the crap out of Carling Black Label, doesn’t it, Greg? That’s all we ever drank in high school in West Virginia. Damned coal miners, man. Yeah. That Carling Black Label. Tasted like salt and piss-water. Or else they mixed their sweat right in your beer. Either way.”
“Put a cork in it, will you, ass-wipe?” said Greg.
“Whatever.”
The next day some of my students were reading papers they had prepared in lieu of a final exam. My classroom was up on the second floor of a large old building in the middle of campus. The second story had tall windows with a view out into these huge old trees. It was warm out already and the smell of mowed lawns drifted in through the open windows and Greg’s was the last paper of the class. He read from his paper in a florid pontificating voice about the French novelist Celine and the effect surrealism had on him. As he was finishing, he said, “In summation, Celine decided the ultimate insult you could hurl at someone was the word, ‘Nasturtium!’ I think you can best summarize Celine’s attitude toward the meaning of life by the following gesture.”
Greg threw his cigarette on the floor with a look of disdain. One student began to applaud, when suddenly Greg sprinted toward the window, waving as he went, and dove right through the open window, disappearing downward out of sight. Everyone in the room gasped, realizing that we were a whole tall floor up among the trees, and that this guy was diving headlong to his death. En masse we all rushed to the window. There lay Greg on his back on a pile of mattresses assembled by Warren, Steve and Allison, Kirk, Creamcheese and Kent. Greg was laughing his ass off down below, and my classroom went nuts. People were hitting each other. They were ecstatic. Needless to say, I gave Greg an A. In fact, I scrawled across the top of his paper: Fucking A+. A fact which, unfortunately, did not sit well around that campus. It was the crowning touch to my travails with Mr. Gordon and Mr. Brown, President and Dean of that fine institution of higher learning in the Midwest. As the students around there used to sing: “We love you, Mr. Gordon. We love you, Mr. Brown.”


2


The next day was my faculty trial, and things grew real intense around the campus of that little college. A large crowd of students began to gather around the base of the building that housed the administrative offices, where my hearing was being held. The meeting room was up on the second floor. They ushered me into a room with a long table, around which sat the heads of every department on campus, including the art department, Mitchell Parkman, more or less my only ally on the faculty, at the insistence of his wife Mary Jo, who admired me for some reason I couldn’t fathom. Because I wrote poetry maybe, and was different, or so I thought at the time. I saw President Gordon, an old, old man without a chin, occasionally walking over to the window and peering out at the size of the crowd, which kept growing like a stain on the lawn. You could hear shouting voices from below. People held their fists in the air in a gesture of solidarity. It was a serious matter, and kind of scary. With every shout that rose up, heads of the faculty turned and looked at one another. Only Dean Brown seemed unconcerned. He kept thumbing through this stack of memos in a huge file folder in front of him. Here’s what had led up to that mess.
Early on in the year when I had arrived, they’d given me an early morning class at 8 a.m. and I wasn’t an early morning kind of guy. I was more of a late night poet kind of guy. So when many of the students were having trouble making it to class at 8 a.m., I suggested moving the class to my house and meeting at 8 p.m. in my living room. Brilliant! Almost every student showed up for the 8 p.m. class at my house on College Avenue, and everything seemed to be going great until an old woman from town who was taking my class (God knows why) complained to the president of the college that I wasn’t making my 8 a.m. class on campus. She was apparently an early morning person. And our two worlds simply collided.
President Gordon told Dean Brown to collect data on my malfeasance so they could try me in front of the faculty senate and fire me. And Dean Brown with his crew-cut, button-down Richard Nixon jowls, set about writing memos. Unfortunately Dean Brown, even though he had written these memos on my malfeasance, didn’t bother to actually deliver them to me so that I could, you know, respond to them. When you write memos, it’s probably a good idea to deliver them too. In fact, it ought to be a damned requirement. I’d probably make it that way if I were running the country. But I never really wanted to be President anyway. I’m probably about the only one in the United States who didn’t, if you want the truth.
“Okay, Dean Brown, why don’t you present the evidence against Mr. Janov and let’s get on with it,” said President Gordon.
Dean Brown shoved the entire folder across the table. “He ignored every one of these messages. He persisted in meeting his 8 a.m. class at 8 p.m. at his house instead of on campus at 8 a.m., even after repeated warnings.” He tapped a long finger on the folder and sat back with a pleased smile.
President Gordon looked down his nose over his spectacles. He cleared his throat. “And what do you have to say to the charges, Mr. Janov?”
“Well,” I said, “I never got any warnings or messages from Dean Brown. I didn’t know this presented a problem. I was meeting my class at my house at 8 p.m. The students’ attendance improved dramatically, as did their participation.”
“What do you mean? You never got Dean Brown’s memos?” President Gordon shoved the folder closer to me. “Here they are.”
I opened the folder and thumbed through a few of the memos. They looked official. They were memos all right.
“I never received any of these,” I said.
Mitchell Parkman asked the Dean, “Who are these memos written to?”
“Why, to myself and Mr. Janov, of course,” answered Dean Brown. “The carbon copies are for Janov.”
“But I never got them,” I said.
“But I wrote them,” said Dean Brown.
“Well,” asked Mitchell Parkman, “how did you deliver them exactly?”
