The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars by Jerry Ratch (popular books of all time TXT) 📕

through Idaho, always seeking the flattest route possible, following after Lewis and Clarke. Through Twin Falls, Gooding, Mountain Home, Boise, then on into Oregon. When we hit the Columbia River Gorge, a light lit up in my red eyes. Like a heat-seeking missile I headed down that river toward the sea, and we drove all the way down along the river until we came into Portland.
We were exhausted, and when we walked into a record store where they had enormous speakers that were blaring out Janis Joplin singing “Piece of My Heart,” it was like hearing the gospel on the mountain directly from the lips of Ms. Moses. We couldn’t get ourselves to leave that record store, and instead sat around on these enormous comfortable old sofas absorbing the music like bees sotted on honey. We’d been on the road so long, this seemed like the ultimate return to civilization to us. It didn’t seem possible one woman could contain so much soul. And I had seen Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company once in concert down at U.C. Irvine, but this was something else again. We’d been in the wilderness of America just too damned long. When you are out there on the road, America seems like pretty much the same old same old, no matter where you are. Things never seem to change until you hit the big city. Even a place like Portland was big to us. And the size of that music store! It was two stories high inside and absolutely cavernous. And those speakers must have been five feet across, they were so big, and they hung them from the ceiling and it was just wonderful to hear those angelic tones coming out of Janis, our Janis.
I didn’t want to go on. “Portland seems like it might be a nice place to live,” I said. “Let’s stop here.”
Janis Joplin was charming their ears too, like a siren. It took them a minute. Then Steve began to whine. “No, man, we’re going to California. I want to see California. Gre…e…g!” he whined. “Get him off his ass. I want to go to California.”
“Bancroft, will you just shut up and listen to Joplin? Fuck sake!”
“I wanna go to California. I wanna go. C’mon. Jeez! ”
“Nasturtium! Shut the fuck up, will you?”
“Greg, c’mon! C’mon!”
Greg looked over at me. “He’s never going to stop, you know.”
I nodded. I did know that. With the greatest effort I rose from the sofa and looked back at it. “Sofas were once noble flower-eating animals, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, Zbignew Herbert the Polish poet, I know,” Steve said. “But California, man. California! I can almost taste it.”
“You’re getting out at the state line.”
“No, I’m not. Anyway, doesn’t Janis Joplin live there?”
“Not anymore.”
We took Route 5 south out of Portland, then turned west to the coast, after stealing enough to eat from a grocery to last us two days on the road. I wanted to stop at Brookings by the seacoast, almost down to the California border, to visit a poet friend of mine from Irvine, who was living on his brother’s ranch in the mountains next to a river with his girlfriend. This was Bart Leary, who’d gotten a little too far into acid at school and dropped out. He was a terrific young poet but had stopped believing in words and was making amateur films with an 8 mm camera he’d bought. His movies were about the movements of a weed in the wind, things of that sort. “Words are out,” he used to say down at Irvine. “No one reads anymore. Movies are everything now.” All of which turned out to be pretty prescient.
When we drove up this long bumpy road to the ranch, which was along a ridge, his brother, Dick, came out of the house with his wife and two little kids trailing behind. I asked where Bart was, and his brother pointed down the hill at the river. “Bathing with his girlfriend,” Dick said. “They’re down at the river. We ran out of water up here, so…” he trailed off. He turned and went back into the house with his wife and two bare-assed kids traipsing after him like little ducklings.
We went down to the river. From high up on the embankment we could plainly see Bart with this skinny, almost breastless woman, a girl really, sunning themselves on a sandbar. They were both stark naked. Their skin was so white in the bright sunlight that at first they looked like two chunks of human ice in the middle of the stream.
“Jesus, will you look at that,” said Steve. He couldn’t stop looking. “Will you look at that?”
We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We weren’t nudists exactly, so we couldn’t just go barging in on them while they were out in the open, naked that way. It seemed so private somehow, and sacrosanct. So we went back up to the house on the ridge and hung out. About half an hour passed before Bart and his woman went past on a trail behind the house and disappeared into a tiny cabin we hadn’t even noticed. It wasn’t much bigger than an outhouse. About ten minutes later Bart emerged from the cabin with the woman right behind him, her long dark hair still wet from bathing. When he spied us, he acted surprised, even shy.
Bart was living in this cabin without running water or electricity. They were surviving that summer by picking ferns along the ridge for bouquets at flower stands down in Berkeley and San Francisco, places like that. They came out of the shack fully dressed this time, Bart’s skinny little legs hanging out of his shorts. He seemed different. He seemed so domesticated somehow. I guess it made me look at myself, how I was already set in my ways. I was settling into a rigidity, I realized, and I was way too young for that to happen. I needed to open something up about myself. I needed to look at the world in some kind of different, bigger way.
“I read the poems you sent me,” said Bart. “Damn. They were good, real good. I wish I’d written those. When did you become such a damn grown-up?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.”
“It is.” Bart had this way of looking at you out of the side of his eye, shyly, with his face down. It wasn’t always this way. When we’d first met down at school at Irvine, he was as cocky as a male poet could get. Absolutely self-assured. He’d had some terrific early successes in his publishing career and it set him a notch above the rest of us, who were totally unpublished and knew close to nothing about anything. But the acid took the cockiness out of Bart. It gave him some humility, although it also seemed to eat away at his ability with words. And he had ability, believe me. The women on campus used to flock to him like a group of pigeons being fed out of a paper bag. Every night a different one would take him home, until he settled in with a locally famous woman artist. She seemed to tone him down a notch. Or else it may have simply been the acid eating away at his brains.
Myself I had little or no ego. At first I’d come to the writing program at Irvine with some. Then it got kicked right out of me during our criticism classes. Then I gained a little when I’d written a few semi-decent poems. Then it got knocked right out of me when I received my first batch of rejections from magazines. So I’d been up and down the ladder of non-success more than a few times.
Bart took us inside his cabin and proudly showed us this new batch of green beer they had made and bottled by themselves. That night we drank up the entire batch. When we left they had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. They were trying to subsist off the land. I looked at Bart and imagined I saw him getting skinnier and skinnier on into the future. I have no idea to this day whatever happened to him.

