But in the morning (and I’m no Milarepa who could also sit naked in the snow and was seen flying on one occasion) here comes Ron Blake back with Pat McLear and Pat’s wife the beautiful one, and by God their little sweet 5 year old girl who is such a pleasant sight to see as she goes jongling and jiggling through the fields to look for flowers, everything to her is perfectly new beautiful primordial Garden of Eden morning here in this tortured human canyon—And a rather beautiful morning develops—There’s fog so we close the blinds and light the fire and the lamp, me and Pat, and sit there drinking from the jug he brought talking about literature and poetry while his wife listens and occasionally gets up to heat more coffee and tea or goes out to play with Ron and the little girl—Pat and I are in a serious talkative mood and I feel that lonely shiver in my chest which always warns me: you actually love people and you’re glad Pat is here.
Pat is one if not THE most handsome man I've ever seen—Strange that he’s announced in a preface to his poems that his heroes, his Triumvirate, are Jean Harlow, Rimbaud and Billy the Kid because he himself is handsome enough to play Billy the Kid in the movies, that same darkhaired handsome slightly sliteyed look you expect from the myth appearance of Billy the Kid (I suppose not the actual real life William Bonnie who’s said to’ve been a pimply cretin monster).
So we launch on a big discussion of everything in the comfortable gloom of the cabin by the warm red glow of the girly fire, I’m wearing dark glasses anyway for fun, Pat says “Well Jack I didnt have a chance to talk to you yesterday or even last year or even ten years ago when I first met you, I remember I was terrified of you and Pomeray when you ran up my steps one night with sticks of tea, you looked like a couple of car thieves or bank robbers—And you know a lot of this sneery stuff they’ve written against us, against San Francisco or beat poetry and writers is because a lot of us dont LOOK like writers or intellecuals or anything, you and Pomeray I must say look awful in a way, I’m sure I dont fill the bill either”—“Man you oughta go to Hollywood and play Billy the Kid”—“Man I’d rather go to Hollywood and play Rimbaud”—“Well you cant play Jean Harlow”—“I’d really like to just get my ‘Dark Brown’ published in Paris, do you know that when you think it’s possible a word from you to Gallimard or Girodias would help”—“I dunno”—“Do you know that when I read your poems Mexico City Blues I immediately turned around and started writing a brand new way, you enlightened me with that book”—“But it’s nothing like what you do, in fact it’s miles away, I am a language spinner and you're idea man” and so on we talk till about noon and Ron’s been in and out, ’s’made jaunts to the beach with the little ladies and Pat and I dont realize the sun has come out but still sit there deep in the cabin by now talking about Villon and Cervantes.
Suddenly, boom, the door of the cabin is flung open with a loud crash and a burst of sunlight illuminates the room and I see an Angel standing arm outstretched in the door!—It’s Cody! all dressed in his Sunday best in a suit! beside him are ranged several graduating golden angels from Evelyn golden beautiful wife down to the most dazzling angel of them all little Timmy with the sun striking off his hair in beams!—It’s such an incredible sight and surprise that both Pat and I rise from our chairs involuntarily, like we’ve been lifted up in awe, or scared, tho I dont feel scared so much as ecstatically amazed as tho I’ve seen a vision—And the way Cody stands there not saying a word with his arm outstretched for some reason, struck a pose of some sort to surprise us or warn us, he’s so much like St. Michael at the moment it’s unbelievable especially as I also suddenly realize what he’s just actually done, he’s had wife and kiddies sneak up ever so quiet up the porch steps (which are noisy and creaky), across the wood planks, easy and tiptoeing, stood there awhile while he prepared to fling the door open, all lined up and stood straight, then pow, he’s opened the door and thrown the golden universe into the dazzled mystic eyes of big hip Pat McLear and big amazed grateful me—It reminds me of the time I once saw a whole tiptoeing gang of couples sneaking into our back kitchen door on West Street in Lowell the leader telling me to shush as I stand there 9 years old amazed, then all bursting in on my father innocently listening to the Primo Carnera-Ernie Schaaft fight on the old 1930’s radio—For a big roaring toot—But Cody’s oldfashioned family tiptoe sneak carries that strange apocalyptic burst of gold he somehow always manages to produce, like I said elsewhere the time in Mexico he drove an old car over a rutted road very slowly as we were all high on tea and I saw golden Heaven, or the other times he’s always seemed so golden like as I say in a davenport of some sort in Heaven in the golden top of Heaven.
