The Subterraneans

2

AT FIRST I HAD DOUBTS, because she was Negro, because she was sloppy (always putting off everything till tomorrow, the dirty room, unwashed sheets—what do I really for Christ’s sake care about sheets)—doubts because I knew she’d been seriously insane and could very well be again and one of the first things we did, the first nights, she was going into the bathroom naked in the abandoned hall but the door of her place having a strange squeak it sounded to me (high on tea) like suddenly someone had come up and was standing in the stairwell (like maybe Gonzalez the Mexican sort of bum or hanger-on sort of faggish who kept coming up to her place on the strength of some old friendship she’d had with some Tracy Pachucos to bum little 7 centses from her or two cigarettes and all the time usually when she was at her lowest, sometimes even to take negotiable bottles away), thinking it might be him, or some of the subterraneans, in the hall asking “Is anybody with you?” and she naked, unconcernedly, and like in the alley just stands there saying, “No man, you better come back tomorrow I’m busy I’m not alone,” this my tea-revery as I lay there, because the moansqueak of the door had that moan of voices in it, so when she got back from the toilet I told her this (reasoning honesty anyway) (and believing it had been really so, almost, and still believing her actively insane, as on the fence in the alley) but when she heard my confession she said she almost flipped again and was frightened of me and almost got up and ran out—for reasons like this, madness, repeated chances of more madness, I had my “doubts” my male self-contained doubts about her, so reasoned, “I’ll just at some time cut out and get me another girl, white, white thighs, etc., and it’ll have been a grand affair and I hope I don’t hurt her tho.”—Ha!—doubts because she cooked sloppily and never cleaned up dishes right away, which as first I didn’t like and then came to see she really didn’t cook sloppily and did wash the dishes after awhile and at the age of six (she later told me) she was forced to wash dishes for her tyrannical uncle’s family and all the time on top of that forced to go out in alley in dark night with garbage pan every night same time where she was convinced the same ghost lurked for her—doubts, doubts—which I have not now in the luxury of time-past.—What a luxury it is to know that now I want her forever to my breast my prize my own woman whom I would defend from all Yuries and anybodies with my fists and anything else, her time has come to claim independence, announcing, only yesterday ere I began this tearbook, “I want to be an independent chick with money and cuttin’ around.”—Yeah, and knowing and screwing everybody, Wanderingfoot,” I’m thinking, wandering foot from when we—I’d stood at the bus stop in the cold wind and there were a lot of men there and instead of standing at my side she wandered off in little funny red raincoat and black slacks and went into a shoestore doorway (ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO AIN’T NOTHIN’ I LIKE BETTER THAN A GUY DOIN’ WHAT HE WANTS, Leroy always said) so I follow her reluctantly thinking, “She sure has wandering feet to hell with her I’ll get another chick” (weakening at this point as reader can tell from tone) but turns out she knew I had only shirt no undershirt and should stand where no wind was, telling me later, the realization that she did not talk naked to anyone in the hall any more than it was wanderingfoot to walk away to lead me to a warmer waitingplace, that it was no more than shit, still making no impression on my eager impressionable ready-to-create construct destroy and die brain—as will be seen in the great construction of jealousy which I later from a dream and for reasons of self-laceration recreated…. Bear with me all lover readers who’ve suffered pangs, bear with me men who understand that the sea of blackness in a darkeyed woman’s eyes is the lonely sea itself and would you go ask the sea to explain itself, or ask woman why she crosseth hands on lap over rose? no—

Doubts, therefore, of, well, Mardou’s Negro, naturally not only my mother but my sister whom I may have to live with some day and her husband a Southerner and everybody concerned, would be mortified to hell and have nothing to do with us—like it would preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Granddad moonlight I’d so long envisioned for myself and there I am with Doctor Whitley pulling out the panel of my rolltop desk and we drink to great books and outside the cobwebs on the pines and old mules clop in soft roads, what would they say if my mansion lady wife was a black Cherokee, it would cut my life in half, and all such sundry awful American as if to say white ambition thoughts or white daydreams.—Doubts galore too about her body itself, again, and in a funny way really relaxing now to her love so surprising myself I couldn’t believe it, I’d seen it in the light one playful night so I—walking through the Fillmore she insisted we confess everything we’d been hiding for this first week of our relationship, in order to see and understand and I gave my first confession, haltingly, “I thought I saw some kind of black thing I’ve never seen before, hanging, like it scared me” (laughing)—it must have stabbed her heart to hear, it seemed to me I felt some kind of shock in her being at my side as she walked as I divulged this secret thought—but later in the house with light on we both of us childlike examined said body and looked closely and it wasn’t anything pernicious and pizen juices but just bluedark as in all kinds of women and I was really and truly reassured to actually see and make the study with her—but this being a doubt that, confessed, warmed her heart to me and made her see that fundamentally I would never snakelike hide the furthest, not the—but no need to defend, I cannot at all possibly begin to understand who I am or what I am any more, my love for Mardou has completely separated me from any previous phantasies valuable and otherwise—The thing therefore that kept these outburst doubts from holding upper sway in my activity in relating with her was the realization not only that she was sexy and sweet and good for me and I was cutting quite a figure with her on the Beach anyway (and in a sense too now cutting the subterraneans who were becoming progressively deeply colder in their looks towards me in Dante’s and on street from natural reasons that I had taken over their play doll and one of their really if not the most brilliant gals in their orbit)—Adam also saying, “You go well together and it’s good for you,” he being at the time and still my artistic and paternal manager—not only this, but, hard to confess, to show how abstract the life in the city of the Talking Class to which we all belong, the Talking Class trying to rationalize itself I suppose out of a really base almost lecherous lustful materialism—it was the reading, the sudden illuminated glad wondrous discovery of Wilhelm Reich, his book The Function of the Orgasm, clarity as I had not seen in a long time, not since perhaps the clarity of personal modern grief of Céline, or, say, the clarity of Carmody’s mind in 1945 when I first sat at his feet, the clarity of the poesy of Wolfe (at 19 it was clarity for me), the clarity here tho was scientific, Germanic, beautiful, true—something I’d always known and closely indeed connected to my 1948 sudden notion that the only thing that really mattered was love, the lovers going to and fro beneath the boughs in the Forest of Arden of the World, here magnified and at the same time microcosmed and pointed in and maled into: orgasm—the reflexes of the orgasm—you can’t be healthy without normal sex love and orgasm—I won’t go into Reich’s theory since it is available in his own book—but at the same time Mardou kept saying “O don’t pull that Reich on me in bed, I read his damn book, I don’t want our relationship all pointed out and f …. d up with what HE said,” (and I’d noticed that all the subterraneans and practically all intellectuals I have known have really in the strangest way always put down Reich if not at first, after awhile)—besides which, Mardou did not gain orgasm from normal copulation and only after awhile from stimulation as applied by myself (an old trick that I had learned with a previous frigid wife) so it wasn’t so great of me to make her come but as she finally only yesterday said “You’re doing this just to give me the pleasure of coming, you’re so kind,” which was a statement suddenly hard for either one of us to believe and came on the heels of her “I think we ought to break up, we never do anything together, and I want to be in-dep—” and so doubts I had of Mardou, that I the great Finn Macpossipy should take her for my long love wife here there or anywhere and with all the objections my family, especially my really but sweetly but nevertheless really tyrannical (because of my subjective view of her and her influence) mother’s sway over me—sway or whatever.—“Leo, I don’t think it’s good for you to live with your mother always,” Mardou, a statement that in my early confidence only made me think, “Well naturally she, she’s just jealous, and has no folks herself, and is one of those modern psychoanalyzed people who hate mothers anyway”—out loud saying, “I really do really love her and love you too and don’t you see how hard I try to spend my time, divide my time between the two of you—over there it’s my writing work, my well-being and when she comes home from work at night, tired, from the store, mind you, I feel very good making her supper, having the supper and a martini ready when she walks in so by 8 o’clock the dishes are all cleared, see, and she has more time to look at her television—which I worked on the railroad six months to buy her, see.”—Well you’ve done a lot of things for her,” and Adam Moorad (whom my mother considered mad and evil) too had once said “You’ve really done a lot for her, Leo, forget her for a while, you’ve got your own life to live,” which is exactly what my mother always was telling me in the dark of the South San Francisco night when we relaxed with Tom Collinses under the moon and neighbors would join us, “You have your own life to live, I won’t interfere, Ti Leo, with anything you want to do, you decide, of course it will be all right with me,” me sitting there goopy realizing it’s all myself, a big subjective phantasy that my mother really needs me and would die if I weren’t around, and nevertheless having a bellyful of other rationalizations allowing me to rush off two or three times a year on gigantic voyages to Mexico or New York or Panama Canal on ships—A million doubts of Mardou, now dispelled, now (and even without the help of Reich who shows how life is simply the man entering the woman and the rubbing of the two in soft—that essence, that dingdong essence—something making me now almost so mad as to shout, I GOT MY OWN LITTLE BANGTAIL ESSENCE AND THAT ESSENCE IS MIND RECOGNITION—) now no more doubts. Even, a thousand times, I without even remembering later asked her if she’d really stolen the pornographic picture from Bernard and the last time finally she fired “But I’ve told you and told you, about eight times in all, I did not take that picture and I told you too a thousand times I don’t even didn’t even have any pockets whatever in that particular suit I was wearing that night—no pockets at all,” yet it never making an impression (in feverish folly brain me) that it was Bernard now who was really crazy, Bernard had gotten older and developed some personal sad foible, accusing others of stealing, solemnly—“Leo don’t you see and you keep asking it”—this being the last deepest final doubt I wanted about Mardou that she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled (remembering the Tennessee Williams story about the Negro Turkish bath attendant and the little white fag) because, not only Ross Wallenstein had called me to my face a fag—“Man what are you, a fag? you talk you just like a fag,” saying this after I’d said to him in what I hoped were cultured tones, “You’re on goofballs tonight? you ought to try three sometimes, they’ll really knock you out and have a few beers too, but don’t take four, just three,” it insulting him completely since he is the veteran hipster of the Beach and for anyone especially a brash newcomer stealing Mardou from his group and at the same time hoodlum-looking with a reputation as a great writer, which he didn’t see, from only published book—the whole mess of it, Mardou becoming the big buck nigger Turkish bath attendant, and I the little fag who’s broken to bits in the love affair and carried to the bay in a burlap bag, there to be distributed piece by piece and broken bone by bone to the fish if there are still fish in that sad water)—so she’d thieve my soul and eat it—so told me a thousand times, “I did not steal that picture and I’m sure Aylward whatshisname didn’t and you didn’t it’s just Bernard, he’s got some kind of fetish there”—But it never impressed and stayed till the last, only the other night, time—that deepest doubt about her arising too from the time, (which she’d told me about) she was living in Jack Steen’s pad in a crazy loft down on Commercial Street near the seamen’s union halls, in the glooms, had sat in front of his suitcase an hour thinking whether she ought to look in it to see what he had there, then Jack came home and rummaged in it and thought or saw something was missing and said, sinister, sullen, “Have you been going thru my bag?” and she almost leaped up and cried YES because she HAD—“Man I had, in Mind, been going thru that bag all day and suddenly he was looking at me, with that look—I almost flipped”—that story also not impressing into my rigid paranoia-ridden brain, so for two months I went around thinking she’d told me, “Yes, I did go thru his bag but of course took nothing,” but so I saw she’d lied to Jack Steen in reality—but in reality now, the facts, she had only thought to do so, and so on—my doubts all of them hastily ably assisted by a driving paranoia, which is really my confession—doubts, then, all gone.

For now I want Mardou—she just told me that six months ago a disease took root deeply in her soul, and forever now—doesn’t this make her more beautiful?—But I want Mardou—because I see her standing, with her black velvet slacks, handsa-pockets, thin, slouched, cig hanging from lips, the smoke itself curling up, her little black back hairs of short haircut combed down fine and sleek, her lipstick, pale brown skin, dark eyes, the way shadows play on her high cheekbones, the nose, the little soft shape of chin to neck, the little Adam’s apple, so hip, so cool, so beautiful, so modern, so new, so unattainable to sad bagpants me in my shack in the middle of the woods—I want her because of the way she imitated Jack Steen that time on the street and it amazed me so much but Adam Moorad was solemn watching the imitation as if perhaps engrossed in the thing itself, or just skeptical, but she disengaged herself from the two men she was walking with and went ahead of them showing the walk (among crowds) the soft swing of arms, the long cool strides, the stop on the corner to hang and softly face up to birds with like as I say Viennese philosopher—but to see her do it, and to a T, (as I’d seen his walk indeed across the park), the fact of her—I love her but this song is … broken—but in French now … in French I can sing her on and on….

Our little pleasures at home at night, she eats an orange, she makes a lot of noise sucking it—

When I laugh she looks at me with little round black eyes that hide themselves in her lids because she laughs hard (contorting all her face, showing the little teeth, making lights everywhere) (the first time I saw her, at Larry O’Hara’s, in the corner, I remember, I’d put my face close to hers to talk about books, she’d turned her face to me close, it was an ocean of melting things and drowning, I could have swimmed in it, I was afraid of all that richness and looked away)—

With her rose bandana she always puts on for the pleasures of the bed, like a gypsy, rose, and then later the purple one, and the little hairs falling black from the phosphorescent purple in her brow as brown as wood—

Her little eyes moving like cats—

We play Gerry Mulligan loud when he arrives in the night, she listens and chews her fingernails, her head moves slowly side to side like a nun in profound prayer—

When she smokes she raises the cigarette to her mouth and slits her eyes—

She reads till gray dawn, head on one arm, Don Quixote, Proust, anything—

We lie down, look at each other seriously saying nothing, head to head on the pillow—

Sometimes when she speaks and I have my head under hers on the pillow and I see her jaw the dimple the woman in her neck, I see her deeply, richly, the neck, the deep chin, I know she’s one of the most enwomaned women I’ve seen, a brunette of eternity incomprehensibly beautiful and for always sad, profound, calm—

When I catch her in the house, small, squeeze her, she yells out, tickles me furiously, I laugh, she laughs, her eyes shine, she punches me, she wants to beat me with a switch, she says she likes me—

I’m hiding with her in the secret house of the night—

Dawn finds us mystical in our shrouds, heart to heart—

‘My sister!’ I’d thought suddenly the first time I saw her—

The light is out.

