In a week of stupefying labor I managed to save forty dollars. I hitched into Frisco to collect my belongings and to spend two days saying goodbye to inanimate presences. I spent a day in Golden Gate thinking this was the end of it all. I could hear the Pacific out there while gliding through all the crazy unfamiliar flora and fauna. A dozen or so motorcyclists passed me on a bordering street with “SKULLS” on the back of their jackets. Sleeveless leather jackets and hair-bands with hair flowing out behind, a bush-league Gestapo. I re-entered the tropics following some faint music, arriving at a sunlit bandshell where there was a Strauss concert in progress. I waltzed a little and an old couple sitting on a bench grinned and waved at me. I signaled to the old lady and she got up and we made a few gliding slow trips around the bench while her husband clapped. I actually hated waltz music but it seemed appropriate today. Farther on I sat down on the grass and turned to look up a pretty girl's legs. White ninety-nine-cent lollipop panties. Oh darling if only. Thighs ever so slightly parted and eyes closed in rapt attention to the music. Should crawl over there barking and mount. I went into the DeYoung Museum and looked at the Medici statue. Power, that's what I wanted. With power I would fly home rather than hitchhike. Slight chance though that during the Renaissance I wouldn't have been a prince but would have been up on the Baltic in a smoky log hut. At the end of the park I looked out at the Pacific and greeted her with a sigh. Across there in the Orient the Orientals are being Oriental. Huge breakers swept in. Two girls were racing down the beach far below. The whole continent is at my back I thought and I turned and left.
Out on Green Street I couldn't find anybody in the floating world to say goodbye to. The Hanging Gardens were empty—probably someone got busted and they all left. I walked down Grant to Geary then over again through the garden giving the Opera House a wanton high sign. Fuck opera. Who needs it? La Bohème indeed. With a garnish of resolute turkey cream pie. I bought an old metal air force suitcase thinking it would help get me rides in preference to a smelly bedroll.
I caught a ride on 80 to Sacramento with a businessman who thought I was in the air force and perhaps on leave. I said no and he accused me of false advertising. He was in the service during World War Two, he said, and always liked to give our boys a break by picking them up when he saw them hitchhiking. I told him my father had died on the Bataan death march which changed his attitude. He patted my arm and said that Burma took a heavy toll. I had become OK with a gratuitous lie. The Nips sure were a tough bunch of yellow bastards. He went on and on while I dozed. By Sacramento I felt sick with what I suspected was mild food poisoning. It was late evening and I snuck across the State Capitol lawn and vomited in the bushes repeatedly. I finally curled up on the grass and slept fitfully wondering if a policeman would disturb my rest.
I emerged from the bushes early and thought how appropriate a place to get sick I had found—I was amused even though I had mild stomach cramps. All state houses should be turned into vomitoriums and then they could start over in a place that didn't overwhelm them. Say in a big field all votes would be taken while the lawmakers were crawling naked on their hands and knees yelling yes or no. A new perspective. Proper humility in their concerns for millions of helpless citizens. If you've ever taken a trip to Washington you perhaps may gather this meaning—how can anything less than pompous or idle or torpid result from that giant cluster of marble and monuments. The buildings create a self-importance that is destructive. I propose that the whole compound be leveled except the Lincoln Monument and the mall and pond in front of it. And that some adept sculptor do a prone M. L. King to lay across Lincoln's lap in the manner of La Pietà. Only with a big hole in the head. We are mortal O lord. Trigger fingers itch and squeeze, itch and squeeze.
