Good Blonde

This old Greek reminded me of my Uncle Nick in Brooklyn who'd spent 50 years of his life there after being born in Crete, and wandered down the gray streets of Wolfe Brooklyn, short, in a gray suit, with a gray hat, gray face, going to his various jobs as elevator operator and apartment janitor summer winter and fall, and was a plain old ordinary man talking about politics but with a Greek accent, and when he died it seemed to me Brooklyn hadn't changed and would never change, there would always be a strange sad Greek going down the gray streets. I could picture this man on the beach wandering around the white streets of San Francisco, looking at girls, "wandering around and looking at things as they are" as the Chinese say, "patting his belly," even, as Chuang-tse says. "I like these shells." He showed me a few shells he'd picked. "Make nice ashtray, I have lots ashtrays in my house."

"What do you think? You think all this is a dream?"

"What?"

"Life,"

"Here? Now? What you mean a dream, we're awake, we talk, we see, we got eyes for to see the sea and the sand and the sky, if you dream you no see it."

"How we know we're not dreaming?"

"Look my eyes are open ain't they?" He watched me as I washed my dishes and put things away.

"I'm going to try to hitchhike to San Francisco or catch a freight, I don't wanta wait till tonight."

"You mens always in hurry, hey, he he he he" and he laughed just like Old Uncle Nick, hands clasped behind his back, stooped slightly, standing over sand caves his feet had made, kicking little tufts of sand grass. In his green gray eyes which were just like the green gray sea I saw the yawning eternity not only of Greece but of America and myself.

"Well, I go now," says I hoisting my pack to my shoulder.

"I walk you to the beach." Long before we'd stopped talking I'd seen the girl come out of the bushes, shameful and slow, and stroll on back to the bathhouse, then the boy came out, five minutes later. It made me sad I didn't have a girl to meet me in the bushes, in the exciting sand among leaves, to lie there swapping breathless kisses, groping at clothes, squeezing shoulders. Me and the old Greek sighed to see them sneak off. "I was a young man once," he said. At the bathhouse we shook hands and I went off across the mainline track to the little store on the corner where I'd bought the wine and where now they were playing a football game from Michigan loud on the radio and just then the sun came out anyway and I saw all the golden wheatfields of America Football Time stretching out clear back to the East Coast.

"Damn," said I, "I'll just hitchhike on that highway" (101) seeing the fast flash of many new cars. The old Greek was still wandering on the water's edge when I looked back, right on that mystical margin mentioned by Whitman where sea kisses sand in the endless sigh kiss of time. Like the three bos in Lordsburg New Mexico his direction in the void seemed so much sadder than my own, they were going east to hopeless sleeps in burlap in Alabama fields and the eventual Texas chaingang, he was going up and down the beach alone kicking sand ... but I knew that in reality my own direction, going up to San Francisco to see the gang and whatever awaited me there, was no higher and no lower than his own humble and unsayable state. The little store had a tree in front, shade, I laid my pack down and went in and came out with a tencent ice cream on a stick and sat awhile eating, resting, then combed my hair with water out of an outside faucet and went to the highway all ready to thumb. I walked a few blocks up to the light and got on the far side and stood there, pack at my feet, for a good half hour during which time I got madder and madder and finally I was swearing to myself "I will never hitchhike again, it's getting worse and worse every goddamn year." Meanwhile I kept a sharp eye on the rails a block toward the sea watching for convenient freight trains. At the moment when I was the maddest, and was standing there, thumb out, completely infuriated and so much so that (I remember) my eyes were slitted, my teeth clenched, a brand new cinnamon colored Lincoln driven by a beautiful young blonde in a bathingsuit flashed by and suddenly swerved to the right and put to a stop in the side of the road for me. I couldn't believe it. I figured she wanted road information. I picked up my pack and ran. I opened the door and looked in to smile and thank her.

She said "Get in. Can you drive?" She was a gorgeous young blonde girl of about 22 in a pure white bathingsuit, barefooted with a little ankle bracelet around her right ankle. Her bathingsuit was shoulderless and low cut. She sat there in the luxurious cinnamon sea in that white suit like a model. In fact she was a model. Green eyes, from Texas, on her way back to the City.

