Desolation Angels: A Novel

  So Raphael and Irwin take up the theme: “We’ll go all the way out! We’ll take our clothes off to read our poems!”

  They’re shouting this at this polite table yet all seems natural and I look at Rose and again she winks, Ah she knows me—At a thank-God moment when Rose is on the phone and the others are getting coats in the hall, just us boys at the table, Raphael yells “That’s what we’ll do, we’ll have to open their eyes, we’ll have to bomb them! With bombs! we’ll have to do it, Irwin, I’m sorry—it’s true—it’s all too true” and here he is standing up taking off his pants at the lace tablecloth. He goes right through with it pulling out his knees but it’s only a joke and swiftly ties up again as Rose comes back: “Boys, we’ll have to make it snappy now! It’s almost time for the reading!”

  “We’re all gonna drive in separate cars!” she calls.

  I who’ve been laughing all this time hurry to finish my ham, my wine, hurry to talk to the maiden girl who keeps whisking off dishes silently—

  “We’ll all be naked and Time Magazine wont take our pitcher! That’s the true glory! Face it!”

  “I’ll jack off right in front of em!” yells Simon pounding the table, with big serious eyes like Lenin.

  Lazarus is leaning forward eagerly in his chair to hear it all, but at the same time he’s drumming on his chair, or swaying, Rose stands surveying us with a “tsk-tsk” but winks and lets us off—that’s the way she is—All these crazy little poets eating and yelling in her house, thank God they never brought Ronnie Taker up there who’d-a walked off with the silver—he was a poet too—

  “Let’s start a revolution against me!” I yell.

  “We’ll start a revolution against Thomas the Doubter! We’ll institute paradise gardens in the states of our empire! We’ll plague the middleclass with naked nude babies growing up running across the earth!”

  “We’ll wave our pants from stretchers!” yells Irwin.

  “We’ll leap in the air and grab babies!” I yell.

  “That’s good,” says Irwin.

  “We’ll bark at all mad dogs!” screams Raphael triumphantly. Bang on the table. “It’ll be—”

  “We’ll bounce babies in our lap,” says Simon direct at me.

  “Babies, shmabies, we’ll be like death, we’ll kneel down to drink from soundless streams.” (Raphael).

  “Wow”

  “Whatuz that mean?”

  Raphael shrugs. He opens his mouth:—“We’ll bang hammers in their mouth! They’ll be hammers of fire! The hammers themselves’ll be on fire! It’ll pound and pound into their power brains!” And the way he says brains, it all sinks through us, the funny way of the “r’s”… thick, sincere “r’s”… “brwains …”

  “When do I get to be a space ship commander?” says Lazarus who wants that out of our revolution.

  “Lazarus! We’ll provide you with imaginary golden turtle doves to take the place of your motor! We’ll hang St. Francis in effigy! We’ll kill all the babies in our brains! We’ll pour wine down the throats of decaying horses!!! We’ll bring parachutes to the poetry reading!”

  (Irwin is holding his head.)

  These are sample attempts at what he was really saying—

  And we’re all chargin in, like, Irwin charges in with: “We’ll have assholes showing on the screens of Hollywood.”

  Or I say: “We’ll attract attention from the bad mobsters!”

  Or Simon: “We’ll show them the golden brain of our cocks.”

  The way these people talk—Cody says: “We all go to Heaven leaning on the arm of someone we helped.”

  92

  Pass through as does the vanishing lightning, and dont worry—

  We all pile in the two different cars, Donald driving in front, and go off to the poetry reading which I’m not going to enjoy or in fact bear, I’ve already got it in my mind (wine and all) to sneak out to a bar and meet everybody later—“Who is this Merrill Randall?” I ask—the poet who’ll read his work.

