Desolation Angels: A Novel

  So in the same way I was searching for a peaceful kind of life dedicated to contemplation and the delicacy of that, for the sake of my art (in my case prose, tales) (narrative rundowns of what I saw and how I saw) but I also searched for this as my way of life, that is, to see the world from the viewpoint of solitude and to meditate upon the world without being imbroglio’d in its actions, which have by now become famous for their horror & abomination—I wanted to be a Man of Tao, who watches the clouds and lets history rage beneath (something which is no longer allowed after Mao & Camus?) (that’ll be the day)—

  But I never dreamed, and even in spite of my great determination, my experience in the arts of solitude, and my poverty’s freedom—I never dreamed I’d be taken in too by the world’s action—I didnt think it possible that—…

  Well, on with the details, which is the life of it—

  2

  It was okay at first, after I saw that prison bus outside L.A., even when the cops stopped me in the Arizona desert that night when I was hiking out under a full moon at 2 A.M. to go spread my sleepingbag in the sand outside Tucson—When they found out I had enough money for a hotel they wanted to know why I sleep in the desert—You cant explain to the police, or go into a lecture—I was a hardy son of a sun in those days, only 165 pounds and would walk miles with a full pack on my back, and rolled my own cigarettes, and knew how to hide comfortably in riverbottoms or even how to live on dimes and quarters—Nowadays, after all the horror of my literary notoriety, the bathtubs of booze that have passed through my gullet, the years of hiding at home from hundreds of petitioners for my time (pebbles in my window at midnight, “Come on out get drunk Jack, all big wild parties everywhere!”)—oi—As the circle closed in on this old independent renegade, I got to look like a Bourgeois, pot belly and all, that expression on my face of mistrust and affluence (they go hand in hand?)—So that (almost) if it was now the cops were stopping me on a 2 A.M. highway, I almost expect they’d tip their caps—But in those days, only five years ago, I looked wild and rough—They surrounded me with two squad cars.

  They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:—“Where are you going?” which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, “Where are you going?”—Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society “Looking for peace.”

  Does it matter?

  Wait and see.

  P.S. Imagine telling one thousand raving Tokyo snake-dancers in the street that you’re looking for peace though you wont join the parade!

  3

  Mexico—a great city for the artist, where he can get cheap lodgings, good food, lots of fun on Saturday nights (including girls for hire)—Where he can stroll streets and boulevards unimpeded and for that matter at all hours of the night while sweet little policemen look away minding their own business which is crime detection and prevention—In my mind’s eye I always remember Mexico as gay, exciting (especially at 4 P.M. when the summer thundershowers make people hurry over glistening sidewalks which reflect blue and rose neons, the hurrying Indian feet, the buses, raincoats, little dank groceries and shoe repairs, the sweet glee of the voices of the women and children, the stern excitement of the men who still look like Aztecs)—Candlelight in a lonely room, and writing about the world.

  But I always get surprised when I arrive in Mexico to see I’d forgotten a certain drear, even sad, darkness, like the sight of some Indian man in a brown rust suit, with open collared white shirt, waiting for a Circumvalacion bus with a package wrapt in newspaper (El Diario Universal), and the bus is loaded with sitters and strap hangers, dark green gloom inside, no lights, and will take him bouncing over mud hole backstreets for a half hour to the outskirts of the adobe slums where a smell of dead animals and of shit lingers forever—And to glory in any big description of the bleakness of that man is not fair, is, in sum, immature—I wont do it—His life is a horror—But suddenly you see a fat Indian old lady in a shawl holding a little girl by the hand, they’re going into the pasteleria for bright pastries! The little girl is glad—It’s only in Mexico, in the sweetness and innocence, birth and death seem at all worthwhile …

  4

  I came into town on the bus from Nogales and immediately rented a rooftop adobe hut, fixed it up to my liking, lit a candle and started to write about the coming-down-from-the-mountain and the wild week in Frisco.

  Meanwhile, downstairs in a dismal room, my old 60-year-old friend Bull Gaines provided me with companionship.

  He too lived peacefully.

