The Subterraneans Read online

  Waking up, then, from the partying, in Heavenly Lane, again I have the beer nightmare (now a little gin too) and with remorse and again almost and now for no reason revulsion the little white woolly particles from the pillow stuffing in her black almost wiry hair, and her puffed cheeks and little puffed lips, the gloom and dank of Heavenly Lane, and once more “I gotta go home, straighten out”—as tho never I was straight with her, but crooked—never away from my chimerical work room and comfort home, in the alien gray of the world city, in a state of WELL-BEING—. “But why do you always want to rush off so soon?”—“I guess a feeling of well-being at home, that I need, to be straight—like—.” “I know baby—but I’m, I miss you in a way I’m jealous that you have a home and a mother who irons your clothes and all that and I haven’t—.” “When shall I come back, Friday night?”—“But baby it’s up to you—to say when.”—“But tell me what YOU want.”—“But I’m not supposed to.”—“But what do you mean s’posed?”—“It’s like what they say—about—oh, I dunno” (sighing, turning over in the bed, hiding, burrowing little grape body around, so I go, turn her over, flop on bed, kiss the straight line that runs from her breastbone, a depression there, straight, clear down to her belly-button where it becomes an infinitesimal line and proceeds like as if ruled with pencil on down and then continues just as straight underneath, and need a man get well-being from history and thought as she herself said when he has that, the essence, but still).—The weight of my need to go home, my neurotic fears, hangovers, horrors—“I shouldna—we shouldn’t a gone to Bernard’s at all last night—at least we shoulda come home at three with the others.”—“That’s what I say baby—but God” (laughing the shnuffle and making little funny imitation voice of slurring) “you never do what I ash you t’do.”—“Aw I’m sorry—I love you—do you love me?”—“Man,” laughing, “what do you mean”—looking at me warily—“I mean do you feel affection for me?” even as she’s putting brown arm around my tense big neck.—“Naturally baby.”—“But what is the—?” I want to ask everything, can’t, don’t know how, what is the mystery of what I want from you, what is man or woman, love, what do I mean by love or why do I have to insist and ask and why do I go and leave you because in your poor wretched little quarters—“It’s the place depresses me—at home I sit in the yard, under trees, feed my cat.”—“Oh man I know it’s stuffy in here—shall I open the blind?”—“No everybody’ll see you—I’ll be so glad when the summer’s over—when I get that dough and we go to Mexico.”—“Well man, let’s like you say go now on your money that you have now, you say we can really make it.”—“Okay! Okay!” an idea which gains power in my brain as I take a few swigs of stale beer and consider a dobe hut say outside Texcoco at five dollars a month and we go to the market in the early dewy morning she in her sweet brown feet on sandals padding wifelike Ruthlike to follow me, we come, buy oranges, load up on bread, even wine, local wine, we go home and cook it up cleanly on our little cooker, we sit together over coffee writing down our dreams, analyzing them, we make love on our little bed.—Now Mardou and I are sitting there talking all this over, daydreaming, a big phantasy—“Well man,” with little teeth outlaughing, “WHEN do we do this—like it’s been a minor flip our whole relationship, all this indecisive clouds and planning—God.”—“Maybe we should wait till I get that royalty dough—yep! really! it’ll be better, cause like that we can get a typewriter and a three-speed machine and Gerry Mulligan records and clothes for you and everything we need, like the way it is now we can’t do anything.”—“Yeah—I dunno” (brooding) “Man you know I don’t have any eyes for that hysterical poverty deal”—(statements of such sudden pith and hip I get mad and go home and brood about it for days). “When will you be back?”—“Well okay, then we’ll make it Thursday.”—“But if you really want to make it Friday—don’t let me interfere with your work, baby—maybe you’d like it better to be away longer times.”—“After what you—O I love you—you—.” I undress and stay another three hours, and leave guiltily because the well-being, the sense of doing what I should has been sacrificed, but tho sacrificed to healthy love, something is sick in me, lost, fears—I realize too I have not given Mardou a dime, a loaf of bread literally, but talk, hugs, kisses, I leave the house and her unemployment check hasn’t come and she has nothing to eat—“What will you eat?”—“O there’s some cans—or I can go to Adam’s maybe—but I don’t wanta go there too often—I feel he resents me now, your friendship has been, I’ve come between that certain something you had sort of—.” “No you didn’t.”—“But it’s something else—I don’t want to go out, I want to stay in, see no one”—“Not even me?”—“Not even you, sometimes God I feel that.”—“Ah Mardou, I’m all mixed up—I can’t make up my mind—we ought to do something together—I know what, I’ll get a job on the railroad and we’ll live together—” this is the great new idea.