Daydreams of she and I bowing at big fellaheen cocktail parties somehow with glittering Parises in the horizon and in the forefront—she’s crossing the long planks of my floor with a smile.

Always putting her to a test, which goes with “doubts”—doubts indeed—and I would like to accuse myself of bastardliness—such tests—briefly I can name two, the night Arial Lavalina the famous young writer suddenly was standing in the Mask and I was sitting with Carmody also now famous writer in a way who’d just arrived from North Africa, Mardou around the corner in Dante’s cutting back and forth as was our wont all around, from bar to bar, and sometimes she’d cut unescorted there to see the Juliens and others—I saw Lavalina and called his name and he came over.—When Mardou came to get me to go home I wouldn’t go, I kept insisting it was an important literary moment, the meeting of those two (Carmody having plotted with me a year earlier in dark Mexico when we’d lived poor and beat and he’s a junkey, “Write a letter to Ralph Lowry find out how I can get to meet this here good-looking Arial Lavalina, man, look at that picture on the back of Recognition of Rome, ain’t that something?” my sympathies with him in the matter being personal and again like Bernard also queer he was connected with the legend of the bigbrain of myself which was my WORK, that all consuming work, so wrote the letter and all that) but now suddenly (after of course no reply from the Ischia and otherwise grapevines and certainly just as well for me at least) he was standing there and I recognized him from the night I’d met him at the Met ballet when in New York in tux I’d cut out with tuxed editor to see glitter nightworld New York of letters and wit, and Leon Danillian, so I yelled “Arial Lavalina! come here!” which he did.—When Mardou came I said whispering gleefully “This is Arial Lavalina ain’t that mad!”—“Yeh man but I want to go home.”—And in those days her love meaning no more to me than that I had a nice convenient dog chasing after me (much like in my real secretive Mexican vision of her following me down dark dobe streets of slums of Mexico City not walking with me but following, like Indian woman) I just goofed and said “But wait, you go home and wait for me, I want to dig Arial and then I’ll be home.”—“But baby you said that the other night and you were two hours late and you don’t know what pain it caused me to wait.” (Pain!)—“I know but look,” and so I took her around the block to persuade her, and drunk as usual at one point to prove something I stood on my head in the pavement of Montgomery or Clay Street and some hoodlums passed by, saw this, saying “That’s right”—finally (she laughing) depositing her in a cab, to get home, wait for me—going back to Lavalina and Carmody whom gleefully and now alone back in my big world night adolescent literary vision of the world, with nose pressed to window glass, “Will you look at that, Carmody and Lavalina, the great Arial Lavalina tho not a great great writer like me nevertheless so famous and glamorous etc. together in the Mask and I arranged it and everything ties together, the myth of the rainy night, Master Mad, Raw Road, going back to 1949 and 1950 and all things grand great the Mask of old history crusts”—(this my feeling and I go in) and sit with them and drink further—repairing the three of us to 13 Pater a lesbian joint down Columbus, Carmody, high, leaving us to go enjoy it, and we sitting in there, further beers, the horror the unspeakable horror of myself suddenly finding in myself a kind of perhaps William Blake or Crazy Jane or really Christopher Smart alcoholic humility grabbing and kissing Arial’s hand and exclaiming “Oh Arial you dear—you are going to be—you are so famous—you wrote so well—I remember you—what—” whatever and now unrememberable and drunkenness, and there he is a well-known and perfectly obvious homosexual of the first water, my roaring brain—we go to his suite in some hotel—I wake up in the morning on the couch, filled with the first horrible recognition, “I didn’t go back to Mardou’s at all” so in the cab he gives me—I ask for fifty cents but he gives me a dollar saying “You owe me a dollar” and I rush out and walk fast in the hot sun face all broken from drinking and chagrin to her place down in Heavenly Lane arriving just as she’s dressing up to go to the therapist.—Ah sad Mardou with little dark eyes looking with pain and had waited all night in a dark bed and the drunken man leering in and I rushed down in fact at once to get two cans of beer to straighten up (“To curb the fearful hounds of hair” Old Bull Balloon would say), so as she abluted to go out I yelled and cavorted—went to sleep, to wait for her return, which was in the late afternoon, waking to hear the cry of pure children in the alleyways down there—the horror the horror, and deciding, “I’ll write a letter at once to Lavalina,” enclosing a dollar and apologizing for getting so drunk and acting in such a way as to mislead him—Mardou returning, no complaints, only a few a little later, and the days rolling and passing and still she forgives me enough or is humble enough in the wake of my crashing star in fact to write me, a few nights later, this letter:

DEAR BABY,

Isn’t it good to know winter is coming—

as we’d been complaining so much about heat and now the heat was ended, a coolness came into the air, you could feel it in the draining gray airshaft of Heavenly Lane and in the look of the sky and nights with a greater wavy glitter in streetlights—

—and that life will be a little more quiet—and you will be home writing and eating well and we will be spending pleasant nights wrapped round one another—and you are home now, rested and eating well because you should not become too sad—

written after, one night, in the Mask with her and newly arrived and future enemy Yuri erstwhile close lil brother I’d suddenly said “I feel impossibly sad and like I’ll die, what can we do?” and Yuri’d suggested “Call Sam,” which, in my sadness, I did, and so earnestly, as otherwise he’d pay no attention being a newspaper man and new father and no time to goof, but so earnestly he accepted us, the three, to come at once, from the Mask, to his apartment on Russian Hill, where we went, I getting drunker than ever, Sam as ever punching me and saying “The trouble with you, Percepied,” and, “You’ve got rotten bags in the bottom of your store,” and, “You Canucks are really all alike and I don’t even believe you’ll admit it when you die”—Mardou watching amused, drinking a little, Sam finally, as always falling over drunk, but not really, drunk-desiring, over a little lowtable covered a foot high with ashtrays piled three inches high and drinks and doodads, crash, his wife, with baby just from crib, sighing—Yuri, who didn’t drink but only watched bead-eyed, after having said to me the first day of his arrival, “You know Percepied I really like you now, I really feel like communicating with you now,” which I should have suspected, in him, as constituting a new kind of sinister interest in the innocence of my activities, that being by the name of, Mardou—

—because you should not become too sad

was only sweet comment heartbreakable Mardou made about that disastrous awful night—similar to example 2, one following the one with Lavalina, the night of the beautiful faun boy who’d been in bed with Micky two years before at a great depraved wildparty I’d myself arranged in days when living with Micky the great doll of the roaring legend night, seeing him in the Mask, and being with Frank Carmody and everybody, tugging at his shirt, insisting he follow us to other bars, follow us around, Mardou finally in the blur and roar of the night yelling at me “It’s him or me goddamit,” but not really serious (herself usually not a drinker because a subterranean but in her affair with Percepied a big drinker now)—she left, I heard her say “We’re through” but never for a moment believed it and it was not so, she came back later, I saw her again, we swayed together, once more I’d been a bad boy and again ludicrously like a fag, this distressing me again in waking in gray Heavenly Lane in the morning beer roared.—This is the confession of a man who can’t drink.—And so her letter saying:

because you should not become too sad—and I feel better when you are well—

forgiving, forgetting all this sad folly when all she wants to do, “I don’t want to go out drinking and getting drunk with all your friends and keep going to Dante’s and see all those Juliens and everybody again, I want us to stay quiet at home, listen to KPFA and read or something, or go to a show, baby I like shows, movies on Market Street, I really do.”—“But I hate movies, life’s more interesting!” (another putdown)—her sweet letter continuing:

I am full of strange feelings, reliving and refashioning many old things

—when she was 14 or 13 maybe she’d play hookey from school in Oakland and take the ferry to Market Street and spend all day in one movie, wandering around having hallucinated phantasies, looking at all the eyes, a little Negro girl roaming the shuffle restless street of winos, hoodlums, sams, cops, paper peddlers, the mad mixup there the crowd eying looking everywhere the sexfiend crowd and all of it in the gray rain of hookey days—poor Mardou—“I’d get sexual phantasies the strangest kind, not with like sex acts with people but strange situations that I’d spend all day working out as I walked, and my orgasms the few I had only came, because I never masturbated or even knew how, when I dreamed that my father or somebody was leaving me, running away from me, I’d wake up with a funny convulsion and wetness in myself, in my thighs, and on Market Street the same way but different and anxiety dreams woven out of the movies I saw.”—Me thinking O grayscreen gangster cocktail rainyday roaring gunshot spectral immortality B movie tire pile black-in-the-mist Wildamerica but it’s a crazy world!— “Honey” (out loud) “wished I could have seen you walking around Market like that—I bet I DID see you—I bet I did—you were thirteen and I was twenty-two—1944, yeah I bet I saw you, I was a seaman, I was always there, I knew the gangs around the bars—” So in her letter saying:

reliving and refashioning many old things

probably reliving those days and phantasies, and earlier cruder horrors of home in Oakland where her aunt hysterically beat her or hysterically tried and her sisters (tho occasional little-sister tenderness like dutiful kisses before bed and writing on one another’s backs) giving her a bad time, and she roaming the street late, deep in broodthoughts and men trying to make her, the dark men of dark colored-district doors—so going on,

and feeling the cold and the quietude even in the midst of my forebodings and fears—which clear nights soothe and make more sharp and real—tangible and easier to cope with

—said indeed with a nice rhythm, too, so I remember admiring her intelligence even then—but at the same time darkening at home there at my desk of well-being and thinking, “But cope that old psychoanalytic cope, she talks like all of em, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause-and-effect analysis and solution of so-called problems instead of the great JOY of being and will and fearlessness—rupture’s their rapture—that’s her trouble, she’s just like Adam, like Julien, the lot, afraid of madness, the fear of madness haunts her—not Me Not Me by God”—

But why am I writing to say these things to you. But all feelings are real and you probably discern or feel too what I am saying and why I need to write it—

—a sentiment of mystery and charm—but, as I told her often, not enough detail, the details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold it back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out, “That’s” (I now say in reading letter) “a typical example—but no mind, she’s just a girl—humph”—

My image of you now is strange

—I see the bough of that statement, it waves on the tree—

I feel a distance from you which you might feel too which gives me a picture of you that is warm and friendly

and then inserts, in smaller writing,

(and loving)

to obviate my feeling depressed probably over seeing in a letter from lover only word “friendly”—but that whole complicated phrase further complicated by the fact it is presented in originally written form under the marks and additions of a rewrite, which is not as interesting to me, naturally—the rewrite being

I feel a distance from you which you might feel too with pictures of you that are warm and friendly (and loving) —and because of the anxieties we are experiencing but never speak of really, and are similar too—

a piece of communication making me suddenly by some majesty of her pen feel sorry for myself, seeing myself like her lost in the suffering ignorant sea of human life feeling distant from she who should be closest and not knowing (no not under the sun) why the distance instead is the feeling, the both of us entwined and lost in that, as under the sea—

I am going to sleep to dream, to wake

—hints of our business of writing down dreams or telling dreams on waking, all the strange dreams indeed and (later will show) the further brain communicating we did, telepathiz-ing images together with eyes closed, where it will be shown, all thoughts meet in the crystal chandelier of eternity—Jim—yet I also like the rhythm of to dream, to wake, and flatter myself I have a rhythmic girl in any case, at my metaphysical homedesk—

You have a very beautiful face and I like to see it as I do now—

—echoes of that New York girl’s statement and now coming from humble meek Mardou not so unbelievable and I actually begin to preen and believe in this (0 humble paper of letters, O the time I sat on a log near Idlewild airport in New York and watched the helicopter flying in with the mail and as I looked I saw the smile of all the angels of earth who’d written the letters which were packed in its hold, the smiles of them, specifically of my mother, bending over sweet paper and pen to communicate by mail with her daughter, the angelical smile like the smiles of workingwomen in factories, the world-wide bliss of it and the courage and beauty of it, recognition of which facts I shouldn’t even deserve, treating Mardou as I have done) (O forgive me angels of the heaven and of the earth—even Ross Wallenstein will go to heaven)—

Forgive the conjunctions and double infinitives and the not said

—again I’m impressed and I think, she too there, for the first time self-conscious of writing to an author—

I don’t know really what I wanted to say but want you to have a few words from me this Wednesday morning

and the mail only carried it in much later, after I saw her, the letter losing therefore its hopeful impactedness

We are like two animals escaping to dark warm holes and live our pains alone

—at this time my dumb phantasy of the two of us (after all the drunks making me drunksick city sick) was, a shack in the middle of the Mississippi woods, Mardou with me, damn the lynchers, the not-likings, so I wrote back: “I hope you meant by that line (animals to dark warm holes) you’ll turn out to be the woman who can really live with me in profound solitude of woods finally and at same time make the glittering Parises (there it is) and grow old with me in my cottage of peace” (suddenly seeing myself as William Blake with the meek wife in the middle of London early dewy morning, Crabbe Robinson is coming with some more etching work but Blake is lost in the vision of the Lamb at breakfast leavings table).—Ah regrettable Mardou, and never a thought of that thing beats in your brow, that I should kiss, the pain of your own pride, enough 19th-century romantic general talk—the details are the life of it—(a man may act stupid and top tippity and bigtime 19th-century boss type dominant with a woman but it won’t help him when the chips are down—the loss lass’ll make it back, it’s hidden in her eyes, her future triumph and strength—on his lips we hear nothing but “of course love”).—Her closing words a beautiful pastichepattisee, or pie, of—

Write to me anything Please Stay Well Your Freind [misspelled] And my love And Oh [over some kind of hiddenforever erasures] [and many X’s for of course kisses] And Love for You MARDOU [underlined]

and weirdest, most strange, central of all—ringed by itself, the word, PLEASE—her lastplea neither one of us knowing—Answering this letter myself with a dull boloney bullshit rising out of my anger with the incident of the pushcart.

(And tonight this letter is my last hope.)

