up in berry creek

i recognized the black box angela was carrying into the kitchen. it was the same case i once had for my 1940’s smith corona clipper (r.i.p.) i said something. she smiled. “i found it in my grandmother’s closet.” the case was shiny black and unmarred. its perfect condition was the one thing which gave me doubt. all the typewriter cases i had known had been beat to hell. this looked like a thing just bought at woolworth’s in 1945. we set it on the counter and opened it. it was a black 1940’s smith corona looking exactly like the one i had destroyed while typing 4,000 pages, 2,000,000 words about 10 years ago. it did not have the “clipper” decal, which meant it was several years older than mine. the typer was flawless, as if it had never been used. it appeared that the first ribbon was still in it: smith corona. it typed a little stiff at first and the ink was faint, but it warmed up to us nicely. it was the best typewriter i had ever touched and i wanted to bring it home, but i didn’t say anything. i’d let angela decide whether her grandmother’s typewriter came home or stayed at the cabin. we left the typewriter and paper on the counter by the refrigerator, under a fluorescent light and we both went to it when the mood struck. one of us was at it often enough to suggest there was a writer about. we would write a fractured chronicle of our stay at the cabin in berry creek with sascha the german shepherd as our disinterested editor.

welcome cabin this typewriter sure does stick. this is a very old thing. happy new year it is snowing.

things to do in the cabin in the snow:

build a fire.

keep a fire going.

add wood to the fire.

get wood from pile.

remove ashes from fire.

add paper to increase fire.

dampen wood stove.

open stove door to increase fire.

cut kindling for fire.

squirt lighter fluid on fire to keep going.

put kettle of water on stove for humidity.

recheck fire.

add more wood.

we were working with damp wood and the fire would not burn the larger logs. i depleted the wood pile of manzanita kindling and small logs. i dried them on the floor and on top of the woodstove. california had received record rainfall before we decided to light a fire. by the last day we had bought split logs from the store and they burned very well. the stove kept us warm for five days, during which time it caused too much anxiety for a fire.

mountain silence contains no hope. mountain silence trumps conflict. it is not like ocean silence, which is not silence. mountain silence highlights your breathing. it breaks out action. you are on the couch reading your life to the vision of dropping snow. silence is not science. the science of domestic abuse. science sweetens war. science will stop science. silence is arrival without need or promise.

peter died. his liver and kidneys failed and he blew up. i talked to his aunt this morning, joan, my former landlady in maine. angela had anticipated his death. you don’t enter a nursing home at 53 unless you are a goner. peter came to visit six months ago while i was living in maine. he was thoughtful and kind, introspective and spiritual late in his life. he told me he had been sober for 20 years, but his liver did not agree. peter was on the u.s. national shooting team in the 1990s and he could split an pencil eraser head at 30 feet with a pistol. he took shooting up late in life and excelled. he did not see his target, he knew where it was. peter had an exquisitely arrogant tone when we met. i ignored him and scorned him in the beginning, ice to his approaches. it was classic alcoholic arrogance combined with los angeles superficiality. within days i brought him down to the ground and stripped him naked. our fraternity was honest. before he left back for los angeles, we drove to the cemetery and he left a golf club on his father’s grave. his father, a baptist minister, had given him the club before his own death. the reverend was a fine golf player too. we sat in the cemetery that rainy day and drank. peter knew he was dying. on his road trip east from los angeles, he bled from his mouth, ass, and penis. his liver was failing. despite his sickness, peter looked good and handsome, tall with a full head of dark hair. he was animated, funny and fun, and very generous. he bought food for the house. we cooked together, laughing over sliced onions and roasted chicken. we cooked seven course meals in a ballet which required little discussion of the food. i got a bad tooth ache and he persuaded me to see a dentist and he drove me an hour to bangor, where after my exam, we sat in the lot cracking beers and watching the women. at home he drank white zinfandel, trying to go easy on his liver, but it kept him in bed sick on some days. there were days when peter did not emerge from his room, yet i still wondered how sick he was, hoped that he had time. when peter left to return to los angeles, i was not certain that i’d ever see him again. i believed there was a chance. he said he would come back.

burned my fingers on the stove handle.

sascha drinks toilet water while his bowl is full of fresh water.

the wooden handle came off in my hands. i use my handkerchief to open and close the stove.

