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By Root 489 0

of Lindas with ratted hair formed a healthy counterpoint to the rabid scrawl-sessions and hours of yellow-visaged broodings cloistered in my stuffy lair where I dreamed of Love long insomniac nights painting raga-choirs of black-mascara’d hip-avant goddesses dressed in motley streaming rags all across my ceiling, because I knew that somewhere (Greenwich Village, my city in the sky) there lounged lovely sidewalksfull of strange sleek dement-edly beautiful females capable of appreciating my holy madness and the scriptures it spewed. Little did I dream I’d fall in love with Gina, a counterfoil from the most hated hives of the patriotic masscult middle class, the only chick who came forth to challenge my Madman hype. No, I didn’t know myself, but I knew my textbooks well, and so continued brooding lonely toward the day I’d meet my Madwoman, languishing in my room and rereading Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight wishing mad planetoids and torn rhinoceroses would rain from my sky, waiting for apocalypse or high-school graduation, when I would forsake my solitude and journey Eastward, a mad notebook pilgrim seeking the land of pot and street poets, where my Rimbaudian light would be appreciated.

And when in my junior year I finally poked my fuzzy snout and small pink eyes from my burrow, it really didn’t mean much, although my whole façade made a 360-degree retrack—having braved and transcended the cold fires of existential nihilism, I was ready now to be everybody's hyperstimulated hypergregarious Enfant Terrible Guru, grinning big and brassy as a po’ Nigger who's just inherited a million bucks and can start edging other folks’ feet into the cakewalks of his own ragtime soul. Now that the puberty-ovens of solitary penance had been served, I was ready to set the Sucker world (heads, college professors, Aware students, and dilettante esthetes) on its ear. Granted, I started at the very top of the San Diego totem, by God, with college hipster parties at which I was always the youngest one, and yes indeed I held my own admirably, being somewhat new to alcohol though not to pot—joyfully drunk, astoundingly gregarious after a couple of warm-up glasses of wine, I circulated from one group to another spouting spontaneous poetry and impressing the pop-eyed hell out of all of them, always doing things like raising wine bottles over my head and saying, “Ah, the golden flowing river of sunshine joy!” giant-smiling, ecstatic, like the electric disciples of that Love-and-Joy politic destined to flourish three years later, for Christ's sake! But I guess I was just ahead of my time because I got hit more than once with snarls like the one from a really Beat (I know she wasn’t straight because she had straight extra-long hair, wire-rim glasses, sandals, and esoteric duds) chick sitting near me on the night of the golden sunshine outburst, who responded: “Cool it, man!”

But of course I didn’t cool it, I never cooled it, because alcohol always turned me into a Zen lunatic. It was really all involuntary, I was just hip from the core of my sixteen-year-old soul to the jigsaw-jumping charge of joyous jive that vibrated around me as I moved from room to room flashing teeth in that nonstop smile and commanding all to recognize me by the gleam of archangelic enlightenment blazing in my eye as I ad-libbed motley flatulent streams of “poetry,” so that more than one 5-foot-7 tweedsheathed bearded philosophy major was seen to let fall his mask of haughty cynicism during one of my poetic reveries, the mask replaced on his countenance by a slowly spreading expression of dreamy, bemused warmth. The schmucks. One of them tried to match me one night by shooting some spontaneous poeticisings back, but I nailed the sonofabitch to the wall: he had stolen it, nuance for cadence, off a Dylan Thomas record.

But that look they would get on their faces when I’d shift into my routine! It's that stupid expression which signifies that its wearer has suddenly been reminded of one of the most precious, uncontami-nated, uplifting areas of existence, the kind of expression