The incident of the pushcart began, again as usual, in the Mask and Dante’s, drinking, I’d come in to see Mardou from my work, we were in a drinking mood, for some reason suddenly I wanted to drink red Burgundy wine which I’d tasted with Frank and Adam and Yuri the Sunday before—another, and first, worthy of mention incident, being—but that’s the crux of it all—THE DREAM. Oh the bloody dream! In which there was a pushcart, and everything else prophesied. This too after a night of severe drinking, the night of the redshirt faun boy—where everybody afterward of course said “You made a fool of yourself, Leo, you’re making yourself a reputation on the Beach as a big fag tugging at the shirts of well-known punks.”—“But I only wanted him for you to dig.”—“Nevertheless” (Adam) “really”—And Frank: “You really makin a horrible reputation.”—Me: “I don’t care, you remember 1948 when Sylvester Strauss that fag composer got sore at me because I wouldn’t go to bed with him because he’d read my novel and submitted it, yelled at me ‘I know all about you and your awful reputation.’—‘What?’—‘You and that there Sam Vedder go around the Beach picking up sailors and giving them dope and he makes them only so he can bite, I’ve heard about you.’—‘Where did you hear this fantastic tale?’—you know that story, Frank.”—“I should imagine” (Frank laughing) “what with all the things you do right there in the Mask, drunk, in front of everybody, if I didn’t know you I’d swear you were the craziest piece of rough trade that ever walked” (a typical Carmodian pithy statement) and Adam “Really that’s true.”—After the night of the redshirt boy, drunk, I’d slept with Mardou and had the worst nightmare of all, which was, everybody, the whole world was around our bed, we lay there and everything was happening. Dead Jane was there, had a big bottle of Tokay wine hidden in Mardou’s dresser for me and got it out and poured me a big slug and spilled a lot out of the waterglass on the bed (a symbol of even further drinking, more wine, to come)—and Frank with her—and Adam, who went out the door to the dark tragic Italian pushcart Telegraph Hill street, going down the rickety wooden Shatov stairs where the subterraneans were “digging an old Jewish patriarch just arrived from Russia” who is holding some ritual by the barrels of the fish head cats (the fish heads, in the height of the hot days Mardou had a fish head for our crazy little visiting cat who was almost human in his insistence to be loved his scrolling of neck and purring to be against you, for him she had a fish head which smelled so horrible in the almost airless night I threw part of it out in the barrel downstairs after first throwing a piece of slimy gut unbeknownst I’d put my hands against in the dark icebox where was a small piece of ice I wanted to chill my sauterne with, smack against a great soft mass, the guts or mouth of a fish, this being left in the icebox after disposal of fish I threw it out, the piece draped over fire escape and was there all hotnight and so in the morning when waking I was being bitten by gigantic big blue flies that had been attracted by the fish, I was naked and they were biting like mad, which annoyed me, as the pieces of pillow had annoyed me and somehow I tied it up with Mardou’s Indianness, the fish heads the awful sloppy way to dispose of fish, she sensing my annoyance but laughing, ah bird)—that alley, out there, in the dream, Adam, and in the house, the actual room and bed of Mardou and I the whole world roaring around us, back ass flat—Yuri also there, and when I turn my head (after nameless events of the millionfold mothswarms) suddenly he’s got Mardou on the bed laid out and wiggling and is necking furiously with her—at first I say nothing—when I look again, again they’re at it, I get mad—I’m beginning to wake up, just as I give Mardou a rabbit punch in the back of her neck, which causes Yuri to reach a hand for me—I wake up I’m swinging Yuri by the heels against the brick fireplace wall.—On waking from this dream I told all to Mardou except the part where I hit her or Yuri—and she too (in tying in with our telepathies already experienced that sad summer season now autumn mooned to death, we’d communicated many feelings of empathy and I’d come running to see her on nights when she sensed it) had been dreaming like me of the whole world around our bed, of Frank, Adam, others, her recurrent dream of her father rushing off, in a train, the spasm of almost orgasm.—“Ah honey I want to stop all this drinking these nightmares’ll kill me—you don’t know how jealous I was in that dream” (a feeling I’d not yet had about Mardou)—the energy behind this anxious dream had obtained from her reaction to my foolishness with the redshirt boy (Absolutely insufferable type anyway” Carmody had commented “tho obviously good-looking, really Leo you were funny” and Mardou: “Acting like a little boy but I like it.”)—Her reaction had of course been violent, on arriving home, after she’d tugged me in the Mask in front of everyone including her Berkeley friends who saw her and probably even heard “It’s me or him!” and the madness humor futility of that—arriving in Heavenly Lane she’d found a balloon in the hall, nice young writer John Golz who lived downstairs had been playing balloons with the kids of the Lane all day and some were in the hall, with the balloon Mardou had (drunk) danced around the floor, puffing and poooshing and flupping it up with dance interpretive gestures and said something that not only made me fear her madness, her hospital type insanity, but cut my heart deeply, and so deeply that she could not therefore have been insane, in communicating something so exactly, with precise—whatever—“You can go now I have this ballon.”—“What do you mean?” (I, drunk, on floor blearing).—“I have this balloon now—I don’t need you any more—goodbye—goo away—leave me alone”—a statement that even in my drunkenness made me heavy as lead and I lay there, on the floor, where I slept an hour while she played with the balloon and finally went to bed, waking me up at dawn to undress and get in—both of us dreaming the nightmare of the world around our bed—and that GUILT-Jealousy entering into my mind for the first time—the crux of this entire tale being: I want Mardou because she has begun to reject me—BECAUSE—“But baby that was a mad dream.”—“I was so jealous—I was sick.”—I harkened suddenly now to what Mardou’d said the first week of our relationship, when, I thought secretly, in my mind I had privately superseded her importance with the importance of my writing work, as, in every romance, the first week is so intense all previous worlds are eligible for throwover, but when the energy (of mystery, pride) begins to wane, elder worlds of sanity, well-being, common sense, etc., return, so I had secretly told myself: “My work’s more important than Mardou.”—Nevertheless she’d sensed it, that first week, and now said, “Leo there’s something different now—in you—I feel it in me—I don’t know what it is.” I knew very well what it was and pretended not to be able to articulate with myself and least of all with her anyway—I remembered now, in the waking from the jealousy nightmare, where she necks with Yuri, something had changed, I could sense it, something in me was cracked, there was a new loss, a new Mardou even—and, again, the difference was not isolated in myself who had dreamed the cuckold dream, but in she, the subject, who’d not dreamed it, but participated somehow in the general rueful mixed up dream of all this life with me—so I felt she could now this morning look at me and tell that something had died—not due to the balloon and “You can go now”—but the dream—and so the dream, the dream, I kept harping on it, desperately I kept chewing and telling about it, over coffee, to her, finally when Carmody and Adam and Yuri came (in themselves lonely and looking to come get juices from that great current between Mardou and me running, a current everybody I found out later wanted to get in on, the act) I began telling them about the dream, stressing, stressing, stressing the Yuri part, where Yuri “every time I turn my back” is kissing her—naturally the others wanting to know their parts, which I told with less vigor—a sad Sunday afternoon, Yuri going out to get beer, a spread, bread—eating a little—and in fact a few wrestling matches that broke my heart. For when I saw Mardou for fun wrestling with Adam (who was not the villain of the dream tho now I figured I must have switched persons) I was pierced with that pain that’s now all over me, that firstpain, how cute she looked in her jeans wrestling and struggling (I’d said “She’s strong as hell, d’jever hear of of her fight with Jack Steen? try her Adam”)—Adam having already started to wrestle with Frank on some impetus from some talk about holds, now Adam had her pinned in the coitus position on the floor (which in itself didn’t hurt me)—it was her beautifulness, her game guts wrestling, I felt proud, I wanted to know how Carmody felt NOW (feeling he must have been at the outset critical of her for being a Negro, he being a Texan and a Texas gentleman-type at that) to see her be so great, buddy like, joining in, humble and meek too and a real woman. Even somehow the presence of Yuri, whose personality was energized already in my mind from the energy of the dream, added to my love of Mardou—I suddenly loved her.—They wanted me to go with them, sit in the park—as agreed in solemn sober conclaves Mardou said “But I’ll stay here and read and do things, Leo, you go with them like we said”—as they left and trooped down the stairs I stayed behind to tell her I loved her now—she was not as surprised, or pleased, as I wished—she had looked at Yuri now already with the point of view eyes not only of my dream but had seen him in a new light as a possible successor to me because of my continual betrayal and getting drunk.

Yuri Gligoric: a young poet, 22, had just come down from apple-picking Oregon, before that a waiter in a big dude ranch dininghall—tall thin blond Yugoslavian, good-looking, very brash and above all trying to cut Adam and myself and Car-mody, all the time knowing us as an old revered trinity, wanting, naturally, as a young unpublished unknown but very genius poet to destroy the big established gods and raise himself—wanting therefore their women too, being uninhibited, or un-saddened, yet, at least.—I liked him, considered him another new “young brother” (as Leroy and Adam before, whom I’d “shown” writing tricks) and now I would show Yuri and he would be a buddy with me and walk around with me and Mardou—his own lover, June, had left him, he’d treated her badly, he wanted her back, she was with another life in Compton, I sympathized with him and asked about the progress of his letters and phonecalls to Compton, and, most important, as I say, he was now for the first time suddenly looking at me and saying “Percepied I want to talk to you—suddenly I want to really know you.”—In a joke at the Sunday wine in Dante’s I’d said “Frank’s leching after Adam, Adam’s leching after Yuri” and Yuri’d thrown in “And I’m leching after you.”

Indeed he was indeed. On this mournful Sunday of my first pained love of Mardou after sitting in the park with the boys as agreed, I dragged myself again home, to work, to Sunday dinner, guiltily, arriving late, finding my mother glum and all-weekend-alone in a chair with her shawl … and my thoughts rich on Mardou now—not thinking it of any importance whatever that I had told young Yuri not only “I dreamed you were necking with Mardou” but also, at a soda fountain en route to the park when Adam wanted to call Sam and we all sat at counter waiting, with limeades, “Since I saw you last I’ve fallen in love with that girl,” information which he received without comment and which I hope he still remembers, and of course does.

And so now brooding over her, valuing the precious good moments we’d had that heretofore I’d avoided thinking of, came the fact, ballooning in importance, the amazing fact she is the only girl I’ve ever known who could really understand bop and sing it, she’d said that first cuddly day of the redbulb at Adam’s “While I was flipping I heard bop, on juke boxes and in the Red Drum and wherever I was happening to hear it, with an entirely new and different sense, which tho, I really can’t describe.”—“But what was it like?”—“But I can’t describe it, it not only sent waves—went through me—I can’t, like, make it, in telling it in words, you know? 00 dee bee dee dee” singing a few notes, so cutely.—The night we walked swiftly down Larkin past the Blackhawk with Adam actually but he was following and listening, close head to head, singing wild choruses of jazz and bop, at times I’d phrase and she did perfect in fact interesting modern and advanced chords (like I’d never heard anywhere and which bore resemblance to Bartok modern chords but were hep wise to bop) and at other times she just did her chords as I did the bass fiddle, in the old great legend (again of the roaring high davenport amazing smash-afternoon which I expect no one to understand) before, I’d with Ossip Popper sung bop, made records, always taking the part of the bass fiddle thum thum to his phrasing (so much I see now like Billy Eckstine’s bop phrasing)—the two of us arm in arm rushing longstrides down Market the hip old apple of the California Apple singing bop and well too—the glee of it, and coming after an awful party at Roger Walker’s where (Adam’s arrangement and my acquiescence) instead of a regular party were just boys and all queer including one Mexican younghustler and Mardou far from being nonplused enjoyed herself and talked—nevertheless of it all, rushing home to the Third Street bus singing gleeful—

The time we read Faulkner together, I read her Spotted Horses, out loud—when Mike Murphy came in she told him to sit and listen as I’d go on but then I was different and I couldn’t read the same and stopped—but next day in her gloomy solitude Mardou sat down and read the entire Faulkner portable.

The time we went to a French movie on Larkin, the Vogue, saw The Lower Depths, held hands, smoked, felt close—tho out on Market Street she would not have me hold her arm for fear people of the street there would think her a hustler, which it would look like but I felt mad but let it go and we walked along, I wanted to go into a bar for a wine, she was afraid of all the behatted men ranged at the bar, now I saw her Negro fear of American society she was always talking about but palpably in the streets which never gave me any concern—tried to console her, show her she could do anything with me, “In fact baby I’ll be a famous man and you’ll be the dignified wife of a famous man so don’t worry” but she said “You don’t understand” but her little girl-like fear so cute, so edible, I let it go, we went home, to tender love scenes together in our own and secret dark—

Fact, the time, one of those fine times when we, or that is, I didn’t drink and we spent the whole night together in bed, this time telling ghost stories, the tales of Poe I could remember, then we made some up, and finally we were making madhouse eyes at each other and trying to frighten with round stares, she showed me how one of her Market Street reveries had been that she was a catatonic (“Tho then I didn’t know what the word meant, but like, I walked stiffly hang arming arms hanging and man not a soul dared to speak to me and some were afraid to look, there I was walking along zombie-like and just thirteen.”) (Oh gleeful shnuff-fleeflue in fluffle in her little lips, I see the outthrust teeth, I say sternly, “Mardou you must get your teeth cleaned at once, at that hospital there, the therapist, get a dentist too—it’s all free so do it—” because I see beginnings of bad congestion at the corners of her pearlies which would lead to decay)—and she makes the madwoman face at me, the face rigid, the eyes shining shining shining like the stars of heaven and far from being frightened I am utterly amazed at the beauty of her and I say “And I also see the earth in your eyes that’s what I think of you, you have a certain kind of beauty, not that I’m hung-up on the earth and Indians and all that and wanta harp all the time about you and us, but I see in your eyes such warm—but when you make the madwoman I don’t see madness but glee glee—it’s like the ragamuffin dusts in the little kid’s corner and he’s asleep in his crib now and I love you, rain’ll fall on our eaves some day sweetheart”—and we have just candlelight so the mad acts are funnier and the ghost stories more chilling—the one about the—but a lack, a lark, I go larking in the good things and don’t and do forget my pain—

Extending the eye business, the time we closed our eyes (again not drinking because of broke, poverty would have saved this romance) and I sent her messages, “Are you ready,” and I see the first thing in my black eye world and ask her to describe it, amazing how we came to the same thing, it was some rapport, I saw crystal chandeliers and she saw white petals in a black bog just after some melding of images as amazing as the accurate images I’d exchange with Carmody in Mexico—Mardou and I both seeing the same thing, some madness shape, some fountain, now by me forgotten and really not important yet, come together in mutual descriptions of it and joy and glee in this telepathic triumph of ours, ending where our thoughts meet at the crystal white and petals, the mystery—I see the gleeful hunger of her face devouring the sight of mine, I could die, don’t break my heart radio with beautiful music, 0 world—-the candlelight again, flickering, I’d bought a slue of candles in the store, the corners of our room in darkness, her shadow naked brown as she hurries to the sink—our use of the sink—my fear of communicating WHITE images to her in our telepathies for fear she’ll be (in her fun) reminded of our racial difference, at that time making me feel guilty, now I realize it was one love’s gentility on my part—Lord.

