Big Sur/Chapter 25
The silly stupid hiss-the-villain play is alright in itself but just as we arrive at the scene of the chuck wagons and tents all done up real old western style there’s a big fat sheriff type with two sixshooters standing at the admission gate, Cody says “That’s to give it color see” but I’m drunk and as we all pile out of the car I go up to the fat sheriff and start telling him a Southern joke (in fact just the plot of an Erskine Caldwell short story) which he receives with a witless smiling expression or really like the expression of an executioner or a Southern constable listening to a Yankee talk—So naturally I’m surprised later when we go into the cute old west saloon and the kids start banging on the old piano and I join them with big loud Stravinsky chords, here comes two gun sheriff fatty coming in and saying in a menacing voice like T.V. western movies “You cant play that piano”—I'm surprised, turning to Evelyn, to learn that he’s the blasted proprietor of the whole place and if he says I cant play the piano there’s nothing I can do about it legally—But besides that he’s got actual bullets in those six guns—He’s going all out to play the part—But to be yanked from joyful pianothumping with kids to see that awful dead face of negative horror I just jump up and say “Alright, the hell with it I’m leaving anyway” so Cody follows me to the car where I take another swig of white port—“Let’s get the hell out of here” I say—“Just what I was thinkin about,” says Cody, “in fact I’ve already arranged with the director of the play to drive Evelyn and the kids home so we'll just go to the City now”—“Great!”— “And I’ve told Evelyn we’re cuttin out so let’s go.”
“I’m sorry Cody I screwed up your little family party”—“No No” he protests: “Man I have to come to these things you know and be a big hubby and father type and you know I’m on parole and I gotta put up appearances but it’s a drag”—To show what a drag it is we go scootin down that road passing six cars easy as pie—“And I’m GLAD this happened because it gave us an excuse, hee hee titter you know to get outa there, I was thinking for an excuse when it happened, that old fart is crazy you know! he’s a millionaire you know! I've talked to him, that little beady brain, and you be glad you missed hangin around till that performance, man, and that AUDIENCE, ow, ugh, I almost wish I was back in San Quentin but here we go, son!”
So of old we’re alone in a car at night bashing down the line to a specific somewhere, nothing nowhere about it whatever, especially this time, in a way—That white line is feeding into our fender like an anxious impatient electronic quiver shuddering in the night and how beautifully sometimes it curves one side or the other as he smoothly swerves for passing or for something else, avoiding a bump or something—And on the big highway Bay Shore how beautifully he just swings in and out of lanes almost effortlessly and completely unnoticeable passing to the right and to the left without a flaw all kinds of cars with anxious eyes turning to us, altho he’s the only one on the road who knows how to drive completely well—It’s blue dusk all up and down the California world—Frisco glitters up ahead—Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we cant communicate them any more and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books—Too late, too late, the history of everything we’ve seen together and separately has become a library in itself—The shelves pile higher—They’re full of misty documents or documents of the Mist—The mind has convoluted in every tuckaway everywhichaway tuckered hole till there’s no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone old—Mighty genius of the mind Cody whom I announce as the greatest writer the. world will ever know if he ever gets down to writing again like he did earlier—It’s so enormous we both sit here sighing in fact—“No the only writing I done,” he says, “a few letters to Willamine, in fact quite a few, she’s got em all wrapped in ribbons there, I figgered if I tried to write a book or sumptin or prose or sumptin they’d just take it away from me when I left so I wrote her "bout three letters a week for two years—and the trouble of course and as I say and you’ve heard a million times is the mind flows the mind rises and nobody can by any possible o—oh hell, I dont wanta talk about it”—Besides I can see from glancing at him that becoming a writer holds no interest for him because life is so holy for him there’s no need to do anything but live it, writing’s just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface—But if he could! if he would! there I am riding in California miles away from home where my poor cat’s buried and my mother grieves and that’s what I'm thinking.
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow—Hate’s so easy compared—But here I go flattering myself helling headbent to the silliest hate I ever had.