5. One Man Poet, Band-less

5.    One Man Poet, Band-less

 (updated 6-22-14, 7-18-15)

3.                One Man Poet– Band-less

Marina had had aqua blue eyes. She was a classmate at college. Like an angel in his eyes, she glided through his dreams. Her girlfriend, on the other hand, was more like a hippo, though she had blond hair, too. They were the best of friends and she was Marina's protector. During the school term, they rented an apartment together on Ocean Avenue. They stayed at their parents' bungle near the beach on far Rockaway. Johnny went everywhere to get close to Marina. 

      He packed up his Datsun 500 and drove west. His next stop would be San Francisco. The experience he had there would be his last experience in America before he went overseas. The fairy tales in the Castro district were his neighbors. It was there he was propositioned, but he knew he was straight. Arthur in Brooklyn had tested him on that; Johnny was not turned on. His political ideal was so different then the gay crowd in San Francisco.  

      After the fallout of the blackout, the statistical disaster at college and the disappointment of not impressing Aqua Marina, Johnny clicked his heels, sold his record collection for gas, and headed out west by car to San Francisco, alone with an ounce of grass and mescaline tabs. It was the stereotypical journey to start over by changing the location. Moving away from disasters is a good idea. What good would it do camping out where the wreck occurred? Even if it was somebody else's wreck, if one didn’t avoid the debris, one would flatten his tires. 

      The road took him to new experiences he could never imagine having; a rodeo bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, camping by the bottom of a dam in who knows where, Wall, a Minnesota corn field sleeping with the cows and locust, a climb over Estes Park Colorado, an encounter with a fair Mormon maiden near the Great Salt Lake, an encounter with a cow in the slow lane on the interstate, butting in on a deer along a winding mountain road in Nevada, driving up deserted Las Vegas strips alone with the flashing lights, and finally, Los Angeles. Before he headed north on state route 1, Johnny had a mission.

      The mission was a consensus by friends in New York to check on a mutual friend who had become a member of the Hare Krishna temple there. Every one of Alan's friends though he was making a mistake. Johnny took it on himself, since it would be a mission well spent, to try and put some sense into his friend to return to New York where he was missed. 

      “Write about what you know,” Johnny asked Kush one evening at a poetry reading.

      “Write about what you want to know and let the spirits be your guide,” exhausted Kush who blew sage smoke from a pipe filled with vowels but void of consonants or syllables.

      Kush could have been related to Bill Graham the way he looked and acted. He seemed to be a displaced New Yorker of European dissent. His five foot six inch compact frame, like a welterweight kept the vegetarian gleam of nutrition in his mindfulness. His dark eyebrows hung heavy over deep-set eyes and a narrow nose with two gourd-shaped nostrils at the end of a long suspension. His narrow face almost made his jaw look pointed, an illusion exaggerated by his sucked-in cheeks gripping the clay sage pipe. His short hair, in need of a trim, was un-parted and pushed to one side of his brow, covering the upper tops of his close-headed ears. It showed a touch of gray.

      Kush wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old, either; perhaps thirty-five. Johnny always thought him to be an older brother, perhaps ten years older than himself. He wasn’t a married man and wasn’t necessarily straight or gay; he could have been either, or both. He was ethereal. Kush was in love with the natural life of the indigenous people. It showed in his easy manner, shuffling feet in buffalo thong sandals. He was a hippie at heart who took love and peace seriously perhaps originally one of the youngsters of Family Dog commune; not one of the freedom riders who converged on Height-Asbury. Kush earned his income as a teacher at the California Institute if Asian Studies on Mission Street. He had long let go of earthly ambitions. Poetry, to Kush, was a manifestation of the descriptive of life, as it really was, and could be again.

      Two Dykes on Bikes poets received applause from the gathering, including Kush’s. There’s been a feminine strength of their poetry; their militancy and spunk. Johnny read next, his poem called “The Fairy’s Tail” alluded to the lack of militancy and self-interest of the gay community in the Castro, a poem that anticipated the ruckus a year later over the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. There was nothing wrong with being gay so long as one wasn’t a gay Republican capitalist. Person freedom, Johnny wrote, didn’t end at the tip of your dick. Liberty didn’t pertain only to bars and your bedroom. The same conservative system that vilified socialism and workers rights was coming after gay rights, too, unless one acquiesced and joined the political conservatives instead of fighting for the rights of all, gay or straight.