  Slow doing of things, all the time, there he stands hunchbacked and skinny going through interminable searches through coat, drawer, suitcase, under rugs and newspapers for his endlessly hidden stashes of junk—He says to me “Yessir, I like to live peacefully too—I guess you got your art, as you say, altho I doubt it” (looking at me out of the corner of his glasses to see how I take the joke) “but I got my junk—As long as I got my junk I’m satisfied to stay home and read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, which I’ve re-read about a hunnerd times I guess—Satisfied with a little Nescafé at my side, an occasional ham sandwich, my newspaper and a good night’s sleep with a few goofballs, hm-m-m-m-m”—

  “Hm-m-m-m” is where, on finishing a sentence, Gaines always lets out that low junkey groan, tremulous and as though some kind of secret laughter or pleasure that he completed his sentence well, with a sock, in this case “with a few goofballs”—But even when he says “I think I’ll go to bed” he adds that “Hm-m-m-m” so you realize it’s just his way of singing his saying—Like, imagine an Indian Hindu singer doing just that to a beat of gourds and Dravidian tambourines. Old Guru Gaines, in fact, the first of many characters I was to know from that innocent time to now—There he goes poking through his bathrobe pockets looking for a lost codeinetta, forgetting he already ate it the night before—He has the typical bleak junkey dresser, with a full length mirror on each creaky door, inside of which hang battered coats from New York with the lints of the pockets strong enough to boil down in a spoon after 30 years of drug addiction—“In many ways,” he says, “there’s a great resemblance between the dope fiend so called and the artist so called, they like to be alone and comfortable provided they have what they want—They dont go mad running around looking for things to do ’cause they got it all inside, they can sit for hours without movin. They’re sensitive, so called, and dont turn away from the study of good books. And look at those Orozcos I cut out of a Mexican magazine and put on my wall. I study those pictures all the time, I love em—M-m-m-m-m.”

  He turns, tall and wizardly, preparing to begin a sandwich. With long thin white fingers he plucks a slice of bread out with the dexterity you might expect from tweezers. He then puts ham on the bread in a meditation that takes almost two minutes, carefully arranged and rearranged. Then he puts the other bread over it and carries the sandwich to his bed, where he sits on the edge, eyes closed, wondering if he can eat it and going hm-m-m-m. “Yes sir,” he says, starting to search in his bedside drawer again for an old cotton, “the dope fiend and the artist have lots in common.”

  5

  His room had windows opening on the very sidewalk of Mexico with thousands of hepcats and children and yakking people going by—From the street you saw his pink drapes, looking like the drapes of a Persian pad, or like a Gypsy’s room—Inside you saw the battered bed sinking in the middle, itself covered with a pink drape, and his easy chair (an old one but his long Daddy legs stuck out comfortably from it and rested almost level with the floor)—And then the “burner” which he used to heat water for his shaves, just an old electric heat lamp upside down or something (I really cant remember the outlandish, the perfect, the really simple arrangement only a junkey brain could figure out)—Then the sad pail, in which the old invalid pee’d, and had to go upstairs every day to empty in the only toilet, a chore I did for him whenever I lived nearby, as I?
??d done twice now—Whenever I went upstairs with that pail as the women of the house watched I always remembered the marvelous Buddha saying: “I recall that during my five hundred previous rebirths, I had used life after life to practice humility and to look upon my life humbly as though it was some saintly being called upon to suffer patiently”—More direct than that, I knew that at my age, 34, it were better to help an old man than to gloat in lounges—I thought of my father, how I helped him to the toilet when he was dying in 1946. Not to say that I was a model sufferer, I’ve done more than my share of idiotic sinning and stupid boasting.

  There was a Persian feeling in Bull’s room, of an old Guruish Oriental Minister of the Court temporarily taking drugs in a distant city and knowing all the time that he is doomed to be poisoned eventually by the King’s wife, for some old obscure evil reason he wont tell about except “Hm-m-m-m.”

  When the old Minister rode in cabs with me as he went downtown to connect for his morphine, he always sat right next to me and let his bony knees flop against mine—He never as much as laid a hand on my arm when we were in the room, even to make a point or make me listen, but in the backs of cabs he became mock senile (I think to fool the cabdrivers) and let his together-knees keel over on mine, and even slumped like a destitute old horseplayer low in the seat and against my elbow—Yet when we got out of the cab and went down the sidewalk, he’d walk six or seven feet away from me, a little behind, as though we were not together, which was another trick of his to fool watchers in his land of exile (“Man from Cincinnata,” he said)—The cabdriver sees an invalid, the sidewalk populaces see an old hipster walking alone.

