Cars and Rocks

I lived above Larry Flynt’s on Broadway, just across from a bar called Vesuvio’s. I could see it from the window of my apartment, and at night if I looked at the sidewalk under me I could also see down the tops of $50 hookers. I’m originally from a family of farmers in Salinas and I got the Greyhound over to the city for a bit more life than you can get out of a hundred square miles of cabbage patch.
I worked afternoons in Vesuvio’s, pulling pale ales for the tourists tired of sea lions and trams. When I wasn’t busy, I looked out of the window at the workers trailing up and down Columbus, saw their dumb faces, and knew I always hated that shirt and tie jive.
A guy who used to come in regular was the least famous in a family of actors, the son of one of the greatest actors in American cinema. He worked bit parts in the movies, mostly did theatre. Last time I saw him he was doing a Sam Shepard play at the Magic, and he used to come in to wash down tequila’s with beer.
I was cleaning shot glasses, not looking at him, when I heard him stop in mid-flow. I looked up and could see his face backing away from me. The stool landed with a bang and his head cracked on the floor. If we’d had cameras I could have watched it again. Half an hour after the ambulance had taken him, twenty five women from an institute in Copenhagen came in, most of them wanting pale ales. 

I met Alba on Rexroth and bought her some Corso in City Lights. With that and a Guinness or two in Specs she seemed to be getting in the mood. That changed when she saw the hole I was living in: the junkies’ needles on the stairs, the paint stripped door, the mess inside. I’d change the sheets only when they started to stink; I’d wipe dust when it got me to coughing. The bathroom I don’t want to tell you about. So she asked me to walk her home, all the way up Russian Hill. Flat she shared with someone else I didn’t know about then. Nice view up there after the fog: the boats in the bay, the bridges Bay and Golden, the hills of Marin County. I stood in the doorway, kissed her, and she went in and I was left looking at the Golden Gate twinkling its way to Sausalito.
Alba was from Champaign, Illinois, and looked like a young Diana Ross. She always wore hats, beautiful hats, red, green, black. Put them on the bed. Did lots of drugs, got me down that road. She wore skirts like belts and boots up to her thighs and when she danced I lost the name of days.
Now I don’t know if craziness always comes with beauty. I mean, I’m a good looking guy, or I was. Think Cool Hand Luke, only with eyes more blue. Not really. I was more like George Kennedy, big burly mother going bald. But with beauty there’s all that envy, none of the girls like you, whatever way you look people think that you think you’re better.
She liked me for the poetry. She wrote it too, in a way of speaking. One time we saw Ginsberg and Burroughs; another time Baraka at a bookshop on Irving. But you couldn’t expect a poem to write one. She loved it though, and we’d walk around North Beach, sit in the park near the church, lay down on the grass in the summer. Sometimes we’d float stoned in the mornings, see the Chinese doing Tai Chi in the fog.
One day in Golden Gate Park a man in a top hat went by on silver stilts. He carried a golden radio with an aerial going way up into the purple sky. Sea lions came wriggling through the grass and watched as we made our way through sparkling candy stars.
Alba told me her daddy used to pistol-whip her and slash at her legs with whipcord. She said he put her mother’s head through the window and slit her fingers with slivers of glass. She told me her daddy used to rumble in and unbuckle his pants but not to hit her. I didn’t swallow any of that windy city bullshit until I felt the welts on her legs and it made me shiver with visions. Sometimes when we made it she whimpered his name and I went at it harder to shut her up. One time right there she said she was going to kill me. She was profiled with the sun through the window and light steamed off her. She slid a fingernail across my throat like a cutlass.
An old trick of Alba’s died and left her a little wooden house up above Cannery Row. Far enough away from the tourists, with a view of the pacific, and the fish smells nothing like they used to be. Some days I’d sit in the window and see whales, just glimpses, but I got to recognize the splash of the tail and the way it moved in the water.
We’d go down there together, long walks along the coast. In Monterey you could see otters, herons, whales, sea lions, all in the same cross hairs. And we’d walk down along Pacific Grove and freak the health nuts. The sea in Pacific Grove swirls and swirls in big waves and currents, the waves crash in big crashes of white, sometimes the water looks like a kind of jellied green in the dusk. We’d walk along the sand, nobody else around, eating strawberries and looking for galleons on the sea.
They hated Steinbeck when he wrote that book, but not when it brought the tourists in. You know the main character, Doc? His real name was Ricketts and there’s a statue of him just up from Cannery. People put flowers in his hands. You can see the pacific over his shoulders. There’s a bench right there. I’d sit with Alba and we’d watch tourists get to the end of Cannery and turn around for some plastic souvenir.
Alba. I thought I saw the Pacific in her eyes. One time I grabbed her arms and she clawed at mine. Put the nails into me, ripped right down. I didn’t feel it then. I’m from a generation that don’t hit women. I took it until one time we were in a car in Big Sur. I’d told her about the cliffs and the waves that they don’t have in Champaign, Illinois. And I told her about Henry Miller. I pulled over near the Bixby Bridge and we got out, and she stood there shouting. It was 2:19 am. She started pushing at me, clawing again. I was protecting myself, not even looking, when I saw her face and body falling away. She broke up on the rocks. I tried to get back on my own. Couple from Abilene saw me.

I had my drinking days, waking up in alleys in the Tenderloin, groping around for a glinting bottle, getting up shaking to beg. I don’t back up from winos. I listen to what they say, give them a chance; tell them about the Shrine of St Francis of Assisi. Most will talk your ears off with the same self pity. But they’re broken down. And who should we feel sorry for — them, or the women?