      Kush was no crush when it came to progressive thought; no flower child or political patsy was he. Native American chants played on Kush’s cassette player low from a loud room elsewhere, heavy in bass, tinged with treble somewhere on a higher plain of Cloud House.

      Emerson took a seat on the fringed rug which covered most of the poets’ room. Only the alcoves on either side of the recessed doorway were bare-floored up to the two picture windows. Two tiered shelves of books and magazines circles around three sides. The maroon Hopi rug with tantric design mirrored the pattern meeting in the center, an empty space. The poets started to assemble on it. 

      In walked David Moe to join Emerson, two of the Dykes on Bikes poetesses and other poets. He greeted Kush who flowed absent-mindedly around the twenty-square-foot room with pipe in mouth puffing smoke through every area he might have missed don the first go round. Acknowledged, the poets took places around the perimeter of the rectangular rug and unfurled their talisman; clay pipes, bandanas, writing implements, charcoal for sketching, wire or hemp-bound pads with exotic covers placed near their crossed legs or between their legs held by the knees to their chests by clasped hands. The ceremony was about to begin.

      Whoever was there or whoever would come later would know the ceremony had begun because an invocation, a speech on the cassette player in the back room, would be played and all tranquility passed around with a fat joint or two. That’s what Kush did on open poetry reading nights. Steven Kushner lives forever in Cloud House. “Walt Whitman Breathes Here.” Tommy Trantino, Pancho Aguila. David Moe, and Johnny Livewire, too, in small part.

Starlight was the monthly periodical that Cloud House poets published. Someone published it; Johnny didn’t know who. Johnny figured the donation collected after the invocation was for that publication. He dropped a dollar in the small battered wicker basket passed around not long after the last roach had been extinguished.

      The new issue of Starlight was ready to be distributed and stacks of bundles sat on one side of the Cloud House’s back room. They would be delivered by those present, and others, throughout the Bay Area from Daly City to Sausalito, throughout San Francisco and across the bridge to Oakland, Berkeley, and points south on the mainland as south as Haywood, California. They were put into newspaper boxes on street corners alongside other newspaper boxes; The Tribune, Enquirer, Job Offerings, and The Examiner. Johnny had seen the Starlight cover through the boxes’ transparent plastic covers and thought it was pornography, like Screw, because of the large black and white print of a naked woman with stars covering her censored areolas. The sticky slick colors. After a horny customer dropped two quarters into the slot and anxiously opened the cover, somewhere later on, they would be shocked to see not what they had hoped for, but page after page of poetry with sexy words, if you imagined right.

A.D. Winans, editor and writer, produced the Second Coming 180 Poets and Music Festival honoring Josephine Miles and John Lee Hooker. Cloud House was invited to do a segment at the venue, a theater in the Mission District. Johnny Livewire was there to recite his poems. He had already resigned himself to being a small part of a poetry troupe. He spent hours with other Cloud House regulars reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman outside on the steps of the Main San Francisco Public Library as part of the troupe. Now he was getting a chance to read his own poetry in public. Perhaps one day he would be as appreciated as those he loved to read.

Johnny wouldn’t make the same mistake Jim Morrison made; rock ‘n’ roll was no vehicle into a poetic consciousness for the people. If attitudes were going to be changed in America, they would be co-opted by record companies long before they made any radical difference, so thought Johnny, serious about helping to make a change in American society. Johnny so wanted it to be a fundamental change and not just a trend. War had to end. Marijuana had to be legal. Wealth had to be redistributed. Poor Patti Smith, so in need of famer and celebrity, went the wrong direction, no matter how much Johnny Livewire had hoped, that the rock ‘n’ roll bait would catch schools of fish and return the errant hippies to dredge the public ocean polluted by ruling class interests. Johnny lost sleep staying up nights, smoking weed, drinking tequila, writing and dreaming out how he could make it happen. He listened as Patti swam into shallow waters, waters lacking oxygen. It took the death of many of her friends for her to start swimming back to her peers. Johnny would cut straight through the crap. To the poetic hearts of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Whitman, and Blake. 

