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

Eureka. The sun would finally break out about midday for about an hour, then it would get swallowed up in this fog. It got really wearing to be in that grayness all the time. People would sort of wait around for the sun to appear, then we’d all run outdoors yelling like Comanches until it went away. The next thing you’d think about was drinking. And people got on your nerves when you were cooped up together inside all the time. Bo and his wife really started sniping at each other. We started to feel like we needed to get the wheels back on our van and get the hell out of there before things erupted into full-blown mayhem. As soon as the parts arrived I sat down beside Bo and learned what needed to be done so we could speed things up and get back out on the road.
Then we drove down the coast all the way into San Francisco, swinging around curves overhanging the ocean that looked death-defying. And we were cold nearly all the time. I remember once hearing Mark Twain’s description: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Amen to that!
Then on across the Bay Bridge into Berkeley, where the head of the Foul Language School of poets resided, our nemesis, Von Rotten, no relation to Johnny Rotten. And the beginning of the Great San Francisco Poetry Wars.
But we didn’t settle in there yet. Instead we continued down the coast until we came to Santa Cruz where parking was free. This seemed like a good town somehow, situated right on the sea, with a boardwalk and an amusement park with a roller coaster. It seemed untouched by time for some reason, and I thought this would be a good place to hole up someday and write a long poem, something I had already started to envision back in those Illinois cornfields. There was broken glass on the sidewalks every morning from fights between winos. What more could a young poet want? Just ask Charles Bukowski. I drew in the sea air. Yes, this would be perfect, I thought. Perfect.
We kept on driving down along the coast, passing through Big Sur, made famous by Jack Keruoac, who stayed there once in a cabin owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Then along perilous cliffs, down past the Hearst Castle, and finally through smog-filled L.A. until we got to Laguna Beach. 3000 miles in all. As we pulled into a parking lot to get some jug wine before entering Laguna Beach, I was so out of it with the fatigue of driving that we hit something with a loud crunch. It was a damned lamp post, right in the middle of the parking lot across the campus from Irvine, but fortunately we’d only been going a few miles per hour. Who the hell puts a light post right smack dab in the middle of a damned parking lot in Irvine, California? I thought. What an outrage! I looked at everybody. They were all staring at me dumbfounded. They’d gotten pretty used to trusting in me with all the driving, like I was their father. I think it sort of woke us all up.
“Not to worry,” I said, “that’s my good parking karma kicking in.”
They looked worried.
When we got down to Laguna Beach, we stopped at the apartment house where Kirk Dayton was staying with his artist girlfriend, Maggie. It was late at night. Kirk and I went out to a playground for kids and hung out on the swing set, drinking wine and beers. I began shaking my head. Kirk kept eying me.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.
I just shook my head, looking down into the sand. “I don’t know.”
“Fuck, man. Want a joint?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Fuck, man. Fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said. “3000 miles. I drove the whole way. They’re just kids,” I said.
“They’re the same age I am,” Kirk said.
“Yeah. Shit.”
“Well, guess what,” he said.
“What?”
“Maggie’s sleeping with this big honcho artist at Irvine, Philip Guston.”
“You’re kidding. Philip Guston, for real?”
Kirk nodded.
“Man, he’s huge.”
“She’s his favorite and they’re like doing it and I confronted her about it and she wouldn’t say yes but she wouldn’t say no either and now she goes around talking to herself all the time. It’s like blowing her mind.”
“Wow. The Philip Guston? He’s huge, Kirk.”
“I know. And she’s got hot pants for him and he’s easily old enough to be her father, maybe grandfather, who the fuck knows?”
I was shaking my head again. I took a huge mouthful of wine and held my head back and gargled it. Then I swallowed, of course.
We began swinging on the swing set really high, charging into it to get the swings going as high as we could. We could feel the legs of the swing set pulling up out of the ground, because we were swinging in exact formation. Then we started yelling like kids, though it was close to midnight, but we didn’t give a shit about anything and we just kept swinging, swinging wild and free. One could do worse, you know.
Then we tried to figure out how to keep swinging while we drank, but we couldn’t. So we stopped and went over to climb on the monkey bars and sat on them and did some serious drinking and finally I fell off into the sand and just lay there, crying softly. You could hear the waves pounding on the beach below that night. Something big must have been out there, stirring something up way out on the Pacific Ocean.
I had to go find an apartment the next day, but that night I didn’t care about how the normal world worked. I had just escaped from Illinois with three students in a red, white and blue Pepsi van, for Chrissake. I had made it all the way back to Laguna Beach with our history of wild student parties and the wreck of the Sixties splayed out behind us.
I was free at last, free at last, or so I thought.
That night we slept on the floor of Kirk and Maggie’s apartment and listened to them arguing all night about art and life and love. Ah, me, I sighed, the sad soul of America! I thought of Walt Whitman. I thought of Allen Ginsberg. I thought about both of them squeezing melons in the supermarkets of California, and the ghosts of our own lost generation, and of what was to come for someone in this room called Life.


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Publication Date: 03-16-2010

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