Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

by Joyce Johnson

A museum of the cinema revives Pull My Daisy, the film Jack made with Robert Frank. With trepidation, I go to see it for the first time in twenty years. Its images are like solidified memory. There are Allen, Peter, and Gregory, benign pranksters — all beautiful young men. A familiar sooty light comes in through the loft windows. Dave Amram plays his horn. And Jack, the unseen narrator, is everybody all at once, making perfect, tender, absurd sense. But it’s too bad the women are all portrayed as spoilsports. Could I have remembered Jack’s voice? I keep trying to match it to the one I last heard on the phone in 1964, when he called me up out of the blue in terrible drunken loneliness somewhere out there in America — “You never wanted anything but a little ol’ pea soup.” Which wasn’t really true, of course, but I cried after he hung up. “So what was it all about?” my companion asks as the final credits flash on the screen. “I think it was about the right to remain children.”