Johnny’s role at the Poetry Festival was to walk up one aisle and down the other, as others in the Cloud House troupe, in between poetry readings from on stage. It would be a life from the typical boredom the audience had, seated during intermissions, or leaving for rest rooms or outside for a smoke. On a dreary damp San Francisco Saturday in June, Johnny was a heat lamp roaming the audience burning dampness with words of love and wisdom. With verses in hand, Johnny gesticulated the poems meaning and danced up and down the aisles with his firry long brown locks in flight, stopping occasionally to give personal readings to patrons who shared a love of the poems he read and gave attention to what he spoke. He read his own poems like “The City of Virginal Sin,” “The Fairy’s Tail,” and others, some which had been put to music by bands he had played with in Brooklyn a few years before he moved to San Francisco. Johnny loved what he was doing and what he was a part of. Johnny Livewire was at home in San Francisco.e had found hHh

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      She turned him on; she worked at a radio station. Johnny didn’t remember where he met her but he wouldn’t ever forget that he did. It was not hard for a handsome young straight man to meet women in San Francisco. It was like being the only boy in a girls’ school. Those women were hungry for male attention, Johnny noted.

      The only blond woman he had been attracted to was East in Johnny’s rearview mirror. Aqua Marina didn’t let him swim in her ocean. When Johnny was a lad, he had silly childhood experiences with the Scandinavian girls that his neighborhood were chock full of in his neighborhood bordering Bay Ridge, The Sons of Norway kept close tabs on their daughters and married them into the church. The pretty blonde girls in Johnny’s lower and middle school - the Andersons, Iseksen’s - could strike you frigid with their icy blue eyes. The “Vanilla” girls that Johnny knew growing up. To him, they all seemed like angel cakes waiting for some filling and frosting; some flavor. Blonde was the color of base paint needing formula tints to bring them to rainbows. Those girls were bland; they indexed the myriad of blond jokes he’d hear as a young man in bars.

      He remembers sleeping in a bed one night in San Francisco, in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, a streetcar stop or two passed Bimbos 365 Club on Columbus Avenue on the trolley line to Fisherman’s Wharf. Perhaps he met her there at a Boz Scaggs or Hot Tuna concert. Johnny said if he still had his journal he would have remembered more about her, but he’d lost the journals traveling east and west the way you would lose tassels of a blue ribbon award; to falls onto floors, vacuum cleaners, placements in unlabeled boxes on moving days. The frills might be gone but the thrill of the award is always there. The gold leaf writing of the recipient’s name, the placement, or even the event itself may be on lost or faded journal pages somewhere but the shape of the bleached blue ribbon remains, only the name comes back to him now: Tracy, Tracy from radio station KDIA, Oakland, California. Tracy was an urban contemporary country and western radio station employee, a morning new broadcaster who spoke without a drawl, really, could have been an announcer for any radio station in America.

      Johnny Livewire at the outset of his San Francisco experience found a gem. The thrill of finding the right frequency on an out-of-town dial was enough to tear his clothes off, and remove them he did, as she did, after she’d drawn the curtain in her studio down Russian Hill after Lombard Street becomes straight. Vanilla California real blonde self, lace and softness ending where the other began; Twinkies cream was her flower. Unlike, Johnny felt, Aqua Marina’s crashing him over Rockaway rocks and waves. Tracy’s voice smooth, not spoken, like FM in the early morning. She didn’t tell Johnny who she was; he found out through feeling her vowels rounding her sibilants softly. “Tracy, stay home tomorrow.” “No, Johnny, I can’t. Come with me though across the Bay Bridge; 4am. I’ve a fifteen minute stint at 6:45am then we can have breakfast.”

      Beautiful Johnny with long brown waves of hair met her mouth and plunged into her feminine flesh, freshly ground pearl dust of single woman’s garden pillows, puffed down cloud of comfort, halos around her pinkish nipples. Johnny found in dim light blonde pinkness, she like dunes shifting in a blanket of summer breeze; floating coating his Coit Tower with coitus and warm creamy herbal springs, until four o’clock a.m. Tracy’s met Johnny’s impulses caressing him with slender fingers, carmine tipped, translucent like the lids over infants eyes closed in deep sleep. Oh Johnny, don’t consider that she’ll be gone or she will surely go away before you arrive with her. Like an invisible UFO, you are caught in the shadow. The night so mellow with mystic wine so Moorish and a night of comfort to wrestle yourself away from Castro demons and fingerless musicians. Sleep down, dear Johnny Livewire, and ride this to heaven, for what it is now, and don’t consider the morning least it creep in.