The good ones—going up on the top of Nob Hill at night with a fifth of Royal Chalice Tokay, sweet, rich, potent, the lights of the city and of the bay beneath us, the sad mystery—sitting on a bench there, lovers, loners pass, we pass the bottle, talk—she tells all her little girlhood in Oakland.—It’s like Paris—it’s soft, the breeze blows, the city may swelter but the hillers do fly—and over the bay is Oakland (ah me Hart Crane Melville and all ye assorted brother poets of the American night that once I thought would be my sacrificial altar and now it is but who’s to care, know, and I lost love because of it—drunkard, dullard, poet)—returning via Van Ness to Aquatic Park beach, sitting in the sand, as I pass Mexicans I feel that great hepness I’d been having all summer on the street with Mardou my old dream of wanting to be vital, alive like a Negro or an Indian or a Denver Jap or a New York Puerto Rican come true, with her by my side so young, sexy; slender, strange, hip, myself in jeans and casual and both of us as if young (I say as if, to my 31)—the cops telling us to leave the beach, a lonely Negro passing us twice and staring—we walk along the waterslap, she laughs to see the crazy figures of reflected light of the moon dancing so bug-like in the ululating cool smooth water of the night—we smell harbors, we dance—

The time I walked her in broad sweet dry Mexico plateau-like or Arizona-like morning to her appointment with therapist at the hospital, along the Embarcadero, denying the bus, hand in hand—I proud, thinking, “In Mexico she’ll look just like this and not a soul’ll know I’m not an Indian by God and we’ll go along”—and I point out the purity and clarity of the clouds, “Just like Mexico honey, O you’ll love it” and we go up the busy street to the big grimbrick hospital and I’m supposed to be going home from there but she lingers, sad smile, love smile, when I give in and agree to wait for her 20-minute interview and her coming out she radiantly breaks out glad and rushes to the gate which we’ve already passed in her almost therapy-giving-up strolling-with-me meandering, men—love—not for sale—my prize—possession—nobody gets it but gets a Sicilian line down his middle—a German boot in the kisser, an axe Canuck—I’ll pin them wriggling poets to some London wall right here, explained.—And as I wait for her to come out, I sit on side of water, in Mexico-like gravel and grass and concrete blocks and take out sketchbooks and draw big word pictures of the skyline and of the bay, putting in a little mention of the great fact of the huge all-world with its infinite levels, from Standard Oil top down to waterslap at barges where old bargemen dream, the difference between men, the difference so vast between concerns of executives in skyscrapers and seadogs on harbor and psychoanalysts in stuffy offices in great grim buildings full of dead bodies in the morgue below and madwomen at windows, hoping thereby to instill in Mardou recognition of fact it’s a big world and psychoanalysis is a small way to explain it since it only scratches the surface, which is, analysis, cause and effect, why instead of what—when she comes out I read it to her, not impressing her too much but she loves me, holds my hand as we cut down along Embarcadero towards her place and when I leave her at Third and Townsend train in warm clear afternoon she says “O I hate to see you go, I really miss you now.”—“But I gotta be home in time to make the supper—and write—so honey I’ll be back, tomorrow remember promptly at ten.”—And tomorrow I arrive at midnight instead.

The time we had a shuddering come together and she said “I was lost suddenly” and she was lost with me tho not coming herself but frantic in my franticness (Reich’s beclouding of the senses) and how she loved it—all our teachings in bed, I explain me to her, she explains her to me, we work, we wail, we bop—we throw clothes off and jump at each other (after always her little trip to the diaphragm sink and I have to wait holding softer and making goofy remarks and she laughs and trickles water) then here she comes padding to me across the Garden of Eden, and I reach up and help her down to my side on the soft bed, I pull her little body to me and it is warm, her warm spot is hot, I kiss her brown breasts both of them, I kiss her loveshoulders—she keeps with her lips going “ps ps ps” little kiss sounds where actually no contact is made with my face except when haphazardly while doing something else I do move it against her and her little ps ps kisses connect and are as sad and soft as when they don’t—it’s her little litany of night—and when she’s sick and we’re worried, then she takes me on her, on her arm, on mine—she services the mad unthinking beast—I spend long nights and many hours making her, finally I have her, I pray for it to come, I can hear her breathing harder, I hope against hope it’s time, a noise in the hall (or whoop of drunkards next door) takes her mind off and she can’t make it and laughs—but when she does make it I hear her crying, whimpering, the shuddering electrical female orgasm makes her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the night, it lasts a good twenty seconds and when it’s over she moans, “O why can’t it last longer,” and, “O when will I when you do?”—“Soon now I bet,” I say, “you’re getting closer and closer”—sweating against her in the warm sad Frisco with its damn old scows mooing on the tide out there, voom, voooom, and stars flickering on the water even where it waves beneath the pierhead where you expect gangsters dropping encemented bodies, or rats, or The Shadow—my little Mardou whom I love, who’d never read my unpublished works but only the first novel, which has guts but has a dreary prose to it when all’s said and done and so now holding her and spent with sex I dream of the day she’ll read great works by me and admire me, remembering the time Adam had said in sudden strangeness in his kitchen, “Mardou, what do you really think of Leo and myself as writers, our positions in the world, the rack of time,” asking her that, knowing that her thinking is in accord in some ways more or less with the subterraneans whom he admires and fears, whose opinions he values with wonder—Mardou not really replying but evading the issue, but old man me plots greatbooks for her amaze—all those good things, good times we had, others I am now in the heat of my frenzy forgetting but I must tell all, but angels know all and record it in books—

But think of all the bad times—I have a list of bad times to make the good times, the times I was good to her and like I should be, to make it sick—when early in our love I was three hours late which is a lot of hours of lateness for younglovers, and so she wigged, got frightened, walked around the church hands-apockets brooding looking for me in the mist of dawn and I ran out (seeing her note saying “I am gone out to look for you”) (in all Frisco yet! that east and west, north and south of soulless loveless bleak she’d seen from the fence, all the countless men in hats going into buses and not caring about the naked girl on the fence, why)—when I saw her, I myself running out to find her, I opened my arms a halfmile away—

The worst almost worst time of all when a red flame crossed my brain, I was sitting with her and Larry O’Hara in his pad, we’d been drinking French Bordeaux and blasting, a subject was up, I had a hand on Larry’s knee shouting “But listen to me, but listen to me!” wanting to make my point so bad there was a big crazy plead in the tone and Larry deeply engrossed in what Mardou is saying simultaneously and feeding a few words to her dialog, in the emptiness after the red flame I suddenly leap up and rush to the door and tug at it, ugh, locked, the indoor chain lock, I slide and undo it and with another try I lunge out in the hall and down the stairs as fast as my thieves’ quick crepesoul shoes’ll take me, putt pitterpit, floor after floor reeling around me as I round the stairwell, leaving them agape up there—calling back in half hour, meeting her on the street three blocks away—there is no hope—

The time even when we’d agreed she needed money for food, that I’d go home and get it and just bring it back and stay a short while, but I’m at this time far from in love, but bugged, not only her pitiful demands for money but that doubt, that old Mardou-doubt, and so rush into her pad, Alice her friend is there, I use that as an excuse (because Alice dike-like silent unpleasant and strange and likes no one) to lay the two bills on Mardou’s dishes at sink, kiss a quick peck in the malt of her ear, say “I’ll be back tomorrow” and run right out again without even asking her opinion—as if the whore’d made me for two bucks and I was sore.

How clear the realization one is going mad—the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.

Bad time she asked me, “What does Adam really think of me, you never told me, I know he resents us together but—” and I told her substantially what Adam had told me, of which none should have been divulged to her for the sake of her peace of mind, “He said it was just a social question of his not now wanting to get hung-up with you lovewise because you’re Negro”—feeling again her telepathic little shock cross the room to me, it sunk deep, I question my motives for telling her this.

The time her cheerful little neighbor young writer John Golz came up (he dutifully eight hours a day types working on magazine stories, admirer of Hemingway, often feeds Mardou and is a nice Indiana boy and means no harm and certainly not a slinky snaky interesting subterranean but openfaced, jovial, plays with children in the court for God’s sake)—came up to see Mardou, I was there alone (for some reason, Mardou at a bar with our accord arrangement, the night she went out with a Negro boy she didn’t like too much but just for fun and told Adam she was doing it because she wanted to make it with a Negro boy again, which made me jealous, but Adam said “If I should if she should hear that you went out with a white girl to see if you could make it again she’d sure be flattered, Leo”)—that night, I was at her place waiting, reading, young John Golz came in to borrow cigarettes and seeing I was alone wanted to talk literature—“Well I believe that the most important thing is selectivity,” and I blew up and said “Ah don’t give me all that high school stuff I’ve heard it and heard it long before you were born almost for krissakes and really now, say something interesting and new about writing”—putting him down, sullen, for reasons mainly of irritation and because he seemed harmless and therefore could be counted on to be safe to yell at, which he was—putting him down, her friend, was not nice—no, the world’s no fit place for this kind of activity, and what we gonna do, and where? when? wha wha wha, the baby bawls in the midnight boom.

Nor could it have been charming and helpful to her fears and anxieties to have me start out, at the outset of our romance, “kissing her down between the stems”—starting and then suddenly quitting so later in an unguarded drinkingmoment she said, “You suddenly stopped as tho I was—” and the reason I stopped being in itself not as significant as the reason I did it at all, to secure her greater sexual interest, which once tied on with a bow knot, I could dally out of—the warm lovemouth of the woman, the womb, being the place for men who love, not … this immature drunkard and egomaniacal … this … knowing as I do from past experience and interior sense, you’ve got to fall down on your knees and beg the woman’s permission, beg the woman’s forgiveness for all your sins, protect her, support her, doing everything for her, die for her but for God’s sake love her and love her all the way in and every way you can—yes psychoanalysis, I hear (fearing secretly the few times I had come into contact with the rough stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore a little rougher, tho not enough to make any difference, and the insides itself I should say the best, the richest, most fecund moist warm and full of hidden soft slidy mountains, also the pull and force of the muscles being so powerful she unknowing often vice-like closes over and makes a dam-up and hurt, tho this I only realized the other night, too late—). And so the final lingering physiological doubt I have that this contraction and greatstrength of womb, responsible I think now in retrospect for the time when Adam in his first encounter with her experienced piercing unsupportable screamingsudden pain, so he had to go to the doctor and have himself bandaged and all (and even later when Carmody arrived and made a local orgone accumulator out of a big old watercan and burlap and vegetative materials placing the nozzle of himself into the nozzle of the can to heal), I now wonder and suspect if our little chick didn’t really intend to bust us in half, if Adam isn’t thinking it’s his own fault and doesn’t know, but she contracted mightily there (the lesbian !) (always knew it) and busted him and fixed him and couldn’t do it to me but tried enough till she threw me over a dead hulk that now I am—psychoanalyst, I’m serious!