"Sure I can drive but I don't have a license."

"You drive all right?"

"I drive as good as anybody."

"Well I'm dog tired, I've been driving all the way from Texas without sleep, I went to see my family there" (by now she had the heap jet gone up the road and went up to 60 and kept it there hard and clean on the line, driving like a good man driver). "Boy," she said, "I sure wish I had some Benzedrine or sumptin to keep me awake. I'll have to give you the wheel pretty soon."

"Well how far you going?"

"Far as you are I think ... San Francisco."

"Wow, great." (To myself: who will ever believe I got a ride like this from a beautiful chick like that practically naked in a bathingsuit, wow, what does she expect me to do next?) "And Benzedrine you say?" I said. "I've got some here in my bag, I just got back from Mexico, I got plenty."

"Crazy!" she yelled. "Pull it out. I want some."

"Baby you'll drive all the way when you get high on that stuff, Mexican you know."

"Mexican Shmexican just give it to me."

"OK." Grinning I began dumping all my dirty old unwashed rags and gear and claptraps of cookpot junk and pieces of food in wrapper on the floor of her car searching feverishly for the little tubes of Benny suddenly I couldn't find anymore. I began to panic. I looked in all the flaps and sidepockets. "Goddamn-it where is it!" I kept worrying the smell of my old unwashed clothes would be repugnant to her, I wanted to find the stuff as soon as possible and repack everything away.

"Never mind man, take your time," she said looking straight ahead at the road, and in a pause in my search I let my eye wander to her ankle bracelet, as damaging a sight as Cleopatra on her poop of beaten gold, and the sweet little snowy bare foot on the gas pedal, enough to drive a man mad. I kept wondering why she'd really picked me up.

I asked her "How come you picked up a guy like me? I never seen a girl alone pick up a guy."

"Well I tell you I need someone to help me drive to the City and I figured you could drive, you looked like it anyway ..."

"O where are those Bennies!"

"Take your time."

"Here they are!"

"Crazy! I'll pull into that station up ahead and we'll go in and have a Coke and swallow em down." She pulled into the station which also had an inside luncheonette. She jumped out of the car barefooted in her low-cut bathingsuit as the attendant stared and ordered a full tank as I went in and bought two bottles of Coke to go out, cold. When I came back she was in the car with her change, ready to go. What a wild chick. I looked at the attendant to see what he was thinking. He was looking at me enviously. I kept having the urge to tell him the true story.

"Here," and I handed her the tubes, and she took out two. "Hey, that's too many, your top'll fly out ... better take one and a half, or one. I take one myself."

"I don't want no one and a half, I want two."

"You've had it before?"

"Of course man and everything else."

"Pot too?"

"Sure pot ... I know all the musicians in L.A. and the City, when I come into the Ramador Shelly Manne sees me coming and stops whatever they're playing and they play my theme song which is a little bop arrangement."

"How does it go?"

"Ha! and it goes: boop boop be doodleya dap."

"Wow, you can sing."

"I walk in, man, and they play that, and everybody knows I'm back." She took her two Bennies and swigged down, and buzzed the car up to a steady 70 as we hit the country north of Santa Barbara, the traffic thinning and the road getting longer and straighter. "Long drive to San Francisco, four hundred miles just about. I hope these Bennies are good, I'd like to go all the way."