      And then she was gone. Yes, they drove back over the Bay Bridge for breakfast at an all night diner where Lombard becomes 101 near Presidio. She finished her coffee soon; she had an appointment but she would drive Johnny home, back to Church and 15^th Street. She kissed him goodbye leaning over from the drivers’ seat. He never saw her again, knew not her phone number, and wouldn’t dare disturb the foggy San Francisco night in the valley between Russian Hill and North Beach, near Montgomery.

      In between the inspiration from beautiful women in Johnny Livewire’s life, women attracted to Johnny’s sexual tension, musical desperation, there was the occasional woman who admired him for his intelligence and poetic sensibilities. Mooney was a square-jawed young lady with un-curved figure, bulky in areas that should have been slim and slim in areas that should have been bulky. She was not a rainbow in the clothes she wore nor did she try to adorn her face with make-up or tweezers’ sculpture. But she was clean in body and mind. Where Tracy’s country/western rhinestones glittered with cosmopolitan glee, Mooney was a diamond in the dust, a rough rock of salvation that the boat which Johnny rowed didn’t yet need anchorage for; the turbulent waters of his life were still way upstream beyond the hidden sandbar. But Johnny felt nice in knowing, as he held the strap going around the curves that the crowded streetcar heading through Noe Valley was hurtling towards an admirer who would be waiting for his arrival in a lecture hall at San Francisco State University.

      “So, big boy, did you write the book review yet?” asked Mooney as Johnny took his seat. “I finished mine late last night, till midnight to do it. God, what would my mother think if she’d seen me all cockeyed with a pile of peanut shells all over the floor?” Mooney spun her pointer finger around her ear for effect. She reached in her bohemian Paris motif book sack that she’d gotten at Urban Outfitters and pulled out a report binder revealing, through its transparent cover, the neatly typed professor prescribed title page. “Would you like to read it and check it for me? You can take it home with you if you’d like.”

      “I didn’t do mine, yet.” Johnny responded, absent-mindedly, with effort. If he were that kind of man, he probably could have gotten Mooney to give her report to him; he wasn’t that type of man.

      With a wink in her eye, Mooney said, “I bet you were doing something more important and immediate, like writing a new poem.”

      “As a matter of fact, I was.”

      “I’d love to see it. You didn’t bring it with you, did you?” she asked, slyly, as she shifted both legs, knees tightly drawn together in tandem, to face Johnny, hands clasped on lap, exaggeratedly, itching to hold something of Johnny’s creation.

      “I left it home.”

      “I could come home with you after class, you know, if you’d like.”

      “That’s nice of you to offer,” he said, avoiding the implication, “but you don’t have to; I’ll bring it in with me Thursday.” Johnny knew very well that the woman beside him had just invited herself to his bedroom but it didn’t matter; however she made herself available to him, he wasn’t going to want her. Mooney could feel the rejection but soldiered on.   

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Gail was another fairy tale, altogether. She was the woman who taught Emerson telepathic love.

      Gail had a deck of Tarot cards that she carried around. They showed her the way and educated her diversion. Eventually, those Tarot cards were tossed from Emerson’s window to the street below; no one bothered to notice which cards were facing up. Gail was downstairs screaming; she couldn’t come up and didn’t want to stay. She had taught Emerson enough, she believed, to make love to a woman without moving hips. With him inside her, only internal muscles, moving not a bone, each others’ feeling, but she had to leave and she couldn’t stay; the class was over.

      Emerson met Gail one day as she strolled among the tourists down Powell Street. She passed him leaning on a doorway near the circus popcorn machine outside the Hole in the Wall Hot Dog Stand. She asked him for directions. A Vietnam vet in fatigue hat stood outside with guitar. Emerson gave him free hot dogs and they chatted about the war when no one was buying. Gail approached; Emerson was attracted to her braless peasant blouse. Emerson obliged her with directions she really didn’t need. 

      Gail wanted to know where she could find a seafood store. She wanted to worship raw fish at a seafood store the way another Vietnam vet, Jack, did in Flatbush; opened hands hovering above the fish, absorbing it’s dynamic energy. Gail danced off merrily in the direction of the hot dog stand with the khaki clothed Vietnam Vet singing “Oh, the cattle are standing like statues” to the tourists lined up the sidewalk for the cable car in front them for their return to Fisherman’s Wharf, particularly loud and sharp when no coins were being dropped into his guitar case. “I’ll find it anyway,” she said, and she did, but she came back for Emerson, to share her sashimi and show him how a woman wants to be made love to; she knew she could.

