The Subterraneans

  —said indeed with a nice rhythm, too, so I remember admiring her intelligence even then—but at the same time darkening at home there at my desk of well-being and thinking, “But cope that old psychoanalytic cope, she talks like all of em, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause-and-effect analysis and solution of so-called problems instead of the great JOY of being and will and fearlessness—rupture’s their rapture—that’s her trouble, she’s just like Adam, like Julien, the lot, afraid of madness, the fear of madness haunts her—not Me Not Me by God”—

  But why am I writing to say these things to you. But all feelings are real and you probably discern or feel too what I am saying and why I need to write it—

  —a sentiment of mystery and charm—but, as I told her often, not enough detail, the details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold it back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out, “That’s” (I now say in reading letter) “a typical example—but no mind, she’s just a girl—humph”—

  My image of you now is strange

  —I see the bough of that statement, it waves on the tree—

  I feel a distance from you which you might feel too which gives me a picture of you that is warm and friendly

  and then inserts, in smaller writing,

  (and loving)

  to obviate my feeling depressed probably over seeing in a letter from lover only word “friendly”—but that whole complicated phrase further complicated by the fact it is presented in originally written form under the marks and additions of a rewrite, which is not as interesting to me, naturally—the rewrite being

  I feel a distance from you which you might feel too with pictures of you that are warm and friendly (and loving) —and because of the anxieties we are experiencing but never speak of really, and are similar too—

  a piece of communication making me suddenly by some majesty of her pen feel sorry for myself, seeing myself like her lost in the suffering ignorant sea of human life feeling distant from she who should be closest and not knowing (no not under the sun) why the distance instead is the feeling, the both of us entwined and lost in that, as under the sea—

  I am going to sleep to dream, to wake

  —hints of our business of writing down dreams or telling dreams on waking, all the strange dreams indeed and (later will show) the further brain communicating we did, telepathiz-ing images together with eyes closed, where it will be shown, all thoughts meet in the crystal chandelier of eternity—Jim—yet I also like the rhythm of to dream, to wake, and flatter myself I have a rhythmic girl in any case, at my metaphysical homedesk—

  You have a very beautiful face and I like to see it as I do now—

  —echoes of that New York girl’s statement and now coming from humble meek Mardou not so unbelievable and I actually begin to preen and believe in this (0 humble paper of letters, O the time I sat on a log near Idlewild airport in New York and watched the helicopter flying in with the mail and as I looked I saw the smile of all the angels of earth who’d written the letters which were packed in its hold, the smiles of them, specifically of my mother, bending over sweet paper and pen to communicate by mail with her daughter, the angelical smile like the smiles of workingwomen in factories, the world-wide bliss of it and the courage and beauty of it, recognition of which facts I shouldn’t even deserve, treating Mardou as I have done) (O forgive me angels of the heaven and of the earth—even Ross Wallenstein will go to heaven)—

  Forgive the conjunctions and double infinitives and the not said

  —again I’m impressed and I think, she too there, for the first time self-conscious of writing to an author—

  I don’t know really what I wanted to say but want you to have a few words from me this Wednesday morning

  and the mail only carried it in much later, after I saw her, the letter losing therefore its hopeful impactedness

  We are like two animals escaping to dark warm holes and live our pains alone

  —at this time my dumb phantasy of the two of us (after all the drunks making me drunksick city sick) was, a shack in the middle of the Mississippi woods, Mardou with me, damn the lynchers, the not-likings, so I wrote back: “I hope you meant by that line (animals to dark warm holes) you’ll turn out to be the woman who can really live with me in profound solitude of woods finally and at same time make the glittering Parises (there it is) and grow old with me in my cottage of peace” (suddenly seeing myself as William Blake with the meek wife in the middle of London early dewy morning, Crabbe Robinson is coming with some more etching work but Blake is lost in the vision of the Lamb at breakfast leavings table).—Ah regrettable Mardou, and never a thought of that thing beats in your brow, that I should kiss, the pain of your own pride, enough 19th-century romantic general talk—the details are the life of it—(a man may act stupid and top tippity and bigtime 19th-century boss type dominant with a woman but it won’t help him when the chips are down—the loss lass’ll make it back, it’s hidden in her eyes, her future triumph and strength—on his lips we hear nothing but “of course love”).—Her closing words a beautiful pastichepattisee, or pie, of—

  Write to me anything Please Stay Well Your Freind [misspelled] And my love And Oh [over some kind of hiddenforever erasures] [and many X’s for of course kisses] And Love for You MARDOU [underlined]

  and weirdest, most strange, central of all—ringed by itself, the word, PLEASE—her lastplea neither one of us knowing—Answering this letter myself with a dull boloney bullshit rising out of my anger with the incident of the pushcart.