In the first light I had three cups of tea at an all-night cafe and read the Sunday paper without remembering anything but a bikini clad model in the travel section who said in an artful blib, “COME TO BERMUDA.” Be glad to. O island in the sun chigadigdigdo. I caught a ride across the Sierras from a Frisco cab driver with two days off and headed to Reno to beat Harold's Club with a new system. Upon my promise not to tell anyone he explained the questionable mathematics of blackjack and gobbled up a hundred miles of fine scenery. He pointed out the gorge where the Donner party had come to their end eating each other. Literally. Have a piece of Mama's liver, Brad. John Muir walked around here peacefully years ago but now people trample each other and scramble for campsites. In Rocky Mountain National Park I was way up in the “high lonesome” sleeping near a glacier when I heard the strains of “You Are My Sunshine.” Nice family packing in a battery-operated record player. From Scarsdale no less. I was sixteen at the time and feisty beyond belief and told them that I was going to kick their little machine to pieces if they didn't turn it off. On the way out of the woods I was stopped at a ranger station and asked to fill out a long questionnaire on the general quality of the services and pleasures in the park. This request got a shrieking “fuck you” and the other campers that had gathered and the ranger gave me that look of “Well here's a mad dog let's hope he goes away.” The hotel where I worked had recently fired then rehired me over my abortive attempt to unionize the dining room labor. We all worked a triple split shift and the manager of the hotel offered me three hundred dollars to call the thing off. The option was a quick and forceful trip to Denver with a local deputy. I called off the walkout but didn't accept the money which was a fortune to me at the time. I felt laved in honor and pride. They're not buying off Reuther Junior goddamnit. I hoped Steffens and Herbert Croly were watching me from Labor Heaven. Of course I was a chickenshit and should have taken the ride to Denver with the cop. But he might have hurt my body. I got back at the management by organizing pilferage, pulling the plug on the ice machine, and serving raw eggs on my room service trips. I was ashamed during a room service breakfast trip to betray a homely old lady who had treated me well in the past. I served her two absolutely raw eggs then raced back to the kitchen to the phone in order to receive her complaint. Seems her husband who I had heard showering didn't like his eggs raw. Would you please bring two more. Yes of course in a concealed voice then to the refrigerator for two hard-boiled eggs and sending them up with another waiter. Desperation would set in but then a fifteen-hour day wasn't my idea of acceptable working conditions. My most courageous action was the dropping of a full tray of silverware during a muted lovely dinner hour with the sun glinting off Longs Peak. Horrid noise with diners’ necks jerking around. Might cause whiplash. I picked up the silverware slowly while the maitre d'hotel and the headwaiter stood nearby cursing.
In the tent cross-legged looking at the maps in the dark by a gradually dimming flashlight. I plotted a ten-mile circle which would start out toward the west, then north and back east and south back to the tent. It wouldn't be a bad walk assuming I began at dawn and assuming again that I didn't get lost. I turned off my flashlight and lay back on my sleeping bag. I seemed to be losing weight but it might just be liquid from not drinking. I felt my chest and stomach and their layer of fat which had gathered slowly over the years. From the vantage point of 1970 it appeared that all my movements since 1958 had been lateral rather than forward. I had printed three extremely slender books of poems which took up approximately an inch of shelf space. A succession of not very interesting nervous breakdowns. The reading of perhaps a few thousand books and the absorption of no wisdom at all from them. I no longer carried books around as a walking blood bank, a purgative for sorrow. Swallow when needed. Take when lost and Bo-Peep will find you as she finds all lost sheep. I heard of a man who traced mandalas by riding the New York City subway. I had become covert about the past to the extent that my interest in it slackened. And the future was even more oblique. Not that I was unhappy or particularly upset about its prospects. I had once planned to walk the periphery of the United States but then I had also planned a trip on the Trans-Siberian Express, the Orient Express, and a tracing of Rimbaud's path into Africa. But these intenti