      Gail gave Emerson the ‘dead fish’ treatment. He came around to her liking. It was an evening. She had no place to stay until her parents arrived from Los Angeles the next day. She would leave Emerson to show them around; she would be back in a few evenings

 She went upstairs, passed the kitchen and Emerson’s roommate, Chak Chi-Tat, an exchange student from China, her exaggerated smile at him with a blank stare, removing food stuck between his teeth with a toothpick. She walked into Emerson’s room and opened her backpack; she was staying. She went out to offer Chak some sashimi. He called her ‘locust.’ She knew he was rude but didn’t understand; she returned to Emerson’s room with no politeness left. Emerson grinned, closed the door, and devoured her. She let Johnny devour her, detached, watching. Johnny wasn’t easy. She wasn’t going and she wasn’t coming. He took her but she looked up at him, emotionless.

      “Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?” Gail knew love and she was going to start Emerson over, the right way, from scratch; show him how to make love to a woman, how to really make love to a woman; satisfy both their desires. That’s when she taught him how to move muscles, not bones. 

      Gail went through life as naked as she could; flesh wasn’t available under her peasant gown. Her feet hadn’t worn socks since high school before she became a gypsy and took to alchemy and Tarot cards. Gail felt that she could be Emerson’s muse; she could nurse his lost spirit.

      She called often when he lived at the Market street walk-up around the corner from the derelicts and Greyhound buses. “I’m coming up,” she called from a corner downstairs, a hobo by choice, not necessity.

Chak Chi-Tat and Chak Chi-Ming were amused by this American variation of the wandering monk. The Han Shan persona, discredited by the Chinese Communist regime, had its capitalistic renegades who risked their lives swimming to the New Territory of Hong Kong from China as the Chak brothers had done. Gail was swimming to an imaginary time and place, a representative of the nomadic American women they didn’t know existed; not the glossy lip-stick kind they had seen on the covers of magazines on newsstands in Hong Kong. 

“Chi-Tat opened the door. “She here, you girlfriend,” he said without feeling, and then quickly turned away. He couldn’t have imagined that for all her bohemian posturing, she admired the same classic Tang and Song poetry that brother Chi-Ming did dissertations on at Berkeley. Johnny was witness to Chi-Ming’s literary prowess, his recitation of poems, among thousands he memorized by heart. To Gail, Chi-Ming could have been a short order chef at a local take-out.

Emerson knew his place in the world wasn’t pretentious. “So you know thousands of fourteen-hundred year old poems by heart?” He would say.  “I happen to know the lyrics to thousands of rock ‘n’ roll songs, from Abba to Zappa.” He was hoping to make his Chinese roommate laugh.”

“This poem not allowed by the Communist Party,” Emerson didn’t know if he was referring to Li-Bai, Tu-Fu, or Karen Carpenter.

 “’They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha’ was banned, too,” Johnny said sarcastically, “by the American government.”

“Move with me, Emmy; don’t touch me. Just let our eyes meet,” Gail would say. Emerson did as he was told or he wouldn’t get any pudding. Eventually, the pudding would come with thoughts of anticipation censored from the hazel eyes that stabbed him like sushi knives. Her parted lips fermented under her longish nose. Emerson had pulled the swollen wood door to his room shut to keep Chak Chi-Tat’s prying Asian eyes out of his local triple X feature, but no can do, Emerson; no pudding for you, yet.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Gail said to Johnny, throbbing under her. “First let me do your Tarot.”

“This is the right time,” Emerson protested playfully. “The right time is now.” Chak Chi-Tat ducked back into the kitchen. Gail dismounted, took her deck and shuffled. Emerson moaned.

      “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was at midnight on Market Street. The line awaited the open doors. In the line, Emerson waited with Gail and her parents, her parents.  Everyone on the line was high, with slices of toast to toss when Magenta made a toast, seltzer bottles to spritz during the rainy night with the light over at the Frankenstein place. When a man ran between street cars and crossed Market Street, approached a man ten persons behind and ran away, no one thought anything of it, until his girlfriend screamed; they all thought it was part of the sub-plot. Until blood spilled from his side onto the street and the girlfriend screamed again, “Someone help! My boyfriend’s been stabbed!” He doubled over and fell to the sidewalk.