Not that he means to produce this effect: he’s just standing there with innate dramatic mystery holding forth his arm as if to say Behold, the sun! and Behold, the angels! sorta pointing at all the golden heads of his family and Pat and I stand aghast.
“Happy birthday Jack!” yells Cody or some such ordinary crazy inane greeting “I’ve come to you with good news! I’ve brought Evelyn and Emily and Gaby and Timmy because we’re all so grateful and glad because everything has worked out absolutely dead perfect, or living perfect, boy, with that little old hunnerd dollars you gave me let me tell you the fantastic story of what happened” (to him it was utterly fantastic), “I went out and traded in my Nash that as you know wont even start but I have to have m’old buddies push it down the road for me, this guy had a perfect gem of a purple or what color is it Maw? magenty, slamelty, a jeepster stationwagon Jack but a perfect beauty mind you listen with a beautiful radio, a brand new set of backup lights, thisa and thata down to the perfect new tires and that wonderful shiney paint job, that color! knock you out, that’s what is it, Grape!” (as Evelyn murmurs the color) “Grape color for all the old grape wine jacks, so we’ve come here to not only thank you and see you again but to celebrate this, and on top of all that, occasion, goo me I’m all so gushy and girly, hee hee hee, yes that’s right come on in children and then go out and get that gear in the car and get ready to sleep outdoors tonight and get that good open fresh air, Jack on top of all that and my heart is jess OVERflowin I got a NEW JOB!! along with that splissly little old beautiful new jeep! a new job right downtown in Los Gatos in fact I dont even have to drive to work any more, I can walk it, just half a mile, now Ma you come in here, meet old Pat McLear here, start up some eggs or some of that steak we brought, open up that vieen roossee wine we brought for drunk old Jack that good old boy while I personally private take him to walk with me back down the road where the jeep is parked, unlock that gate, you got the corral key Jack, okay, and we’ll talk and walk just like old times and drive back real slow in my new slowboat to China.”
So it’s a whole new day, a whole new situation the way it is with Cody, in fact a whole new universe as suddenly were alone again really for the first time in ages walking rapidly down the road to go get the car and he looks at me with that hand-rubbing wicked look like he’s about to spring a surprise on me that’s the top surprise of them all, “You guessed it old buddy I have here the LAST, the absolutely LAST yet most perfect of all blackhaired seeded packed tight superbomber joints in the world which you and I are now going to light up, ’s’why I didnt want you to bring any of that wine right away, why boy we got time to drink wine and wine and dance” and here he is lighting up, says “Now dont walk too fast, it’s time to stroll along like we used to do remember sometimes on our daysoff on the railroad, or walkin across that Third and Townsend tar like you said and the time we watched the sun go down so perfect holy purple over that Mission cross—Yessir, slow and easy, lookin at this gone valley” so we start to puff the pot but as usual it creates doubtful paranoias in both our minds and we actually sort of fall silent on the way to the car which is a beautiful grape color at that, a brand new shiney Jeepster with all the equipments, and the whole golden reunion deteriorates into Cody’s matter-of-fact lecture on why the car is going to be such a honey (the technical details) and he even yells at me to hurry up with that corral gate, “Cant wait here all day, hor hor hor.”
But that’s not the point, about pot paranoia, yet maybe it is at that—I’ve long given it up because it bugs me anyway—But so we drive back slowly to the shack and Evelyn and Pat’s wife have met and are having woman talk and McLear and I and Cody talk around the table planning excursions with the kids to the beach.
And there’s Evelyn and I havent had a chance to talk to her for years either, Oh the old days when we’d stay up late by the fireplace as I say discussing Cody’s soul, Cody this and Cody that, you could hear the name Cody ringing under the roofs of America from coast to coast almost to hear his women talking about him, always pronouncing “Cody” with a kind of anguish yet there was girlish squealing pleasure in it, “Cody has to learn to control the enormous forces in him” and Cody “will always modify his little white lies so much that they turn into black ones,” and according to Irwin Garden Cody’s women were always having transcontiabi) telephone talks about his dong (which is possible.)
Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rushing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night, wow that madman you can at least write on his grave someday “He Lived, He Sweated”—No halfway house is Cody’s house—Tho now as I say sorta sweetly chastised and a little bored at last with the world after the crummy injustice of his arrest and sentence he’s sorta quieted down and where he’d launch into a tremendous explanation of every one of his thoughts for the benefit of everybody in the room as he’s putting on his socks and arranging his papers to leave, now he just flips it aside and may make a stale shrug—A Jesuit at work—Tho I remember one crazy moment in the shack that was typically Cody-like: complicated and simultaneous with a million nuances as though the whole of creation suddenly exploded and imploded together in one moment: at the moment that Pat’s pretty little angel daughter is coming in to hand me an extremely tiny flower (“It’s for you,” she says direct to me) (for some reason the poor little thing thinks I need a flower, or else her mother instructed her for charming reasons, like adornment) Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim “Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing” and at that moment I’m trying to close my palm around the incredibly small flower and its so small I cant even do that, cant feel it, cant hardly see it, in fact such a small flower only that little girl could have found it, but I look up to Cody as he says that to Tim, and also to impress Evelyn who’s watching me, I announced “Never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing but this right hand cant even hold this flower” and Cody only looks up “Yass yass.”
So what started as a big holy reunion and surprise party in Heaven deteriorates to a lot of showoff talk, actually, at least on my part, but when I get to drink the wine I feel lighter and we all go down to the beach—I walk in front with Evelyn but when we get to the narrow path I walk in front like an Indian to show her what a big Indian I’ve been all summer—I’m bursting to tell her everything—“See that grove there, once in a while you’ll be surprised out of your shoes to see the mule quietly standing there with locks of hair like Ruth’s over his forehead, a big Biblical mule meditating, or over there, but up here, and look at that bridge, now what do you think of that?”—the kids are fascinated by the upsidedown car wreck—At one point I’m sitting in the sand as Cody walks up my way, I say to him him imitating Wallace Beery and scratching my armpits “Cuss a man for dyin in Death Valley” (the last lines of that great movie Twenty Mule Team) and Cody says “That’s right, if anybody can imitate old Wallace Beery that’s the only way to do it, you had just the right timber there in the tone of your voice there, Cuss a man for dyin in Death Valley hee hee yes” but he rushes off to talk to McLear’s wife.
Strange sad desultory the way families and people sorta scatter around a beach and look vaguely at the sea, all disorganized and picnic sad—At one point I’m telling Evelyn that a tidal wave from Hawaii could very easily come someday and wed see it miles away a huge wall of awful water and “Boy it would take some doing to run back and climb up these cliffs, huh?” but Cody hears this and says, “What?” and I say “It would wash over us and take us all to Salinas I bet” and Cody says “What? that brand new jeep? I’m goin back and move it!” (an example of his strange humor).
“How’d’st rain rule here?” says I to Evelyn to show her what a big poet I am—She really loves me, used to love me in the old days like a husband, for awhile there she had two husbands Cody and me, we were a perfect family till Cody finally got jealous or maybe I got jealous, it was wild for awhile I’d be coming home from work on the railroad all dirty with my lamp and just as I came in for my Joy bubblebath old Cody was rushing off on a call so Evelyn had her new husband in the second shift then when Cody come home at dawn all dirty for his Joy bubblebath, ring, the phone’s run and the crew clerk’s asked me out and I’m rushing off to work, both of us using the same old clunker car in shifts—And Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say “I’ll get you, Jack, in another lifetime. . . And you'll be very happy”—“What?” I’d yell to joke, “me running up the eternal halls of Karma tryina get away from you hey?”—“It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,” she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her—I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her.
“Ah Jack” she says putting her arm around me on the beach, “it’s nice to see you again, Oh I wish we could be quiet again and just have our suppers of homemade pizza all together and watch T.V. together, you have so many friends and responsibilities now it’s sad, and you get sick drinking and everything, why dont you just come stay with us awhile and rest”—“I will”—But Ron Blake is redhot for Evelyn and keeps coming over to dance with seaweeds and impress her, he’s even asked me to ask Cody to let him spend some time alone with Evelyn, Cody’s said “Go ahead man.”
Having run out of liquor in fact Ron does get his opportunity to be alone with Evelyn as Cody and me and the kids in one car, and McLear and family in the other start for Monterey to stock up for the night and also more cigarettes—Evelyn and Ron light a bonfire on the beach to wait for us—As we’re driving along little Timmy says to Paw “We shoulda brought Mommy with us, her pants got wet in the beach”—“By now they oughta be steamin,” says Cody matter-of-factly in another one of his fantastic puns as he lockwallops that awful narrow dirt canyon road like a getaway car in the mountains in a movie, we leave poor McLear miles back—When Cody comes to a narrow tight curve with all our death staring us in the face down that hole he just swerves the curve saying “The way to drive in the mountains is, boy, no fiddlin around, these roads dont move, you’re the one that moves”—And we come out on the highway and go right battin up to Monterey in the Big Sur dusk where down there on the faint gloamy frothing rocks you can hear the seals cry.