It’s too much. Beginning, as I say with the pushcart incident—the night we drank red wine at Dante’s and were in a drinking mood now both of us so disgusted—Yuri came with us, Ross Wal-lenstein was in there and maybe to show off to Mardou Yuri acted like a kid all night and kept hitting Wallenstein on the back of his head with little finger taps like goofing in a bar but Wallenstein (who’s always being beaten up by hoodlums because of this) turned around a stiff death’s-head gaze with big eyes glaring behind glasses, his Christlike blue unshaven cheeks, staring rigidly as tho the stare itself will floor Yuri, not speaking for a long time, finally saying, “Man, don’t bug me,” and turning back to his conversation with friends and Yuri does it again and Ross turns again the same pitiless awful subterranean sort of nonviolent Indian Mahatma Gandhi defense of some kind (which I’d suspected that first time he talked to me saying, “Are you a fag you talk like a fag” a remark coming from him so absurd because so inflammable and me 170 pounds to his 130 or 120 for God’s sake so I thought secretly “No you can’t fight this man he will only scream and yell and call cops and let you hit him again and haunt all your dreams, there is no way to put a subterranean down on the floor or for that matter put em down at all, they are the most unputdownable in this world and new culture”)—finally Wallenstein going to the head for a leak and Yuri says to me, Mardou being at the bar gathering three more wines, “Come on let’s go in the John and bust him up,” and I get up to go with Yuri but not to bust up Ross rather to stop anything might happen there—Yuri having been in his own in fact realer way than mine almost a hoodlum, imprisoned in Soledad for defending himself in some vicious fight in reform school—Mardou stopping us both as we head to the head, saying, “My God if I hadn’t stopped you” (laughing embarrassed little Mardou smile and shniffle) “you’d actually have gone in there”—a former love of Ross’s and now the bottomless toilet of Ross’s position in her affections I think probably equal to mine now, 0 damblast the thorny flaps of the pap time page—

Going thence to the Mask as usual, beers, get worse drunk, then out to walk home, Yuri having just arrived from Oregon having no place to sleep is asking if it’s allright to sleep at our place, I let Mardou speak for her own house, tho feebly say some “okay” in the middle of the confusion, and Yuri comes heading homeward with us—en route finds a pushcart, says “Get in, I’ll be a taxicab and push you both home up the hill.”—Okay we get in, and lie on our backs drunk as only you can get drunk on red wine, and he pushes us from the Beach at that fateful park (where we’d sat that first sad Sunday afternoon of my dream and premonitions) and we ride along in the pushcart of eternity, Angel Yuri pushing it, I can only see stars and occasional rooftops of blocks—no thought in any mind (except briefly in mine, possibly in others) of the sin, the loss entailed for the poor Italian beggar losing his cart there—on down Broadway clear to Mar-dou’s, in the pushcart, at one point I push and they ride, Mardou and I singing bop and also bop to the tune Are the Stars out Tonight and just drunk—parking it foolishly in front of Adam’s and rushing up, making noise.—Next day, after sleeping on floor with Yuri snoring on the couch, waiting up for Adam as if beaming to hear told about our exploit, Adam comes home blackfaced mad from work and says “Really you have no idea the pain you’re causin’ some poor old Armenian peddler you never think that—but jeopardizing my pad with that thing in front, supposing the cops find it, and what’s the matter with you.” And Carmody saying to me “Leo I think you perpetrated this masterpiece” or “You masterminded this brilliant move” or such which I really didn’t—and all day we’ve been cutting up and down stairs looking at pushcart which far from being cop-discovered still sits there but with Adam’s landlord teetering in front of it, waiting to see who’s going to claim it, sensing something fishy, and of all things Mardou’s poor purse still in it where drunkenly we’d left it and the landlord finally confiscating IT and waiting for further development (she lost a few dollars and her only purse).—“Only thing that can happen, Adam, is the cops’ll find the pushcart, they can very well see the purse, the address, and take it to Mardou’s but all she has to say is ‘O I found my purse,’ and that’s that, and nothing’ll happen.” But Adam cries, “O you even if nothing’ll happen you screw up the security of my pad, come in making noise, leave a licensed vehicle out front, and tell me nothing’ll happen.”—And I had sensed he’d be mad and am prepared and say, “To hell with that, you can give hell to these but you won’t give hell to me, I won’t take it from you—that was just a drunken prank,” I add, and Adam says, “This is my house and I can get mad when it’s—” so I up and throw his keys (the keys he’d had made for me to walk in and out any time) at him but they’re entwined with the chain of my mother’s keys and for a moment we fumble seriously at the mixed keys on the floor disengaging them and he gets his and I say “No that, that’s mine, there,” and he puts it in his pocket and there we are.—I want to rush up and leave, like at Larry’s.—Mardou is there seeing me flip again—far from helping her from flips. (Once she’d asked me “If I ever flip what will you do, will you help me?—Supposing I think you’re trying to harm me?”—“Honey,” I said, “I’ll try in fact I’ll reassure you I’m not harming you and you’d come to your senses, I’ll protect you,” the confidence of the old man—but in reality himself flipping more often.)—I feel great waves of dark hostility, I mean hate, malice, destructiveness flowing out of Adam in his corner chair, I can hardly sit under the withering telepathic blast and there’s all that yage of Carmody’s around the pad, in suitcases, it’s too much—(it’s a comedy tho, we agree it will be a comedy later)—we talk of other things—Adam suddenly flips the key back at me, it lands in my thighs, and instead of dangling it in my finger (as if considering, as if a wily Canuck calculating advantages) I boy-like jump up and throw the key back in my pocket with a little giggle, to make Adam feel better, also to impress Mardou with my “fairness”—but she never noticed, was watching something else—so now that peace is restored I say “And in any case it was Yuri’s fault it isn’t at all as Frank says my unqualified masterminding”—(this pushcart, this darkness, the same as when Adam in the prophetic dream descended the wood steps to see the “Russian Patriarch”, there were pushcarts there)—So in the letter that I write to Mardou answering her beauty which I have paraphrased, I make stupid angry but “pretending to be fair,” “to be calm, deep, poetic” statements, like, “Yes, I got mad and threw Adam’s keys back at him, because ‘friendship, admiration, poetry sleep in the respectful mystery’ and the invisible world is too beatific to have to be dragged before the court of social realities,” or some such twaddle that Mardou must have glanced at with one eye—the letter, which was supposed to match the warmth of hers, her cuddly-in-October masterpiece, beginning with the inane-if-at-all confession: “The last time I wrote a love note it turned out to be boloney” (referring to an earlier in the year half-romance with Arlene Wohl-stetter) “and I am glad you are honest,” or “have honest eyes,” the next sentence said—the letter intended to arrive Saturday morning to make her feel my warm presence while I was out taking my hardworking and deserving mother to her bi-six-monthlial show and shopping on Market Street (old Canuck workingwoman completely ignorant of arrangement of mingled streets of San Francisco) but arriving long after I saw her and read while I was there, and dull—this not a literary complaint, but something that must have pained Mardou, the lack of reciprocity and the stupidity regarding my attack at Adam—“Man, you had no right to yell at him, really, it’s his pad, his right”—but the letter a big defense of this “right to yell at Adam” and not at all response to her love notes—

The pushcart incident not important in itself, but what I saw, what my quick eye and hungry paranoia ate—a gesture of Mardou’s that made my heart sink even as I doubted maybe I wasn’t seeing, interpreting right, as so oft I do.—We’d come in and run upstairs and jumped on the big double bed waking Adam up and yelling and tousling and Carmody too sitting on the edge as if to say “Now children now children,” just a lot of drunken lushes—at one time in the play back and forth between the rooms Mardou and Yuri ended on the couch together in front, where I think all three of us had flopped—but I ran to the bedroom for further business, talking, coming back I saw Yuri who knew I was coming flop off the couch onto the floor and as he did so Mardou (who probably didn’t know I was coming) shot out her hand at him as if to say OH YOU RASCAL as if almost he’d before rolling off the couch goosed her or done something playful—I saw for the first time their youthful playfulness which I in my scowlingness and writer-ness had not participated in and my old man-ness about which I kept telling myself “You’re old you old sonofabitch you’re lucky to have such a young sweet thing” (while nevertheless at the same time plotting, as I’d been doing for about three weeks now, to get rid of Mardou, without her being hurt, even if possible “without her noticing” so as to get back to more comfortable modes of life, like say, stay at home all week and write and work on the three novels to make a lot of money and come in to town only for good times if not to see Mardou then any other chick will do, this was my three week thought and really the energy behind or the surface one behind the creation of the Jealousy Phantasy in the Gray Guilt dream of the World Around Our Bed)—now I saw Mardou pushing Yuri with a OH YOU and I shuddered to think something maybe was going on behind my back—felt warned too by the quick and immediate manner Yuri heard me coming and rolled off but as if guiltily as I say after some kind of goose or feel up some illegal touch of Mardou which made her purse little love loff lips at him and push at him and like kids.—Mardou was just like a kid I remember the first night I met her when Julien, rolling joints on the floor, she behind him hunched, I’d explained to them why that week I wasn’t drinking at all (true at the time, and due to events on the ship in New York, scaring me, saying to myself “If you keep on drinking like that you’ll die you can’t even hold a simple job any more,” so returning to Frisco and not drinking at all and everybody exclaiming “O you look wonderful”), telling that first night almost heads together with Mardou and Julien, they so kidlike in their naive WHY when I told them I wasn’t drinking any more, so kidlike listening to my explanation about the one can of beer leading to the second, the sudden gut explosions and glitters, the third can, the fourth, “And then I go off and drink for days and I’m gone man, like, I’m afraid I’m an alcoholic” and they kidlike and othergenerationey making no comment, but awed, curious—in the same rapport with young Yuri here (her age) pushing at him, Oh You, which in drunkenness I paid not too much attention to, and we slept, Mardou and I on the floor, Yuri on the couch (so kidlike, indulgent, funny of him, all that)—this first exposure of the realization of the mysteries of the guilt jealousy dream leading, from the pushcart time, to the night we went to Bromberg’s, most awful of all.

Beginning as usual in the Mask.

Nights that begin so glitter clear with hope, let’s go see our friends, things, phones ring, people come and go, coats, hats, statements, bright reports, metropolitan excitements, a round of beers, another round of beers, the talk gets more beautiful, more excited, flushed, another round, the midnight hour, later, the flushed happy faces are now wild and soon there’s the swaying buddy da day oobab bab smash smoke drunken latenight goof leading finally to the bartender, like a seer in Eliot, TIME TO CLOSE UP—in this manner more or less arriving at the Mask where a kid called Harold Sand came in, a chance acquaintance of Mardou’s from a year ago, a young novelist looking like Leslie Howard who’d just had a manuscript accepted and so acquired a strange grace in my eyes I wanted to devour—interested in him for same reasons as Lavalina, literary avidity, envy—as usual paying less attention therefore to Mardou (at table) than Yuri whose continual presence with us now did not raise my suspicions, whose complaints “I don’t have a place to stay—do you realize Percepied what it is not to even have a place to write? I have not girls, nothing, Carmody and Moorad won’t let me stay up there any more, they’re a couple of old sisters,” not sinking in, and already the only comment I’d made to Mardou about Yuri had been, after his leaving, “He’s just like that Mexican stud comes up here and grabs up your last cigarettes,” both of us laughing because whenever she was at her lowest financial ebb, bang, somebody who needed a “mooch” was there—not that I would call Yuri a mooch in the least (I’ll tread lightly on him on this point, for obvious reasons).—(Yuri and I’d had a long talk that week in a bar, over port wines, he claimed everything was poetry, I tried to make the common old distinction between verse and prose, he said, “Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?—then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”—“Yes” I said “but verse is verse and prose is prose.”—“No no” he yelled “it’s all poetry.”—“Okay,” I said, “I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.” And he read me his “best line” which was something to do with “seldom nocturne” that I said sounded like small magazine poetry and wasn’t his best—as already I’d seen some much better poetry by him concerning his tough boyhood, about cats, mothers in gutters, Jesus striding in the ashcan, appearing incarnate shining on the blowers of slum tenements or that is making great steps across the light—the sum of it something he could do, and did, well—“No, seldom nocturne isn’t your meat” but he claimed it was great, “I would say rather it was great if you’d written it suddenly on the spur of the moment.”—“But I did—right out of my mind it flowed and I threw it down, it sounds like it’s been planned but it wasn’t, it was bang! just like you say, spontaneous vision!”—Which I now doubt tho his saying “seldom nocturne” came to him spontaneously made me suddenly respect it more, some falsehood hiding beneath our wine yells in a saloon on Kearney.) Yuri hanging out with Mardou and me every night almost—like a shadow—and knowing Sand himself from before, so he, Sand, walking into the Mask, flushed successful young author but “ironic” looking and with a big parkingticket sticking out of his coat lapel, was set upon by the three of us with avidity, made to sit at our table—made to talk.—Around the corner from Mask to 13 Pater thence the lot of us going, and en route (reminiscent now more strongly and now with hints of pain of the pushcart night and Mardou’s OH YOU) Yuri and Mardou start racing, pushing, shoving, wrestling on the sidewalk and finally she lofts a big empty cardboard box and throws it at him and he throws it back, they’re like kids again—I walk on ahead in serious tone conversation with Sand tho—he too has eyes for Mardou—somehow I’m not able (at least haven’t tried) to communicate to him that she is my love and I would prefer if he didn’t have eyes for her so obviously, just as Jimmy Lowell, a colored seaman who’d suddenly phoned in the midst of an Adam party, and came, with a Scandinavian shipmate, looking at Mardou and me wondering, asking me “Do you make it with her sex?” and I saying yes and the night after the Red Drum session where Art Blakey was whaling like mad and Thelonious Monk sweating leading the generation with his elbow chords, eying the band madly to lead them on, the monk and saint of bop I kept telling Yuri, smooth sharp hep Jimmy Lowell leans to me and says “I would like to make it with your chick,” (like in the old days Leroy and I always swapping so I’m not shocked), “would it be okay if I asked her?” and I saying “She’s not that kind of girl, I’m sure she believes in one at a time, if you ask her that’s what she’ll tell you man” (at that time still feeling no pain or jealousy, this incidentally the night before the Jealousy Dream)—not able to communicate to Lowell that’s—that I wanted her—to stay—to be stammer stammer be mine—not being able to come right out and say, “Lissen this is my girl, what are you talking about, if you want to try to make her you’ll have to tangle with me, you understand that pops as well as I do.”—In that way with a stud, in another way with polite dignified Sand a very interesting young fellow, like, “Sand, Mardou is my girl and I would prefer, etc.”—but he has eyes for her and the reason he stays with us and goes around the corner to 13 Pater, but it’s Yuri starts wrestling with her and goofing in the streets—so when we leave 13 Pater later on (a dike bar slummish now and nothing to it, where a year ago there were angels in red shirts straight out of Genet and Djuna Barnes) I get in the front seat of Sand’s old car, he’s going at least to drive us home, I sit next to him at the clutch in front for purposes of talking better and in drunkenness again avoiding Mardou’s womanness, leaving room for her to sit beside me at front window—instead of which, no sooner plops her ass behind me, jumps over seat and dives into backseat with Yuri who is alone back there, to wrestle again and goof with him and now with such intensity I’m afraid to look back and see with my own eyes what’s happening and how the dream (the dream I announced to everyone and made big issues of and told even Yuri about) is coming true.

We pull up at Mardou’s door at Heavenly Lane and drunkly now she says (Sand and I having decided drunkenly to drive down to Los Altos the lot of us and crash in on old Austin Bromberg and have big further parties) “If you’re going down to Bromberg’s in Los Altos you two go out, Yuri and I’ll stay here”—my heart sank deep—it sank so I gloated to hear it for the first time and the confirmation of it crowned me and blessed me.

And I thought, “Well boy here’s your chance to get rid of her” (which I’d plotted for three weeks now) but the sound of this in my own ears sounded awfully false, I didn’t believe it, myself, any more.