“Well, I didn’t … exactly. I wrote the memos covering the situation, as I was instructed to do.”
“But, so, you didn’t deliver them to Mr. Janov?” Mitchell Parkman had a habit of raising one eyebrow when asking or stating the obvious.
“Well … no,” said the Dean.
“How did you expect him to respond then?”
“Oh, I pretty much knew he wouldn’t respond. In fact, I was sure of it. He came from California.”
Mitchell Parkman looked around the room at the heads of all the other departments. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious what our course of action has to be.”
Nearly all of them nodded their heads in unison.
“We can’t afford a lawsuit here,” he said. “I move to dismiss the charges.”
There was so much silence in the room, except for the shouts from outdoors from the students, that I could hear a woodpecker pecking away at a tree.
“Second,” came a weak voice from the other end of the table. It was difficult to tell which one of the heads had said that.
President Gordon’s head swung around for a moment.
“All in favor, raise your hands.”
One by one the hands went up around the table.
“Looks pretty much unanimous,” said Mitchell Parkman. He rose from his chair and extended his hand. “You’re free to go, Mr. Janov. Want to go get a beer at Jack’s bar?”
The students let out an audible groan when they heard about the dismissal. They wanted to damage something. This would have been their chance to stage a real protest, since they had missed most of the protests against the war in Vietnam so far. But they would get their chance. Not to worry. The troops are always on their way somewhere else. There is always another war.
We all went over to Jack’s bar on the town square. Mitchell’s wife Mary Jo was already there before us, holding two long tables that had been put together. My “assistant” Allison had to order a diet Pepsi, but the rest of us were drinking bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I kept ordering in groups of six at a time, so Jack couldn’t tell who was old enough. The crowd was too big and disorderly anyway. The afternoon dragged on into the early evening. We’d forgotten completely about eating anything, and things were getting pretty raucous.
Jimmy Pond, another member of the English faculty was there with Ann Hedstrom, the head of the English Department, who had hired me to replace someone on sabbatical for the year. Ann had soft eyes and deep pock marks that spread over her entire face from a terrible bout with acne when she was young. Jimmy Pond was sleeping with her as a result of one drunken night on my living room couch. Jimmy was from New Orleans and had about the longest Southern drawl I’d ever heard in my life. Ann pounced on Jimmy over his loud protestations one night after his wife left him, which had been exactly two days upon their arriving in the cornfields of Illinois from New Orleans, where she’d been raised. She’d simply never heard so much silence in her life, and she ran from it faster than it took for a suitcase full of cockroaches from New Orleans to make themselves at home in their kitchen on the prairie. She had run for her life, possibly the smartest woman in Illinois, or New Orleans, for that matter.
Jimmy was pontificating in his usual Southern manner about writers from the south, when all of a sudden Mary Jo looked at me and squeezed the bottle of mustard she’d been fondling, and suddenly a long arc of mustard shot across the double table, landing on Jimmy Pond’s white shirt. It was like a perfect arc of bright yellow streaking through the air. It couldn’t have been a more prefect shot if it had been planned by rocket scientists at Nasa. Not one molecule landed anywhere else but on Jimmy’s perfectly laundered and starched white shirt. Jimmy nearly always wore a necktie, because he was a proper New Orleans gentleman who could cook up a mean plate of red beans and rice. You could eat a whole plate of those things without farting once.
Jimmy looked up, startled, then down at his shirt again, to be sure, then back up at Mary Jo. The air flew right out of Mitchell Parkman’s mouth. Mary Jo actually had the nerve to laugh out loud. She kept looking over at me, to make sure I knew what this meant. I had no idea whatsoever what it meant.
“Can I see you outside?” she said to me. She got up from the table without another word and went out the front door of the bar. She had the habit of wearing shapeless hippie dresses so you couldn’t tell what her body was like. She had four children traipsing along behind her most of the time at home. Mitchell kept her pretty much barefoot and pregnant their entire marriage.
I looked back and forth between Jimmy Pond and Mitchell Parkman. Mitchell shrugged and took a long draught of beer from his glass. Mitchell’s secretary, Rosemary, was sitting right beside him. She was a blonde girl with a long nose and a huge chest. She was also their baby-sitter, though not tonight apparently, because this was too big an occasion to miss.
Poor Jimmy was dabbing the mustard off his shirt. Ann Hedstrom kept applying more napkins to the bright yellow squiggle. I walked out the front door of the bar. Mary Jo dragged me by the arm to the curbside.
“See what you made me do?” she said. “By the way, Mitch is fucking that secretary of his, little miss Rosemary with the tits. That’s the third one already and I’m sick and tired of having my nose rubbed in it. But I’m sure he’s already told you all about it. Everybody in town knows all about it. They always do around here. Fucking little Peyton Place. You better not be leaving town any time soon. We haven’t gotten to know each other yet. Do you ever hear the frogs talking around here? I thought you might. They live in the gutters and when it rains they come out and talk to anyone who’ll listen. Have you heard them? I love your poetry, you know. I think you’re a great writer, Janov.”
She pulled my head down to her face and kissed me hard on the mouth, and she wouldn’t let me pull back. Her tongue worked its way into my mouth.
“Don’t you go leaving me behind in this unholy little town, you hear?” Mary Jo had a deep appealing voice, with a slight southern St. Louis accent. Her voice was almost husky. It left the impression that she wasn’t finished saying everything she had to say.