  Gaines was the now fairly famous character who stole an expensive overcoat every day of his life for twenty years in New York and pawned it for junk, a great thief.

  Said “When I got to Mexico the first time some bastard stole my watch—I went into a watch store and gestured with one hand while I picked (hooked) (wired) with the other and walked out with a watch, even!—I was so mad I took chances but the guy never saw me—I was bound to get my watch back—Aint nothin an old thief hates worse—”

  “Takes some doing to steal a watch in a Mexican store!” I said.

  “Hm-m-m-mm.”

  Then he’d send me on errands: to the corner store for boiled ham, sliced by machine by the Greekish proprietor who was a typical tightfisted middleclass Mexican merchant but sorta liked Old Bull Gaines, called him “Señor Gahr-va” (almost like Sanskrit)—Then I’d have to go traipsing to Sears Roebuck on Insurgentes Street for his weekly News Report and Time Magazine, which he read from cover to cover in his easy chair, high on morphine, sometimes falling asleep in the middle of a sentence in the Last Luce Style but waking up to finish it from right where he left off, only to fall asleep again right on the next sentence, sitting there nodding as I dreamed into space in the company of this excellent and quiet man—In his room, of exile, though dismal, like a monastery.

  6

  I’d also have to go to the super Mercado and buy his favorite candies, chocolate triangles full of cream, refrigerated—But when it came to going to the laundry he came with me just to josh the old Chinese laundryman. He’d always say: “Opium today?” and make the sign of the pipe. “No tellee me where.”

  And the little shriveled opium addict Chinaman would always say “No savvy. No no no.”

  “Them Chinese are the most tightlipped junkeys in the world,” says Bull.

  We get in a cab and go downtown again, he’s leaning weakly with a weak grin against me—Says “Tell the driver to stop at every drugstore he sees and you run out and buy a tube of codeinettas in each one, here’s fifty pesos.” Which we do. “No sense burnin down lettin any of these druggists get wise. Then they cant put the finger on you.” And on the way home he always tells the driver to stop at Cine So and So, the nearby movie house, and walks the extra block so no cabby ever knows where he lives. “When I go across the border nobody can put the finger on me because I put the finger up my ass.”

  What a strange vision, an old man walking across the border with his finger up his behind?

  “I get a rubber finger that doctors use, I fill it with junk, I put it in—Nobody can put the finger on me because I got the finger up my ass. I always come back across the border at another town,” he adds.

  When we return from a cab trip the landladies greet him with respect, “Señor Garv-ha! Si?” He unlocks his padlock, unlocks the key lock under it, and pushes into his room, which is dank. No amount of smoky kerosene heat can help. “Jack, if you really wanted to help an old man you’d come with me to the West Coast of Mexico and we’d live in a grass hut and smoke the local opium in the sun and raise chickens. That’s the way I’d like to end my days.”

  His face is thin, with white hair combed sleekly back with water like a teenager. He wears purple slippers when he sits in his easy chair, high on junk, and begins to re-read The Outline of History. He lectures me all day on all kinds of subjects. When it’s time for me to go up to my hut on the roof and write he says “Hm-mmm, it’s still early, why dont you stay around awhile—”

  Outside the pink curtains the city hums and croons with cha-cha night. And there he is mumbling on: “Orphism is one subject should interest you, Jack—”

  And I sit there with him, when he falls asleep for a minute I’ve got nothing to do but think, and often I thought: “Who on earth, claiming to be sound of mind, could call this gentle old guy a fiend—thief or no thief, and where are the thieves … as thievish … as your respectable day-by-day business … thieves?”

  7

  Except for the times when he was violently ill from lack of his medicine, and I had to run errands for him into the slums where connections like Tristessa or the Black Bastard sat behind pink drapes of their own, I had a quiet time on my roof. I especially joyed in the stars, the moon, the cool air up there three flights from the musical street. I could sit on the edge of the roof and look down and listen to the cha-chas of the taco jukeboxes. I had my little wines, lesser drugs of my own (for excitement, for sleep, or for contemplation, and when in Rome)—and with the day done and all the washerwomen sleeping I had the whole roof to myself. I paced up and down in my soft desert boots. Or I went inside the hut and brewed another pot of coffee or cocoa. And I went to sleep well, and woke up to bright sun. I wrote a whole novel, finished another, and wrote a whole book of poetry.

