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of milk. I bought a whole bunch of food wraps like Japhy's. I was all outfitted for the
Apocalypse indeed, no joke about that; if an atom bomb should have hit San Francisco
that night all I'd have to do is hike on out of there, if possible, and with my dried foods
all packed tight and my bedroom and kitchen on my head, no trouble in the world. The
final big purchases were my cookpots, two large pots fitting into each other, with a
handled cover that was also the frying pan, and tin cups, and small fitted-together
cutlery
making speeches about what I was going to hunt for was infinitely more valuable to
mankind in the long run than ore, but let them tell me: "Boy, all you gotta do is go to
that Colorady country and take off with your pack there and a nice little Geiger
counter and you'll be a millionaire." Everybody in Skid Row wants to be a millionaire.
"Okay boys," I said, "mebbe I'll do that." "Lotsa uranium up in the Yukon country too."
"And down in Chihuahua," said an old man. "Bet any dough thar's uranium in
Chihuahua." .
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I went out of there and walked around San Francisco with my huge pack, happy. I
went over to Rosie's place to see Cody and Rosie. I was amazed to see her, she'd
changed so suddenly, she was suddenly skinny and a skeleton and her eyes were huge
with terror and popping out of her face. "What's the matter?"
Cody drew me into the other room and didn't want me to talk to her. "She's got like
this in the last forty-eight hours," he whispered.
"What's the matter with her?"
"She says she wrote out a list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then
tried to flush them down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in
the toilet and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess
and she claims he wore a uniform and was a cop and took it with him to the police
station and we're all going to be arrested. She's just nuts, that's all." Cody was my old
buddy who'd let me live in his attic in San Francisco years ago, an old trusted friend.
"And did you see the marks on her arms?"
"Yes." I had seen her arms, which were all cut up.
"She tried to slash her wrists with some old knife that doesn't cut right. I'm worried
about her. Will you watch her while I go to work tonight?"
"Oh man "
"Oh you, oh man, don't be like that. You know what it says in the Bible, 'even unto
the least of these . . .'"
"All right but I was planning on having fun tonight."
"Fun isn't everything. You've got some responsibilities sometimes, you know."
I didn't have a chance to show off my new pack in The
110
Place. He drove me to the cafeteria on Van Ness where I got Rosie a bunch of
sandwiches with his money and I went back alone and tried to make her eat. She sat in
the kitchen staring at me.
"But you don't realize what this means!" she kept saying. "Now they know
everything about you."
"Who?"
"You."
"Me?"
"You, and Alvah, and Cody, and that Japhy Ryder, all of you, and me. Everybody that
hangs around The Place. We're all going to be arrested tomorrow if not sooner." She
looked at the door in sheer terror.
"Why'd you try to cut your arms like that? Isn't that a mean thing to do to yourself?"
"Because I don't want to live. I'm telling you there's going to be a big new revolution of
police now."
"No, there's going to be a rucksack revolution," I said laughing, not realizing how
serious the situation was; in fact Cody and I had no sense, we should have known from
her arms how far she wanted to go. "Listen to me," I began, but she wouldn't listen.
"Don't you realize what's happening?" she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere
eyes trying by crazy telepathy to make me believe that what she was saying was
absolutely true. She stood there in the kitchen of the little apartment with her skeletal
hands held out in supplicatory explanation, her legs braced, her red hair all frizzly,
trembling and shuddering and grabbing her face from time to time.
"It's nothing but bullshit!" I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I
tried to explain the Dharma
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to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened,
they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn't know anything, I was just
a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn't understand the serious significance
of this very important, very real world.
"The police are going to swoop down and arrest us all and not only that but we're all
going to be questioned for weeks and weeks and maybe even years till they find out
all the crimes and sins that have been committed, it's a network, it runs in every
direction, finally they'll arrest everybody in North Beach and even everybody in
Greenwich Village and then Paris and then finally they'll have everybody in jail, you
don't know, it's only the beginning." She kept jumping at sounds in the hall, thinking
the cops were coming.
"Why don't you listen to me?" I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she
hypnotized me with her staring eyes and almost had me for a while believing in what
she believed from the sheer weight of her complete dedication to the discriminations
her mind was making. "But you're getting these silly convictions and conceptions out
of nowhere, don't you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don't you just relax and
enjoy God? God is you, you fool!"
"Oh, they're going to destroy you, Ray, I can see it, they're going to fetch all the
religious squares too and fix them good. It's only begun. It's all tied in with Russia
though they won't say it . . . and there's something I heard about the sun's rays and
something about what happens while we're all asleep. Oh Ray the world will never be
the same!"
"What world? What difference does it make? Please stop, you're scaring me. By
God in fact you're not scaring me and I won't listen to another word." I went out,
angry, bought
gut, it burns your stomach out, it makes your brain dull. I can tell there's something wrong with
you, you're not sensitive, you don't realize what's going on!"
"Oh come on."
"This is my last night on earth," she added.
The musicians and I drank up all the wine and talked, till about midnight, and Rosie [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]