But on the sidewalk going in flushed Yuri takes my arm as Mardou and Sand go on ahead up the fish head stairs, “Lissen, Leo I don’t want to make Mardou at all, she’s all over me, I want you to know that I don’t want to make her, all I want to do if you’re going out there is go to sleep in your bed because I have an appointment tomorrow.”—But now I myself feel reluctant to stay in Heavenly Lane for the night because Yuri will be there, in fact now is already on the bed tacitly as if, one would have to say, “Get off the bed so we can get in, go to that uncomfortable chair for the night.”—So this more than anything else (in my tiredness and growing wisdom and patience) makes me agree with Sand (also reluctant) that we might as well drive down to Los Altos and wake up good old Bromberg, and I turn to Mardou with eyes saying or suggesting, “You can stay with Yuri you bitch” but she’s already got her little traveling basket or weekend bag and is putting my toothbrush hairbrush and her things in and the idea is we three drive out—which we do, leaving Yuri in the bed.—En route, at near Bayshore in the great highway roadlamp night, which is now nothing but a bleakness for me and the prospect of the “weekend” at Bromberg’s a horror of shame, I can’t stand it any more and look at Mardou as soon as Sand gets out to buy hamburgs in the diner, “You jumped in the backseat with Yuri why’d you do that? and why’d you say you wanted to stay with him?”—“It was silly of me, I was just high baby.” But I don’t darkly any more now want to believe her—art is short, life is long—now I’ve got in full dragon bloom the monster of jealousy as green as in any cliché cartoon rising in my being, “You and Yuri play together all the time, it’s just like the dream I told you about, that’s what’s horrible—O I’ll never believe in dreams come true again.”—“But baby it isn’t anything like that” but I don’t believe her—I can tell by looking at her she’s got eyes for the youth—you can’t fool an old hand who at the age of sixteen before even the juice was wiped off his heart by the Great Imperial World Wiper with Sadcloth fell in love with an impossible flirt and cheater, this is a boast—I feel so sick I can’t stand it, curl up in the back seat, alone—they drive on, and Sand having anticipated a gay talkative weekend now finds himself with a couple of grim lover worriers, hears in fact the fragment “But I didn’t mean you to think that baby” so obviously harkening to his mind the Yuri incident—finds himself with this pair of bores and has to drive all the way down to Los Altos, and so with the same grit that made him write the half million words of his novel bends to it and pushes the car through the Peninsula night and on into the dawn.

Arriving at Bromberg’s house in Los Altos at gray dawn, parking, and ringing the doorbell the three of us sheepishly I most sheepish of all—and Bromberg comes right down, at once, with great roars of approval cries “Leo I didn’t know you knew each other” (meaning Sand, whom Bromberg admired very much) and in we go to rum and coffee in the crazy famous Bromberg kitchen.—You might say, Bromberg the most amazing guy in the world with small dark curly hair like the hip girl Roxanne making little garter snakes over his brow and his great really angelic eyes shining, rolling, a big burbling baby, a great genius of talk really, wrote research and essays and has (and is famous for) the greatest possible private library in the world, right there in that house, library due to his erudition and this no reflection also on his big income—the house inherited from father—was also the sudden new bosom friend of Carmody and about to go to Peru with him, they’d go dig Indian boys and talk about it and discuss art and visit literaries and things of that nature, all matters so much had been dinning in Mardou’s ear (queer, cultured matters) in her love affair with me that by now she was quite tired of cultured tones and fancy explicity, emphatic daintiness of expression, of which roll-eyed ecstatic almost spastic big Bromberg almost the pastmaster, “O my dear it’s such a charming thing and I think much MUCH better than the Gascoyne translation tho I do believe—” and Sand imitating him to a T, from some recent great meeting and mutual admiration—so the two of them there in the once-to-me adventurous gray dawn of the Metropolitan Great-Rome Frisco talking of literary and musical and artistic matters, the kitchen littered, Bromberg rushing up (in pajamas) to fetch three-inch thick French editions of Genet or old editions of Chaucer or whatever he and Sand’d come to, Mardou darklashed and still thinking of Yuri (as I’m thinking to myself) sitting at the corner of the kitchen table, with her getting-cold rum and coffee—O I on a stool, hurt, broken, injured, about to get worse, drinking cup after cup and loading up on the great heavy brew—the birds beginning to sing finally at about eight and Bromberg’s great voice, one of the mightiest you can hear, making the walls of the kitchen throw back great shudders of deep ecstatic sound—turning on the phonograph, an expensive well-furnished completely appointed house, with French wine, refrigerators, three-speed machines with speakers, cellar, etc.—I want to look at Mardou I don’t know with what expression—I am afraid in fact to look only to find there the supplication in her eyes saying “Don’t worry baby, I told you, I confessed to you I was silly, I’m sorry sorry sorry—” that “I’m-sorry” look hurting me the most as I glance side eyes to see it….

It won’t do when the very bluebirds are bleak, which I mention to Bromberg, he asking, “Whatsamatter with you this morning Leo?” (with burbling peek under eyebrows to see me better and make me laugh).—“Nothing, Austin, just that when I look out the window this morning the birds are bleak.”—(And earlier when Mardou went upstairs to toilet I did mention, bearded, gaunt, foolish drunkard, to these erudite gentlemen, something about ‘inconstancy,’ which must have surprised them tho)—O inconstancy!

So they try anyway to make the best of it in spite of my palpable unhappy brooding all over the place, while listening to Verdi and Puccini opera recordings in the great upstairs library (four walls from rug to ceiling with things like The Explanation of the Apocalypse in three volumes, the complete works and poems of Chris Smart, the complete this and that, the apology of so-and-so written obscurely to you-know-who in 1839, in 1638—). I jump at the chance to say, “I’m going to sleep,” it’s now eleven, I have a right to be tired, been sitting on the floor and Mardou with dame-like majesty all this time in the easy chair in the corner of the library (where once I’d seen the famous one-armed Nick Spain sit when Bromberg on a happier early time in the year played for us the original recording of The Rake’s Progress) and looking so, herself, tragic, lost—hurt so much by my hurt—by my sorriness from her sorriness borrowing—I think sensitive—that at one point in a burst of forgiveness, need, I run and sit at her feet and lean head on her knee in front of the others who by now don’t care any more, that is Sand does not care about these things now, deeply engrossed in the music, the books, the brilliant conversation (the likes of which cannot be surpassed anywhere in the world, incidentally, and this too, tho now tiredly, crosses by my epic-wanting brain and I see the scheme of all my life, all acquaintances, loves, worries, travels rising again in a big symphonic mass but now I’m beginning not to care so much any more because of this 105 pounds of woman and brown at that whose little toenails, red in the thonged sandals, make my throat gulp)—“O dear Leo, you DO seem to be bored.”—“Not bored! how could I be bored here!”—I wish I had some sympathetic way to tell Bromberg, “Every time I come here there’s something wrong with me, it must seem like some awful comment on your house and hospitality and it isn’t at all, can’t you understand that this morning my heart is broken and out the window is bleak” (and how explain to him the other time I was a guest at his place, again uninvited but breaking in at gray dawn with Charley Krasner and the kids were there, and Mary, and the others came, gin and Schweppes, I became so drunk, disorderly, lost, I then too brooded and slept in fact on the floor in the middle of the room in front of everybody in the height of day—and for reasons so far removed from now, tho still as tho an adverse comment on the quality of Bromberg’s weekend)—“No Austin I’m just sick—.” No doubt, too, Sand must have hipped him quietly in a whisper somewhere what was happening with the lovers, Mardou also being silent—one of the strangest guests ever to hit Bromberg’s, a poor subterranean beat Negro girl with no clothes on her back worth a twopenny (I saw to that generously), and yet so strange faced, solemn, serious, like a funny solemn unwanted probably angel in the house—feeling, as she told me, later, really unwanted because of the circumstances.—So I cop out, from the lot, from life, all of it, go to sleep in the bedroom (where Charley and I that earlier time had danced the mambo naked with Mary) and fall exhausted into new nightmares waking up about three hours later, in the heartbreakingly pure, clear, sane, happy afternoon, birds still singing, now kids singing, as if I was a spider waking up in a dusty bin and the world wasn’t for me but for other airier creatures and more constant themselves and also less liable to the stains of inconstancy too—

While sleeping they three get in Sand’s car and (properly) drive out to the beach, twenty miles, the boys jump in, swim, Mardou wanders on the shores of eternity her toes and feet that I love pressing down in the pale sand against the little shells and anemones and paupered dry seaweed long washed up and the wind blowing back her short haircut, as if Eternity’d met Heavenly Lane (as I thought of it in my bed) (seeing her also wandering around pouting, not knowing what to do next, abandoned by Suffering Leo and really alone and incapable of chatting about every tom dick and harry in art with Bromberg and Sand, what to do?)—So when they return she comes to the bed (after Bromberg’s preliminary wild bound up the stairs and bursting in of door and “WAKE up Leo you don’t want to sleep all day we’ve been to the beach, really it’s not fair!”)—“Leo,” says Mardou, “I didn’t want to sleep with you because I didn’t want to wake up in Bromberg’s bed at seven o’clock in the evening, it would be too much to cope with, I can’t—” meaning her therapy (which she hadn’t been going to any more out of sheer paralysis with me and my gang and cups), her inadequacy, the great now-crushing weight and fear of madness increasing in this disorderly awful life and unloved affair with me, to wake up horrified from hangover in a stranger’s (a kind but nevertheless not altogether wholeheartedwelcoming stranger’s) bed, with poor incapable Leo.—I suddenly looked at her, listening not to these real poor pleas so much as digging in her eyes that light that had shined on Yuri and it wasn’t her fault it could shine on all the world all the time, my light o love—

“Are you sincere?”—(“God you frighten me,” she said later, “you make me think suddenly I’ve been two people and betrayed you in one way, with one person, and this other person—it really frightened me—“) but as I ask that, “Are you sincere?” the pain I feel is so great, it has just risen fresh from that disordered roaring dream (“God is so disposed as to make our lives less cruel than our dreams,” is a quote I saw the other day God knows where)—feeling all that and harkening to other horrified hangover awakenings in Bromberg’s and all the hangover awakenings in my life, feeling now, “Boy, this is the real real beginning of the end, you can’t go on much further, how much more vagueness can your positive flesh take and how long will it stay positive if your psyche keeps blamming on it—boy, you are going to die, when birds get bleak—that’s the sign—.” But thinking more roars than that, visions of my work neglected, my well-being (so-called old well-being again) smashed, brain permanently injured now—ideas for working on the railroad—O God the whole host and foolish illusion and entire rigamarole and madness that we erect in the place of onelove, in our sadness—but now with Mardou leaning over me, tired, solemn, somber, capable as she played with the little unshaven uglies of my chin of seeing right through my flesh into my horror and capable of feeling every vibration of pain and futility I could send, as, too, attested by her recognition of “Are you sincere?” as the deep-well sounded call from the bottom—“Baby, let’s go home.”

“We’ll have to wait till Bromberg goes, take the train with him—I guess—.” So I get up, go into the bathroom (where I’d been earlier while they were at the beach and sex-phantasized in remembrance of the time, on another even wilder and further back Bromberg weekend, poor Annie with her hair done up in curlers and her face no makeup and Leroy poor Leroy in the other room wondering what his wife’s doing in there, and Leroy later driving off desperately into the night realizing we were up to something in the bathroom and so remembering myself now the pain I had caused Leroy that morning just for the sake of a little bit of sate for that worm and snake called sex)—I go into the bathroom and wash up and come down, trying to be cheerful.

Still I can’t look at Mardou straight in the eye—in my heart, “O why did you do it?”—sensing, in my desperation, the prophecy of what’s to come.

As if not enough this was the day of the night of the great Jones party, which was the night I jumped out of Mardou’s cab and abandoned her to the dogs of war—the war man Yuri wages gainst man Leo, each one.—Beginning, Bromberg making phone-calls and gathering birthday gifts and getting ready to take the bus to make old 151 at 4:47 for the city, Sand driving us (a sorry lot indeed) to bus stop, where we have quick one in bar across street while Mardou by now ashamed not only of herself but me too stays in back seat of car (tho exhausted) but in broad daylight, trying to catch a wink—really trying to think her way out of trap only I could help her out of if I’m given one more chance—in the bar, parenthetically amazed I am to hear Bromberg going right on with big booming burbling comments on art and literature and even in fact by God queer anecdotes as sullen Santa Clara Valley farmers guzzle at rail, Bromberg doesn’t even have consciousness of his fantastic impact on the ordinary—and Sand enjoying, himself in fact also weird—but minor details.—I come out to tell Mardou we have decided to take later train in order to go back to house to pick up forgotten package which is just another ringaroundtherosy of futility for her, she receives this news with solemn lips—ah my love and lost darling (out of date word)—if then I’d known what I know now, instead of returning to bar, for further talks, and looking at her with hurt eyes, etc., and let her lay there in the bleak sea of time untended and unsolaced and unforgiven for the sin of the sea of time I’d have gone in and sat down with her, taken her hand, promised her my life and protection—“Because I love you and there’s no reason”—but then far from having completely successfully realized this love, I was still in the act of thinking I was climbing out of my doubt about her—but the train came, finally, 153 at 5:31 after all our delays, we got in, and rode to the city—through South San Francisco and past my house, facing one another in coach seats, riding by the big yards in Bayshore and I gleefully (trying to be gleeful) point out a kicked boxcar ramming a hopper and you see the tinscrap shuddering far off, wow—but most of the time sitting bleakly under either stare and saying, finally, “I really do feel I must be getting a rummy nose”—anything I could think of saying to ease the pressure of what I really wanted to weep about—but in the main the three of us really sad, riding together on a train to gayety, horror, the eventual H bomb.