  Once in a while poor old Bull struggled up the winding iron stairs and I made him spaghetti and he’d fall asleep on my bed a moment and burn a hole in it with his cigarette. He’d wake up and start a lecture on Rimbaud or something. His longest lectures were on Alexander the Great, the Epic of Gilganish, Ancient Crete, Petronius, Mallarmé, Current Affairs such as the Suez Crisis of that time (ah, the clouds didnt notice no Suez Crisis!), old days in Boston Tallahassee Lexington and New York, his favorite songs, and stories about his old buddy Eddy Corporal. “Eddy Corporal walk into the same clothing store every day, talk and joke with the salesmen and walk out with a suit doubled up inside his belt buckle I dont know how he did it, some weird trick he had. Man was an oil burner type junkey. Bring him five grains and he shoots it up, all.”

  “What about Alexander the Great?”

  “Only general I know of rode in front of his cavalry swinging a sword” and he’s asleep again.

  And that night I see the Moon, Citlapol in Aztec, and even draw a picture of it on the moonlit roof with house paint, blue and white.

  8

  As an example, therefore, of my peace at the time.

  But events were brewing.

  Take another look at me to get the story better (now I’m getting drunk):—I am a widow’s son, at the time she is living with relatives, penniless. All I have is that summer’s mountain lookout pay converted into pitiful $5 traveler’s checks—and the big gooky rucksack full of old sweaters and wraps of peanuts and raisins in case I get caught starving and all such hoboish shifts—I’m 34, regular looking, but in my jeans
and eerie outfits people are scared to look at me because I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside of an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day—Walking thru towns in the middle of America I got stared at weirdly—I was bound to live my own way—The expression “nonconformity” was something I’d vaguely heard about somewhere (Adler? Eric Fromm?)—But I was determined to be glad!—Dostoevsky said “Give man his Utopia and he will deliberately destroy it with a grin” and I was determined with the same grin to disprove Dostoevsky!—I was also a notorious wino who exploded anywhere anytime he got drunk—My friends in San Francisco said I was a Zen Lunatic, at least a Drunken Lunatic, yet sat with me in moonlight fields drinking and singing—At age 21 I had been discharged from the Navy as a “schizoid personality” after telling the Navy doctors I could not take discipline—Even I cant understand how to explain myself—When my books became notorious (Beat Generation) and interviewers tried to ask me questions, I just answered with everything I could think of—I had no guts to tell them to leave me alone, that, as Dave Wain later said (a great character at Big Sur) “Tell ’em you’re busy interviewing yourself”—Clinically, at the time of the beginning of this story, on the roof over Gaines, I was an Ambitious Paranoid—Nothing could stop me from writing big books of prose and poetry for nothing, that is, with no hope of ever having them published—I was simply writing them because I was an “Idealist” and I believed in “Life” and was going about justifying it with my earnest scribblings—Strangely enough, these scribblings were the first of their kind in the world, I was originating (without knowing it, you say?) a new way of writing about life, no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts, the heartbreaking discipline of the veritable fire ordeal where you cant go back but have made the vow of “speak now or forever hold your tongue” and all of it innocent go-ahead confession, the discipline of making the mind the slave of the tongue with no chance to lie or re-elaborate (in keeping not only with the dictums of Dichtung Warheit Goethe but those of the Catholic Church my childhood)—I wrote those manuscripts as I’m writing this one in cheap nickel notebooks by candlelight in poverty and fame—Fame of self—For I was Ti Jean, and the difficulty in explaining all this and “Ti Jean” too is that readers who havent read up to this point in the earlier works are not filled in on the background—The background being my brother Gerard who said things to me before he died, though I dont remember a word, or maybe I do remember a few (I was only four)—But said things to me about a reverence for life, no, at least a reverence of the idea of life, which I translated as meaning that life itself is the Holy Ghost—