cold rain laughs/german shepherd ears/kermit ass makes popcorn. kermit ass is angela who has been wearing lounge wear the color of kermit the frog. i can’t stand it.

angela and i are working on this together. satirical remarks about me are a result of the y chromosome. kermit ass just sneezed into the popcorn bowl.

question: can this frog sit on your log? : )

what do you call a frog’s home? not a den or a nest or a hive . . .!

snow falling around the cabin in the woods . . .

deer have owned this place until sascha.

sascha melts to our legs like warming snowdrifts.

pat tending fires like a father.

unsure and constantly checking, adjusting.

perfecting and perfect.

he is worried about being awake for the fire.

so i tell him he is like a new father and he laughs it off.

sascha looks like a fruit bat. the fruit bat dog thing on the couch, black face leaning into humanity. ears erect, muzzle hanging dozing nostriles.

rain deer: the deer created in your mind by the sound of rain falling in the woods. kermit ass got a photo of real deer this morning at the bottom of the driveway in the snow, a silhouette slipping behind the snowy redwoods and manzanita. the photo came out black and white on color film, except for the brown leaves on a tree in the foreground.

that early lucidity is lost by years, experience, alcohol, the collisions with love and death. by the time you know your craft, you are losing your edge. like all journeys, it’s about your gait. five years is what you get – the open window you walk through on air. you know it when you’re hot, but like an animal, you don’t see your death.

paper plates. sascha with his toilet bowl. angela walks away and excludes me from her anger, even though it can’t be done. this morning i cleaned the ashes out of the bottom of the stove and put them in a plastic five-gallon bucket. i didn’t know they were still hot. i put the bucket on the rug in front of the stove and forgot about it. it had looked like inert gray ash, so no hurry to dump it outside. a little while later i moved the bucket and when i lifted it, the ashes fell out the bottom, right though a hole melted through the plastic and into the synthetic rug. the heat burned the finish off the linoleum floor. it was my fault and angela says that will make it worse in her parents’ eyes. angela doesn’t know what to do. accidents happen, but she doesn’t know what to say.  she walks off.  i know she knows what to think, but she will resist thinking it until her tour of self punishment is completed.

retreat into the angry cell. flow stopped. no omniscience. no sharing. i know you’re writing about me, she says. you’re damn right. i check to see if i’m alive hourly and you’re hung up on tainted linoleum. where does this love of garbage come from? we all must now contemplate the status of an inanimate object. this chick really drags me down sometimes with her material commitments. i’ve been nearly beaten to death in the street and gave it less time than she’s giving these plastic squares and rectangles. i can’t be bothered by her superficiality and family dysfunction. i can be bothered by her disregard for me.

yes, please don’t be bothered. thank you.

it’s not the slaughter

of

pigs

cows

turkeys

fish

that is the sin

it’s raising them

the bullet and net

take them

out of the

pathetic existences

we gave them

hitching up the mountain was easy, i thought it would be until half-way to the store on foot, when i doubted. that’s when a tan guy with a bushy white mustache stopped. a cigarette hung from his lips. he was fine, but in the seat behind me was a growling rotweiller. “i don’t know,” he said as i climbed in. “yeah, maybe we better not,” i said. the dog had already growled at me through the open back window when the guy had pulled into the sand on the side of the road. as i leaned into the truck, the threat was more imminent. i had had a girlfriend with a rotweiller that was sweet and goofy, but this one was unnerved and defensive. i climbed in. the dog was a large male, “still a pup,” he laughed. it must have divined something acceptable about me and we spent the ride with him sniffing my shoulders and the back of my head. maybe he smelled sascha and knew i was a dog to respect. the man drove a white toyota pick-up, beat.

in a smile she said i want to fuck you and i like you.