  “He’s a thin elegant guy with hornrimmed glasses and nice ties that you met in New York in the Remo but you don’t remember,” says Irwin. “One of the Hartzjohn crowd—”

  The high tea cups—it might be interesting to hear him converse spontaneously but I will not sit thru his crafty productions on a typewriter dedicated as they are usually to the imitation of the best poetry hitherto written, or at least the approximation—I’d rather hear Raphael’s new bombs of words, in fact I’d rather hear Lazarus write a poem—

  Rose is slowly anxiously wheeling her car to downtown San Francisco traffic, I cant help thinking “If old Cody was driving we’d be there and back by now”—Funny how Cody never comes to poetry readings or any of these formalities, he only came once, to honor Irwin’s first reading, and when Irwin had finished howling the last poem and there was a dead silence in the hall it was Cody, dressed in his Sunday suit, who stepped up and offered his hand to the poet (his buddy Irwin with whom he’d hitch hiked thru the Texases and Apocalypses of 1947)—I always remember that as a typical humble beautiful act of friendship and good taste—Touching knees in the car and all upsidedown we all crane around as Rose strives to park in her slot, slowly—“Okay, okay, a little more, cut your wheel.” And she sighs “Well that’s that—” I feel like saying “O Rosey why dont you just stay home and eat chocolate bars and read Boswell, all this society-izing will bring you nothing but lines of anxiety in your face—and a sociable smile is nothing but teeth.”

  But the hall of the reading is crowded with early arrivers, and there’s the ticket girl, and programs, and we sit around talking and finally Irwin and I cut out to buy a fifth of sauterne to loosen tongues—It’s actually charming, Donald is there alone now, the girl is gone, and he speaks fluid little charming jokes—Lazarus stands in the background, I squat with the bottle—Rose has driven us and her work is done, she goes and sits down, she has been the Mother driving the Vehicle Machine to Heaven, with all her little children who wouldnt believe that the house was on fire—

  All that interests me is that there’s going to be a party in a big house afterwards, with punch bowl, but now in walks David D’Angeli, gliding like an Arab, grinning, with a beautiful French girl called Yvette on his arm and O my he’s like some elegant hero of Proust, The Priest, if Cody is the Preacher David is the Priest but he’s always got some beautiful chick in chow, in fact I’m certain of the fact that the only thing may prevent David from taking his Vow in the Catholic Orders is he might want to get married (been married once already) again, and raise children—of all of us David is the most beautiful man, he has perfect features, like Tyrone Power, yet more subtle and esoteric, and that accent he talks in I do not know where he picked it up—It’s like a Moor educated at Oxford, something distinctly Arabic or Aramaean about David (or Carthaginian, like Augustine) tho he’s the son of a now-dead well-to-do Italian wholesaler and his mother lives in a beautiful apartment with expensive mahogany furniture and silver and cellar full of Italian ham and cheese and wines—home-made—David is like a Saint, he looks like a Saint, he is that fascinating kind of figure who begins his youth as an evil-seeker (“Try some of these pills,” he’d said the first time Cody met him, “it’ll really give you the final kick” so that Cody never dared take them)—There was David, that night, lying elegantly on a white fur cover on a bed, with a black cat, reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead and passing joints around, talking strangely, “But how marvel-l-l-ous, real-ll-y,” he’d say then, but since that time “the Angel knocked him off the chair,” he saw a vision of the books of the Fathers of the Church, all of them in an instant, and he was commanded to return to the Catholic faith of his birth so instead of growing up an elegant and slightly effete hipster poet now suddenly he’s a dazzling St. Augustine figure of past evils dedicated to the Vision of the Cross—Next month he’s going into a Trappist Monastery for a spell and a try-out—At home he plays Gabrielli fullblast before going to communion—He is kind, just, brilliant, eager to
explain, wont take no for an answer, “Your Buddhism is nothing but the vestiges of Manichaeism J-a-a-ck, face it—after oll you’ve been baptized and there’s no queshtion, you see,” holding out his thin white delicate priest-hand to gesture—Yet now he comes gliding into the poetry reading completely urbane, there’s been gossip that he’s decided to cease proselytizing and has entered upon the stage of urbane regularity silence on the subject, perfectly natural to have that gorgeous Yvette on his arm, and him all dolled to perfection in a simple suit and simple tie and a new crew cut that gives his sweet face a new virile look, tho his face in a year has changed from boyish sweetness to manly sweetness and gravity—

  “You look more virile this year!” is the first thing I say.