A brightness entered my eyes when she kissed me. Something lit up in my future. But the next day my students drove me out to a used car lot on Route 66, and I bought that red, white and blue Pepsi van, and by the end of the week we were off to the West Coast on our 3000 mile trip.

* * *

We packed my king-sized mattress, given to me for free by an old teacher at Irvine, onto a sheet of plywood in the van. That was for Allison and me. Greg and Steve had pup tents, which they would roll out wherever we stopped and they would sleep under the stars. This worked fine until the first night it rained. That put a real crimp in our already crimped sex life. Actually I didn’t mind as much as Allison minded. It made her real grumpy when she didn’t get laid. I could never understand how she could bear so much pain. I guess it was the mixture of pleasure and pain that kept her going, or maybe she was practicing to have children.
We said we would meet my old Irvine students back in Laguna Beach when we got out to California. Our plan was to take the northern route out through Wyoming, then straight across to Portland before turning south and heading all the way down Highway 101 and Highway 1 to drive the whole coast. A 3000 mile trip in all. Unfortunately, none of us had ever driven a delivery van that was meant for deliveries on the plains, not the mountains. It didn’t have the requisite dual rear wheels you needed for stability going around mountain curves. Neither did it have four gears, only three on the column. You need more than three gears when you’re going down a steep incline. We discovered as we were heading down our first steep incline in Wyoming that our gearshift wouldn’t stay in second gear without holding it up in second gear with one hand. It kept popping out of gear. That meant we had no way of gearing down and slowing the descent of the truck except for our brakes, which began smoking and grinding and groaning as soon as we hit that first incline. The vehicle was simply not made for the mountains. One of my students, either Greg or Steve, occasionally Allison, would sit or kneel on the floor of the van right next to me, holding that gear shift in second gear as we shimmied along down mountain roads.
But first let me back up a little. After piling all of my belongings into the truck, stowing as much as possible underneath the sheet of plywood that acted as the base for our bed, we pulled up in front of Dean Brown’s house, which was situated at the edge of town. He lived in a sprawling rancher with a half wagon wheel planted in the neatly mowed front yard. The wagon wheel was painted white.
Greg insisted on trying to learn how to drive a stick shift and told me to go sit on the mattress with Allison. He and Steve hung out the stand-up doors and began singing at the top of their lungs: “We love you, Mr. Gordon! We love you, Mr. Brown!”
Then Greg jumped into the driver’s seat, floored the engine and popped the clutch, and the van lurched forward, letting out a peal of rubber as he swung around the corner on two wheels, nearly turning over. Steve Bancroft kept hollering out the right side door as we tore up the street, holding up his middle finger as we went. When he turned around, he was so red in the face I thought he was going to pass out. He collapsed on the mattress, laughing and coughing in a spasm.
But at the next stop sign Greg put the truck in neutral and crawled out from behind the wheel. He looked at me. “It’s all yours, captain. I need a drink.” He pulled a cold beer out of a brown paper bag.
“Hey, put that stuff away,” I said. “I can’t go driving down the road with open booze.” Greg sucked down half the bottle and Steve practically inhaled the rest. They tossed the bottle right out the open door into the street where it shattered, and off we went.
I turned the truck onto Mary Jo’s street and crawled past the house where she lived with Mitchell Parkman and her four kids. The kids were running all over the front yard when Mary Jo spotted our truck. She came to the curbside as I pulled up in front of the house. She motioned for me to come out of the truck. We walked to the corner of her street. She was a good deal shorter than me. Her hair was long and flowing and had turned prematurely white. She looked over her glasses at me. She was still quite lovely. She had once been a debutante in St. Louis.
“This is where I come when I need to talk to the frogs.”
She pointed at the gutter by a storm drain.
‘They’re the only ones I can talk to around here. There was nobody else, until you came to town.”
“We’re leaving for the coast.”
“Please don’t leave me here, Janov. Can’t you see what it’s done to me? I’m going crazy here.”
I looked all around at the tall lovely elm trees and the big sleepy houses. I saw something move behind a curtain in one of the houses.
“They’re watching us,” she said. “They’re always watching. The frogs are all I have to talk to. You know?”
I nodded. Sadly, I knew. I touched her on the forearm. The bare skin along her forearms was quite firm and muscular. She was a painter, like her husband. There were small spots of white paint along her arms. I stepped back and hesitated, then turned and went back to the red, white and blue Pepsi van.
“I’ll follow you out to the coast, Janov!” she yelled after me.
We drove one last time around the town square and saw John Fox, still walking. We drove past Jack’s bar. Greg hopped to the door and saluted Lyndon Baines Johnson. Then we drove out to Route 66 and started out toward the Coast. That was the last I saw of Illinois.
As we were passing an Army surplus store in downtown St. Louis, Greg started shaking me by the arm. “Stop the truck! Stop the truck!”
“What? What?” I rammed on the brakes, thinking it was some emergency, or I was about to hit something I couldn’t see.
“I need to get me some pants,” he said. “It won’t take long. You can wait right here, and keep the motor running. Ass-wipe, you come inside with me.” He dragged Steve by the arm. They went running into the store. Allison and I started making out the instant they went inside the store. But they both came running back out of the store before I could get a good hard-on.
