The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, Jerry Ratch [mobile ebook reader .TXT] 📗

so someone can think?” Greg remarked, almost to himself. “Jeez. Just look at the landscape, will you? Fucking-A, man. You always gotta have the last word, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Steve.
“I mean, Vietnam, man. Think about it.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “I’d rather get married.”
“Nasturtium!” Greg yelled, and he dove at Steve on the mattress, pinning him down. “Nasturtium!” he yelled right in Steve’s ear.
“Watch your fucking language, man!” Steve yelled back from his position in a headlock. “There’s a lady present.”
After crossing the border into Kansas, a minor tornado appeared out of the dark lowering clouds, and the truck really began to rock. We turned north to avoid a head-on collision with it, and stumbled on the Oregon National Historic Trail, also known as the Lewis and Clark Trail. It was the flattest route out to the coast. Day 1.


3


We woke up at a rest stop on a knoll overlooking the Platte River, somewhere in Nebraska. Allison and I were under a blanket on our mattress when Greg and Steve peered in the door of our red, white, and blue Pepsi van.
“Psst! Janov, you awake yet? The sun’s been up for like a whole hour, man. Get the hell up already, will you? These big damn trucks are keeping us awake out here with their diesel fumes. C’mon, man. Pull your dick out of Allison and let’s get going.”
“My dick’s not in Allison.”
“It’s in my mouth,” she said.
“Then how come you’re still talking? No, wait, I get it,” said Greg.
“What?” said Allison. “What?” Greg was smiling. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I get it,” Allison said. “Well, it’s way more than I can handle, I can tell you that much, you dirty old man!”
Steve Bancroft fell down in the dirt outside. “I already miss my future wife,” he said. He lay flat on his back, looking up at the sky. “Let’s get the hell outta here. There’s a river out here. What’s the name of it? Where the fug are we anyway? Are we there yet? C’mon, Janov, what say you get your ass out of bed? I need some breakfast or I’m going to throw a giant tantrum.”
“Okay, Janov,” said Greg. “Drive us to the nearest store so we can rustle up some breakfast.”
I got into the driver’s seat. At the next small town we stopped in front of a grocery and Greg went in with Steve again, who acted as suspicious as possible as a decoy. A man in a white apron came out hauling Steve along by the collar and yelled at him never to come back to his store. But right behind the man, out slipped Greg with his cargo pants bulging with goodies. Out of his pants Greg pulled a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, another squashed loaf of Wonder bread, and two enormous Idaho potatoes. Then some green onions. Two more red apples. He looked at me, because he saw me watching him.
“Always have fruit with every meal, man,” Greg said. “Uh, listen, can we stop at the next liquor store and get a jug of Gallo or Red Mountain or Gallo or something? I’ve about had it with all this driving crap. I think we need to pull over and spend some serious time drinking our asses off. I kinda thought we’d be there by this time. What do you say?”
I shook my head. Allison was nodding her head. I think she was about ready to jump on me. We needed some time alone.
“Okay,” I said. “Just a little further. We need to keep pushing ahead a little more, if we’re ever going to get there.”
“Aw, man!” Steve whined. “Crap. We need a good drink. C’mon. C’mon!”
“Okay. Just a little further,” I said.
We drove all the way through Nebraska that way, Steve whining, Greg holding his head, demanding a drink. “Look at my hand, will you? It’s shaking. Look at it!”
Finally I pulled into a small shopping mall outside a town on the border of Wyoming. Ahead you could see the road starting to head uphill for quite a long stretch. Greg jumped out of the van and began doing handsprings in the parking lot. “Holy shit! Ah, I can’t believe it. Earth. Real fucking ground! Okay, Janov, here’s some money. We need two gallon jugs of some fine Red Mountain Pink Chablis. Oh, boy!”
I went into the liquor store and purchased two one-gallon jugs of Gallo Pink Chablis. They didn’t have nor had they ever heard of Red Mountain for some reason. I got two six packs of Coors beer for myself and Allison. But when I came out, Greg looked at me and laughed.
“No, no,” he said. “Look, just stay here. And start the motor, will you?”
He ran into the store with Steve. In less than five minutes they came running back out with their arms loaded with stuff. A pack of firewood, a box of stick matches, the biggest package of hot dogs I’d ever seen. It looked like enough to feed a campsite full of Boy Scouts. They had rolls of toilet paper, two newspapers. They had a whole sack of apples, they had marshmallows in one enormous bag. They leapt into the truck.
“Go, go, go!” Greg shouted. “Get the fuck out of here! The guy had a rifle, man! Floor this sucker! Go! Step on it!”
The door to the grocery began to open. I saw a rifle coming out first, and away we flew.