 Gail looked at Emerson; the parents stood agape. “Is this really happening?” Emerson wondered. Others in the line were laughing. “Wow. It looks so real. Wow.” An ambulance came screaming up the street. The doors of the theater were opened. The crowd filled the dilapidated movie theater for the midnight show.

Some people looked back at the unfortunate woman and hoped her boyfriend would be alright. Others put it out of their mind so it wouldn’t ruin their evening. No one could believe that a stranger would shove a knife into a random movie-goers side and run away but that’s exactly what he did. 

 Emerson said goodbye to Gail and her parents after the show and walked home. The next time he saw her she was downstairs picking up Tarot cards he had thrown to her from out his window. Emerson realized that, with Gail, he was he was on the wrong track; he wasn’t interested in a slow boat to China.

      Gail was another fairy tale, altogether. She was the woman who taught Johnny telepathic love. Johnny always felt that he were ever to write his autobiography, Gail would want herself placed between Joanne Mooney and Tracy; the first woman he couldn’t love and the woman whose love he couldn’t forget. But Tracy came first; Gail last.

      Gail had a deck of Tarot cards that she carried around. They showed her the way and educated her diversion. Those Tarot cards went flying out, tossed from Johnny’s window to the street below, and no one bothered to notice which cards were face up or face down. Gail was downstairs saying she couldn’t come up and didn’t want to stay. She had Johnny enough, she believed, how to make love to a woman without moving one’s hips. With him inside her, using only internal muscles, not moving a bone, in symmetry, in sequences, they moved each others’ without feeling, but she had to leave and she couldn’t stay; the class was over. He didn’t want her back after that.

      Johnny met Gail one day as she strolled among the tourists down Powell Street. She passed him leaning on a doorway near the circus popcorn machine outside the Hole in the Wall Hot Dog Stand. She asked him for directions. A Vietnam vet with regrettably large male tits stood by, in his flop hat with guitar, stood with Johnny who gave him free hot dogs when no one was looking. He winked at Johnny when Gail approached him. He even played a rendition of “Chico and the Man” for them as Gail, looking up, tied Johnny’s loose sneakers as Johnny looked down to observe her breasts inside her braless peasant blouse. Johnny obliged her with directions she really didn’t need.  

      Gail wanted to know where she could find a seafood store. She wanted to worship at the seafood store the way another Vietnam vet, Jack, did in Brooklyn, with his opened hand hovering above the fish’s flesh, absorbing it’s dynamic energy, The raw fish fillets grasping the inherent energy thereof from raw, pale tilapia, flounder, and then wrapped into wax paper, enclosed in a tear of white butcher block, Gail danced off merrily back in the direction of the hot dog stand with the khaki clothed self-conscious Vietnam Vet singing “Oh, the cattle are standing like statues” to the tourists lined up the sidewalk for the cable car in front them for their return to Fisherman’s Wharf, particularly loud and sharp when no coins were being dropped into his guitar case. “I’ll find it anyway,” she said, and she did, but she came back for Johnny, to share her sashimi and show him how a woman wants to be made love to; she knew she could.

      Gail gave Johnny the ‘dead fish’ treatment until he came around to her liking. It was an evening when she had no place to stay until her parents arrived from Los Angeles the next day. She would leave Johnny then to show them around but she would be back and have them meet him in a few evenings. Wow so fast, Johnny was going to meet the parents. She came upstairs and walked past Johnny’s roommate, Chak Chi-Tat, an exchange student from China, her with an exaggerated smile, him with a blank stare, removing food stuck between his teeth with a finger. She walked into Johnny’s room and opened her backpack; she was staying. She went out to offer Chak some sashimi. He called her a ‘locust.’ She knew he was rude, in a funny way, and she returned to Johnny’s room with no politeness left. Johnny grinned and closed the door and devoured her. She let Johnny devour her and remove her peasant blouse, detached, watching saying, “My my; we’ve got a live one here.” Johnny wasn’t easy and wasn’t hearing the word ‘stop,’ either. She wasn’t going and she wasn’t coming. He took her but she looked up at him, emotionless.

      “Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?” Gail knew love and she was going to start Johnny over, the right way, from scratch, and show him how to make love to a woman, how to really make love to a woman and satisfy both their desires. That’s when she taught him how to move muscles, not bones. 

      Gail went through life as naked as she could, but flesh wasn’t available under her peasant gown despite no brassiere or panties. Her feet hadn’t worn socks since high school years ago before she became a gypsy and took to alchemy and Tarot cards. Gail felt that she could be Johnny’s muse; she could nurse his lost spirit.