* * *

Next we drove down the road to Eureka, California, after first stopping right at the border to let Steve out so he could kiss the ground of California and everything California stood for. In Eureka we dropped in on another poet friend from my writing program named Bo, who was teaching at a junior college called College of the Redwoods. Going down the mountains outside Eureka was where I got the scare of my life when we kept trying to hold the gear shift up in second to gear the truck down, because these huge logging trucks kept swooping down on us from behind. In the mirror I would watch them getting closer and closer to our rear bumper. I was sweating bullets or brains or at least huge drops right out of my forehead. I asked Allison to keep mopping off my brow as we went down that mountain, and one by one the logging trucks would swing out around us whenever they got half the chance, to blow past this bunch of screaming hippies in our red, white and blue Pepsi van, going down the mountain on their turf. The nerve! It was like I could hear them yelling out the curses as they flew past us. If they’d only known the ultimate curse: Nasturtiums! they would yell. Nasturtiums! NASTURTIUMS!
Then our brakes gave out, though fortunately at the bottom of our long descent into Eureka. We all got out and looked at the blue smoking wheels of the Pepsi van. It smelled just awful, like asbestos. None of us knew what to do. I called Bo and got directions to his house, which was out in the sticks at the edge of town. We put the van in first gear and limped slowly all the way there.
Bo lived with his wife Dana in a house with her children from another marriage. The house had a duck pond with actual ducks floating on the surface. Her kids entertained themselves throwing food at the ducks, which would dive to retrieve what didn’t hit them directly. The ducks were pretty adept at catching food in mid-air, hamburger buns, pieces of baloney, sliced pickles, which they would spit out, looking at the kids impudently. Not even a duck, apparently, liked pickles, though I did. I loved pickles, as a matter of fact. I could eat them until I developed a good case of hives.
Bo knew everything there was about mechanical stuff like brake shoes. He got that van up on jacks and started right in taking off the wheels. But then we couldn’t find the right parts at a local auto store, so we had to spend the next week waiting for them to be shipped in from somewhere else. In the meantime, we got a chance to slow down and relax. And Bo took us out at night to some pretty great music at the house of some locals. There was a woman there who played this electric violin, country blues music that was drenched with soul. I didn’t even know you could hook up a violin electrically. It was astounding music. I wanted to weep, it was so beautiful. Of course, I was getting pretty soused too, once I got the chance to quit thinking about the next day’s drive.
Trouble was, it rained damn near every day in