  “What do you mean virile!” he cries, stamping his foot and laughing—The way he sweeps right up on Arab glides and presents you his limp white earnest gentle hand—But as he talks and at all stages in his development all I can do is laugh, he really is very funny, he keeps his smile going beyond the bounds of reason and you realize his smile is a subtle joke (a big joke) that he expects you to realize anyway and he goes on shining white madness in that mask till all you can do then is hear his inner words that he’s not speaking at all (undoubtedly funny words) and it’s too much—“What are you laughing at, J-a-a-ck!” he calls out—He pronounces his “a’s” broad, it’s a distinctly flavored accent made up of (apparently) American Italian second-generation but with strong Britishified overlays upon his Mediterranean elegance, which creates an excellent and strange new form of English I’ve never heard anywhere—Charity David, Civility David, who’d worn (at my urging) my poncho Capuchin rain-cape at my shack and gone out in it to meditate under the trees at night and had prayed on his knees probably, and come back to the lamplit shack where I’m reading “Manichaean” sutras and removed the cape only after letting me see how he did look in it, and he looked like a monk—David who’d taken me to church on Sunday morning and after communion here he comes down the aisle with the host melting underneath his tongue, eyes piously yet somehow humorously or at least engagingly lowered, hands clasped, for all the ladies to see, the perfect image of a priest—Everybody constantly telling him: “David write the confession of your life like St. Augustine!” which amuses him: “But everybody!” he laughs—But that’s because they all know he’s a tremendous hepcat who’s been through hell and’s headed now for heaven, which has no earthly use, and everybody really senses that he knows something that’s been forgotten and that’s been excluded from the experience of St. Augustine or of Francis or Loyola or the others—Now he shakes my hand, introduces me to blue-eyed perfect beauty Yvette, and squats with me for a slug of sauterne—

  “What are you doing now?” he laughs.

  “Will you be at the party later?—good—I’m cuttin out and goin to a bar—”

  “Well dont get drunk!” he laughs, he always laughs, in fact when he and Irwin get together it’s just one giggle after another, they exchange esoteric mysteries under the common Byzantium dome of their empty heads—mosaic tile by mosaic tile, the atoms are empty—“The tables are empty, everybody’s gone over,” I sing, to Sinatra’s “You’re Learning the Blues”—

  “O that empty business,” laughs David. “Really Jack, I expect you to make a better show of what you really do know, than all these Buddhist negatives—”

  “O I’m not a Buddhist anymore—I’m not anything anymore!” I yell and he laughs and slaps me gently. He’d told me before: “You’ve been baptized, the mystery of the water has touched you, thank God for that—”… “otherwise I dont know what would have happened to you—” It’s David’s theory, or belief, that “Christ crashed through from Heaven to bring us deliverance”—and the simple rules laid down by St. Paul are as good as gold, inasmuch as they are all born of the Christ-Epic, the Son sent by the Father to open our eyes, by the supreme sacrifice of giving His life—But when I tell him Buddha didnt have to die in blood but just sat in peaceful ecstasy under the Tree of Eternity, “But J-a-a-c-k, that’s not outside the natural order”—All events except the event of Christ are in the natural order, subordinate to the commandments of the Supernatural Order—How often in fact I’d feared to meet David, he really dented my brain with his enthusiastic, passionate and brilliant expositions of the Universal Orthodoxy—He’d been to Mexico and prowled among cathedrals, and made close friends with monks in monasteries—David also a poet, a strange refined poet, some of his earlier pre-conversion (pre-re) poems had been weird peyotl visions and such—and more than I ever saw—But I had never succeeded in bringing David and Cody together for a big long talk about Christ—

  But now the reading is getting underway, there’s Merrill Randall the poet arranging his manuscripts at the front desk so after we kill the fifth in the toilet I whisper to Irwin that I’m cutting out to a bar and Simon whispers “And I’m comin with you!” and Irwin really wants to come too but he has to stay and make a show of poetic interest—As for Raphael he’s seated and ready to listen, saying:—

  “I know it will be nowhere but it’s the unexpected potry I wanta hear,” that little cat, so Simon and I hurry out just as Randall’s begun his first line:

  “The duodenal abyss that brings me to the margin

  consuming my flesh”

  and such, some line that I hear, and dont want to hear more, because in it I hear the craft of his carefully arranged thoughts and not the uncontrollable involuntary thoughts themselves, dig—Altho myself in those days I wouldnt have the nerve to stand up there and read even the Diamond Sutra.