ons had become all gaggle and gilt from planning. I was twelve years old again sharpening broadhead arrows in my bedroom while someone said downstairs that Ike's going to get us out of Korea. Where and why was Korea or Panmunjon? Across the flat blue ocean on a map, across the Marianas Trench. Stop in Hawaii where there were bared belly buttons. I knew I was dying daily day per day. At an acceleration rate of twenty-four-hour units. A trip to Jerusalem to see where Jesus walked. It occurred to me that I was still an orthodox Christer and believed in the Second Coming. Lion of Judah. I still read the last book of the Bible with fright, the Book of Revelation. I had lost my urge to chat with Gandhi or Ramakrishna. Only Shakespeare or Apollinaire would do and the exchange of information would be nominal and diffident. They would be curious about color TV and freeze-dried foods as great artists always seemed to devour particulars. If I found wolf tracks tomorrow or even spotted a wolf or found the impossible den that would scarcely change the fact that my first love had betrayed me. My real griefs were over the dead and the prospects of a disastrous future; my affection for the presentness of the woods was easily accounted for. Trees offer no problems and even if all wilderness is despoiled I'll settle for a hundred acres and hide within it and defend it with howls perfected by operatic training. I'll hand-roll Bugler tobacco and become a hermit. They'll parachute starlets into my outpost to be reseeded—the poor girls will wander about aimlessly for a few hours wondering what the hell it's all about and I'll follow them like a male Rima the birdman sizing up the cut of their haunches. Sex enters. To mate not once but a thousand times. And one turns out to be quite enough if you give yourself over to her and if you can give yourself over to anything. The urge seems so atavistic and never leaves for more than a day at a time except during illness and then the lovely worm stirs again with no sense of aim. I sat up trying to catch a new sound, almost a bark but guttural. Probably a bear raiding a honey tree at night and getting stung around the nose and mouth. I cut a honey tree down during winter when the bees were sluggish and almost dormant, dropping out of the hole to the ground where they froze instantly in the near zero cold. I chopped with an ax until I reached the cache of honey which was after all their food. I took off a glove and scooped up a handful. Not very good, almost rank with a buckwheat flavor. Put sticky hand back in glove and walked away on my snowshoes. You spot honey trees in the summer and come back when it's cool enough not to get stung. Rabelais said a cunt was a honeypot, but no bees of course. The first time you enter and the breathless hammering of your heart in your chest. Dwell on the sexual as it is not yet totally atrophied by our progress. We would be looked upon strangely by those in the past who might be busy building a civilization. How to make bricks with no straw they said in Egypt to the Pharaoh before the long walk out and north. I ran my hand along the barrel of the rifle and thought of its pitiless machinery. Leakey crept up on a deer and stabbed it with a knife chipped from stone to show it was possible. The final sport will be throwing stones at stars, super refined with an earth population of fifty billion and the falling stones bringing an anonymous and non-selective death. I turned over in sleeplessness, reached out for an imaginary bottle. Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. Even earth is a she. Millions kissed her daily before it occurred to Raskolnikov as an act of penance. Real grass still grows. That girl you knew in 1956 lasted a year with heroin until she was found in the East River her head nearly severed from the body. Not dooms. Hapless accident walked into if you turn tricks for any habit as my brain shrank with a succession of jobs in pastel offices here and there in cities. If the wanderings were traced on a map I would hope the connecting numbers would spell something but I'm sure they don't. Mouse or ground squirrel outside the tent. God I told you I didn't want a full moon tonight or I wanted it covered. The woman I read about in the Brooks Range, now littered with oil and barrels and derricks, had her howling answered by wolves. Silver light through tent front. I got up into a crouch and loaded the rifle, then crawled out of the tent. No clouds or slightest breeze. Wolfbane blooming in the Carpathians. I sighted on the moon with the rifle uncocked then racked a shell into the chamber, aiming at a gray mottled area on the moon's surface. If I squeezed now I would see blue flame and hear the noise until morning. I gently released the hammer and added a log to the fire, chilled now with only my shorts on. I tested the rifle's length for suicide turning the end of the barrel against my forehead where its cool tip further chilled me. Thinking of how Hemingway in unthinkable pain, mental and physical, picked the shotgun from the cabinet that morning. I smiled to myself. How far again I was from taking my life with the woods covered with the skin of moonlight. The log began to take, a flame shooting up from one side of the bed of hot coals. I squatted close to the fire and then stood and took off my shorts and squatted again as near to the flame as I could bear. I looked down in a vague wonderment—walking around putting that thing in girls. How pleasant. I thought of howling against the improbable chance of getting an answer but then I knew if I howled I would frighten myself. I remembered wrestling with a friend after football practice and a quarrel and getting a chokehold on him, holding it until his face changed color. I was afraid, losing my anger instantly. When we got up he looked at me strangely and we scarcely ever spoke again. Something moved in the brush and trees near the creek and I wished that I had brought along my predator