  (And tonight this letter is my last hope.)

  The incident of the pushcart began, again as usual, in the Mask and Dante’s, drinking, I’d come in to see Mardou from my work, we were in a drinking mood, for some reason suddenly I wanted to drink red Burgundy wine which I’d tasted with Frank and Adam and Yuri the Sunday before—another, and first, worthy of mention incident, being—but that’s the crux of it all—THE DREAM. Oh the bloody dream! In which there was a pushcart, and everything else prophesied. This too after a night of severe drinking, the night of the redshirt faun boy—where everybody afterward of course said “You made a fool of yourself, Leo, you’re making yourself a reputation on the Beach as a big fag tugging at the shirts of well-known punks.”—“But I only wanted him for you to dig.”—“Nevertheless” (Adam) “really”—And Frank: “You really makin a horrible reputation.”—Me: “I don’t care, you remember 1948 when Sylvester Strauss that fag composer got sore at me because I wouldn’t go to bed with him because he’d read my novel and submitted it, yelled at me ‘I know all about you and your awful reputation.’—‘What?’—‘You and that there Sam Vedder go around the Beach picking up sailors and giving them dope and he makes them only so he can bite, I’ve heard about you.’—‘Where did you hear this fantastic tale?’—you know that story, Frank.”—“I should imagine” (Frank laughing) “what with all the things you do right there in the Mask, drunk, in front of everybody, if I didn’t know you I’d swear you were the craziest piece of rough trade that ever walked” (a typical Carmodian pithy statement) and Adam “Really that’s true.”—After the night of the redshirt boy, drunk, I’d slept with Mardou and had the worst nightmare of all, which was, everybody, the whole world was around our bed, we lay there and everything was happening. Dead Jane was there, had a big bottle of Tokay wine hidden in Mardou’s dresser for me and got it out and poured me a big slug and spilled a lot out of the waterglass on the bed (a symbol of even further drinking, more wine, to come)—and Frank with her—and Adam, who went out the door to the dark tragic Italian pushcart Telegraph Hill street, going down the rickety wooden Shatov stairs where the subterraneans were “digging an old Jewish patriarch just arrived from Russia” who is holding some ritual by the barrels of the fish head cats (the fish heads, in the height of the hot days Mardou had a fish head for our crazy little visiting cat who was almost human in his insistence to be loved his scrolling of neck and purring t
o be against you, for him she had a fish head which smelled so horrible in the almost airless night I threw part of it out in the barrel downstairs after first throwing a piece of slimy gut unbeknownst I’d put my hands against in the dark icebox where was a small piece of ice I wanted to chill my sauterne with, smack against a great soft mass, the guts or mouth of a fish, this being left in the icebox after disposal of fish I threw it out, the piece draped over fire escape and was there all hotnight and so in the morning when waking I was being bitten by gigantic big blue flies that had been attracted by the fish, I was naked and they were biting like mad, which annoyed me, as the pieces of pillow had annoyed me and somehow I tied it up with Mardou’s Indianness, the fish heads the awful sloppy way to dispose of fish, she sensing my annoyance but laughing, ah bird)—that alley, out there, in the dream, Adam, and in the house, the actual room and bed of Mardou and I the whole world roaring around us, back ass flat—Yuri also there, and when I turn my head (after nameless events of the millionfold mothswarms) suddenly he’s got Mardou on the bed laid out and wiggling and is necking furiously with her—at first I say nothing—when I look again, again they’re at it, I get mad—I’m beginning to wake up, just as I give Mardou a rabbit punch in the back of her neck, which causes Yuri to reach a hand for me—I wake up I’m swinging Yuri by the heels against the brick fireplace wall.—On waking from this dream I told all to Mardou except the part where I hit her or Yuri—and she too (in tying in with our telepathies already experienced that sad summer season now autumn mooned to death, we’d communicated many feelings of empathy and I’d come running to see her on nights when she sensed it) had been dreaming like me of the whole world around our bed, of Frank, Adam, others, her recurrent dream of her father rushing off, in a train, the spasm of almost orgasm.—“Ah honey I want to stop all this drinking these nightmares’ll kill me—you don’t know how jealous I was in that dream” (a feeling I’d not yet had about Mardou)—the energy behind this anxious dream had obtained from her reaction to my foolishness with the redshirt boy (Absolutely insufferable type anyway” Carmody had commented “tho obviously good-looking, really Leo you were funny” and Mardou: “Acting like a little boy but I like it.”)