Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (9 page)

We had some roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy. There were hundreds of flies in the place. Quite a crew of them had found some strips of flypaper that were hanging here and there like nooses in the restaurant, and were making themselves at home.

An old man came in. He said he wanted a glass of milk. The waitress got one for him. He drank it and put a nickel in a slot machine on his way out. Then he shook his head.

After we finished eating, Uncle Jarv had to go over to the post office and send a postcard. We walked over there and it was just a small building, mors like a shack than anything else. We opened the screen door and went in.

There was a lot of post office stuff: a counter and an old clock with a long drooping hand like a mustache under the sea, swinging softly back and forth, keeping time with time.

There was a large nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The first one I had ever seen in a post office. She was lying on a big piece of red. It seemed like a strange thing to have on the wall of a post office, but of course I was a stranger in the land.

The postmistress was a middle-aged woman, and she had copied on her face one of those mouths they used to wear during the 1920s. Uncle Jarv bought a postcard and filled it up on the counter as if it were a glass of water.

It took a couple of moments. Halfway through the postcard Uncle Jarv stopped and glanced up at Marilyn Monroe. There was nothing lustful about his looking up there. She just as well could have been a photograph of mountains and trees.

I don't remember whom he was writing to. Perhaps it was to a friend or a relative. I stood there staring at the nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe for all I was worth. Then Uncle Jarv mailed the postcard. "Come on," he said.

We went back to the house where the bears were, but they were gone. "Where did they go?" somebody said.

A lot of people had gathered around and they were all talking about the missing bears and were kind of looking for the bears all over the place.

"They're dead," somebody said, trying to be reassuring, and pretty soon we were looking inside the house, and a woman went through the closets, looking for bears.

After a while the mayor came over and said, "I'm hungry. Where are my bears?"

Somebody told the mayor that they had disappeared into thin air and the mayor said, "That's impossible," and got down and looked under the porch. There were no bears there.

An hour or so passed and everybody gave up looking for the bears, and the sun went down. We sat outside on the front porch where once upon a time, there had been bears.

The men talked about playing high school football during the Depression, and made jokes about how old and fat they had grown. Somebody asked Uncle Jarv about the four hotel rooms and the four bottles of whiskey. Everybody laughed except Uncle Jarv. He smiled instead. Night had just started when somebody found the bears.

They were on a side street sitting in the front seat of a car. One of the bears had on a pair of pants and a checkered shirt. He was wearing a red hunting hat and had a pipe in the
mouth and two paws on the steering wheel like Barney Old-field.

The other bear had on a whits silk negligee, one of the kind you see advertised in the back pages of men's magazines, and a pair of felt slippers stuck on the feet. There was a pink bonnet tied on the head and a purse in the lap.

Somebody opened up the purse, but there wasn't anything inside. I don't know what they expected to find, but they were disappointed. What would a dead bear carry in its purse, anyway?

***

Strange is the thing that makes me recall all this again: the bears. It's a photograph in the newspaper of Marilyn Monroe, dead from a sleeping pill suicide, young and beautiful, as they say, with everything to live for.

The newspapers are filled with it: articles and photographs and the like—her body being taken away on a cart, the body wrapped in a dull blanket. I wonder what post office wall in Eastern Oregon will wear this photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

An attendant is pushing the cart out a door, and the sun is shining under the cart. Venetian blinds are in the photograph and the branches of a tree.

T
HE
room had a high Victorian ceiling and there was a marble fireplace and an avocado tree growing in the window, and she lay beside me sleeping in a very well-built blond way.

And I was asleep, too, and it was just starting to be dawn in September.

1964.

Then suddenly, without any warning, she sat up in bed, waking me instantly, and she started to get out of bed. She was very serious about it.

"What are you doing?" I said.

Her eyes were wide open.

"I'm getting up," she said.

They were a somnambulist blue.

"Get back in bed," I said.

"Why?" she said, now halfway out of bed with one blond foot touching the floor.

"Because you're still asleep," I said.

"Ohhh ... OK," she said. That made sense to her and
she got back into bed and pulled the covers around herself and cuddled up close to me. She didn't say another word and she didn't move.

She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie.

