loose from their heritage, or even not learn that heritage, because there was more relevance to be found in the splashy trash of the popular press, in the open-throated yawps and mechanical twangs of rock ‘n’ roll, in the chaotic inner jungles which all of us hurled ourselves into with every type of drug imaginable; and engaging in all this willful and apparently self-destructive abuse to the sensibilities for the purpose of finding each of us for ourselves the raw endlessly disguised essence which had to be sought outside all schools, methods, social mechanisms, and popular self-help devices. In other words, we had to fuck up before we could stand up, and nothing was more relevant than the apparently irrelevant, and nothing less relevant than the Eternal Verities enclosing this 2,000-year-old consciousness like a box. The consciousness of all of this was a vague cloud distantly forming then, but I followed my as-yet-masked muse even so, by reading trashy tabloids instead of enduring literature, and spending much more time under my headphones filling my shimmying soul with rock ‘n’ roll than I spent reading anything, by smoking grass and attending acid as a guidance counselor, by writing eight to twelve hours in a row on innumerable allnite binges, piling up reams of raving bullshit but honing my talents all the time and publishing this straight-ahead improvisatory style month after month, until at last I began to speak in a Voice almost my own, to gain effortlessly a progressive mastery of words, tossing off adolescent woodshed epiphanies in white-hot eruptions of inspiration, even though the influence of William Burroughs still shows. I suppose I’m not a truly dedicated artist, whatever that is, and I don’t want to be. I’ll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.
Part 1 (Prologue), Chapter 4
Previously Unpublished, 1968
from The Great El Cajon
Race Riot and Two
Friday Night Parties
Idon’t know what kind of sociopsychological implications I was looking for, but they weren’t there. It was merely another night at the Hell's Angels’, where cruelty and violence and the degradation of women is taken for granted. Several people were markedly bored. It was boring, in a way. No, not boring—it seemed almost as if time had come to a stop. Despite the rising and falling intermittent hubbub of conversations, there seemed to be a peculiar kind of silence in the air that made itself felt like a heavy purple blanket, a thick undersea atmosphere in which all motion was slowed in effect though not in sight… in every part of the room, every aspect of the surroundings, all my perceptions were suffused with a strange, almost tangible stillness. But perhaps it is time to begin at the beginning.
It was a dull Friday evening in early March. Gina had a play rehearsal at school immediately after dinner, so I rode up with her, intending to listen to a record I’d seen in the Listening Library a few days before called The Sounds of Harlem. Unfortunately I had forgotten that the library was closed on Friday nights, so I spent the time watching the play rehearsal, although I had already seen it three times. After a few minutes I slipped out for a moment and took three Libriums at the water fountain. The drama kids invited us to a party afterwards, and my boredom-and-Librium-deadened heart lifted at the pleasant expectation that perhaps I’d be able to do a little drinking.
It was quite a party. Our thoughtful hostess had provided a wonderful selection of Coke & 7-Up, to go with our cake, and after an old war movie starring Richard Widmark in the Casbah we played charades.