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• Classic-Fiction

Jesus, he says,

and he takes a drink from a pint of whiskey,

then passes the bottle to his

friend.

they both stand and look at the car,

one holding the whiskey, the other the water bag.

they are not dressed in conventional hippie garb

but in natural old clothes

faded, dirty and torn.

a butterfly goes past my window

and they get back in the

car

and it bucks off in low

like a rodeo bronc

they are both laughing

and one has the bottle

tilted…

the butterfly is gone

and outside there is a globe of smoke

40 feet in circumference.

first human beings I’ve seen in Los Angeles

in 15 years.

the shoelace

a woman, a

tire that’s flat, a

disease, a

desire; fears in front of you,

fears that hold so still

you can study them

like pieces on a

chessboard…

it’s not the large things that

send a man to the

mad house. death he’s ready for, or

murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…

no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies

that send a man to the

mad house…

not the death of his love

but a shoelace that snaps

with no time left…

the dread of life

is that swarm of trivialities

that can kill quicker than cancer

and which are always there—

license plates or taxes

or expired driver’s license,

or hiring or firing,

doing it or having it done to you, or

constipation

speeding tickets

rickets or crickets or mice or termites or

roaches or flies or a

broken hook on a

screen, or out of gas

or too much gas,

the sink’s stopped up, the landlord’s drunk,

the president doesn’t care and the governor’s

crazy.

lightswitch broken, mattress like a

porcupine;

$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at

Sears Roebuck;

and the phone bill’s up and the market’s

down

and the toilet chain is

broken,

and the light has burned out—

the hall light, the front light, the back light,

the inner light; it’s

darker than hell

and twice as

expensive.

then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails

and people who insist they’re

your friends;

there’s always that and worse;

leaky faucet, Christ and Christmas;

blue salami, 9 day rains,

50 cent avocados

and purple

liverwurst.

or making it

as a waitress at Norm’s on the split shift,

or as an emptier of

bedpans,

or as a carwash or a busboy

or a stealer of old lady’s purses

leaving them screaming on the sidewalks

with broken arms at the age of

80.

suddenly

2 red lights in your rearview mirror

and blood in your

underwear;

toothache, and $979 for a bridge

$300 for a gold

tooth,

and China and Russia and America, and

long hair and short hair and no

hair, and beards and no

faces, and plenty of zigzag but no

pot, except maybe one to piss in and

the other one around your

gut.

with each broken shoelace

out of one hundred broken shoelaces,

one man, one woman, one

thing

enters a

mad house.

so be careful

when you

bend over.

self-inflicted wounds

he talked about Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe and he

wrote like a cross between the two of them

and I lived in a hotel on Figueroa Street

close to the bars

and he lived further uptown in a small room

and we both wanted to be writers

and we’d meet at the public library, sit on the stone

benches and talk about that.

he showed me his short stories and he wrote well, he

wrote better than I did, there was a calm and a

strength in his work that mine did not have.

my stories were jagged, harsh, with self-inflicted wounds.

I showed him all my work but he was more impressed with

my drinking prowess and my worldly attitude

after talking a bit we would go to Clifton’s Cafeteria

for our only meal of the day

(for less than a dollar in 1941)

yet

we were in great health.

we lost jobs, found jobs, lost jobs.

mostly we didn’t work, we always envisioned we soon

would be receiving regular checks from

The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and

Harper’s.

we ran with a gang of young men who didn’t envision

anything at all

but they had a gallant lawless charm

and we drank with them and fought with them and

had a hell of a