Big Sur/Chapter 26
Altho cody’s said these things I’m very well aware that the real arrangement of the evening is that we’re just going to see Billie together so she can get her kicks meeting me (after hearing about me from him and after reading my books etc.) and in fact Cody has already conferred with Evelyn about how I’m going to be staying at their house in Los Gatos for a month, as of old sleeping in my bag in the backyard not because they dont want me to sleep in the house but it’s my idea, but it’s beautiful anyway to sleep under the stars and anyway I therefore keep out of the way of the family when they get up to go to work and school—At noon they see me shambling in from the big back field yard yawning for coffee—and I’m in line for that, i.e., that’s what I want to do and that’s my plan—But when we run upstairs to Willamine’s apartment and come bursting in to this neat little well arranged pad with goldfish bowl, books, strange doodads, neat kitchen, the whole clean as a pin, and there’s Billie herself a blonde with arched eyebrows exactly like the male Julien blond with arched eyebrows and I yell out “It’s Julien by God it’s Julien!” (and by now I’m drunk anyway because we’ve as of old picked up an old hitch hiker on Bay Shore who says his name is Joe Ihnat and we bought him a bottle and I bought me one too, never will forget old Joe Ihnat in fact somehow because he said he was a Russian and his was an ancient Russian name and when I wrote out our names he said my name was an ancient Russian name also) (tho it’s Breton) (and also told us he’d just been beaten up by a young Negro for no reason in a public toilet and Cody gasps and says to me “I’ve met those Negroes that beat up old men, they're called the Strongarms in San Quentin, they’re all put away among themselves away from the other prisoners, they’re all Negroes and it seems all they wanta do is beat up old defenseless men, he’s tellin the absolute truth’—“But why do they do that?”—“Oh man I dont know they just want hit up on some old man that cant hit back and just beat him and beat him till he’s dead” and Oh the horror of Cody’s knowledge of the world when all is said and done)—So now were sitting with Billie in her pad, outside the window you see the glittering lights of the city again, ah Urbi y Roma, the world again, and she’s got these mad blue eyes, arched eyebrows, intelligent face, just like Julien, I keep saying “Julien goddamit!” and I see even in my drunkenness a little worried flutter in Cody's eyes—The fact of the matter being, Billie and I go for each other like two tons of bricks right there in front of Cody so that when he rises and announces he’s going back to Los Gatos to get some sleep to go to work it’s already well agreed I’m staying right where I am and not only for tonight but for weeks months years.
Poor Cody—Yet you see I’ve already explained why actually subconsciously this is what he really wants to happen but he wont admit it ever and always invents reasons around this to get mad at me and call me a bastard—But aside from Cody I find Billie to be a very companionable strange kid in this lonesome night and I actually NEED to stay with her awhile—In fact both Billie and I explain to Cody why—But there's nothing evil, man-against-man or sinister about any of it, it’s just a strange innocence, a spontaneous burst of love in fact and Cody understands that bettern anybody else anyway so he leaves at midnight saying he’ll be back tomorrow night and all of a sudden I’m alone with a charming woman and we’re talking a blue streak sitting crosslegged facing each other on the floor in a litter of books and bottles.