“Go, go, go!” shouted Greg. Steve was laughing and running. The store door opened and a store dick came running out, looking both ways up and down the sidewalk.
“Put this thing in gear,” Greg yelled, “for Chrissakes, floor this sucker. Two-wheel it around the corner, will you?”
He had a cigarette in his mouth and lit a stick match with his thumbnail. He puffed on the thing like Groucho Marx, tapping the ash delicately with his ring finger.
“Yowsir! Got me some pants. Now we’re in business.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’ll see. Drive,” he said. “For Chrissakes, look out where you’re going.”
Both Steve and Greg lay on their backs on my mattress in the rear and howled with laughter. They were kicking their legs in the air like babes in new diapers.
“Shit, shit!” Steve howled. “You should have seen the look on that store clerk’s face when Greg vaulted over the check out stand.”
We drove in front of the St. Louis Arch on our way out west. It was like one enormous goal post in the shape of an arch, or one of the hoops to a gigantic croquet set. We set our eyes west from there, rolling out into the vast sea of cornfields extending from the Mississippi River until you reached the base of the Wyoming highlands. Wyoming is like a huge raised plateau before you got to the Rocky Mountains. We kept driving and driving and driving. My students were pretty much no use at all, so I had to do most of it myself.
Forty miles outside St. Louis, Allison said to pull down this side road. We drove past her farm and stopped beside a pasture with horses in it. She got out of the truck, taking me by the arm. We walked to the fence and she made a noise and one of the horses came right over toward the fence. She put her hand on the horse’s muzzle and petted it, whispering its name. She pulled a small red apple out of her jeans. Her horse began wolfing down the apple without biting her hand. Pretty adept.
“Do you want to meet my parents, Mr. Janov?” she asked, looking at me. “I know they would like to meet you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“No, they would love you, just like I do.”
“I don’t think so. Love to kill me maybe.”
“No, they would love you too. I’m pretty sure, Mr. Janov. Who wouldn’t love a poet? My horse too. Her name is Ginger, because she’s red.”
She looked her horse in the eye. “I’m going out to California with Mr. Janov,” she said softly. “He’s my lover.”
Her horse looked right at me. The smell of horse shit was staggering, pretty much. I guess you’d get used to it after a time. But I was a city boy, raised in Chicago, where horses were kept under the hood of fast cars and power boats or at the movies.
Allison kissed her horse’s nose, and I saw tears sliding down beside her rosy baby-fat cheeks. When we got back into our Pepsi van, Greg had put on his Army cargo pants, which were loose and baggy.
I couldn’t understand why in hell he insisted on wearing these things until the first time we ran out of cigarettes. We were somewhere, God-knows-where, on the outskirts of some godforsaken little town. That was when he disappeared into a food store and emerged with his pants bulging with goods. He was laughing wildly. He pulled a whole carton of Pall Malls out of his pants. Then a package of Oscar Meyer baloney, a red apple, a small jar of mayonnaise, a squashed loaf of Wonder bread. I began wondering what he didn’t have jammed into those pants.
I said, “What happens if they catch you with all this stuff?”
“What if they do?” he said. “What’s the worst that could happen? I go to jail, right? Then I don’t have to worry about going to Vietnam anymore. So, good.”
“Good?” echoed Steve. “Fucking-A! It’s great!”
We’d been driving through head-high cornstalks for what seemed like close to 100 years of complete and utter solitude. All you could hear when you pulled over for a piss stop was the insect roar out in those fields, or when they swooped past your ear. Flattened snakes glistened on the surface of the road, road kill covered by dense swarms of flies.
“Who lives out here?” I asked.
“Pretty near everyone else in America,” said Allison. “Parents with their kids, white picket fences. You know, that kind of thing. People discovering dope and sex for the first time.”
“Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” said Steve. “Yeah!”
“Ass-wipe, will you just shut your pie-hole for one minute so someone can think?” Greg remarked, almost to himself. “Jeez. Just look at the landscape, will you? Fucking-A, man. You always gotta have the last word, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Steve.
“I mean, Vietnam, man. Think about it.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “I’d rather get married.”
“Nasturtium!” Greg yelled, and he dove at Steve on the mattress, pinning him down. “Nasturtium!” he yelled right in Steve’s ear.
“Watch your fucking language, man!” Steve yelled back from his position in a headlock. “There’s a lady present.”
After crossing the border into Kansas, a minor tornado appeared out of the dark lowering clouds, and the truck really began to rock. We turned north to avoid a head-on collision with it, and stumbled on the Oregon National Historic Trail, also known as the Lewis and Clark Trail. It was the flattest route out to the coast. Day 1.


3


We woke up at a rest stop on a knoll overlooking the Platte River, somewhere in Nebraska. Allison and I were under a blanket on our mattress when Greg and Steve peered in the door of our red, white, and blue Pepsi van.
“Psst! Janov, you awake yet? The sun’s been up for like a whole hour, man. Get the hell up already, will you? These big damn trucks are keeping us awake out here with their diesel fumes. C’mon, man. Pull your dick out of Allison and let’s get going.”
“My dick’s not in Allison.”
“It’s in my mouth,” she said.
“Then how come you’re still talking? No, wait, I get it,” said Greg.