call which is a small wooden whistle-type object that when blown into properly makes the sound of a dying rabbit. A horrid strangling sound, closest to high-pitched child-weeping. A porcupine when mortally wounded makes a similar sound when he falls from the tree. They are vastly overpopulated because their predator, the marten, has been trapped to extinction for its beautiful fur. Hard to get close to one—I've pulled quills from a dog's mouth a number of times. You trim the ends to let air into the hollow quill then twist and jerk. Out comes the barbed quill and a gout of blood, very painful to the dog but they seem to know the process is necessary. I want to draw false conclusions about everything and obvious scientific facts will not change my weak mind and its continuous droning monologue against itself. I left the circle of light the fire cast and walked slowly toward the creek to find the source of the noise. Nothing there—probably moved on when I arose. If I were to live here long enough many of the animals would adjust to my harmless presence. Many frogs along the creek and the raccoons eat them. And are always cleansing themselves as a falcon does to avoid fleas. I went back to the tent and got into my sleeping bag which was cheap and serviceable but useless when the weather turned cooler. Sleeping in a down mummy bag in the Absarokas thinking that a grizzly might tear off my face as one did to those two girls at Glacier. Sleeping on picnic tables in Hastings, Nebraska, and near Brainerd, Minnesota. Better sleeping with that girl who wouldn't sleep when I awoke in the morning and I was a house guest and she was nimbly curious. Only fourteen and I didn't enter but may as well have, when she brought orange juice and coffee. Me with the sheet bound around my feet when she entered the room and the pillow over my eyes, daughter of an acquaintance when I read poems in Wisconsin to a collection of general dimwits, speed and acid freaks and dazed graduate students. She's looking at my lighthouse giggling. How old are you. Fooling around necking. She held it too hard. What if your parents. I never tell them anything they're creeps. Dress so short and when I push it up I bury my face then pull off panties. She's laughing because it tickles. Of course it does and she has too many teeth and I can't hold anything. I'll suffocate here now that she is silent and wriggles hike all her older sisters on earth and then when I finish she is on her hands and knees still squirming. After I wash myself and come back into the room she is on her back, dress still up, looking at the pictures in my billfold, panties around an ankle smiling at me—"That was fun I love to pet.” Maybe I wasn't first I didn't ask. We used to say seventeen will get you twenty and meant statutory rape is frowned upon but how can you tell nowadays anyway? Put it there for a moment rubbing it back and forth madly with her legs up as we kiss open mouth and nearly enter the nether plac
e to conclude. Frightened but she wasn't at all, only saying your coffee is cold now I'll get you some more. I love you of course I thought and will return when you're less old enough to be my daughter or were half my age. More fleece. Will you be spoiled and I have spoiled you. John Calvin is back there in my brain and sweating in guilt a dozen times since. I carry a small school photo of her with her small empire curls before her ears and light brown hair. Smooth, brown, strong, she played tennis all the time but her buttocks so white. Should confess to her parents and whisk her to Virginia where that age isn't rare and fuck until my brain is sated and built of honeysuckle flowers which was her scent. First color of dawn now and I can't bother with sleep if I'm going to make my circle.
Reno, Fallon, Austin, Ely. God I took the wrong way with nearly a week to reach Salt Lake City again. I see why they test atomic bombs in this state—if they didn't I would, only in more central locations. Reno a remuda of divorcees. I arrived at noon with three dollars and by one o'clock I had only fifty cents what with the nickel misery of slot machines and an aluminum roast beef sandwich sprayed with tabasco to make it a tabasco aluminum roast beef sandwich. And iced tea in a small foggy plastic glass with a trace of lipstick on it. Whose lips and I wonder who is kissing her now and where precisely. Out on the hot asphalt street a policeman parked at the curb looks at me from an air-conditioned squad car. I mill about close to a tourist family staring in shop windows at cowboy hats and beaded moccasins and turquoise amulets. Through the door of a club I watch a woman working two slot machines at once with a big pile of silver dollars. Probably from Dayton, Ohio, come here for a divorce because marriage hasn't in fifteen marfak years fulfilled her life or widened her horizons. Turning around I see that the squad car is now on the other side of the street and I'm sure now that I'm being watched. His small face and big sunglasses remind me of an enlarged photo of the head of a fly. A fuzz buzz. On the corner in vacant lot there is a mobile glass cage. I walk up to it and smell the cotton candy, caramel corn and hot dogs. I ask a girl in a white uniform for a glass of water and she says, Coke rootbeer orange Pepsi RC Dr Pepper Seven-Up lime cherry cream soda.