  (And Charles Bernard, the vastness of the name in the cosmogony of my brain, a hero of the Proustian past in the scheme as I knew it, in the Frisco-alone branch of it, Charles Bernard who’d been Jane’s lover, Jane who’d been shot by Frank, Jane whom I’d lived with, Marie’s best friend, the cold winter rainy nights when Charles would be crossing the campus saying something witty, the great epics almost here sounding phantom like and uninteresting if at all believable but the true position and bigburn importance of not only Charles but a good dozen others in the light rack of my brain, so Mardou seen in this light, is a little brown body in a gray sheet bed in the slums of Telegraph Hill, huge figure in the history of the night yes but only one among many, the asexuality of the WORK—also the sudden gut joy of beer when the visions of great words in rhythmic order all in one giant archangel book go roaring thru my brain, so I lie in the dark also seeing also hearing the jargon of the future worlds—damajehe eleout ekeke dhdkdk dldoud, —— d, ekeoeu dhdhdkehgyt—better not a more than lther ehe the macmurphy out of that dgardent that which strangely he doth mdodudltkdip—baseeaatra—poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing—in a funny wind—well-being believes he’ll go to heaven—a word to the wise is enough—“Smart went Crazy,” wrote Allen Ginsberg.)

  Reason why I didn’t go home at 3 A.M.—and example.

  2

  AT FIRST I HAD DOUBTS, because she was Negro, because she was sloppy (always putting off everything till tomorrow, the dirty room, unwashed sheets—what do I really for Christ’s sake care about sheets)—doubts because I knew she’d been seriously insane and could very well be again and one of the first things we did, the first nights, she was going into the bathroom naked in the abandoned hall but the door of her place having a strange squeak it sounded to me (high on tea) like suddenly someone had come up and was standing in the stairwell (like maybe Gonzalez the Mexican sort of bum or hanger-on sort of faggish who kept coming up to her place on the strength of some old friendship she’d had with some Tracy Pachucos to bum little 7 centses from her or two cigarettes and all the time usually when she was at her lowest, sometimes even to take negotiable bottles away), thinking it might be him, or some of the subterraneans, in the hall asking “Is anybody with you?” and she naked, unconcernedly, and like in the alley just stands there saying, “No man, you better come back tomorrow I’m busy I’m not alone,” this my tea-revery as I lay there, because the moansqueak of the door had that moan of voices in it, so when she got back from the toilet I told her this (reasoning honesty anyway) (and believing it had been really so, almost, and still believing her actively insane, as on the fence in the alley) but when she heard my confession she said she almost flipped again and was frightened of me and almost got up and ran out—for reasons like this, madness, repeated chances of more madness, I had my “doubts” my male self-contained doubts about her, so reasoned, “I’ll just at some time cut out and get me another girl
, white, white thighs, etc., and it’ll have been a grand affair and I hope I don’t hurt her tho.”—Ha!—doubts because she cooked sloppily and never cleaned up dishes right away, which as first I didn’t like and then came to see she really didn’t cook sloppily and did wash the dishes after awhile and at the age of six (she later told me) she was forced to wash dishes for her tyrannical uncle’s family and all the time on top of that forced to go out in alley in dark night with garbage pan every night same time where she was convinced the same ghost lurked for her—doubts, doubts—which I have not now in the luxury of time-past.—What a luxury it is to know that now I want her forever to my breast my prize my own woman whom I would defend from all Yuries and anybodies with my fists and anything else, her time has come to claim independence, announcing, only yesterday ere I began this tearbook, “I want to be an independent chick with money and cuttin’ around.”—Yeah, and knowing and screwing everybody, Wanderingfoot,” I’m thinking, wandering foot from when we—I’d stood at the bus stop in the cold wind and there were a lot of men there and instead of standing at my side she wandered off in little funny red raincoat and black slacks and went into a shoestore doorway (ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO AIN’T NOTHIN’ I LIKE BETTER THAN A GUY DOIN’ WHAT HE WANTS, Leroy always said) so I follow her reluctantly thinking, “She sure has wandering feet to hell with her I’ll get another chick” (weakening at this point as reader can tell from tone) but turns out she knew I had only shirt no undershirt and should stand where no wind was, telling me later, the realization that she did not talk naked to anyone in the hall any more than it was wanderingfoot to walk away to lead me to a warmer waitingplace, that it was no more than shit, still making no impression on my eager impressionable ready-to-create construct destroy and die brain—as will be seen in the great construction of jealousy which I later from a dream and for reasons of self-laceration recreated. … Bear with me all lover readers who’ve suffered pangs, bear with me men who understand that the sea of blackness in a darkeyed woman’s eyes is the lonely sea itself and would you go ask the sea to explain itself, or ask woman why she crosseth hands on lap over rose? no—

