This Tiny Ship

SKIPPERTOO AND GET ME HOME, I MEAN IF YOU REALLY WANT TO hear about it. They took away my facial hair and gave me a small hat. Please to ignore dead bird around neck, hokay? We were seven, like the Mercury astronauts. But all that came after I'd done my time in the booby hatch.

Eisenhower on the rebop, waving yo-ho to a U-2 and a boo-hoo to Batista. So hipped am I on clinching my Houdini exit from the old burg, where the specimen before you wore a sweatshirt laundered only by my tears, that I don't even feed the mailbox a snack for my best high-school buddy after Dobie skywrites me an epistle exhaling how gassed he is the New Frontier is here. When the thousand days start clicking off, I'm hanging on by my goatee in North Beach. The coffeehouses are losing steam, the topless bars aren't so much as a gleam in Carol Doda's plastic surgeon's scalpel. On the sidewalk outside City Lights, with avid periwinkle peepers but a poor Christmas salting his ever waggable chin, even Ferlinghetti's looking like he doesn't know where his next trochee's coming from. Hello, hi, "Can you believe this fog?" he says, clutching my arm, which what with Fisherman's Wharf north by northwest and the Rice-A-Roni streetcar going dingding practically in our ears makes me think, wow, he's never had a dull moment.

Then he put on some lip about the big "Ask not" recital that got beamed our way this San Fran A.M. out of snowy — doubly snowy, in the transmission-flaked ghost dance our coast's early risers blinked at — Washington, DeeCee. "And so the Harvard sonovabitch asks Robert Frost to write him an inaugural poem, for Christ and Buddha's sake," Larry sniffed, huffing himself up to his full height just as some middle-aged square doing a walk-by in a mackintosh gave us a look like he hadn't known our kind was still roosting in the nabe. "Pass that torch, Jack! They'll never learn. That monosyllabic, meter-crazy Vermont retard — he ever stops by my woods with miles to go before he croaks, I'll take two forks and stab him in the ass with them! Why wasn't it Bill Carlos Bills? Hell, what about me? I'd have been there like a shot off a shovel." We know you would, Ferl, I said, and made to split. Larry always reminded me of a St. Bernard who'd gotten bombed on his own brandy cask. A dog on a long MacLeish, Corso used to say.

But me, I'm toking on a modest hope that things are looking up. Even if Rexroth did call it déjà lu, in a slam that accused me of counterfeiting bongos and beret to pull a fast one on easy readers" "If I'm any judge," which he was in all but robe and gavel, "this kid knows North Beach like the back of Allen Ginsberg's hand" — my little book Wake Me When It's Over Daddy-O: Proems 1957 — 1960 has sold a couple of copies, and my girl, who got hers for free, looks good in a leotard. And even better out of one, even if I can't quit missing Thalia Menninger, who never knew what she meant to me. For our bread, Suze is girl-ing the java urn at a place called the Vertigo-Go. Then, just three months into Camelot, JFK banana-peels us with the Bay of Pigs.

Bam, ogle me on the move with a few other scraggly cats and chicks down Columbus Avenue to Montgomery Street and Union Square, lipping "Hands off Castro!" and shoving our "Fair Play for Cuba" leaflets at a sluice of snap-brims all doing the lunch-hour hurry-hurry. Ferlinghetti's rounded up whoever isn't on a reading tour or in Tangiers with Burroughs to show some angry beard. Soon a red light holds us up and we accordion, which is when the tagalonging crewcut we were hoping was plainclothes says he's with the Chronicle. That's all Ferl needs:

"When governments write bad poetry, poets have to govern. And this," he says, puffing himself up to his full heat, "is a bad poem, in my professional opinion. You remember what Shelley said," and if you're fast you see the crewcut's brain go "Winters?" but Larry is tearing along: "I mean I don't know where Allen and Gregory are on this, we each go our own way, but to me the 'free' in free verse has always been a verb, you see. The way Fidel did Havana, I want to free verse. Free verse!" he hollers, jerking his head up at the rest of us. "Free verse!" And my Suze, who's in black from her Feiffer-feet to the witch hat on her middle-parted hair and looks like she's just guessed where all the flowers went, is nudging in and saying, "Larry, it's turned green, like really green, green like my eyes, we gotta go."

Across from a scary-looking mausoleum just short of Union Square, some burlies are hoisting a sign that makes me wonder if I'm on peyote. It's a clock with twelve hands all holding coffee cups, and underneath it says, "There's Always Time For Some More Maxwell House!" I mean, sometimes I think the straights know things we don't, out in the crazy heart of America. The whole bit's gone a little haywire, we aren't moving, now I see that Ferlinghetti's in a face-off with a couple of wharf rats up from the Embarcadero who think our gang is what's wrong with this picture, and that's why they've just knocked FaFaFaFair Playayayay ffor CubaCubaCuba in a long scoop down the gutter. The fat one with the hair like shaving cream is tearing off his cap and lipping away at Larry like a one-man what's-up-doc cartoon, and the shrimp in the sneaks and red sweater next to him has hard and frightened eyes for me, why me? I know I don't know him from Adam.

Then someone hollers "Watch yourself, Maynard!," in the same brain-blink that my inner radar pings a toppling world of uh-oh up above. When I look the coffee clock's come loose, did it jump or was it pushed?, and is avalanching toward me from the sky. I try to protect myself with my "Leave Fidel Alone!" sign, but it's too late, because time has grown a thousand feathers that I have to try to name. The clouds keel like old sails in a washing machine, hey pops which way to Alcatraz?, and Suze's face is skidding at me from all directions under her witch's hat, her mouth making the big O, as Larry jumps back like a circus lion in a movie running backwards and I think Corso never liked me. Off in a corner of this scene, which I couldn't sort out with a colander, a lanky detective was hauling a drenched blonde out of the big blue drink next to the Golden Gate.

While a ship with nowhere to get to sailed calmly on.

* * *

I came to in a Jasper Johns, not representational like you would know of, what but undeniably sturdy. Big on white, a use of pigment so tactile it made your eyeballs feel like workingmen's thumbs, and shapes of sheriff's badges in rows and uninhabited aisles in an as yet unrecognizable pattern. This is either prison or a dream, I thought; not noticing the false dichotomy. After a minute or a week, part of the painting opened up, and a nice Negro lady Jasper had hidden back of it said, "With us again at last! It's about time. You must be starving. I'll just go fetch Dr. Troop."

Dr. Troop? I knew no Dr. Troop. Nor can I peg the cat who soon comes nimbly ambling in as if the air behind his heels is still begging for more autographs, a square but clearly some sort of glamor...