Big Sur/Chapter 1
THE CHURCH IS BLOWING a sad windblown “Kathleen” on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woe-begone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I’d ruined my “secret return” to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums and then marching forth into North Beach to see everybody altho Lorenzo Monsanto and I’d exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy Pulvertaft (also writers) and then he would secretly drive me to his cabin in the Big Sur woods where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks just chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc. etc.—But instead I’ve bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at the height of Saturday night business, everyone recognized me (even tho I was wearing my disguise-like fisherman’s hat and fisherman coat and pants waterproof) and ’t’all ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody “King of the Beatniks” is back in town buying drinks for everyone—Two days of that, including Sunday the day Lorenzo is supposed to pick me up at my “secret” skid row hotel (the Mars on 4th and Howard) but when he calls for me there’s no answer, he has the clerk open the door and what does he see but me out on the floor among bottles, Ben Fagan stretched out partly beneath the bed, and Robert Browning the beatnik painter out on the bed, snoring—So says to himself “I’ll pick him up next weekend, I guess he wants to drink for a week in the city (like he always does, I guess)” so off he drives to his Big Sur cabin without me thinking he’s doing the right thing but my God when I wake up, and Ben and Browning are gone, they’ve somehow dumped me on the bed, and I hear “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” being bellroped so sad in the fog winds out there that blow across the rooftops of eerie old hangover Frisco, wow, I’ve hit the end of the trail and cant even drag my body any more even to a refuge in the woods let alone stay upright in the city a minute—It’s the first trip I’ve taken away from home (my mother’s house) since the publication of “Road” the book that “made me famous” and in fact so much so I’ve been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers (a big voice saying in my basement window as I prepare to write a story:—ARE YOU BUSY?) or the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom as I sat there in my pajamas trying to write down a dream—Teenagers jumping the six-foot fence I’d had built around my yard for privacy—Parties with bottles yelling at my study window “Come on out and get drunk, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”—A woman coming to my door and saying “I’m not going to ask you if you’re Jack Duluoz because I know he wears a beard, can you tell me where I can find him, I want a real beatnik at my annual Shindig party”—Drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing books and even pencils—Uninvited acquaintances staying for days because of the clean beds and good food my mother provided—Me drunk practically all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this but finally realizing I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die—So Lorenzo Monsanto wrote and said “Come to my cabin, no one’ll know,” etc. so I had sneaked into San Francisco as I say, coming 3000 miles from my home in Long Island (Northport) in a pleasant roomette on the California Zephyr train watching America roll by outside my private picture window, really happy for the first time in three years, staying in the roomette all three days and three nights with my instant coffee and sandwiches—Up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago and then the Plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of California, all so easy and dreamlike compared to my old harsh hitch hikings before I made enough money to take transcontinental trains (all over America highschool and college kids thinking “Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road, all the time hitch hiking” while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat)—But in any case a wonderful start towards my retreat so generously offered by sweet old Monsanto and instead of going thru smooth and easy I wake up drunk, sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song across the roofs mingling with the lachrymose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the corner below “Satan is the cause of your alcoholism, Satan is the cause of your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent now” and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next to mine, the creak of hall steps, the moans everywhere—Including the moan that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by a big roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.