"Well if you're tired I can drive," I said but hoped I wouldn't have to drive, the car was so brand new and beautiful. It was a '55 Lincoln and here it was October 1955. Beautiful, lowslung, sleek. Zip, rich. I leaned back with my Benny in my palm and threw it down with the Coke and felt good. Up ahead suddenly I realized the whole city of San Francisco would be all bright lights and glittering wide open waiting for me this very night, and no strain, no hurt, no pain, no freight train, no sweating on the hitchhike road but up there zip zoom inside about eight hours. She passed cars smoothly and went on. She turned on the radio and began looking for jazz, found rock 'n' roll and left that on, loud. The way she looked straight ahead and drove with no expression and sending no mincing gestures my way or even telepathies of mincingness, you'd never believe she was a lovely little chick in a bathingsuit. I was amazed. And in the bottom of that scheming mind I kept wondering and wondering (dirtily) if she hadn't picked me up because she was secretly a sexfiend and was waiting for me to say "Let's park the car somewhere and make it" but something so inviolately grave about her prevented me from saying this, more than that my own sudden bashfulness (as the holy Benny began taking effect) prevented me from making such an importunate and really insulting proposition seeing I'd just met the young lady. But the thought stuck and stuck with me. I was afraid to turn and look at her and only occasionally dropped my eyes to that ankle bracelet and the little white lily foot on the gas pedal. And we talked and talked. Finally the Benny began hitting us strong after Los Alamos and we were talking a blue streak, she did most of the talking. She'd been a model, she wanted to be an actress, so forth, the usual beautiful-California-blonde designs but finally I said "As for me I don't want anything ... I think life is suffering, a suffering dream, and all I wanta do is rest and be kind somewhere, preferably in the woods, under a tree, live in a shack."

"Ain't you ever gonna get married?"

"Been married twice and I've had it."

"Well you oughta take a third crack at it, maybe this time you'd hit a homerun."

"That ain't the point, in the first place I wouldn't wanta have children, they only born to die."

"You better not tell that to my mom and dad, they had eight kids in Texas, I was the second, they've had a damn good long life and the kids are great, you know what my youngest brother did when I walked in the house last week and hadn't seen him for a year: he was all grown up tall and put on a rock-'n'-roll record for me and wanted me to do the lindy with him. O what laughs we had in the old homestead last week. I'm glad I went."

"I'll bet when you were a little girl you had a ball there in Texas huh? hunting, wandering around."

"Everything man, sometimes I think my new life now modeling and acting in cities isn't half as good as that was."

"And there you were on long Texas nights Grandma readin the Bible, right?"

"Yeah and all the good food we made, nowadays I have dates in good restaurants and man------"

"Dates ... you ain't married hey?"

"Not yet, pretty soon."

"Well what does a beautiful girl like you think about?" This made her turn and look at me with bland frank green eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know ... I'd say, for a man, (continued on page 192)Good Blonde (continued from page 140) like me, what I say is best for him ... but for a beautiful girl like you I guess what you're doing is best." I wasn't going to say get thee to a nunnery, she was too gone, too pretty too, besides she wouldn't have done it by a long shot, she just didn't care. In no time at all we were way up north of Los Alamos and coming into a little bumper to bumper traffic outside Santa Maria where she pulled up at a gas station and said:

"Say do you happen to have a little change?"

"About a dollar and a half."

"Hmmmm ... I want to call longdistance to South City and tell my man I'll be in at eight or so."

"Call him collect if he's your man."

"Now you're talkin like a man" she said and went trottin barefoot to the phone booth in the driveway and got in and made a call with a dime. I got out of the car to stretch out, high and dizzy and pale and sweating and excited from the Benzedrine, I could see she was the same way in the phone booth, chewing vigorously on a wad of gum. She got her call and talked while I picked up an orange from the ground and wound up and did the pitcher-on-the-mound bit to stretch my muscles. I felt good. A cool wind was blowing across Santa Maria, with a smell of the sea in it somehow. The palm trees waved in a cooler wind than the one in Barbara and L.A. Tonight it would be the cool fogs of Frisco again! After all these years! She came out and we got in.

"Who's the guy."

"He's my man, Joey King, he runs a bar in South City ... on Main Street."

"Say I used to be a yardclerk in the yards there and I'd go to some of those bars on Main Street for a beer ... with a little cocktail glass neon in front, with a stick in it?"

"All the bars have that around here" she laughed and gunned on up the road fast. Pretty soon, yakking happily about jazz and even singing a lot of jazz, we got to San Luis Obispo, went through town, and started up the pass to Santa Margarita.

