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By Root 924 0

wide open still, cold, but going chomp-chomp on delicious home-made Chinese dinners. Japhy really knew how to handle chopsticks and shoveled it in with a will. Then I’d sometimes wash the dishes and go out to meditate awhile on my mat beneath the eucalypti, and in the window of the shack I’d see the brown glow of Japhy’s kerosene lamp as he sat reading and picking his teeth. Sometimes he’d come to the door of the shack and yell “Hoo!” and I wouldn’t answer and I could hear him mutter “Where the hell is he?” and see him peering out into the night for his bhikku. One night I was sitting meditating when I heard a loud crack to my right and I looked and it was a deer, coming to re-visit the ancient deer park and munch awhile in the dry foliage. Across the evening valley the old mule went with his heartbroken “Hee haw” broken like a yodel in the wind: like a horn blown by some terribly sad angel: like a reminder to people digesting dinners at home that all was not as well as they thought. Yet it was just a love cry for another mule. But that was why…

One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away without biting.

27

A few days before his big farewell party Japhy and I had an argument. We went into San Francisco to deliver his bike to the freighter at the pier and then went up to Skid Row in a drizzling rain to get cheap haircuts at the barber college and pook around Salvation Army and Goodwill stores in search of long underwear and stuff. As we were walking in the drizzly exciting streets (“Reminds me of Seattle!” he yelled) I got the overwhelming urge to get drunk and feel good. I bought a poorboy of ruby port and uncapped it and dragged Japhy into an alley and we drank. “You better not drink too much,” he said, “you know we gotta go to Berkeley after this and attend a lecture and discussion at the Buddhist Center.”

“Aw I don’t wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.”

“But they’re expecting you, I read all your poems there last year.”

“I don’t care. Look at that fog flyin over the alley and look at this warm ruby red port, don’t it make ya feel like singing in the wind?”

“No it doesn’t. You know, Ray, Cacoethes says you drink too much.”

“And him with his ulcer! Why do you think he has an ulcer? Because he drank too much himself. Do I have an ulcer? Not on your life! I drink for joy! If you don’t like my drinking you can go to the lecture by yourself. I’ll wait at Coughlin’s cottage.”

“But you’ll miss all that, just for some old wine.”

“There’s wisdom in wine, goddam it!” I yelled. “Have a shot!”

“No I won’t!”

“Well then I’ll drink it!” and I drained the bottle and we went back on Sixth Street where I immediately jumped back into the same store and bought another poorboy. I was feeling fine now.

Japhy was sad and disappointed. “How do you expect to become a good bhikku or even a Bodhisattva Mahasattva always getting drunk like that?”

“Have you forgotten the last of the Bulls, where he gets drunk with the butchers?”

“Ah so what, how can you understand your own mind essence with your head all muddled and your teeth all stained and your belly all sick?”

“I’m not sick, I’m fine. I could just float up into that gray fog and fly around San Francisco like a seagull. D’I ever tell you about Skid Row here, I used to live here—”

“I lived on Skid Road in Seattle myself, I know all about all that.”

The neons of stores and bars were glowing in the gray gloom of rainy afternoon, I felt great. After we had our haircuts we went into a Goodwill store and fished around bins, pulling out socks and undershirts and various belts and junk that we bought for a few pennies. I kept taking surreptitious slugs of wine out of my bottle which I had wedged in my belt. Japhy was disgusted. Then we got in the jalopy and drove to Berkeley, across the rainy bridge, to the cottages of Oakland and then downtown Oakland, where Japhy wanted to find a pair of jeans that fitted me. We’d been looking all