Somewhere between Cheyenne and Rock Springs, Wyoming, they ground me down, and I pulled over and stopped the truck. We were way the hell out in the middle of absolute nowhere. Trucks rarely went by on the highway. Almost nobody, it seemed, traveled this route. We crept up a small incline and parked in an open swing-about space where we could camp without being noticed, even if we built a big campfire, which was exactly what we did. There were logs and deadwood of all sorts scattered around the space. We dragged what we could toward the center and built this big pyramid of wood, and sat down to do some serious drinking on logs that acted as benches around the fire. We waited for darkness to come upon us before striking a match. Then it was the biggest bonfire I’d ever seen. It was like something you would see at a homecoming football match. We started jumping all around the flames as they rose higher and higher, because we noticed our own huge shadows leaping against a cliff right next to us. That was when we discovered we could make one shadow jump right through another and come out whole on the other side. Our shadows were indestructible. It was one of those moments of discovery maybe only gallons of pink Chablis could bring on. Or dope. Because Allison also broke out a couple of joints and we were getting pretty stoned.
All of a sudden there was a howl from somewhere out in the bushes around us. The next thing I knew Greg took to howling as well. Then Steve began howling. Then to my amazement so did Allison, then me as well. We all began howling with whatever it was that was out there, and I turned and noticed the moon which seemed to have swerved over the horizon, which began all the way back in Illinois. I grew certain I could see all the way back to the beginning from our plateau in Wyoming.
“I saw the moon swerve over the horizon,” I said.
“Let’s haul out the poetry, man” Greg said. He ran to the truck and brought out a hardbound edition of the Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
“Give me that,” I said. I turned to “The Meditations of an Old Woman” and began to read. I read two pages and put the book down on the ground. I thought I was getting up to go take a leak, but I leapt over the flames of the fire instead. I don’t know why I did that.
Well, all hell broke loose.
Greg jumped to his feet and grabbed the book of poetry and began shouting out lines rapid-fire, then he too leapt through the flames.
Steve was next. Even Allison took a turn at reading, but she was a little too short and plump to make it over the flames. The pit was pretty damned wide. She got to the edge and looked in and turned back and sat down, taking another toke off the joint.
“C’mon, Sheffield, don’t chicken out,” yelled Steve.
“Ah, leave her alone,” said Greg.
“You’re no fun,” Steve complained.
“Go fuck yourself,” Greg retorted. He took an enormous swig off the jug of wine. Then he leapt back through the flames again. He came back to where the book was and handed it to me. “Read some more, man. You’re a great reader. Here.”
I opened the book and began reading. I saw Steve and Greg sit down on the ground and sink back against the logs. They let their heads tilt back and their faces lifted up to the stars. I could feel the heat emanating from Allison’s skin. It was still quite warm out, but a wind began picking up, making the flames more raggedy. I turned up my collar and kept reading. When my throat went dry, I took a long pull from my bottle of Coors. No one said a word while I drank. Then I began flowing back into the “Meditations of an Old Woman.” The poet’s words held us. They held us all. We went this way and that with the memories and the mind of age as it bent and swayed between its idle and sharp thoughts. Roethke had really managed to get inside that old woman. We felt a twig snap in the universe.
No, wait, that was a real twig in the real world. What was out there? Ah, but what did it matter? Not one of us moved, and I dug in further and let that old mind carry us. The cares of the other world that was out there drifted further away. The wars. The politicians with their warped thoughts, speaking about dollars in the night. We were carried away by the internal river of words.
We were clueless as to how it all worked, and we did not care how it all worked.
We were poets. We were in love with the world again.
Allison took her clothes off. She was full-bodied with abundant breasts and the firelight shone on her large nipples. She took me by the hand as Steve and Greg stared open-mouthed. Steve began to masturbate, while Greg kept drinking wine. Allison and I went into the truck and balled our brains out. Allison screamed out with the pain and the joy. Day 2.
Finally at one point in the middle of the night I heard Greg saying, “Will you put your dick away, ass-wipe? Jesus! You’re not going to bring your girlfriend out here with all your whiplash masturbation.”
After three days of complete and utter debauchery in our little encampment on that plateau in Wyoming, we started heading west again. Altogether, after numerous runs to a liquor/grocery store, we had consumed a grand total of twelve gallons of Gallo pink Chablis, four cases of Coors beer, and two bags of weed. We began passing through one town after another. They all became a blur. We kept driving and driving. We descended upon Salt Lake City, then turned north up