—Bidding Austin adieu finally at some teeming corner on Market where Mardou and I wandered among great sad sullen crowds in a confusion mass, as if we were suddenly lost in the actual physical manifestation of the mental condition we’d been in now together for two months, not even holding hands but I anxiously leading the way through crowds (so’s to get out fast, hated it) but really because I was too “hurt” to hold her hand and remembering (now with greater pain) her usual insistence that I not hold her in the street or people’ll think she’s a hustler—ending up, in bright lost sad afternoon, down Price Street (0 fated Price Street) towards Heavenly Lane, among the children, the young good-looking Mex chicks each one making me say to myself with contempt “Ah they’re almost all of ‘em better than Mardou, all I gotta do is get one of them … but O, but O”—neither one of us speaking much, and such chagrin in her eyes that in the original place where I had seen that Indian warmth which had originally prompted me to say to her, on some happy candlelit night, “Honey what I see in your eyes is a lifetime of affection not only from the Indian in you but because as part Negro somehow you are the first, the essential woman, and therefore the most, most originally most fully affectionate and maternal”—there now is the chagrin too, some lost American addition and mood with it—“Eden’s in Africa,” I’d added one time—but now in my hurt hate turning the other way and so walking down Price with her every time I see a Mexican gal or Negress I say to myself, “hustlers,” they’re all the same, always trying to cheat and rob you—harking back to all relations in the past with them—Mardou sensing these waves of hostility from me and silent.

And who’s in our bed in Heavenly Lane but Yuri—cheerful—“Hey I been workin’ all day, so tired I had to come back and get some more rest.”—I decide to tell him everything, try to form the words in my mouth, Yuri sees my eyes, senses the tenseness, Mardou senses the tenseness, a knock on the door brings in John Golz (always romantically interested in Mardou in a naiver way), he senses the tenseness, “I’ve come to borrow a book”—grim expression on his face and remembering how I’d put him down about selectivity—so leaves at once, with book, and Yuri in getting up from bed (while Mardou hides behind screen to change from party dress to home jeans)—“Leo hand me my pants.”—“Get up and get ‘em yourself, they’re right there on the chair, she can’t see you”—a funny statement, and my mind feels funny and I look at Mardou who is silent and inward.

The moment she goes to the bathroom I say to Yuri “I’m very jealous about you and Mardou in the backseat last night man, I really am.”—“It’s not my fault, it was her started it.”—“Lissen, you’re such—like don’t let her, keep away—you’re such a lady-killer they all fall for you”—saying this just as Mardou returns, looking up sharply not hearing the words but seeing them in the air, and Yuri at once grabs the still open door and says “Well anyway I’m going to Adam’s I’ll see you there later.”

“What did you tell Yuri—?”—I tell her word for word—“God the tenseness in here was unbearable”—(sheepishly I review the fact that instead of being stern and Moses-like in my jealousy and position I’d instead chatted with nervous “poet” talk with Yuri, as always, giving him the tension but not the positiveness of my feelings in words—sheepishly I review my sheepishness—I get sad to see old Carmody somehow—

“Baby I’m gonna—you think they got chickens on Columbus?—I’ve seen some—And cook it, see, we’ll have a nice chicken supper.”—“And,” I say to myself, “what good is a nice domestic chicken supper when you love Yuri so much he has to leave the moment you walk in because of the pressure of my jealousy and your possibility as prophesied in a dream?” “I want” (out loud) “to see Carmody, I’m sad—you stay here, cook the chicken, eat—alone—I’ll come back later and get you.”—“But it always starts off like this, we always go away, we never stay alone.”—“I know but tonight I’m sad I gotta see Carmody, for some reason don’t ask me I have a tremendous sad desire and reason just to—after all I drew his picture the other day” (I had drawn my first pencil sketches of human figures reclining and they were greeted with amazement by Carmody and Adam and so I was proud) “and after all in drawing those shots of Frank the other day I saw such great sadness in the lines under his eyes that I know he—” (to myself: I know he’ll understand how sad I am now, I know he has suffered on four continents this way).—Pondering Mardou does not know which way to turn but suddenly I tell her of my quick talk with Yuri the part I’d forgotten in the first report (and here too) “He said to me ‘Leo I don’t want to make your girl Mardou, after all I have no eyes—’.” “Oh, so he has no eyes! A hell of a thing to say!” (the same teeth of glee now the portals where pass angry winds, and her eyes glitter) and I hear that junkey-like emphasis on the ings where she presses down on her ings like many junkies I know, from some inside heavy somnolent reason, which in Mardou I’d attributed to her amazing modernness culled (as I once asked her) “From where? where did you learn all you know and that amazing way you speak?” but now to hear that interesting ing only makes me mad as it’s coming in a transparent speech about Yuri where she shows she’s not really against seeing Yuri again at party or otherwise, “if he’s gonna talk like that about no eyes,” she’s gonna tell him.—“O,” I say, “now you WANT to come to the party at Adam’s, because there you can get even with Yuri and tell him off—you’re so transparent.”

“Jesus,” as we’re walking along the benches of the church park sad park of the whole summer season, “now you’re calling me names, transparent.”

“Well that’s what it is, you think I can’t see through that, at first you didn’t want to go to Adam’s at all and now that you hear—well the hell with that if it ain’t transparent I don’t know what is.”—“Calling me names, Jesus” (shnuffling to laugh) and both of us actually hysterically smiling and as tho nothing had happened at all and in fact like happy unconcerned people you see in newsreels busy going down the street to their chores and where-go’s and we’re in the same rainy newsreel mystery sad but inside of us (as must then be so inside the puppet filmdolls of screen) the great tumescent turbulent turmoil alliterative as a hammer on the brain bone bag and balls, bang I’m sorry I was ever born….

To cap everything, as if it wasn’t enough, the whole world opens up as Adam opens the door bowing solemnly but with a glint and secret in his eye and some kind of unwelcomeness I bristle at the sight of—“What’s the matter?” Then I sense the presence of more people in there than Frank and Adam and Yuri.—“We have visitors.”—“Oh,” I say, “distinguished visitors?”—“I think so.”—“Who?”—“Mac Jones and Phyllis.”—“What?” (the great moment has come when I’m to come face to face, or leave, with my arch literary enemy Balliol Mac-Jones erstwhile so close to me we used to slop beer on each other’s knees in leaning-over talk excitement, we’d talked and exchanged and borrowed and read books and literarized so much the poor innocent had actually come under some kind of influence from me, that is, in the sense, only, that he learned the talk and style, mainly the history of the hip or beat generation or subterranean generation and I’d told him “Mac, write a great book about everything that happened when Leroy came to New York in 1949 and don’t leave a word out and blow, go!” which he did, and I read it, critically Adam and I in visits to his place both critical of the manuscript but when it came out they guarantee him 20,000 dollars an unheard of sum and all of us beat types wandering the Beach and Market Street and Times Square when in New York, tho Adam and I had solemnly admitted, quote, “Jones is not of us—but from another world—the midtown sillies world” (an Adamism). And so his great success coming at the moment when I was poorest and most neglected by publishers and worse than that hung-up on paranoiac drug habits I became incensed but I didn’t get too mad, but stayed black about it, changing my mind after father time’s few local scythes and various misfortunes and trips around, writing him apologetic letters on ships which I tore up, he too writing them meanwhile, and then, Adam acting a year later as some kind of saint and mediator reported favorable inclinations on both our parts, to both parties—the great moment when I would have to face old Mac and shake with him and call it quits, let go all the rancor—making as little impression on Mardou, who is so independent and unavailable in that new heartbreaking way. Anyway Macjones was there, immediately I said out loud “Good, great, I been wantin’ to see him,” and I rushed into the living-room and over someone’s head who was getting up (Yuri it was) I shook hands firmly with Balliol, sat brooding awhile, didn’t even notice how poor Mardou had managed to position herself (here as at Bromberg’s as everywhere poor dark angel)—finally going to the bedroom unable to bear the polite conversation under which not only Yuri but Jones (and also Phyllis his woman who kept staring at me to see if it was still crazy) rumbled, I ran to the bedroom and lay in the dark and at the first opportunity tried to get Mardou to lie down with me but she said “Leo I don’t want to lay around in here in the dark.”—Yuri then coming over, putting on one of Adam’s ties, saying, “I’m going out and find me a girl,” and we have a kind of whispering rapport now away from them in the parlor—all’s forgiven.—But I feel that because Jones does not move from his couch he really doesn’t want to talk to me and probably wishes secretly I’d leave, when Mardou roams back again to my bed of shame and sorrow and hidingplace, I say, “What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him anything about music.”—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)—I’m the bop writer!—But as I’m commissioned to get the beer downstairs, when I come in again with beer in arms they’re all in the kitchen, Mac foremost, smiling, and saying, “Leo! let me see those drawings they told me you did, I want to see them.”—So we become friends again bending over drawings and Yuri has to be showing his too (he draws) and Mardou is in the other room, again forgotten—but it is a historic moment and as we also, with Carmody, study Carmody’s South American bleak pictures of high jungle villages and Andean towns where you can see the clouds pass, I notice Mac’s expensive good-looking clothes, wrist watch, I feel proud of him and now he has an attractive little mustache that makes his maturity—which I announce to everyone—the beer by now warming us all up, and then his wife Phyllis begins a supper and the conviviality flows back and forth—

In the red bulblight parlor in fact I see Jones alone with Mardou questioning, as if interviewing her, I see that he’s grinning and saying to himself ‘Old Percepied’s got himself another amazing doll’ and I inside yearn to myself, “Yeah, for how long”—and he’s listening to Mardou, who, impressed, forewarned, understanding everything, makes solemn statements about bop, like, “I don’t like bop, I really don’t, it’s like junk to me, too many junkies are bop men and I hear the junk in it.”—“Well,” Mac adjusting glasses, “that’s interesting.”—And I go up and say, “But you never like what you come from” (looking at Mardou).—“What do you mean?”—“You’re the child of Bop,” or the children of bop, some such statement, which Mac and I agree on—so that later when we all the whole gang troop out to further festivities of the night, and Mardou, wearing Adam’s long black velvet jacket (for her long) and a mad long scarf too, looking like a little Polish underground girl or boy in a sewer beneath the city and cute and hip, and in the street rushes up from one group to the one I’m in, and I reach out as she reaches me (I’m wearing Carmody’s felt hat straight on my head like hipster for joke and my red shirt still, now defunct from weekends) and sweep her littleness off her feet and up against me and go on walking carrying her, I hear Mac’s appreciative “Wow” and “Go” laugh in the background and I think proudly “He sees now that I have a real great chick—that I am not dead but going on—old continuous Percepied—never getting older, always in there, always with the young, the new generations—.” A motley group in any case going down the street what with Adam Moorad wearing a full tuxedo borrowed from Sam the night before so he could attend some opening with tickets free from his office—trooping down to Dante’s and Mask again—that Mask, that old po mask all the time—Dante’s where in the rise and roar of the social and gab excitement I looked up many times to catch Mardou’s eyes and play eyes with her but she seemed reluctant, abstract, brooding—no longer affectionate of me—sick of all our talk, with Bromberg re-arriving and great further discourses and that particular noxious group-enthusiasm that you’re supposed to feel when like Mardou you’re with a star of the group or even I mean just a member of that constellation, how noisome, tiresome it must have been to her to have to appreciate all we were saying, to be amazed by the latest quip from the lips of the one and only, the newest manifestation of the same old dreary mystery of personality in Kaja the great—disgusted she seemed indeed, and looking into space.

So later when in my drunkenness I managed to get Paddy Cordavan over to our table and he invited us all to his place for further drinking (the usually unattainable social Paddy Cordavan due to his woman who always wanted to go home alone with him, Paddy Cordavan of whom Buddy Pond had said, “He’s too beautiful I can’t look,” tall, blond, big-jawed somber Montana cowboy slowmoving, slow talking, slow shouldered) Mardou wasn’t impressed, as she wanted to get away from Paddy and all the other subterraneans of Dante’s anyway, whom I had just freshly annoyed by yelling again at Julien, “Come here, we’re all going to Paddy’s party and Julien’s coming,” at which Julien immediately leaped up and rushed back to Ross Wallenstein and the others at their own booth, thinking, “God that awful Per-cepied is screaming at me and trying to drag me to his silly places again, I wish someone would do something about him.” And Mardou wasn’t any further impressed when, at Yuri’s insistence, I went to the phone and spoke to Sam (calling from work) and agreed to meet him later at the bar across from the office—“We’ll all go! we’ll all go!” I’m screaming by now and even Adam and Frank are yawning ready to go home and Jones is long gone—rushing around up and down Paddy’s stairs for further calls with Sam and at one point here I am rushing into Paddy’s kitchen to get Mardou to come meet Sam with me and Ross Wallenstein having arrived while I was in the bar calling says, looking up, “Who let this guy in, hey, who is this? how’d you get in here! Hey Paddy!” in serious continuation of his original dislike and “are-you-a-fag” come-on, which I ignored, saying, “Brother I’ll take the fuzz off your peach if you don’t shut up,” or some such putdown, can’t remember, strong enough to make him swivel like a soldier, the way he does, stiff necked, and retire—I dragging Mardou down to a cab to rush to Sam’s and all this wild world swirling night and she in her little voice I hear protesting from far away, “But Leo, dear Leo, I want to go home and sleep.”—“Ah hell!” and I give Sam’s address to the taxidriver, she says NO, insists, gives Heavenly Lane, “Take me there first and then go to Sam’s” but I’m really seriously hung-up on the undeniable fact that if I take her to Heavenly Lane first the cab will never make it to Sam’s waiting bar before closing time, so I argue, we harangue hurling different addresses at the cab driver who like in a movie waits, but suddenly, with that red flame that same red flame (for want of a better image) I leap out of the cab and rush out and there’s another one, I jump in, give Sam’s address and off he guns her—Mardou left in the night, in a cab, sick, and tired, and me intending to pay the second cab with the buck she’d entrusted to Adam to get her a sandwich but which in the turmoil had been forgotten but he gave it to me for her—poor Mardou going home alone, again, and drunken maniac was gone.

