Still About Kerouac, Different Shape of Degrees of Separation

About ten years later I was living at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Philip Whalen was teaching a class in writing poetry. For an exercise he asked us to write about something beautiful.

        Michael McClure is beautiful    (I wrote)
        ten years later.
        Slightly grey
        that smile
        and still the handsomest man I've ever seen.

"Kerouac thought so too," said Phil. "Huh?" I said. "He said McClure was the handsomest man he'd ever seen," said Phil.

*****************
I suppose this needs all kinds of footnotes. That in 1977 McClure had just then been at Zen Center for a reading. That in 1967 I served him mashed potatoes, or maybe it was peas, in the serving line at the free Thanksgiving dinner in the basement of All Saint's Episcopal Church on Waller Street (or maybe it was Howard Presbyterian on Oak Street) in the Haight. That in the Instamatic Archive I (still) have a picture I took of McClure and Freewheelin' Frank the Hell's Angel making music behind the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967.

That Certain Amount of Experience With Scroll Manuscripts

I went back to the Museum this evening and type type typed my story. It goes:

This is the scroll story. It's a little misty as to before and after. In 1968 I was living in a carriage house on the inside of the block bounded by Haight, Belvedere, Waller and Cole in the Haight Ashbury. My downstairs neighbor had a kind of continuous open house which ran on pills for half of every month until he ran out of money. Among the people who came to Tommy's was a poet named John Foret, who evenually connected my friend Jet with Irving Rosenthal, who had just arrived from New York with a printing press and Beat Connections. I think that's how a man named Angel got into my life and my apartment. Angel had also just arrived, from Afghanistan with a leather jacket full of hashish, and so couldn't stay in Irving's commune... anyway, Angel saw the typewriter on my kitchen table and told me that Kerouac had composed On the Road in a continuous scroll on telegraph paper. I went away for a few days and Angel stayed in my apartment. When I came home, Angel was gone and my cat Pickle was lost, and there was a long long scroll typed on yellow paper in the typewriter. I rolled it up and taped it with masking tape, and kept it a long time, but Angel never came back. I've no idea what I did with it in the end, but I can see it plainly in my memory, even now 40 years later. The paper was much heavier than Kerouac's—I was quite startled when I saw how thin the Museum's scroll is. About a year later the cat reappeared for a couple of days. He seemed to remember me, but had turned into a huge wild street cat, and didn't stay.

Quite Elegant Circumstances

Sleeping in a bay window overlooking Dolores Street. Even after all these years, San Francisco is The City, the home country. L's flat is in the blue building at the corner, kind of hidden behind a smaller tree. It's going ok. (Though I gotta say, today she is right cranky. Better, I think, but cranky.)

See You Up There...

Heading up to the next state north for the study-meeting with Roshi. It will be more difficult this time than when I went in January. They are in their practice period schedule. Wakeup bell at 3:40 AM. All meals with oryoki. Etc.

Really don' wanna. Will anyway. Back Friday.

A decade ago I used to make this trip a lot more often, in parallel with several other people. (A highway patrolman once nailed three separate vehicles full of us, all speeding north up US 285 to get to an ordination ceremony.) Here is a ghost story from those days:

Date: Tue, 20 May 1997
From: (mb in santa fe)
To: (wc)
Subject: ghost

It turns out that the only thing wrong with my answering machine is that the volume was turned down, so I couldn't hear any messages people had left. Wondering if I could figure out what I had missed, I rewound/played back repeatedly until the machine agreed to play me all the messages it had on its tape. Including, as it turned out, very old ones somehow stranded on parts of the tape apparently never recorded over. Back back back in time I went, techno messages from my boss, New Years greetings from my Mom (which year?), suddenly there was a part of a crying message from an unidentifiable voice who had just heard about R's death. October 1995, I just had time to think. And then there was R, not only his voice but his living self: a messsage like probably fifty others I heard over the years. Hi cutie, have you heard from J, how many vehicles do we need to take, give me a call if the arrangements unravel, see you up there.

See you up there.

Since here and now I wasn't on my way to the mountain and R is nineteen months dead, what seemed most likely was that... that what? That what seemed to be now was actually some other past time, or some present parallel time, in which R was, is, still alive. The tape itself seemed more real than any reality I know.

R is now a further ten years dead. When I was on the mountain in January, I didn't offer incense at his stone. Must do it this time.

Two Stones

I spent 72 hours in England once. It was 1989. Roshi had promised me years before that he would take me to Stonehenge, and this was it: I was headed to Germany to help him with his first European sesshin, and we added three days in England to my itinerary. I landed at Heathrow, rented a car; went to Avebury, and Stonehenge, and the Nine Stones in Dorset, and back to Stonehenge. (Philip spent the same three days in Paris.)

Nine Stones is right next to an A road, but at that time there was a dense screen of brush along the roadside. I parked illegally on the verge of the road, and pushed through the vegetation, through the gate, into the small circle.

There was just me, and the stones, for as long as I cared to stay inside the circle. Unlike the mega- megalith sites, the Nine Stones are human sized.
Myself, standing next to the tallest stone