i buy the beer and hit the windy road, down the mountain to my wood stove or bust. here comes a blue caravan making the curves . . . the guy is young with a clean-shaven face except for his handle-bar mustache. he has coils of waxed hair on the sides of his face and a bible on the dashboard. he is the youngest person i have ever seen wearing a handle-bar mustache. he tells me his name is ron. i tell him my name and we shake hands. he is headed to walmart, he laughs. he tells me he is from pennsylvania. but he was from tennessee first. i say my grandmother was, is pennsylvania dutch. he asks me what town, but i don’t know. he tells me there are a lot of them there, the dutch and the germans. same thing, he says, but there is a difference between the germans and the dutch though neither of us can think of what it is. ron is gay. “but tennessee,” he says, like he loves the state and misses his home. i don’t mention that angela and i and derek are going to tennessee in the spring. sun records. graceland. the gibson factory. the blues. it just would have been too much of a coincidence to talk about. i ride in wonder that this van is on the road. it is dirty as an engine compartment and the side is dented deep. it is an absolute piece of shit that could break down before we reach the cabin and i would be entangled in automotive repairs. i look at the bible again. i look at the guy sitting next to me, a gay doc holiday. he takes me past our place because i miss the gate and driveway, which are invisible coming down the hill. i get home with the beer and sascha is happy and the stove needs more wood.

 

spoiled

by the fire, i am rereading a moveable feast. it’s all i can do to read this bullshit without vomiting up the oysters and white wine . . . let me have a shot of rum and then a beer and then a shot of rum and then a jim beam and a beer and where did i put those psilocybin mushrooms?

a moveable boast

he hung his worn

felt hat

on the hook

inside the clean

well-lighted café

he liked

and sat down

to work on his

suicide

he was poor

and struggling

compared to scott

and was on

his way

to see gertrude stein

when he ducked

out

of the paris winter rain

to have

a couple of rum martiniques

and write

one true sentence

he finished his story

and ordered a plate

of oysters and

white wine

that washed away

the metallic taste

he and hadley

must go

to austria

to the mountains

for a few months

where there is no rain

only sun and snow

they’ll keep

the paris flat

in the hotel

where verlaine died

and rent a place

in the mountains

for more money

but he has the money

because

he just sold

three articles to Toronto

(& hadley inherited

a fortune)

in writing, he said

what you leave out

is most important:

-         his family is rich

-         hadley’s family is richer

-         he grew up with

five servants in the house

and has one in paris

for six months

in a rooming house

i lived on ramen noodles

writing my first novel

and contracted

scurvy

and eight teeth fell out

what i wish to leave out are:

-         the ramen noodles

-         the dealers

-         and imbeciles

-         and my most

frequent caller,

a guy who murdered

his best friend

trout fishing

i’m too malnourished

and tired

to pose

outside shakespeare & co.

i just sold

three articles

to the boston globe

paid rent

on this room

and put the rest down

on a life raft

i’d gather hemingway knew it, but would never credit that masculine prose to a woman. in the beginning, hemingway was a hack who got his newspaper jobs through family connections. his letters, hadley’s letters, while he was a reporter in kansas city and toronto, reveal she had the “mot juste” before earnest ever heard of it. her writing is lean and rhythmical. she was a keen observer and expressive. she wrote in a human voice that evoked. i have read hemingway’s short stories from those days and they are unevocative and journalistic, egotistical ramblings. hadley did him a favor when she left the rest of them on the platform at the train station. the other writer who preceded hemingway and who he never mentions is jack london, the first writer in history to make a million dollars from his writing. london accomplished this during hem’s young adulthood. london wrote of courage. london’s “to build a fire” is a veritable template for hem’s best work. hadley and london. the lean, “right word,” belonged to hadley, who was much less innocent than hem depicted her in a moveable feast. it always takes two, love the accomplice of art: hadley was the brains without ambition and hem was the marketing man and thief. his depiction of her comes across as an intentional marginalization. hem’s writing career depended on nepotism. first the newspapers, then sherwood anderson, whom he fucked good and well when he no longer had use for him, and then scott, his ticket to fame. the best book he ever wrote, the most revolutionary and daring, was in our time, his first, when he was with hadley. for the next 30 years he jerked off on his roof. in 1960, hem was bitching. he wasn’t making any money. he was bringing in only $100,000 a year in royalties. the poor writer was acting poorly. in the early 20s, writing in our time, he uses a sharpener on his pencil because a knife is too wasteful. in the 1950s he is bitching that he got only a hundred grand from hollywood for the old man and the sea when he had previously gotten that amount for a short story, “the snows of kilamanjaro.” when he was with hadley, hem said “never complain.”

i walk out the cabin door singing the theme to “sanford and son” and a woodpecker picks up the melody and rhythm almost note for note.