"There you see it," I said, "see where the railroad track winds around to go up the pass, I was a brakeman on that for years, on drizzly nights I'd be squattin under lumber boards ridin up that pass and when I'd go through the tunnels I'd hold my bandanna over my nose not to suffocate."

"Why were you riding on the outside of the engine."

"Because I was the guy assigned to puttin pops up and down, air valves, for mountain brakes, all that crap ... I don't think it would interest you."

"Sure, my brother's a brakeman in Texas. He's about your age."

"I'm thirty-three."

"Well he's a little younger but his eyes are greener than yours, yours are blue."

"Yours are green."

"No, mine are hazel."

"Well that's what green-eyed girls always say."

"What do hazel-eyed girls always say?"

"They say, hey now." We were (as you see) talking like two kids and completely unself-conscious and by this time I'd quite forgotten the lurking thought of us sexing together in some bushes by the side of the road, though I kept smelling her, the Benny sweat, which is abundant, and perfumy in the way it works, it filled the car with a sweet perfume, mingled with my own sweat, in our noses if not in our minds there was a thought of sweating love ... at least in my mind. Sometimes I felt the urge to just lay my head in her lap as she drove but then I got mad and thought "Ah hell it's all a dream including beauty, leave the Angel Alone you dirty old foney Duluoz" which I did. To this day I never know what she wanted, I mean, what she really secretly thought of me, of picking me up, and she got so high on the Benny she drove all the way anyway, or perhaps she woulda drove all the way anyway, I don't know. She balled up over the pass in the gathering late afternoon golden shadows of California and came out on the flats of the Margarita plateau, where we stopped for gas, where in the rather cool mountain wind she got out and ran to the ladies room and the gas attendant said to me:

"Where'd you pick her up?" thinking the car was mine.

"She picked me up, pops."

"Well I oughta be glad if I was you."

"I ain't unglad."

"Sure is a nice little bundle."

"She's been wearing that bathingsuit clear from Texas."

"Geez." She came out and we went up the Salinas valley as it got dark slowly with old orange sunsets behind the rim where I'd seen bears as a brakeman, at night, standing by the track as we'd in the Diesel ball by with a hundred-car freight behind us, and one time a cougar. Wild country. And the floor of the dry Salinas riverbottom is all clean white sand and bushes, ideal for bhikkuing (outdoor camping where nobody bothers you) because you can hide good and hide your campfire and the only people to bother you are cattle, and snakes I guess, and beautiful dry climate with stars, even now at dusk, I could see flashing in the pale plank of heaven, like bhaghavat nails. I told Pretty about it:

"Someday I'm gonna bring my pack and a month's essential groceries right down to that riverbottom and build a little shelter with twigs and stuff and a tarpaulin or a poncho and lay up and do nothing for a month."

"What you wanta do that for? There's no fun in that."

"Sure there is."

"Well I can't figure all this out but ... it's all right I guess." At times I didn't like her, at one point I definitely didn't like her because there was something so cold and yawny distant about her. I felt that in her secret bedroom she probably yawned a lot and didn't know what to do with herself and to compensate for that had a lot of boyfriends who bought her expensive presents (just because she was beautiful, which compensated not for her inside unbeautiful feeling), and going to restaurants and bars and jazz clubs and yooking it up because there was nothing else inside. And I thought: "Truly, I'm better off without a doll like this ... out there in that riverbottom, pure and free, what immensities I'd have, in real riches ... alone, in old clothes, cooking my own food, finding my own peace ... instead of sniffin around her ankles day in day out wonderin whether in some mean mood she's going to throw me out anyway and then I would have to clap her one or something and all of it a crock for sure ---" I didn't dare tell her all this, besides the point being she wouldn't have been interested in the least. It got dark, we flew on, soon we saw the sealike flats of Salinas valley stretching on both sides of us, with occasional brown farmlamps, the stars overhead, a vast storm cloud gathering in the night sky in the east and the radio announcer predicting rain for the night, then finally far up ahead the jeweled cluster of Salinas the city and airport lights. Outside Salinas on the four lane, about five miles, suddenly she said "The car's run out of gas, Oho" and she began wobbling the car from side to side in a graceful dance.