  Doubts, therefore, of, well, Mardou’s Negro, naturally not only my mother but my sister whom I may have to live with some day and her husband a Southerner and everybody concerned, would be mortified to hell and have nothing to do with us—like it would preclude completely the possibility of living in the South, like in that Faulknerian pillar homestead in the Old Granddad moonlight I’d so long envisioned for myself and there I am with Doctor Whitley pulling out the panel of my rolltop desk and we drink to great books and outside the cobwebs on the pines and old mules clop in soft roads, what would they say if my mansion lady wife was a black Cherokee, it would cut my life in half, and all such sundry awful American as if to say white ambition thoughts or white daydreams.—Doubts galore too about her body itself, again, and in a funny way really relaxing now to her love so surprising myself I couldn’t believe it, I’d seen it in the light one playful night so I—walking through the Fillmore she insisted we confess everything we’d been hiding for this first week of our relationship, in order to see and understand and I gave my first confession, haltingly, “I thought I saw some kind of black thing I’ve never seen before, hanging, like it scared me” (laughing)—it must have stabbed her heart to hear, it seemed to me I felt some kind of shock in her being at my side as she walked as I divulged this secret thought—but later in the house with light on we both of us childlike examined said body and looked closely and it wasn’t anything pernicious and pizen juices but just bluedark as in all kinds of women and I was really and truly reassured to actually see and make the study with her—but this being a doubt that, confessed, warmed her heart to me and made her see that fundamentally I would never snakelike hide the furthest, not the—but no need to defend, I cannot at all possibly begin to understand who I am or what I am any more, my love for Mardou has completely separated me from any previous phantasies valuable and otherwise—The thing therefore that kept these outburst doubts from holding upper sway in my activity in relating with her was the realization not only that she was sexy and sweet and good for me and I was cutting quite a figure with her on the Beach anyway (and in a sense too now cutting the subterraneans who were becoming progressively deeply colder in their looks towards me in Dante’s and on street from natural reasons that I had taken over their play doll and one of their really if not the most brilliant gals in their orbit)—Adam also saying, “You go well together and it’s good for you,” he being at the time and still my artistic and paternal manager—not only this, but, hard to confess, to show how abstract the life in the city of the Talking Class to which we all belong, the Talking Class trying to rationalize itself I suppose out of a really base almost lecherous lustful materialism—it was the reading, the sudden illuminated glad wondrous discovery of Wilhelm Reich, his book The Function of the Orgasm, clarity as I had not seen in a long time, not since perhaps the clarity of personal modern grief of Céline, or, say, the clarity of Carmody’s mind in 1945 when I first sat at his feet, the clarity of the poesy of Wolfe (at 19 it was clarity for me), the clarity here tho was scientific, Germanic, beautiful, true—something I’d always known and closely indeed connected to my 1948 sudden notion that the only thing that really mattered was love, the lovers going to and fro beneath the boughs in the Forest of Arden of the World, here magnified and at the same time microcosmed and pointed in and maled into: orgasm—the reflexes of the orgasm—you can’t be healthy without normal sex love and orgasm—I won’t go into Reich’s theory since it is available in his own book—but at the same time Mardou kept saying “O don’t pull that Reich on me in bed, I read his damn book, I don’t want our relationship all pointed out and f …. d up with what HE said,” (and I’d noticed that all the subterraneans and practically all intellectuals I have known have really in the strangest way always put down Reich if not at first, after awhile)—besides which, Mardou did not gain orgasm from normal copulation and only after awhile from stimulation as applied by myself (an old trick that I had learned with a previous frigid wife) so it wasn’t so great of me to make her come but as she finally only yesterday said “You’re doing this just to give me the pleasure of coming, you’re so kind,” which was a statement suddenly hard for either one of us to believe and came on the heels of her “I think we ought to break up, we never do anything together, and I want to be in-dep—” and so doubts I had of Mardou, that I the great Finn Macpossipy should take her for my long love wife here there or anywhere and with all the objections my family, especially my really but sweetly but nevertheless really tyrannical (because of my subjective view of her and her influence) mother’s sway over me—sway or whatever.