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Is a thought I’d rather not think

That the world could be saved

By the terrors I’ve braved

Is worse than the terrors I’ve braved

I finally said fuck it

I don’t want to buck it

I’m tired of being alone

We had some more substantive talks, mostly about World War II for some reason, but most of it was dancing and giggling. It was lots of fun.

Even then, a few days away from death by starvation, having zilch earthly control and quite a bit of earthly pain, lots of very nice things were happening. I could hallucinate my saxophone and any side men I wanted. Coltrane, Philly Joe, Cannonball, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and I whiled away many an hour with the most nectar-sweet, hard-ass-funky music ever. I did some solo stuff so beautiful I couldn’t stop crying. Monk and I funked out some lovely duets. Dylan dropped in one day, Mose Allison the next. With them I just lay back and listened.

And it wasn’t just music and musicians. Poets, painters, writers, historical figures, movie stars, old friends. Some I invited, some showed up all on their own.

Pain and anguish was all that came from trying to maintain contact with the world as I had known it, a world I was no longer able to do anything or be anything in, a world where Virginia and my father were dead and all sorts of other awful things were happening. The nice thing happened when I just gave up on all that.

TIME TO GO. My father and others had wanted to tell me but things moved too fast. There was no way to get word to me through normal channels, but somehow I had caught on. Not fully maybe, but enough.

One big clue was a line in my father’s last letter to me. He was talking about his teaching at Harvard and how he was giving it up. “At least it gave me a chance to get to know people who are at home on Earth.” If he wasn’t at home on Earth, then where was he at home? Was I too not really of the Earth? Did he owe allegiance to some other place? In the crunch, would he sell Earth down the river? Was I going to have to choose between Earth and my father?

The overall tone of the letter was apologetic. His overall tone for the past couple of years had been apologetic. What was he apologizing for? He knew I didn’t dig his New York City fame and fortune bit and the shit he was putting Mother through. He was always saying he had been a not so hot father, which was absurd. But there seemed to be something else he was apologizing for. Something much bigger.

He and some of the other voices kept trying to get me to curse him. There were numerous indications that that would make things a lot easier for me, but I couldn’t get into it. There’s a Thoreau quote I like: “No man ever profited by cursing his father, no matter how much a curse his father was to him.” And my father has been anything but a curse to me.

It was time for everyone who wasn’t really at home on Earth to split. If only we could get the hell out of the way and let things take their course. We were nuns milling about in between two opposing armies, keeping both sides from seeing each other except through our eyes. Between man and God, between the living and the dead, the past and the future, between blacks and whites, young and old, men and women.

Maybe a good battle would clear the air. After the dust settled something better could be built. But no matter what side I chose, no matter how the lines were drawn, I was pretty sure that I’d be purged afterward. My interests were in the ambiguity. I had nothing to gain by things becoming clear and everything to lose. That’s why I was milling around unarmed in the middle of all those battlefields.

But the time when ambiguity could stay was past. I either had to be as big a jerk as everyone else or get the fuck out of the way.

FEBRUARY 14: VALENTINE’S DAY. Oh, God, it was awful. The end. So fucking hopeless, so fucking lonely. And getting more and more so and worse and worse. And harder and harder to hang on. And oh, Mother, how did your poor son end up in such a depressing hopeless meaningless mess? And oh, Father, what’s gone so terribly wrong?