"What you doin that for?"

"That's to splash what's left of the gas into the carburetor ... I can do this for a few miles, let's pray we see a station or we don't get to South City by eight." She swayed and wobbled along, grinning faintly over her wheel, and in the cuddly dark and little emergency of the night, I began to love her again and thought "Ah well and what a strong sweet angel to spend the rest of your life with, though, damn." Pretty soon the wobbles were wider and the speed slower and she finally pulled over by the side of the road and parked and said "That's that, we're out of gas."

"I'll go out and hail a car."

"While you're doing that I'll go in the backseat and put something over my bathingsuit, it's getting cold," which it was. I unsuccessfully tried to hail down cars for five minutes or so, they were all zipping at a steady 70, and I said:

"Say when you're ready come on out, when they see you they'll stop." She came out and we joked a bit in the dark dancing and showing our legs at the cars and finally a big truck stopped and I ran after it to talk to him. It was a big burly guy eager to help, he'd seen the blonde. He got out a chain and tied her car on and off we went at about 15 miles per hour to the gas station three miles down. He had airbrakes and she was worried about ramming him and hoped he wouldn't go too fast. He went perfect. In the gas station driveway he got out to admire her some more.

"Boy, that's a little bit of sumptin" he said to me as she went to the toilet.

"She picked me up in Santa Barbara, she's been driving all the way from Texas alone."

"Well, well, you're a luck hitchhiker." He undid the chain. She came out and stood around chatting with the big truckdriver and the attendant. Now she was clad in tightfitting black slacks and a neat keen throwover of some kind, and sandals, in which she padded like a little tightfit Indian. I felt humble and foolish with the two men staring at her and me waiting by the car for my poor world ride. She came back and off we went, getting through Salinas and out on the dark road and now finally we found some real fine jazz from San Francisco, the Pat Henry show or some other show, and we didn't speak much anymore but just sang with the music and kept our eyes glued on the headlamp swatch and the inwinding kiss-in of the white line in the road where it again became a two-laner. Soon we were going through Watsonville, a little behind schedule.

"Here's where I did most of my work as a brakeman ... insteada sleeping in the railroad dormitory I'd go out to the sandbottom of that river, the Pajaro, and cook woodfires and eat hotdogs like last night and sleep in the sand ..."

"You're always in some riverbottom or other." The music on the radio got louder and louder as we began to approach San Jose and the City. The storm to the east hadn't formed yet. It was exciting to be coming into the City now. On Bayshore we really felt it, all the cars flashing by both ways in the lanes, the lights, the roadside restaurants, the antennas, nothing had looked like that all day, the big city, "The Apple," I said, "the Apple of California but have you ever been to the Apple, New York!" to which she replied: "Yeah man."

"But nothing wrong with this little old town, it's got everything ... isn't it ... don't you feel a funny feeling in your belly coming into the City."

"Yeah man I always do." We agreed on that and talked about it, and soon we were coming into South San Francisco where I suddenly realized she was going to let me out in only a few minutes and I hadn't anticipated parting from her ever, somehow. She pulled up right smack in front of the little station where I'd worked as a yardclerk and there were the same old tracks, I knew every number and name of them, and the same old overpass, and the spurs leading off to the slaughterhouses Armour and Swift east, the same sad lamps and sad dim red switchlights in the darkness. The car stopped, our bodies were still vibrating as we sat in the stillness, the radio booming.

"Well I'll get out and let you get home," I said, "and I needn't tell you how great it was and how glad I am you gave me this great ride."

"Oh man, nothing, it was fun."

"Why don't you give me your phone, I'll call you and we'll go down and hear Brue Moore, I hear he's in town."

"O he's my favorite tenor, I've seen him ... OK, I'll give you my address, I haven't got a phone in yet."

