Off the Road - 32

a jazz novel on a typewriter

Five

1

Life is worthwhile like a clear white claim on a grim dirty alter. As I was saying in my last chapter need were swinging down the zone of the bottom end of Market Street (which had the top), but I forgot to mention that with bouillabaisse taken out from Denny’s, we had also miles playing on the iPhone with John Coltrane making giant steps that seemed to push be Oldsmobile along add a pace which was a quit rhythm off be swung tritones. It was hip man though still I did not understand. Leave were six minutes from the Castro Street theater wear the first showing of Blade Runner was going to start in 15 minutes. It was there the director’s cut was shown in glorious Technicolor and it was there that the Final Cut was revived from time to time. And that time was now from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife. The moment I did not hear the colored girls sing “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.” But it was not a relief like festooned on the Beaux-Arts with a green dome City Hall from our little corner of the American Renaissance.

“Sal, you know that we are going feasted the place wear Machiavelli sits in hell.”

“Well, he must be having be onset of a personal crisis because everyone knows that’s how it goes.”

We squandered around the southside because I wanted to find some plonk for the crate. Then we went up to the espresso shop to get a double shot for waiting for are ticket. We just made it because even the first show was packed to the heel and toe, and we were off for the ride surely taking him some somewhere with great speed. We only had to ride it quietly as the opening credits flashed in blue and we were on that ride. It would be a philosopher’s world where men do not have a hammered impulse towards the common good. Instead, everything was a shade of black where people explained how they were going to do what they do and for what reason.

The terms that marked the flying car and the rapturous galumph of a man shot through the wall thrilled our little hearts to the very bone. It was an escape from the humdrum world of cold-calling scams and mystical promises in whatever present you come from.

 But then once the Monologue was finished and we were shooed out by the janitors we came out into the sun with a warm glow and the arrival of fever which we welcomed wholeheartedly because sick was the new healthy.

“Dean, you have not said where we are going to shack up.”

“I be working on that right now.”

I did not mention that he was making it tight if we were going to have a roof, but he knew better in this world of SF CA because it was his town where he grew up and knew all of the inns that outed. (SF CA was the contemporary blast to say the town’s name in the slickest way possible.)

This is why while we sauntered to the jalopy he was constantly on the phone asking, pleading, begging, and cajoling for a place to lie our heads down for the month, week, or day. And then it was when I opened the car door that he got his first nibble.

“Sal, we have to go to this performance of poetry, and we will meet a guy that I know through at least six connections and he will find us a place to sleep for the night.”

“This sounds like we are going to have to do it again all over tomorrow.”

“Welcome to the city by the bay which never sleeps because all of the rooms are accounted for.”

I just whistled: “We built the city on rock ‘n roll.”

“And a slab of spires going skyward and some freeways going downward to make the downtown look like uptown.”

Then I got the heap running so we could sleep until the town woke up with the sunset. And there we were on Larkin St. and Vallejo St. resting our lids over our cornea until the cats got up.

Then we drove over to the pad which the hipsters knew was the place for “the place” reading poetry and drinking whatever neurotoxicant is your preference.

The first few were the first-time supplicants and were absolutely fantastically stupendously dull. Which was the first poem of anyone who writes poetry. But then came up one of the big attractions a man dressed as a woman who was reading snippets of her magnum opus: “Miss Lonelyhearts” which went on without a carriage return talking about the sordid life in the city there were men dressed up as women women dressed up as men men dressed up as women dressing up as men fish dressed up as dolphins and dogs and cats sleeping together in mass hysteria.

When that poet was finished there was a rendition of Ginsberg’s Howl for Carl Solomon: who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night. So it goes. And in a mélange, a few more poets cried in the distance, and we waited around a scuffed-up Pine table to meet the black and bearded man who would send us to a bed. We hoped.

And was a cool million in waiting time and we felt like a cripple and felt ridiculous because we were still clinging to the humility and the intense form of self-laughter that came with it. And then like sex, the exchange comes and goes, it is exciting, but it is over far too fast. And there you are with your ticket to slumber in a room that you will never see again in your life.

And all you can do is cry help me, help me in a deadpan way.

And the pain in your brain gets louder until you insert another drill to the Temple.