—“Leo, I don’t think it’s good for you to live with your mother always,” Mardou, a statement that in my early confidence only made me think, “Well naturally she, she’s just jealous, and has no folks herself, and is one of those modern psychoanalyzed people who hate mothers anyway”—out loud saying, “I really do really love her and love you too and don’t you see how hard I try to spend my time, divide my time between the two of you—over there it’s my writing work, my well-being and when she comes home from work at night, tired, from the store, mind you, I feel very good making her supper, having the supper and a martini ready when she walks in so by 8 o’clock the dishes are all cleared, see, and she has more time to look at her television—which I worked on the railroad six months to buy her, see.”—Well you’ve done a lot of things for her,” and Adam Moorad (whom my mother considered mad and evil) too had once said “You’ve really done a lot for her, Leo, forget her for a while, you’ve got your own life to live,” which is exactly what my mother always was telling me in the dark of the South San Francisco night when we relaxed with Tom Collinses under the moon and neighbors would join us, “You have your own life to live, I won’t interfere, Ti Leo, with anything you want to do, you decide, of course it will be all right with me,” me sitting there goopy realizing
it’s all myself, a big subjective phantasy that my mother really needs me and would die if I weren’t around, and nevertheless having a bellyful of other rationalizations allowing me to rush off two or three times a year on gigantic voyages to Mexico or New York or Panama Canal on ships—A million doubts of Mardou, now dispelled, now (and even without the help of Reich who shows how life is simply the man entering the woman and the rubbing of the two in soft—that essence, that dingdong essence—something making me now almost so mad as to shout, I GOT MY OWN LITTLE BANGTAIL ESSENCE AND THAT ESSENCE IS MIND RECOGNITION—) now no more doubts. Even, a thousand times, I without even remembering later asked her if she’d really stolen the pornographic picture from Bernard and the last time finally she fired “But I’ve told you and told you, about eight times in all, I did not take that picture and I told you too a thousand times I don’t even didn’t even have any pockets whatever in that particular suit I was wearing that night—no pockets at all,” yet it never making an impression (in feverish folly brain me) that it was Bernard now who was really crazy, Bernard had gotten older and developed some personal sad foible, accusing others of stealing, solemnly—“Leo don’t you see and you keep asking it”—this being the last deepest final doubt I wanted about Mardou that she was really a thief of some sort and therefore was out to steal my heart, my white man heart, a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled (remembering the Tennessee Williams story about the Negro Turkish bath attendant and the little white fag) because, not only Ross Wallenstein had called me to my face a fag—“Man what are you, a fag? you talk you just like a fag,” saying this after I’d said to him in what I hoped were cultured tones, “You’re on goofballs tonight? you ought to try three sometimes, they’ll really knock you out and have a few beers too, but don’t take four, just three,” it insulting him completely since he is the veteran hipster of the Beach and for anyone especially a brash newcomer stealing Mardou from his group and at the same time hoodlum-looking with a reputation as a great writer, which he didn’t see, from only published book—the whole mess of it, Mardou becoming the big buck nigger Turkish bath attendant, and I the little fag who’s broken to bits in the love affair and carried to the bay in a burlap bag, there to be distributed piece by piece and broken bone by bone to the fish if there are still fish in that sad water)—so she’d thieve my soul and eat it—so told me a thousand times, “I did not steal that picture and I’m sure Aylward whatshisname didn’t and you didn’t it’s just Bernard, he’s got some kind of fetish there”—But it never impressed and stayed till the last, only the other night, time—that deepest doubt about her arising too from the time, (which she’d told me about) she was living in Jack Steen’s pad in a crazy loft down on Commercial Street near the seamen’s union halls, in the glooms, had sat in front of his suitcase an hour thinking whether she ought to look in it to see what he had there, then Jack came home and rummaged in it and thought or saw something was missing and said, sinister, sullen, “Have you been going thru my bag?” and she almost leaped up and cried YES because she HAD—“Man I had, in Mind, been going thru that bag all day and suddenly he was looking at me, with that look—I almost flipped”—that story also not impressing into my rigid paranoia-ridden brain, so for two months I went around thinking she’d told me, “Yes, I did go thru his bag but of course took nothing,” but so I saw she’d lied to Jack Steen in reality—but in reality now, the facts, she had only thought to do so, and so on—my doubts all of them hastily ably assisted by a driving paranoia, which is really my confession—doubts, then, all gone.