Well, I thought, this is the end—I finally made the step and by God I paid her back for what she done to me—it had to come and this is it—ploop.

and

BUT THE DEEPEST premonition and prophesy of all had always been, that when I walked into Heavenly Lane, cutting in sharply from sidewalk, I’d look up, and if Mardou’s light was on Mardou’s light was on—“But some day, dear Leo, that light will not shine for you”—this a prophesy irrespective of all your Yuris and attenuations in the snake of time.—“Someday she won’t be there when you want her to be there, the light’ll be out and you’ll be looking up and it will be dark in Heavenly Lane and Mardou’ll be gone, and it’ll be when you least expect it and want it.”—Always I knew this—it crossed my mind that night when I ran up, met Sam in the bar, he was with two newspapermen, we bought drinks, I spilled money on the floor, I hurried to get drunk (through with my baby!), rushed up to Adam and Frank’s, woke them up again, wrestled on the floor, made noise, Sam tore my T-shirt off, bashed the lamp in, drank a fifth of bourbon as of old in our tremendous days together, it was just another big downcrashing in the night and all for nothing … waking up, I, in the morning with the final hangover that said to me, “Too late”—and got up and staggered to the door through the debris, and opened it, and went home, Adam saying to me as he heard me fiddle with the groaning faucet, “Leo go home and recuperate well,” sensing how sick I was tho not knowing about Mardou and me—and at home I wandered around, couldn’t stay in the house, couldn’t stop, had to walk, as if someone was going to die soon, as if I could smell the flowers of death in the air, and I went in the South San Francisco railyard and cried.

Cried in the railyard sitting on an old piece of iron under the new moon and on the side of the old Southern Pacific tracks, cried because not only I had cast off Mardou whom now I was not so sure I wanted to cast off but the die’d been thrown, feeling too her empathetic tears across the night and the final horror both of us round-eyed realizing we part—but seeing suddenly not in the face of the moon but somewhere in the sky as I looked up and hoped to figure, the face of my mother—remembering it in fact from a haunted nap just after supper that same restless unable-to-stay-in-a-chair or on-earth day—just as I woke to some Arthur Godfrey program on the TV, I saw bending over me the visage of my mother, with impenetrable eyes and moveless lips and round cheekbones and glasses that glinted and hid the major part of her expression which at first I thought was a vision of horror that I might shudder at, but it didn’t make me shudder—wondering about it on the walk and suddenly now in the railyards weeping for my lost Mardou and so stupidly because I’d decided to throw her away myself, it had been a vision of my mother’s love for me—that expressionless and expressionless-because-so-profound face bending over me in the vision of my sleep, and with lips not so pressed together as enduring and as if to say, “Pauvre Ti Leo, pauvre Ti Leo, tu souffri, les hommes souffri tant, y’ainque toi dans le monde j’va’t prendre soin, j’aim’ra beaucoup t’prendre soin tous tes jours mon ange”—“Poor Little Leo, poor Little Leo, you suffer, men suffer so, you’re all alone in the world I’ll take care of you, I would very much like to take care of you all your days my angel.”—My mother an angel too—the tears welled up in my eyes, something broke, I cracked—I had been sitting for an hour, in front of me was Butler Road and the gigantic rose neon ten blocks long BETHLEHEM WEST COAST STEEL with stars above and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I sit there and let them pass and far down the line in the night around that South San Francisco airport you can see that sonofa-bitch red light waving Mars signal light swimming in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter’s summertime tall, like trees—the only man in South City who ever walked from the neat suburban homes and went and hid by boxcars to think—broke.—Something fell loose in me—O blood of my soul I thought and the Good Lord or whatever’s put me here to suffer and groan and on top of that be guilty and gives me the flesh and blood that is so painful the—women all mean well—this I knew—women love, bend over you—you’d as soon betray a woman’s love as spit on your own feet, clay—

That sudden short crying in the railyard and for a reason I really didn’t fathom, and couldn’t—saying to myself in the bottom, “You see a vision of the face of the woman who is your mother who loves you so much she has supported you and protected you for years, you a bum, a drunkard—never complained a jot—because she knows that in your present state you can’t go out in the world and make a living and take care of yourself and even find and hold the love of another protecting woman—and all because you are poor stupid Ti Leo—deep in the dark pit of night under the stars of the world you are lost, poor, no one cares, and now you threw away a little woman’s love because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity.”

And as always.

Ending with the great sorrow of Price Street when Mardou and I, reunited on Sunday night according to my schedule (I’d made up the schedule that week thinking in a yard tea-reverie, “This is the cleverest arrangement I ever made, why with this thing I can live a full love-life,” conscious of Mardou’s Reichian worth, and at the same time write those three novels and be a big—etc.) (schedule all written out, and delivered to Mardou for her perusal, it said, “Go to Mardou at 9 in the evening, sleep, return following noon for afternoon of writing and evening supper and aftersupper rest and then return at 9 P.M. again,” with holes in the schedule left open on weekends for “possible going out”) (getting plastered)—with this schedule still in mind and after spending the weekend at home steeped in that awful—I rushed anyway to Mardou’s on Sunday night at 9 P.M., as scheduled, there was no light in her window (“Just as I knew it would happen someday”)—but on the door a note, and for me, which I read after quick leak in the hall John—“Dear Leo, I’ll be back at 10:30,” and the door (as always) unlocked and I go in to wait and read Reich—carrying again my big forward-looking healthybook Reich and ready at least to “throw a good one in her” in case it’s all bound to end this very night and sitting there eyes shifting around and plotting—11:30 and she hasn’t come yet—fearing me—missing—(“Leo,” later, she told me, “I really thought we were through, that you wouldn’t come back at all”)—nevertheless she’d left that Bird of Paradise note for me, always and still hoping and not aiming to hurt me and keep me waiting in dark—but because she does not return at 11:30 I cut out, to Adam’s, leaving message for her to call, with ramifications that I erase after a while—all a host of minor details leading to the great sorrow of Price Street taking place after we spend a night of “successful” sex, when I tell her, “Mardou you’ve become much more precious to me since everything that happened,” and because of that, as we agree, I am able to make her fulfill better, which she does—twice, in fact, and for the first time—spending a whole sweet afternoon as if reunited but at intervals poor Mardou looking up and saying, “But we should really break up, we’ve never done anything together, we were going to Mexico, and then you were going to get a job and we’d live together, then remember the loft idea, all big phantasm that like haven’t worked out because you haven’t pushed them from your mind out into the open world, haven’t acted on them, and like, me, I don’t—I’ve missed my therapist for weeks.” (She’d written a fine letter that very day to the therapist begging forgiveness and permission to come back in a few weeks and advice for her lostness and I’d approved of it.)—All of this unreal from the moment I walked into Heavenly Lane after my crying-in-the-railyard lonely dark sojourn at home to see her light was out at last (as deeply promised), but the note, saving us awhile, my finding her a little later that night as she did finally call me at Adam’s and told me to come to Rita’s, where I brought beer, then Mike Murphy came and he brought beer too—ending with another silly yelling conversation drunk night.—Mardou saying in the morning, “Do you remember anything you said last night to Mike and Rita?” and me, “Of course not.”—The whole day, borrowed from the sky day, sweet—we make love and try to make promises of little kinds—no go, as in the evening she says “Let’s go to a show” (with her pitiful check money).—“Jesus, we’ll spend all your money.”—“Well goddamit I don’t care, I’m going to spend that money and that’s all there is to it,” with great emphasis—so she puts on her black velvet slacks and some perfume and I go up and smell her neck and God, how sweet can you smell—and I want her more than ever, in my arms she’s gone—in my hand she’s as slippy as dust—something’s wrong.—“Did I cut you when I jumped out of the cab?”—“Leo, it was baby, it was the most maniacal thing I ever saw.”—“I’m sorry.”—“I know you’re sorry but it was the most maniacal thing I ever saw and it keeps happening and getting worse and like, now, oh hell—let’s go to a show.”—So we go out, and she has on this little heartbreaking never-seen-by-me before red raincoat over the black velvet slacks and cuts along, with black short hair making her look so strange, like a—like someone in Paris—I have on just my old ex-brakeman railroad Cant Bust Ems and a workshirt without undershirt and suddenly it’s cold October out there, and with gusts of rain, so I shiver at her side as we hurry up Price Street—towards Market, shows—I remember that afternoon returning from the Bromberg weekend—something is caught in both our throats, I don’t know what, she does.

“Baby I’m going to tell you something and if I tell it to you I want you to promise nevertheless you’ll come to the movie with me.”—“Okay.”—And naturally I add, after pause, “What is it?”—I think it has something to do with “Let’s break up really and truly, I don’t want to make it, not because I don’t like you but it’s by now or should be obvious to both of us by now—” that kind of argument that I can, as of yore and again, break, by saying, “But let’s, look, I have, wait—” for always the man can make the little woman bend, she was made to bend, the little woman was—so I wait confidently for this kind of talk, tho feel bleak, tragic, grim, and the air cold.—“You know the other night” (she spends some time trying to order confused nights of recent—and I help her straighten them out, and have my arm around her waist, as we cut along we come closer to the brittle jewel lights of Price and Columbus that old North Beach corner so weird and ever weirder now and I have my private thoughts about it as from older scenes in my San Francisco life, in brief, almost smug and snug in the rug of myself—in any case we agree that the night she means to tell me about is Saturday night, which was the night I cried in the railyards —that short sudden, as I say, crying, that vision—I’m trying in fact to interpose and tell her about it, trying also to figure out if she means now that on Saturday night something awful happened that I should know—).

“Well I went to Dante’s and didn’t want to stay, and tried to leave—and Yuri was trying to hang around—and he called somebody—and I was at the phone—and told Yuri he was wanted” (as incoherent as that) “and while he is in the booth I cut on home, because I was tired—baby at two o’clock in the morning he came and knocked on the door—“

“Why?”—“For a place to sleep, he was drunk, he rushed in—and—well—.”

“Huh?”

“Well baby we made it together,”—that hip word—at the sound of which even as I walked and my legs propelled under me and my feet felt firm, the lower part of my stomach sagged into my pants or loins and the body experienced a sensation of deep melting downgoing into some soft somewhere, nowhere—suddenly the streets were so bleak, the people passing so beastly, the lights so unnecessary just to illumine this … this cutting world—it was going across the cobbles when she said it, “made it together,” I had (locomotive wise) to concentrate on getting up on the curb again and I didn’t look at her—I looked down Columbus and thought of walking away, rapidly, as I’d done at Larry’s—I didn’t—I said “I don’t want to live in this beastly world”—but so low she barely if at all heard me and if so never commented, but after a pause she added a few things, like, “There are other details, like, what—but I won’t go into them—like,” stammering, and slow—yet both of us swinging along in the street to the show—the show being Brave Bulls (I cried to see the grief in the matador when he heard his best friend and girl had gone off the mountain in his own car, I cried to see even the bull that I knew would die and I knew the big deaths bulls do die in their trap called bullring)—I wanted to run away from Mardou. (“Look man,” she’d said only a week before when I’d suddenly started talking about Adam and Eve and referred to her as Eve, the woman who by her beauty is able to make the man do anything, “don’t call me Eve.”)—But now no matter—walking along, at one point so irritable to my senses she stopped short on the rainy sidewalk and coolly said “I need a neckerchief” and turned to go into the store and I turned and followed her from reluctant ten feet back realizing I hadn’t known what was going on in my mind really ever since Price and Columbus and here we were on Market—while she’s in the store I keep haggling with myself, shall I just go now, I have my fare, just cut down the street swiftly and go home and when she comes out she’ll see you’re gone, she’ll know you broke the promise to go to the movies just like you broke a lot of promises but this time she’ll know you have a big male right to—but none of this is enough—I feel stabbed by Yuri—by Mardou I feel forsaken and shamed—I turn to look in the store blindly at anything and there she comes at just that moment wearing a phosphorescent purple bandana (because big raindrops had just started flying and she didn’t want the rain to string out her carefully combed for the movies hair and here she was spending her small monies on kerchiefs.)—In the movie I hold her hand, after a fifteen-minute wait, not thinking to at all not because I was mad but I felt she would feel it was too subservient at this time to take her hand in the movieshow, like lovers—but I took her hand, she was warm, lost—ask not the sea why the eyes of the dark-eyed woman are strange and lost—came out of the movie, I glum, she businesslike to get through the cold to the bus, where, at the bus stop, she walked away from me to lead me to a warmer waiting place and (as I said) I’d mentally accused her of wan-deringfoot.

Arriving home, where we sat, she on my lap, after a long warm talk with John Golz, who came in to see her, but found me too, and might have left, but in my new spirit I wanted at once to show him that I respected and liked him, and talked with him, and he stayed two hours—in fact I saw how he annoyed Mardou by talking literature with her beyond the point where she was interested and also about things she’d long known about—poor Mardou.

So he left, and I curled her on my lap, and she talked about the war between men—“They have a war, to them a woman is a prize, to Yuri it’s just that your prize has less value now.”

“Yeah,” I say, sad, “but I should have paid more attention to the old junkey nevertheless, who said there’s a lover on every corner—they’re all the same, boy, don’t get hung-up on one.”

“It isn’t true, it isn’t true, that’s just what Yuri wants is for you to go down to Dante’s now and the two of you’ll laugh and talk me over and agree that women are good lays and there are a lot of them.—I think you’re like me—you want one love—like, men have the essence in the woman, there’s an essence” (“Yes,” I thought, “there’s an essence, and that is your womb”) “and the man has it in his hand, but rushes off to build big constructions.” (I’d just read her the first few pages of Finnegans Wake and explained them and where Finnegan is always putting up “buildung supra buildung supra buildung” on the banks of the Liffey—dung!)

“I will say nothing,” I thought—“Will you think I am not a man if I don’t get mad?”

“Just like that war I told you about.”

“Women have wars too—“

Oh what’ll we do? I think—now I go home, and it’s all over for sure, not only now is she bored and has had enough but has pierced me with an adultery of a kind, has been inconstant, as prophesied in a dream, the dream the bloody dream—I see myself grabbing Yuri by the shirt and throwing him on the floor, he pulls out a Yugoslavian knife, I pick up a chair to bash him with, everybody’s watching … but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see suddenly the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, “Funny Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans.”

“Baby it’s up to you,” is what she’s actually saying, “about how many times you wanta see me and all that—but I want to be independent like I say.”

And I go home having lost her love.

And write this book.