It gives me a pang of pain and remorse really now to recall that on this first night her apartment was so neat and clean and charming—The chair by the goldfish bowl which I quickly appropriated as my old man chair, where I sat constantly sipping port for a whole week, the kitchen with its intelligent arrangements of spices and eggs in the icebox, and for that matter too the poor little son of Billie sleeping in a well arranged back room (her son from her deceased husband who was also a railroad man)—Elliott the child’s name and I didnt get to see him till later that night—And with the huge packet of Cody’s San Quentin letters in her hand she launches forth on her theories about Cody and eternity but all I can keep saying as I swig from my bottle is “Julien, you’re talking too much! Julien, Julien, my God who’d ever dream I’d run into a woman who looks like Julien. . . you look like Julien but you’re not Julien and on top of that you’re a woman, how goddam strange”—In fact she had to pack me off to bed drunk—But not before our first lovely undertaking of love and everything Cody said about her being absolutely true—But the main thing being that tho she looked like Julien etc. and had Cody’s big sad abstract letters about Karma in a ribbon and actually went out in the morning and earned a hundred a week in fashion modeling she had the most musical beautiful and sad voice I’ve ever heard in my life—The things she’s saying are really rather inane because after all her education is based on really Californian hysterias like the earlier mistress of Cody Rosemarie who also was thin and pale haired and crazy and kept talking abstract—(Like she’s saying “I thought I could do something to ease the contradiction between immanent and universal ethics which I thought was my problem and was what I hoped to gain thru therapy, like, any evolution presupposes an involution and all that kind of thinking” as I sigh, but she does say something interesting once in a while like “While Cody was in prison my main occupation was praying for him, I had an all day going, there was also a bit we did together every evening from 9:00 to 9:09 but he’s out now and something else is happening I’m not sure what . . . but I’m sure we aid the storm when we transcend time in one respect and cant even keep up with it in others. . .”)—But also all kinds of to-me-unimportant and uninteresting crap about channels about people being either closed or open channels and Cody is a big open channel pouring out all his holy gysm on Heaven, I really cant remember, or the destinies, the sighs, the rooftops of all that, the stars are shining down on their poor heads as they draw breath to explain inanities really—Like the letters to her (I glance at them) are all about how they’ve met and their souls have collided in this dimension because of some unfulfilled Karma on another planet and in another plane that is, and now they have to gird themselves to assume this big responsibility to meet some measure of this and that, I dont even wanta go into it—Because also the fact of the matter being, when Willamine talks to me I’m utterly bored, I’m only interested in the sad music of her voice and in the strange circumstance (I guess Karma-like too) that she looks like poor Julien.
Her voice is the main point—She talks with a broken heart—Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it’s almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a night club who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesnt even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess (if women ever wonder)—So that as she’s trying to explain all that nonsense to me (all that philosophy of hers and Cody’s and Cody’s new buddy Perry, coming up the next day) I just sit and marvel and stare at her mouth wondering where all the beauty is coming from and why—And we end up making love sweetly too—A little blonde well experienced in all the facets of lovemaking and sweet with compassion and just too much so that b’dawn were already going to get married and fly away to Mexico in a week—In fact I can see it now, a great big four way marriage with Cody and Evelyn.
For she is the great enemy of Evelyn—She’s not satisfied just to be Cody’s lover and soul heart she wants to go right over there and lay Evelyn down on the line and take Cody away with her forever and to do this she’ll even have a deadend heaven deep love affair with old Jack (same pattern of old)—There’s not much difference between her and Evelyn when you listen to their talk about Cody except in Evelyn’s case I’m always fascinatedly interested—Billie actually bores me tho of course I cant tell her that—Evelyn is still the champ and I wonder about Cody.
O the ups and downs and juggling of women, blondes at that, all in the great magical City of the Gandharvas of San Francisco and here I am alone on a magic carpet with one of em, whee, at first of course it’s a great ball, a great new eye-shattering explosion of experience—Not dreaming, I, what’s to come—For with sad musical Billie in my arms and my name Billie too now, Billie and Billie arm in arm, oh beautiful, and Cody has given his consent in a way, we go roaming the Genghiz Khan clouds of soft love and hope and anybody who’s never done this is crazy—Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah’d and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love—Dont let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of love, it’s awful, were stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama—Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow—The secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves.
How strange in all, and making everything that’s happened in the past weeks, the backs and forths and pains of me in City and Sur, all piled up now rationally like a big construction whereon could be built a divingboard which would enable me clumsily to dive into Billie’s soul and therefore why complain?
In the middle of the night she fetches the little 4 year old boy to show me the spiritual beauty of her son—He is one of the weirdest persons I’ve ever met—He has large liquid brown eyes very beautiful and he hates anybody who comes near his mother and keeps asking her questions constantly like “Why do you stay with him? why is he here, who is he?” or “Why is it dark outside?” or “Why does the sun shine yesterday?” or anything, he’ll just ask questions about everything and she answers every one of them with extreme delight and patience till I say “Doesnt he bother you with all these questions? why dont you let him croon and goof like a little child, he’s tugging at your knee asking EVERYTHING man why dont you just let him singsong?”—She answers “I answer him because I may be missing his next question, everything he asks me and says to me represents something important about the absolute I may be missing”—“What do you mean the absolute?”—“You yourself said everything is the absolute” but of course she’s right and I realize that in my dirty old soul I’m already jealous of Elliott.