“What?” said Allison. “What?” Greg was smiling. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I get it,” Allison said. “Well, it’s way more than I can handle, I can tell you that much, you dirty old man!”
Steve Bancroft fell down in the dirt outside. “I already miss my future wife,” he said. He lay flat on his back, looking up at the sky. “Let’s get the hell outta here. There’s a river out here. What’s the name of it? Where the fug are we anyway? Are we there yet? C’mon, Janov, what say you get your ass out of bed? I need some breakfast or I’m going to throw a giant tantrum.”
“Okay, Janov,” said Greg. “Drive us to the nearest store so we can rustle up some breakfast.”
I got into the driver’s seat. At the next small town we stopped in front of a grocery and Greg went in with Steve again, who acted as suspicious as possible as a decoy. A man in a white apron came out hauling Steve along by the collar and yelled at him never to come back to his store. But right behind the man, out slipped Greg with his cargo pants bulging with goodies. Out of his pants Greg pulled a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, another squashed loaf of Wonder bread, and two enormous Idaho potatoes. Then some green onions. Two more red apples. He looked at me, because he saw me watching him.
“Always have fruit with every meal, man,” Greg said. “Uh, listen, can we stop at the next liquor store and get a jug of Gallo or Red Mountain or Gallo or something? I’ve about had it with all this driving crap. I think we need to pull over and spend some serious time drinking our asses off. I kinda thought we’d be there by this time. What do you say?”
I shook my head. Allison was nodding her head. I think she was about ready to jump on me. We needed some time alone.
“Okay,” I said. “Just a little further. We need to keep pushing ahead a little more, if we’re ever going to get there.”
“Aw, man!” Steve whined. “Crap. We need a good drink. C’mon. C’mon!”
“Okay. Just a little further,” I said.
We drove all the way through Nebraska that way, Steve whining, Greg holding his head, demanding a drink. “Look at my hand, will you? It’s shaking. Look at it!”
Finally I pulled into a small shopping mall outside a town on the border of Wyoming. Ahead you could see the road starting to head uphill for quite a long stretch. Greg jumped out of the van and began doing handsprings in the parking lot. “Holy shit! Ah, I can’t believe it. Earth. Real fucking ground! Okay, Janov, here’s some money. We need two gallon jugs of some fine Red Mountain Pink Chablis. Oh, boy!”
I went into the liquor store and purchased two one-gallon jugs of Gallo Pink Chablis. They didn’t have nor had they ever heard of Red Mountain for some reason. I got two six packs of Coors beer for myself and Allison. But when I came out, Greg looked at me and laughed.
“No, no,” he said. “Look, just stay here. And start the motor, will you?”
He ran into the store with Steve. In less than five minutes they came running back out with their arms loaded with stuff. A pack of firewood, a box of stick matches, the biggest package of hot dogs I’d ever seen. It looked like enough to feed a campsite full of Boy Scouts. They had rolls of toilet paper, two newspapers. They had a whole sack of apples, they had marshmallows in one enormous bag. They leapt into the truck.
“Go, go, go!” Greg shouted. “Get the fuck out of here! The guy had a rifle, man! Floor this sucker! Go! Step on it!”
The door to the grocery began to open. I saw a rifle coming out first, and away we flew.
Somewhere between Cheyenne and Rock Springs, Wyoming, they ground me down, and I pulled over and stopped the truck. We were way the hell out in the middle of absolute nowhere. Trucks rarely went by on the highway. Almost nobody, it seemed, traveled this route. We crept up a small incline and parked in an open swing-about space where we could camp without being noticed, even if we built a big campfire, which was exactly what we did. There were logs and deadwood of all sorts scattered around the space. We dragged what we could toward the center and built this big pyramid of wood, and sat down to do some serious drinking on logs that acted as benches around the fire. We waited for darkness to come upon us before striking a match. Then it was the biggest bonfire I’d ever seen. It was like something you would see at a homecoming football match. We started jumping all around the flames as they rose higher and higher, because we noticed our own huge shadows leaping against a cliff right next to us. That was when we discovered we could make one shadow jump right through another and come out whole on the other side. Our shadows were indestructible. It was one of those moments of discovery maybe only gallons of pink Chablis could bring on. Or dope. Because Allison also broke out a couple of joints and we were getting pretty stoned.
All of a sudden there was a howl from somewhere out in the bushes around us. The next thing I knew Greg took to howling as well. Then Steve began howling. Then to my amazement so did Allison, then me as well. We all began howling with whatever it was that was out there, and I turned and noticed the moon which seemed to have swerved over the horizon, which began all the way back in Illinois. I grew certain I could see all the way back to the beginning from our plateau in Wyoming.
“I saw the moon swerve over the horizon,” I said.
“Let’s haul out the poetry, man” Greg said. He ran to the truck and brought out a hardbound edition of the Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
“Give me that,” I said. I turned to “The Meditations of an Old Woman” and began to read. I read two pages and put the book down on the ground. I thought I was getting up to go take a leak, but I leapt over the flames of the fire instead. I don’t know why I did that.
Well, all hell broke loose.
Greg jumped to his feet and grabbed the book of poetry and began shouting out lines rapid-fire, then he too leapt through the flames.
Steve was next. Even Allison took a turn at reading, but she was a little too short and plump to make it over the flames. The pit was pretty damned wide. She got to the edge and looked in and turned back and sat down, taking another toke off the joint.
