How the Sixties Ended

Untitled Part 1

Prologue

I got on the Greyhound Bus at 11 a.m. and sat by myself staring out the window. I could see the reflection of my own dark beard in the window, a 27 year-old man with a huge poem bursting my heart, gasping to get out into the bright lit-up world out there, pulsing at my neck like a gigantic fish breathing through its gills as its life lay pounding on the deck, hearing the sirens singing in my ears like Homer or Janis Joplin singing her heart out through her dense haze of Southern Comfort. I had my whole life splayed out before me and I was heading up the highway toward a rendezvous with a married woman with four kids in Berkeley — Berkeley, California, of all places. And I was scared out of my wits . I had my own fate in my hands, and I didn’t have my fate in my own hands at all. It was a startling complexity of the universe that no man ever foresees until love blinds him and takes his balls in its mouth and begins chewing, chewing relentlessly and without mercy.

And the mother of all battles, the San Francisco Poetry Wars awaited me, and I knew nothing about it. When you are a young poet and starting out in the world for the first time like Homer first setting sail, you are so damned naïve, there is no way to know or express it. Rise sail, lord over and take me away! That’s all I can say.

The mountains were a blur, the bus gliding around curves, and down into Los Gatos, where the rich and the idle played. Then on into San Jose, the future heart of the not yet invented Silicon Valley. The geniuses were already gathered in their garages there inventing. Up the highway we went until we pulled into the Greyhound Bus Terminal in one of the seedier parts of Oakland. Bottles lay broken on the ground and winos were slumped over on the bus benches waiting to go God knows where, Eureka maybe, stripped of everything but their souls and a sleeping bag or a rolled-up dirty blanket. They lay with their mouths open, teeth missing, sleeping because this was a safe place to sleep. They who’d already lost the world.

And when I walked outside into the sunlight, there was Mary Jo waiting for me in their long van.

“Janov,” she said, waving. “Here I am.” That voice of hers. Oh my God!

She pushed the passenger door open with her foot across the seat. She had on a long hippie-style dress, which was pulled way up her thigh. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing anything underneath. She let her white leg lay there across the front seat.

“You want to drive?” she said. And she slid over in the seat. As she did her skirt hiked all the way up and there was nothing on underneath, nothing at all. My heart began pounding.

I jumped in behind the wheel. She took my head in her hands and kissed me hungrily. We were there about ten minutes in a loading zone until a cop pulled up, honking. I started up the motor and put it in gear, my hard-on bursting out of my pants. Mary Jo wouldn’t take her hand off the bulge and kept rubbing it. “Go faster,” she said. “Turn here. Step on it. My dress is all wet between my legs. Here, feel this.”

She took my hand and lifted her dress. I felt the buttery creaminess between her thighs. Jesus, I thought. Jesus.

We drove into the hills above Berkeley, along Grizzly Peak, and she had me drive up a path off the road and stop the truck. She pulled me out of the van. We walked through dense high weeds, heading down a slope toward a small lake, and all of a sudden she lay down on her back, pulling me down on top of her. She wiggled out of her dress in the bright sunlight. Her skin was as white as the innards of an oyster. Then she unbuckled my belt and yanked. We didn’t even wait to get the pants off my right leg before she slipped me inside her, she was sopping wet, and we came about three times each. It just went on and on. I couldn’t remember fucking so much in one burst ever, with anyone. This was fantastic. Bugs and flies kept landing on my bare ass while it was going up and down and I didn’t care and we lunged toward some new world record. That’s how hungry we were for each other. Man alive! I thought. Was this what it was like to be in love? Really in love, like my first time? No, maybe even better!

When we finally rolled off each other, weeds and stickers were all over her dress, but she put it back on anyway. I kept trying to pick foxtails off her dress, and the next thing I knew she had it raised up and we were flat on the ground. We were wholly unstable and entirely unstoppable. It was like we were in a barnyard. But there had to be an end. What about her kids? What about nightfall? What about Park Rangers and Boy Scouts who would use these trails and Campfire Girls and Brownies in their little chocolate outfits? We didn’t care. I was mining my way out of childhood and deeper into adulthood than I had ever imagined it was possible to go without a roadmap, without a clue as to how to get out. Did one ever get out of adulthood? Yes, one way. One way only. I was on a one-way road now.

Then she drove me over the hill into Orinda and dropped me off at my brother’s house. He lived there with his wife Beryl and their daughter. Beryl was a pink Chablis drunkard stay-at-home mom who ran around the house in a muumuu and bunny slippers, smoking Parliaments and sipping from a plastic wine glass all day.

Mary Jo came in the house with me. It appeared no one was home, so we went into the TV room and stripped off our clothes and tried to go at it one more time but it was no use. I was too pooped and it would not stay up anymore. All I wanted to do was go to sleep, so Mary Jo left.

How were we going to communicate? I thought, before passing out on the couch. I did not have a clue what one did in this sort of affair. I’d never been in an affair with a married woman before. No wait. That simply was not true. I’d forgotten completely about Carla, the woman with three children who’d come out to the writing program with me at Irvine. She had left her husband to run off to California. Ah, yes, I was at it again.

The next day Beryl drove me to the Greyhound Bus terminal and I went back to Santa Cruz. The loneliest time of my life began. I did not hear a word from Mary Jo. What was happening to her? Had Mitchell found out? Did he get violent as only a Texan can? That was where he’d been born and raised. They settled things with guns and knives there. I well knew how that line of thinking went. You did not steal people’s turtles, you did not take a woman from a man. You drank cold beers all afternoon in front of an iced-over air conditioner without saying a thing, and you drove along the highway shooting holes in every road sign you could. Still, in Texas the law was everything, except when it came to the politicians. They were above it. Our own Lyndon Baines Johnson came from Texas, after all, and his idea of law and order was, “Don’t spit in the soup, we all got to eat.”

I crept back to my little hovel by the sea and waited for word from Berkeley. I made a vow to stop drinking even, if I heard any kind of good news from up there. That’s right, you heard me — I would stop drinking. Greg laughed in my face when he heard me say that. We went out to the pier one night while the fog rolled in around us. He offered me a swig from his jug of Red Mountain. I waved it away, and he stood up and guffawed. “C’mon!” he shouted at me. I hung my head. I was despondent. I just waved.

“C’mon, for Chrissakes. C’mon!”

A harbor seal began yelping loudly on the piers below, then another, then a whole chorus of them, talking to each other about courtship and pain and the state of the sea. Yelping, yelping and yelping. Then they quieted down.

I made a gesture and I could see Greg grin, nodding his head. He handed me the jug of wine and I took a long pull and it began warming up my soul just a little. I saw the reason behind living again. The world opened up to me. I saw a certain vastness that would become my poem, Puppet X. I saw the beginning plainly: “I know you,/ ladies and gentlemen./ We see the near future/ through you.” I also saw the end. “For the first time in six years,/ I spoke.” All I had to do now was fill in the middle 65 pages.

 “Great stuff. I feel like if Kerouac and Vonnegut had had a baby you might be it,

with Heller as your god-father maybe. Really funny."

-- Thomas Calder