  Simon and I miraculously find a bar where two girls are sitting at a table waiting to be picked up, and in the middle of the room is a kid singing and playing jazz on the piano, and at the bar thirty men milling over beers—We immediately sit with the girls, after a little come-on, but I see right away they dont approve of either Simon or myself, and besides it’s the jazz I wanta hear, not their complaints, at least jazz is new, and I go over and stand at the piano—The kid I’d seen before on Television (in Frisco) tremendously naïve and excited with a guitar yelling and singing, dancing, but now he’s quieted down and’s trying to make a living as a cocktail pianist—On TV he’d reminded me of Cody, a younger musical Cody, in his Old Midnight Ghost guitar (chug chugalug chugchug chugalug) I’d heard that Old Road poetry, and in his face I’d seen belief and love—Now he looks as if the City’s finally brought him down and he idly picks on a few tunes—Finally I start singing a little and he starts playing “The Thrill Is Gone” and asks me to sing it, formally, which I do, not loud, and loose, imitating to a certain extent the style of June Christie, which is the coming man-style in jazz singing, the slur, the loose dont-care slides—the pathetic Hollywood Boulevard Loneliness—Meanwhile Simon wont give up and keeps jazzing at the girls—“Let’s all go to my place …”

  Time flies as we enjoy and suddenly in comes Irwin, everywhere he appears with those big staring eyes, like a ghost, somehow he knew we’d come here (coupla blocks around), you cant evade him, “There you are, the reading is over, we’re all going to a big party, what have you been doing?” and behind him in fact is Lazarus—

  Lazarus amazes me at the party—It’s in a regular mansion somewhere, with a paneled library containing a grand piano and leather easy chairs, and a large room with chandelier and oils, fireplace with creamy marble, and andirons of pure brass, and on a table a vast punch bowl and paper cups—In all the talking and yelling of a typical late-night cocktail party here’s Lazarus all by himself in the library staring at an oil-portrait of a girl of 14, asking elegant queers at his side, “Who is she, where is she? Can I meet her?”

  Meanwhile Raphael slouches on the couch and shouts out a reading of his own poems, “Buddha-fish” etc. which he has in his coat—I jump from Yvette to David to another girl back to Yvette, in fact finally Penny shows up again, escorted by the painter Levesque, and the party gets noisier—I even chat awhile with the poet Randall, exchanging views ab
out New York—I end up upending the punch bowl into my cup, a tremendous task—Lazarus amazes me also the cool way he’s passed thru the whole night, you turn around and he’s got a drink in his hand, and smiling, but he’s not drunk and not saying a word—

  The dialogue of such parties is always one vast hubbub that rises to the ceiling and seems to clash and thunder there, the effect when you close your eyes and listen, is “Bwash bwash crash” as everybody is trying to emphasize their conversation at the risk of interruption or drown-out, finally it gets louder, the drinks keep coming, the hors d’oeuvres are destroyed and the punch is slaked in by hungry talking tongues, finally it degenerates into a shoutfest and always the host begins to worry about the neighbors and his last hour is spent in politely closing up the party—There are always late loud stragglers, i.e., us,—the last partyers are always gently pushed out—as in my case, I go to the punch bowl to dump it in my cup but the host’s best friend gently removes the bowl from my hand, saying “It’s empty—besides the party’s over”—the last horrible scene shows the bohemian cramming his pockets with free cigarettes that have been generously left in open boxes made of teakwood—It’s Levesque the painter who does that, with an evil leer, a penniless painter, a crazy man, all his hair shaved off to a bare minimum fuzz and pucks and bruises all over him where he got drunk and fell down the night before—Yet the best painter in San Francisco—

  The hosts nod and assure us out to the garden path and we all go shouting away in a drunken singing gang consisting of: Raphael, me, Irwin, Simon, Lazarus, David D’Angeli and Levesque the painter. The night’s only begun.

  93

  We all sit on a curbstone and Raphael collapses sitting crosslegged in the road facing us and begins talking and gesturing in the air those hands—Some of us are sitting crosslegged—It’s a long speech he makes which has drunken triumph in it, we’re all drunk, but it’s also got that bird-pure triumph of Raphael’s anyway but here come the cops, and pull up in a cruiser. I get up and say “Let’s go, we’re making too much noise” and everybody’s following me but the cops walk in on us and want to know who we are.