Big Sur/Chapter 27
The mat of night admits the groaning glory godlike love I guess but at the same time it’s also boring in a way and we both laugh to discuss that—We stay awake that first night till dawn discussing everything in the books from Cody in every detail down to me in every detail to her in every detail to Evelyn to books and philosophies and religions and the absolute and I end up whispering her poems—Poor kid has to get up in the morning and go to work and I’m left there snoring drunk—But she makes her neat breakfast and takes Elliott off to the daily babysitter lady and I wake up at one in the afternoon alone and take a swig of wine and get in the hot bath to read a book—The phone keeps ringing, everybody from Monsanto to Fagan to McLear to the Moon Man has somehow found out where I am and what the number is, tho none of them have previously even met Billie let alone seen her—I shudder to realize Cody will get mad for making his secret life so public.
But here comes Perry—Like me Perry has that strange brotherly relationship with Cody whereby he gets to be confidant and sometimes lover of all Cody’s gals—And I can see why—He looks just like me onlyhe’s young and looks like I did when first Cody met me but the point is not that so much, he is a tempestuous lost tossed soul just out of Soledad State Prison for attempted robbery with a boyish face and black hair falling over it but powerful thick muscular arms that I realize he could break a man in half with—His name is strange too, Perry Yturbide, I immediately say: “I know what you are, Basque”—“Basque? is that it? I never found out! let’s call my mother longdistance in Utah and tell her that!”—And he rings up his mother way over there, on Billie’s phone bill, and here I am bottle of port wine in one hand and butt in mouth talking to a Basque ex con’s mother in Utah telling her in fact reassuring her “Yes I believe it’s a Basque name”—She’s saying “Hey, what you say? who are you?” and there’s Perry smiling all glad—A very strange kid—It’s been a long time in fact in my literary sort of life that I’ve met a real tough hombre like that out of jails and with those arms of steel and that fevered concern that scares governments and makes officials pale, that’s why he’s always put away in prison this type of man—Yes yet the type of man the country always needs when there’s a little old war started by an aging governor—A real dangerous character, in fact, Perry, because tho I appreciate his poetic soul and everything I realize looking at him he’s capable of exploding and killing somebody for an idea maybe or for love.
Some of his own friends ring Billie’s doorbell, everybody seems to know I’m there, they come up, they are strange anarchistic Negroes and ex cons, it seems to be some sort of gang, I begin to wonder—Like a ring of fevered sages, the Negroes are intense and crazy and intellectual but they’ve all got those strong muscular arms again and all have jail records yet they all talk as tho the end of the world depended on their words—Hard to explain (but will do).
Billie and her gang in fact, with all that fancy rigamarole about spiritual matters I wonder if it isnt just a big secret hustler outfit tho I also realize that I’ve noticed it before in San Francisco a kind of ephemeral hysteria that hides in the air over the rooftops among certain circles there leading always to suicide and maim—Me just an innocent lost hearted meditator and Goop among strange intense criminal agitators of the heart—It reminds me in fact of a nightmare I had just before coming out to the Coast, in the dream I’m back in San Francisco but there’s something funny going on: there’s dead silence throughout the entire city: men like printers and office executives and house-painters are all standing silently in second floor windows looking down on the empty streets of San Francisco: once in a while some beatniks walk by below, also silent: they’re being watched but not only by the authorities but by everybody: the beatniks seem to have the whole street system to themselves: but nobody’s saying anything: and in this intense silence I take a ride on a self propelled platform right downtown and out to the farms where a woman running a chicken farm invites me to join her and live with her—The little platform rolling quietly as the people are watching from windows in groups of profile like the profiles in old Van Dyck paintings, intense, suspicious, momentous—This Billie business reminding me of that but because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on—But this also an indication of the coming madness in Big Sur.