“C’mon, Sheffield, don’t chicken out,” yelled Steve.
“Ah, leave her alone,” said Greg.
“You’re no fun,” Steve complained.
“Go fuck yourself,” Greg retorted. He took an enormous swig off the jug of wine. Then he leapt back through the flames again. He came back to where the book was and handed it to me. “Read some more, man. You’re a great reader. Here.”
I opened the book and began reading. I saw Steve and Greg sit down on the ground and sink back against the logs. They let their heads tilt back and their faces lifted up to the stars. I could feel the heat emanating from Allison’s skin. It was still quite warm out, but a wind began picking up, making the flames more raggedy. I turned up my collar and kept reading. When my throat went dry, I took a long pull from my bottle of Coors. No one said a word while I drank. Then I began flowing back into the “Meditations of an Old Woman.” The poet’s words held us. They held us all. We went this way and that with the memories and the mind of age as it bent and swayed between its idle and sharp thoughts. Roethke had really managed to get inside that old woman. We felt a twig snap in the universe.
No, wait, that was a real twig in the real world. What was out there? Ah, but what did it matter? Not one of us moved, and I dug in further and let that old mind carry us. The cares of the other world that was out there drifted further away. The wars. The politicians with their warped thoughts, speaking about dollars in the night. We were carried away by the internal river of words.
We were clueless as to how it all worked, and we did not care how it all worked.
We were poets. We were in love with the world again.
Allison took her clothes off. She was full-bodied with abundant breasts and the firelight shone on her large nipples. She took me by the hand as Steve and Greg stared open-mouthed. Steve began to masturbate, while Greg kept drinking wine. Allison and I went into the truck and balled our brains out. Allison screamed out with the pain and the joy. Day 2.
Finally at one point in the middle of the night I heard Greg saying, “Will you put your dick away, ass-wipe? Jesus! You’re not going to bring your girlfriend out here with all your whiplash masturbation.”
After three days of complete and utter debauchery in our little encampment on that plateau in Wyoming, we started heading west again. Altogether, after numerous runs to a liquor/grocery store, we had consumed a grand total of twelve gallons of Gallo pink Chablis, four cases of Coors beer, and two bags of weed. We began passing through one town after another. They all became a blur. We kept driving and driving. We descended upon Salt Lake City, then turned north up through Idaho, always seeking the flattest route possible, following after Lewis and Clarke. Through Twin Falls, Gooding, Mountain Home, Boise, then on into Oregon. When we hit the Columbia River Gorge, a light lit up in my red eyes. Like a heat-seeking missile I headed down that river toward the sea, and we drove all the way down along the river until we came into Portland.
We were exhausted, and when we walked into a record store where they had enormous speakers that were blaring out Janis Joplin singing “Piece of My Heart,” it was like hearing the gospel on the mountain directly from the lips of Ms. Moses. We couldn’t get ourselves to leave that record store, and instead sat around on these enormous comfortable old sofas absorbing the music like bees sotted on honey. We’d been on the road so long, this seemed like the ultimate return to civilization to us. It didn’t seem possible one woman could contain so much soul. And I had seen Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company once in concert down at U.C. Irvine, but this was something else again. We’d been in the wilderness of America just too damned long. When you are out there on the road, America seems like pretty much the same old same old, no matter where you are. Things never seem to change until you hit the big city. Even a place like Portland was big to us. And the size of that music store! It was two stories high inside and absolutely cavernous. And those speakers must have been five feet across, they were so big, and they hung them from the ceiling and it was just wonderful to hear those angelic tones coming out of Janis, our Janis.
I didn’t want to go on. “Portland seems like it might be a nice place to live,” I said. “Let’s stop here.”
Janis Joplin was charming their ears too, like a siren. It took them a minute. Then Steve began to whine. “No, man, we’re going to California. I want to see California. Gre…e…g!” he whined. “Get him off his ass. I want to go to California.”
“Bancroft, will you just shut up and listen to Joplin? Fuck sake!”
“I wanna go to California. I wanna go. C’mon. Jeez! ”
“Nasturtium! Shut the fuck up, will you?”
“Greg, c’mon! C’mon!”
Greg looked over at me. “He’s never going to stop, you know.”
I nodded. I did know that. With the greatest effort I rose from the sofa and looked back at it. “Sofas were once noble flower-eating animals, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, Zbignew Herbert the Polish poet, I know,” Steve said. “But California, man. California! I can almost taste it.”
“You’re getting out at the state line.”
“No, I’m not. Anyway, doesn’t Janis Joplin live there?”
“Not anymore.”
We took Route 5 south out of Portland, then turned west to the coast, after stealing enough to eat from a grocery to last us two days on the road. I wanted to stop at Brookings by the seacoast, almost down to the California border, to visit a poet friend of mine from Irvine, who was living on his brother’s ranch in the mountains next to a river with his girlfriend. This was Bart Leary, who’d gotten a little too far into acid at school and dropped out. He was a terrific young poet but had stopped believing in words and was making amateur films with an 8 mm camera he’d bought. His movies were about the movements of a weed in the wind, things of that sort. “Words are out,” he used to say down at Irvine. “No one reads anymore. Movies are everything now.” All of which turned out to be pretty prescient.
