Suppose, I pondered as I continued down the sidewalk, he were black instead of white. (Suppose he bit his nails instead of neglecting them wholly.) Suppose his wide-bottomed body hid some astonishing talent, a wisdom, a power beyond its obvious physical strength.
Suppose he were simply other than he was: different. …
I’d spoken a word or two to him three or four times in as many years, when we’d passed in the morning through Tompkins Square, when we’d met at the bodega’s counter, him to get a late Snickers, me to buy a quart of milk for tomorrow’s coffee. He was a slow, unexceptional kid, as likely to become angry as to guffaw — at things I found neither offensive nor funny.
Suppose (and I laughed, now, as I walked home) the world about him (and me) were so changed from the one we actually shared that the myths reducing the whole of our culture, from the Greek tales of Orpheus and Theseus to stories contemporary radio and old movie magazines told of the Beatles and Jean Harlow, had to be written … differently?
In that world, what voice would he command?
With its center of gravity eight inches below mine (we were the same height), how would his heavy, graceful body leap and dance?
Later that afternoon, while a breeze came through the window by the houseplants, I opened my notebook at the round table, tan cover folded back under, to imagine what, under speculation’s pressure, he’d become — and began to consider his tale (arriving in language blocks) as though I reread it through that marvelous, amorphous shadow at once as apt a metaphor for death as for all the unconsciously creative.
And I wrote ten pages of it down.
59.7. Ron’s and my plans were to meet at Kennedy Airport for our seven P.M. Icelandic flight to Reykjavik, then Luxembourg (twenty-three hours total, on a prop-jet plane). Some incidents from the seventy-two hours before I actually took off have stayed with me, however, and I recount them here.
59.8. Then working at the State Personnel Agency on Fourteenth Street, Marilyn was not at our fourth-floor Sixth Street apartment two days before I actually left; though neither she nor I remembers where she stayed from time to time after Bob left. (My assumption was that she went to stay with her mother; she says today she doesn’t think so.) It was Indian summer, and I believe I’d worn a flannel shirt as a jacket, unbuttoned over a lighter workshirt — though even that was too warm for the shirtsleeve weather that drifted with an occasional breeze that October over the city; I usually wore heavy orange construction shoes and jeans in those days, pretty standard bohemian attire at a time when the term “hippie” had not yet become commonplace.
There’d been a period of a few months — through most of the Bob affair — when I hadn’t seen Sonny at all. But that afternoon, I ran into him on Second Avenue, just down from St. Marks Place. He was living on the street. He hadn’t eaten that day. I bought him a hamburger and a milkshake, probably up at the Veselka Coffee Shop. “How’s Marilyn?” he asked, wolfing at meat and bun in a manner not too far from his (recently deceased) father’s. “She still writin’ them poems?”
I shrugged. “We’re not getting along too well right through here.”
“Yeah, that happens. You still singin’ that old folks’ music?” And the hamburger was gone.
“Sometimes.”
We parted, Sonny still with a white mustache from the milkshake, and both of us making vague noises about seeing you around.
I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in Central Park and, after a subway ride up from the Lower East Side, went walking through the paths around the Eighties. I was of course aware that Central Park was a heavy cruising area, and had from time to time spent late-night hours in the Rambles. The area along Central Park West had been the regular cruising strip for me before my marriage — indeed, my second, third, and fourth pickups had occurred there. But since I’d moved to the Lower East Side, I hadn’t visited it that frequently. How much I was, or wasn’t, thinking of sexual prospects is, at this point, hard to say. But soon I was sitting on a park bench beside a medium-height blond man in his middle thirties, in jeans, black engineer’s boots, and a blue wool shirt, with a bomber jacket slung over the bench back for which the weather was too warm.
Within the first few minutes, I told him I was going to Europe in a couple of days.
“Oh, you’ll love it,” he said. It seemed he had just returned from a monastery in Japan, where he’d been studying Zen — had I ever heard of a D. T. Suzuki? (I had indeed read at least one and a half of Suzuki’s books.) He had been his teacher. Before that, there had been Europe and San Francisco. He’d been in the monastery with a poet, Gary Snyder, and Snyder’s wife, poet Joanne Kyger — she was just wonderful! They’d just been divorced. Did I know Snyder’s work?
I didn’t.
Well, I should. He was very good friends, he told me, with lots of poets, like Robert Duncan, Helen Adam, and Jack Spicer — who had just died. And Charles Olson …? I knew Duncan’s name — had, indeed, named a section in one of my early novels I’d so recently delivered to Henry, Those Spared by Fire, after a Duncan poem: “This Place Rumourd to Have Been Sodom.” Olson’s and Spicer’s names were familiar from the early “San Francisco Renaissance” issue of the Evergreen Review I had read years before.
Helen Adam had written a wonderful play, he explained, in verse: it was called San Francisco’s Burning. They might do it in New York. “Believe me — ” he frowned and shook his hand dismissively — “if they do it here, it’ll blow New York away!” The man was a painter, Bill McNeilclass="underline" and the number of names he managed to drop in twenty minutes of conversation — some known, but most not, though he talked of them as if everyone in the world must know the poems of George Stanley and John Ryan and James Broughton and Richard Brautigan and the paintings of Paul Alexander and Russell FitzGerald — was both amusing, somewhat off-putting, and interesting. To talk to him for half an hour was to see, I suspect, that he was a bit of a charlatan, a bit of a showman. But at the same time you recognized that he had boundless enthusiasm for his artistic circle, some of whose members (thanks largely to the Evergreen Review and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets series) were beginning to garner some attention. He himself was sure he was just on the verge of making some breakthrough into larger recognition — though, of course, who cared what other people thought? But he obviously did.
I asked Bill if he’d ever heard of Marilyn’s and my friend, Marie Ponsot, whose first book of poems, True Minds, had been published in the Pocket Poets series, right after Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems.
No. Apparently his reading did not go too far outside his largely San Francisco-based friends.
When I meet someone new, especially in a sexual situation (which this was), I almost never mention that I am a writer — with, at that time, five books in print (and two more just sold). That has been true for years. But I was also curious what Bill’s reaction might be, so rather tentatively I told him that, well, I was writing a novel.
“Isn’t everyone!” was Bill’s response. But I believe he got as far as asking what it was about.
“It’s about myths,” I said. “Christ, Orpheus, Jean Harlow, Billy the Kid, and the Beatles — it’s about ancient myths and modern myths and how they both work together.”
“Oh!” declared Bill. “You should see a wonderful play by a friend of mine, Michael McClure. He’s trying to get it done in San Francisco. A wonderful play! It’ll change everything, and drive anyone who sees it crazy! It’s called The Beard, and it’s all about Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid!”