—Her reaction had of course been violent, on arriving home, after she’d tugged me in the Mask in front of everyone including her Berkeley friends who saw her and probably even heard “It’s me or him!” and the madness humor futility of that—arriving in Heavenly Lane she’d found a balloon in the hall, nice young writer John Golz who lived downstairs had been playing balloons with the kids of the Lane all day and some were in the hall, with the balloon Mardou had (drunk) danced around the floor, puffing and poooshing and flupping it up with dance interpretive gestures and said something that not only made me fear her madness, her hospital type insanity, but cut my heart deeply, and so deeply that she could not therefore have been insane, in communicating something so exactly, with precise—whatever—“You can go now I have this ballon.”—“What do you mean?” (I, drunk, on floor blearing).—“I have this balloon now—I don’t need you any more—goodbye—goo away—leave me alone”—a statement that even in my drunkenness made me heavy as lead and I lay there, on the floor, where I slept an hour while she played with the balloon and finally went to bed, waking me up at dawn to undress and get in—both of us dreaming the nightmare of the world around our bed—and that GUILT-Jealousy entering into my mind for the first time—the crux of this entire tale being: I want Mardou because she has begun to reject me—BECAUSE—“But baby that was a mad dream.”—“I was so jealous—I was sick.”—I harkened suddenly now to what Mardou’d said the first week of our relationship, when, I thought secretly, in my mind I had privately superseded her importance with the importance of my writing work, as, in every romance, the first week is so intense all previous worlds are eligible for throwover, but when the energy (of mystery, pride) begins to wane, elder worlds of sanity, well-being, common sense, etc., return, so I had secretly told myself: “My work’s more important than Mardou.”—Nevertheless she’d sensed it, that first week, and now said, “Leo there’s something different now—in you—I feel it in me—I don’t know what it is.” I knew very well what it was and pretended not to be able to articulate with myself and least of all with her anyway—I remembered now, in the waking from the jealousy nightmare, where she necks with Yuri, something had changed, I could sense it, something in me was cracked, there was a new loss, a new Mardou even—and, again, the difference was not isolated in myself who had dreamed the cuckold dream, but in she, the subject, who’d not dreamed it, but participated somehow in the general rueful mixed up dream of all this life with me—so I felt she could now this morning look at me and tell that something had died—not due to the balloon and “You can go now”—but the dream—and so the dream, the dream, I kept harping on it, desperately I kept chewing and telling about it, over coffee, to her, finally when Carmody and Adam and Yuri came (in themselves lonely and looking to come get juices from that great current between Mardou and me running, a current everybody I found out later wanted to get in on, the act) I began telling them about the dream, stressing, stressing, stressing the Yuri part, where Yuri “every time I turn my back” is kissing her—naturally the others wanting to know their parts, which I told with less vigor—a sad Sunday afternoon, Yuri going out to get beer, a spread, bread—eating a little—and in fact a few wrestling matches that broke my heart. For when I saw Mardou for fun wrestling with Adam (who was not the villain of the dream tho now I figured I must have switched persons) I was pierced with that pain that’s now all over me, that firstpain, how cute she looked in her jeans wrestling and struggling (I’d said “She’s strong as hell, d’jever hear of of her fight with Jack Steen? try her Adam”)—Adam having already started to wrestle with Frank on some impetus from some talk about holds, now Adam had her pinned in the coitus position on the floor (which in itself didn’t hurt me)—it was her beautifulness, her game guts wrestling, I felt proud, I wanted to know how Carmody felt NOW (feeling he must have been at the outset critical of her for being a Negro, he being a Texan and a Texas gentleman-type at that) to see her be so great, buddy like, joining in, humble and meek too and a real woman. Even somehow the presence of Yuri, whose personality was energized already in my mind from the energy of the dream, added to my love of Mardou—I suddenly loved her.—They wanted me to go with them, sit in the park—as agreed in solemn sober conclaves Mardou said “But I’ll stay here and read and do things, Leo, you go with them like we said”—as they left and trooped down the stairs I stayed behind to tell her I loved her now—she was not as surprised, or pleased, as I wished—she had looked at Yuri now already with the point of view eyes not only of my dream but had seen him in a new light as a possible successor to me because of my continual betrayal and getting drunk.