When we drove up this long bumpy road to the ranch, which was along a ridge, his brother, Dick, came out of the house with his wife and two little kids trailing behind. I asked where Bart was, and his brother pointed down the hill at the river. “Bathing with his girlfriend,” Dick said. “They’re down at the river. We ran out of water up here, so…” he trailed off. He turned and went back into the house with his wife and two bare-assed kids traipsing after him like little ducklings.
We went down to the river. From high up on the embankment we could plainly see Bart with this skinny, almost breastless woman, a girl really, sunning themselves on a sandbar. They were both stark naked. Their skin was so white in the bright sunlight that at first they looked like two chunks of human ice in the middle of the stream.
“Jesus, will you look at that,” said Steve. He couldn’t stop looking. “Will you look at that?”
We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We weren’t nudists exactly, so we couldn’t just go barging in on them while they were out in the open, naked that way. It seemed so private somehow, and sacrosanct. So we went back up to the house on the ridge and hung out. About half an hour passed before Bart and his woman went past on a trail behind the house and disappeared into a tiny cabin we hadn’t even noticed. It wasn’t much bigger than an outhouse. About ten minutes later Bart emerged from the cabin with the woman right behind him, her long dark hair still wet from bathing. When he spied us, he acted surprised, even shy.
Bart was living in this cabin without running water or electricity. They were surviving that summer by picking ferns along the ridge for bouquets at flower stands down in Berkeley and San Francisco, places like that. They came out of the shack fully dressed this time, Bart’s skinny little legs hanging out of his shorts. He seemed different. He seemed so domesticated somehow. I guess it made me look at myself, how I was already set in my ways. I was settling into a rigidity, I realized, and I was way too young for that to happen. I needed to open something up about myself. I needed to look at the world in some kind of different, bigger way.
“I read the poems you sent me,” said Bart. “Damn. They were good, real good. I wish I’d written those. When did you become such a damn grown-up?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.”
“It is.” Bart had this way of looking at you out of the side of his eye, shyly, with his face down. It wasn’t always this way. When we’d first met down at school at Irvine, he was as cocky as a male poet could get. Absolutely self-assured. He’d had some terrific early successes in his publishing career and it set him a notch above the rest of us, who were totally unpublished and knew close to nothing about anything. But the acid took the cockiness out of Bart. It gave him some humility, although it also seemed to eat away at his ability with words. And he had ability, believe me. The women on campus used to flock to him like a group of pigeons being fed out of a paper bag. Every night a different one would take him home, until he settled in with a locally famous woman artist. She seemed to tone him down a notch. Or else it may have simply been the acid eating away at his brains.
Myself I had little or no ego. At first I’d come to the writing program at Irvine with some. Then it got kicked right out of me during our criticism classes. Then I gained a little when I’d written a few semi-decent poems. Then it got knocked right out of me when I received my first batch of rejections from magazines. So I’d been up and down the ladder of non-success more than a few times.
Bart took us inside his cabin and proudly showed us this new batch of green beer they had made and bottled by themselves. That night we drank up the entire batch. When we left they had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. They were trying to subsist off the land. I looked at Bart and imagined I saw him getting skinnier and skinnier on into the future. I have no idea to this day whatever happened to him.

* * *

Next we drove down the road to Eureka, California, after first stopping right at the border to let Steve out so he could kiss the ground of California and everything California stood for. In Eureka we dropped in on another poet friend from my writing program named Bo, who was teaching at a junior college called College of the Redwoods. Going down the mountains outside Eureka was where I got the scare of my life when we kept trying to hold the gear shift up in second to gear the truck down, because these huge logging trucks kept swooping down on us from behind. In the mirror I would watch them getting closer and closer to our rear bumper. I was sweating bullets or brains or at least huge drops right out of my forehead. I asked Allison to keep mopping off my brow as we went down that mountain, and one by one the logging trucks would swing out around us whenever they got half the chance, to blow past this bunch of screaming hippies in our red, white and blue Pepsi van, going down the mountain on their turf. The nerve! It was like I could hear them yelling out the curses as they flew past us. If they’d only known the ultimate curse: Nasturtiums! they would yell. Nasturtiums! NASTURTIUMS!
Then our brakes gave out, though fortunately at the bottom of our long descent into Eureka. We all got out and looked at the blue smoking wheels of the Pepsi van. It smelled just awful, like asbestos. None of us knew what to do. I called Bo and got directions to his house, which was out in the sticks at the edge of town. We put the van in first gear and limped slowly all the way there.
Bo lived with his wife Dana in a house with her children from another marriage. The house had a duck pond with actual ducks floating on the surface. Her kids entertained themselves throwing food at the ducks, which would dive to retrieve what didn’t hit them directly. The ducks were pretty adept at catching food in mid-air, hamburger buns, pieces of baloney, sliced pickles, which they would spit out, looking at the kids impudently. Not even a duck, apparently, liked pickles, though I did. I loved pickles, as a matter of fact. I could eat them until I developed a good case of hives.
Bo knew everything there was about mechanical stuff like brake shoes. He got that van up on jacks and started right in taking off the wheels. But then we couldn’t find the right parts at a local auto store, so we had to spend the next week waiting for them to be shipped in from somewhere else. In the meantime, we got a chance to slow down and relax. And Bo took us out at night to some pretty great music at the house of some locals. There was a woman there who played this electric violin, country blues music that was drenched with soul. I didn’t even know you could hook up a violin electrically. It was astounding music. I wanted to weep, it was so beautiful. Of course, I was getting pretty soused too, once I got the chance to quit thinking about the next day’s drive.