"OK." She wrote out the address in my little breastpocket notebook and I could see she was anxious to get on home to her man so I said "OK, here I go," and got my bag and went out and stuck my hand in to shake and off she went, up Main Street, probably to her pad to take a shower and dress up and go down to her man's bar. And I put my bag on my back and walked down the same old homey familiar rail and felt glad ... probably gladder than she did, but who knows? It almost brought tears to my eyes to see my old railyards again, as though I'd been brought up to them on a magic carpet just to see them and remember, the whole trip had been so ephemeral and easy and fast, in fact the whole trip from Mexico City 4000 gory miles away ... as though some ruling God in the sky had said "Jack I want you to cry when you remember your past life, and to accomplish this. I'm going to shoot you to that spot" and there I was, walking numbly on the same old railside cinders and there across the way the long sorrowful pink neon saying Bsethlehem West Coast Steel about five long blocks of it and I used to take down the numbers of boxcars and gons in drags that were even longer than that and measure their length by the length of the huge neon: beyond which you could hear frogs croaking in the airport marsh, where mountains of tin scrap soaked in scum water, and rats scurried, and occasional pure Chinese birds sailed around (at night, bats). I went into the old station (actually a brand new little station still fresh with new bricks) and consulted the timetable and saw that I had a train to the City in five minutes, everything perfect. As of yore, to celebrate, I stuck a nickel in my old candy machine and got out a Pay Day and munched on that on the platform, stole a newspaper from the rack, and it was just like old times 11:15 going home with work done. But the train had changed, it came being pulled by a new type of small engine I'd never seen (electric) and the cars were doubledeckers with commuters sitting up and below like dolls in the bright lights of the new ceilings. "Too new, too fancy" I thought, regretting it, and got on and got my ticket punched by a conductor whose face I vaguely remembered from the trainmen's lockers at Third and Townsend. On we went to the City. Bayshore Yards appeared after a while, with the old redbrick 1890 roundhouse gloomy like Out Our Way cartoons of 1930 factories in the night, smoke of steampots beyond, the distant marvel and visible miracle of Oakland suddenly seen casting its infinitesimal and as-if-innumerable lights on the far bay waters, and then swosh into the tunnel, coming out right smack in the City with white tenements and houses on grassy cliffs by the side of the dug-in rail canyon, and then the long slow curve, the long slow appearance of the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, so sad, so reddish, so mysterious and Chinese, and the general purple brownness of the yards, red and green switchlights, funny switchmen at the crossings and the train slowing down as it comes into the station to the deadend blocks to stop.

Everybody got up and got out. I went slowly to savor everything. The smell of San Francisco was great, it is always the same, at night, a compoundment of sea, fog, cinders, coalsmoke, taffy and dust. And somehow the smell of wine, maybe from all the broken bottles on Third Street. Now I was really exhausted and headed up Third Street, after a slow nostalgic survey of the Third and Townsend station, looking desultorily if there was anybody I knew, like maybe Cody, or Mal. I went straight to the little old Cameo Hotel on the corner of Harrison and Third, where for 75 cents a night you could always get a clean room with no bedbugs and nice soft mattresses with soft old clean sheets, clean enough, not snow-white Fab by any means but better, and nice quilts, and old frayed carpets and quiet sleep: that's the main thing. The clerk in the cage was the same Hindu I'd known there in 1954, he didn't remember me or the night he'd told me the long story of his boyhood in India and his father who owned 700 camels and the time he'd peeked at a woman's religious ritual where he claimed there were some virgins and barren women walking around a stone phallus and sitting on it. I didn't bring it up but followed him up the stairs and down the sad old hall to my door, and the room. I took all my clothes off and got in the cool smooth sheets and said "Now I'll just lay like this for fifteen minutes in the dark and rest and then I'll get up, dress and go down to Chinatown and have a nice feed: I'll have sweet and sour prawn and cold broiled duck, yessir, I'll splurge a dollar and a half on that" and I uncapped my little poorboy of tokay wine I'd bought in the store downstairs and took a swig and in fifteen minutes, after three swigs and dreamy thoughts with a serene smile realizing I was at last back in my beloved San Francisco and surely must have a lot of crazy adventures ahead of me, I was asleep. And slept the sleep of the justified.