  Yuri Gligoric: a young poet, 22, had just come down from apple-picking Oregon, before that a waiter in a big dude ranch dininghall—tall thin blond Yugoslavian, good-looking, very brash and above all trying to cut Adam and myself and Car-mody, all the time knowing us as an old revered trinity, wanting, naturally, as a young unpublished unknown but very genius poet to destroy the big established gods and raise himself—wanting therefore their women too, being uninhibited, or un-saddened, yet, at least.—I liked him, considered him another new “young brother” (as Leroy and Adam before, whom I’d “shown” writing tricks) and now I would show Yuri and he would be a buddy with me and walk around with me and Mardou—his own lover, June, had left him, he’d treated her badly, he wanted her back, she was with another life in Compton, I sympathized with him and asked about the progress of his letters and phonecalls to Compton, and, most important, as I say, he was now for the first time suddenly looking at me and saying “Percepied I want to talk to you—suddenly I want to really know you.”—In a joke at the Sunday wine in Dante’s I’d said “Frank’s leching after Adam, Adam’s leching after Yuri” and Yuri’d thrown in “And I’m leching after you.”

  Indeed he
was indeed. On this mournful Sunday of my first pained love of Mardou after sitting in the park with the boys as agreed, I dragged myself again home, to work, to Sunday dinner, guiltily, arriving late, finding my mother glum and all-weekend-alone in a chair with her shawl … and my thoughts rich on Mardou now—not thinking it of any importance whatever that I had told young Yuri not only “I dreamed you were necking with Mardou” but also, at a soda fountain en route to the park when Adam wanted to call Sam and we all sat at counter waiting, with limeades, “Since I saw you last I’ve fallen in love with that girl,” information which he received without comment and which I hope he still remembers, and of course does.

  And so now brooding over her, valuing the precious good moments we’d had that heretofore I’d avoided thinking of, came the fact, ballooning in importance, the amazing fact she is the only girl I’ve ever known who could really understand bop and sing it, she’d said that first cuddly day of the redbulb at Adam’s “While I was flipping I heard bop, on juke boxes and in the Red Drum and wherever I was happening to hear it, with an entirely new and different sense, which tho, I really can’t describe.”—“But what was it like?”—“But I can’t describe it, it not only sent waves—went through me—I can’t, like, make it, in telling it in words, you know? 00 dee bee dee dee” singing a few notes, so cutely.—The night we walked swiftly down Larkin past the Blackhawk with Adam actually but he was following and listening, close head to head, singing wild choruses of jazz and bop, at times I’d phrase and she did perfect in fact interesting modern and advanced chords (like I’d never heard anywhere and which bore resemblance to Bartok modern chords but were hep wise to bop) and at other times she just did her chords as I did the bass fiddle, in the old great legend (again of the roaring high davenport amazing smash-afternoon which I expect no one to understand) before, I’d with Ossip Popper sung bop, made records, always taking the part of the bass fiddle thum thum to his phrasing (so much I see now like Billy Eckstine’s bop phrasing)—the two of us arm in arm rushing longstrides down Market the hip old apple of the California Apple singing bop and well too—the glee of it, and coming after an awful party at Roger Walker’s where (Adam’s arrangement and my acquiescence) instead of a regular party were just boys and all queer including one Mexican younghustler and Mardou far from being nonplused enjoyed herself and talked—nevertheless of it all, rushing home to the Third Street bus singing gleeful—