I like to sit in the cheap theaters of America where people live and die with Elizabethan manners while watching the movies. There is a theater down on Market Street where I can see four movies for a dollar. I really don't care how good they are either. I'm not a critic. I just like to watch movies. Their presence on the screen is enough for me.

The theater is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, soldiers, sailors and the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.

"No! No! Get back in the car, Clyde. Oh, God, they're killing Bonnie!"

I am the poet-in-residence at these theaters but I don't plan on getting a Guggenheim for it.

Once I went into the theater at six o'clock in the evening and got out at one o'clock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.

In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.

I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theater called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.

The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.

There was a man sitting next to me.

He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity.

His baggy no-style clothes covered him like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.

Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, so that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.

S
HE
hates hotel rooms. It's like a Shakespearean sonnet. I mean, the childwoman or Lolita thing. It's a classic form:

She hates hotel rooms. It's the light in the morning that really bothers her. She doesn't like to wake up surrounded by that kind of light.

The morning light in hotel rooms is always synthetic, harshly clean as if the maid had let herself so quietly in, like a maidmouse, and put the light there by making phantom beds with strange sheets hanging in the very air itself.

She used to lie in bed and pretend that she was still asleep, so as to catch the maid coming in with the morning light folded in her arms, but she never caught her and finally gave it up.

Her father is asleep in the other room with a new lover. Her father is a famous movie director and in town to promote one of his pictures.

This trip to San Francisco he is promoting a horror movie that he has just finished directing called
The Attack of the Giant Rose People.
It is a film about a mad gardener and the results of his handiwork in the greenhouse working with experimental fertilizers.

She thinks the giant rose people are a bore. "They look like a bunch of funky valentines," she recently told her father.

"Why don't you go fuck yourself?" had been his reply.

That afternoon he would have lunch with Paine Knickerbocker of the
Chronicle
and later on in the afternoon he would be interviewed by Eichelbaum of the
Examiner
and a few days later her father's same old line of bullshit would appear in the papers.

Last night he rented a suite at the Fairmont but she wanted to stay at a motel on Lombard.

"Are you crazy? This is San Francisco!" he'd said.

She likes motels a lot better than she does hotels, but she doesn't know why. Maybe it's the light in the morning. That probably has something to do with it. The light in motel
rooms is more natural. It's not as if the maid had put it there.

She got out of bed. She wanted to see who her father was sleeping with. It was a little game of hers. She liked to see if she could guess who her father was in bed with, but it was a kind of silly game and she knew it because the women that her father went to bed with always looked just like her.

She wondered where her father kept finding them.

Some of his friends and other people liked to make little jokes about it. They liked to say that his lovers and his daughter always looked like sisters. Sometimes she felt as if she were the member of a strange and changing family of sisters.

She was 5-7, had straight blond hair that went almost down to her ass. She weighed 113 pounds. She had
very
blue eyes.

She was fifteen years old but she could have been any age. With just the turn of a whim she could look anywhere between thirteen and thirty-five.

Sometimes she would deliberately look thirty-five, so that young men in their early twenties would be attracted to her and consider her to be an older, experienced woman.

She could perform perfectly the role of a still glamorous but fading thirty-five-year-old woman, having studied so many of them in Hollywood, New York, Paris, Rome, London, etc.

She'd already had three affairs with young men in their early twenties without them ever catching on that she was only fifteen.

It had become a little hobby of hers.

She could invent whole lifetimes for herself and it was as if she had lived them in a kind of dreamy telescope way. She could be a thirty-four-year-old matron with three children in Glendale married to a Jewish dentist and having a lost youth fling on the side or she could be a thirty-one-year-old spinster literary editor from New York trying to escape the clutches of an insane lesbian lover and needing a young man to provide her salvation from perversion or she could be a thirty-
year-old divorcée with an incurable but attractive disease and wanting to have one more chance at romance before...

She loved it.

She got out of bed and tiptoed without any clothes on into the living room and went over to the door of her father's bedroom and stood there listening to see if they were awake or making love.

Her father and his lover were sound asleep. She could feel it through the door. It was like a chunk of warm frozen space in their bedroom.

She opened the door a crack and saw the blond hair of the woman spilling over the side of the bed like the sleeve of a yellow shirt.

She smiled and closed the door.

And that's where we leave her.

We know a little about her.

And she knows a lot about us.