Trouble was, it rained damn near every day in Eureka. The sun would finally break out about midday for about an hour, then it would get swallowed up in this fog. It got really wearing to be in that grayness all the time. People would sort of wait around for the sun to appear, then we’d all run outdoors yelling like Comanches until it went away. The next thing you’d think about was drinking. And people got on your nerves when you were cooped up together inside all the time. Bo and his wife really started sniping at each other. We started to feel like we needed to get the wheels back on our van and get the hell out of there before things erupted into full-blown mayhem. As soon as the parts arrived I sat down beside Bo and learned what needed to be done so we could speed things up and get back out on the road.
Then we drove down the coast all the way into San Francisco, swinging around curves overhanging the ocean that looked death-defying. And we were cold nearly all the time. I remember once hearing Mark Twain’s description: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Amen to that!
Then on across the Bay Bridge into Berkeley, where the head of the Foul Language School of poets resided, our nemesis, Von Rotten, no relation to Johnny Rotten. And the beginning of the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars.
But we didn’t settle in there yet. Instead we continued down the coast until we came to Santa Cruz where parking was free. This seemed like a good town somehow, situated right on the sea, with a boardwalk and an amusement park with a roller coaster. It seemed untouched by time for some reason, and I thought this would be a good place to hole up someday and write a long poem, something I had already started to envision back in those Illinois cornfields. There was broken glass on the sidewalks every morning from fights between winos. What more could a young poet want? Just ask Charles Bukowski. I drew in the sea air. Yes, this would be perfect, I thought. Perfect.
We kept on driving down along the coast, passing through Big Sur, made famous by Jack Keruoac, who stayed there once in a cabin owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Then along perilous cliffs, down past the Hearst Castle, and finally through smog-filled L.A. until we got to Laguna Beach. 3000 miles in all. As we pulled into a parking lot to get some jug wine before entering Laguna Beach, I was so out of it with the fatigue of driving that we hit something with a loud crunch. It was a damned lamp post, right in the middle of the parking lot across the campus from Irvine, but fortunately we’d only been going a few miles per hour. Who the hell puts a light post right smack dab in the middle of a damned parking lot in Irvine, California? I thought. What an outrage! I looked at everybody. They were all staring at me dumbfounded. They’d gotten pretty used to trusting in me with all the driving, like I was their father. I think it sort of woke us all up.
“Not to worry,” I said, “that’s my good parking karma kicking in.”
They looked worried.
When we got down to Laguna Beach, we stopped at the apartment house where Kirk Dayton was staying with his artist girlfriend, Maggie. It was late at night. Kirk and I went out to a playground for kids and hung out on the swing set, drinking wine and beers. I began shaking my head. Kirk kept eying me.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.
I just shook my head, looking down into the sand. “I don’t know.”
“Fuck, man. Want a joint?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Fuck, man. Fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said. “3000 miles. I drove the whole way. They’re just kids,” I said.
“They’re the same age I am,” Kirk said.
“Yeah. Shit.”
“Well, guess what,” he said.
“What?”
“Maggie’s sleeping with this big honcho artist at Irvine, Philip Guston.”
“You’re kidding. Philip Guston, for real?”
Kirk nodded.
“Man, he’s huge.”
“She’s his favorite and they’re like doing it and I confronted her about it and she wouldn’t say yes but she wouldn’t say no either and now she goes around talking to herself all the time. It’s like blowing her mind.”
“Wow. The Philip Guston? He’s huge, Kirk.”
“I know. And she’s got hot pants for him and he’s easily old enough to be her father, maybe grandfather, who the fuck knows?”
I was shaking my head again. I took a huge mouthful of wine and held my head back and gargled it. Then I swallowed, of course.
We began swinging on the swing set really high, charging into it to get the swings going as high as we could. We could feel the legs of the swing set pulling up out of the ground, because we were swinging in exact formation. Then we started yelling like kids, though it was close to midnight, but we didn’t give a shit about anything and we just kept swinging, swinging wild and free. One could do worse, you know.
Then we tried to figure out how to keep swinging while we drank, but we couldn’t. So we stopped and went over to climb on the monkey bars and sat on them and did some serious drinking and finally I fell off into the sand and just lay there, crying softly. You could hear the waves pounding on the beach below that night. Something big must have been out there, stirring something up way out on the Pacific Ocean.
I had to go find an apartment the next day, but that night I didn’t care about how the normal world worked. I had just escaped from Illinois with three students in a red, white and blue Pepsi van, for Chrissake. I had made it all the way back to Laguna Beach with our history of wild student parties and the wreck of the Sixties splayed out behind us.
I was free at last, free at last, or so I thought.
That night we slept on the floor of Kirk and Maggie’s apartment and listened to them arguing all night about art and life and love. Ah, me, I sighed, the sad soul of America! I thought of Walt Whitman. I thought of Allen Ginsberg. I thought about both of them squeezing melons in the supermarkets of California, and the ghosts of our own lost generation, and of what was to come for someone in this room called Life.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.03.2010

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