      She called often when he lived at the Market street walk-up around the corner from the derelicts and Greyhound buses. “I’m coming up,” she called from a corner downstairs, a hobo by choice, not necessity.

Chak Chi-Tat and Chak Chi-Ming were amused by this American variation of the wandering monk. The Han Shan persona, discredited by the Chinese Communist regime, had its capitalistic renegades who risked their lives swimming to the New Territory of Hong Kong from China as the Chak brothers had done. Gail was swimming to an imaginary time and place, a representative of the nomadic American women they didn’t know existed; not the glossy lip-stick kind they had seen on the covers of magazines on newsstands in Hong Kong. 

“Chi-Tat opened the door. “She here, you girlfriend,” he said without feeling, and then quickly turned away. He couldn’t have imagined that for all her bohemian posturing, she admired the same classic Tang and Song poetry that brother Chi-Ming did dissertations on at Berkeley. Johnny was witness to Chi-Ming’s literary prowess, his recitation of poems, among thousands he memorized by heart. To Gail, Chi-Ming could have been a short order chef at a local take-out.

Johnny knew his place in the world of poetry and wasn’t pretentious. “So you know thousands of fourteen-hundred year old poems by heart; so what?” He would say. 

“I happen to know the lyrics to thousands of rock ‘n’ roll songs, from Abba to Zappa.” He was hoping to make his Chinese roommate laugh.”

“This poem no allow by Communist Party,” Johnny didn’t know if he was referring to Li-Bai, Tu-Fu, or Karen Carpenter.

 “’They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha’ was banned, too,” Johnny said sarcastically, “by the American government.”

“Move with me, Johnny; don’t touch me. Just let our eyes meet,” Gail would say. Johnny did as he was told or he wouldn’t get any pudding. Eventually, the pudding would come with thoughts of anticipation censored from the hazel eyes that stabbed him like sushi knives. Her parted lips fermenting under her longish nose. Johnny had pulled the swollen wood door to his room shut to keep Chak Chi-Tat’s prying Asian eyes out of his local triple X feature, but no can do, Johnny; no pudding for you, yet.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Gail said to Johnny, throbbing under her. “First let me do your Tarot.”

“This is the right time,” Johnny protested playfully. “The right time is now.” Chak Chi-Tat ducked back into the kitchen. Gail dismounted, took her deck and shuffled. Johnny moaned.

      “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was at midnight on Market Street. The line awaited the open doors. In the line, Johnny waited with Gail and her parents, her parents, and everyone on the line was high with slices of toast to toss when Magenta made a toast, and seltzer bottles to spritz during the rainy night with the light over at the Frankenstein place. When a man ran between street cars and crossed Market Street, approached a man ten persons behind and ran away, no one thought anything of it, until his girlfriend screamed; they all thought it was part of the sub-plot. Until blood spilled from his side onto the street and the girlfriend screamed again, “Someone help! My boyfriend’s been stabbed!” He doubled over and fell to the sidewalk. Gail looked at Johnny and the parents stood were agape. “Is this really happening?” Others in the line were laughing. “Wow. It looks so real. Wow.” Until an ambulance came screaming up the street as the doors were opened and the crowd filled the dilapidated movie theater for the midnight show. Some people looked back at the unfortunate couple and hoped he would be alright. Others put it out of their mind so it wouldn’t ruin their evening. No one could believe that a stranger would shove a knife into a random movie-goers side and run away but that’s exactly what he did. Johnny said goodbye to Gail and her parents after the show and walked home. The next time he saw her she was downstairs picking up Tarot cards he had thrown to her from out his window. 

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It had come to this. She was not dead. She smelled like she was dead but she was breathing, labouringly. Lying there, grimaced, her body twitching. Once, every now and then, she would open her eyes and, of course, when Johnny touched her, there. She didn’t want him to do it but she had no energy to stop him. If he tried, she could only plead in hopes of gaining sympathy. Johnny looked at her. She was on the sofa-bed in his narrow studio, two large windows on one side of the room, its only distinguishing feature. Drapes drawn. Damn the street light that shone perpendicular, five feet across the narrow garage lane off Church Street, the vapor light that, throughout the night, started out dim, and got brighter and brighter until it was ready to explode with brightness, then went dim again. You could almost see the outline of the light through the tweed of the window drapes.

She lay there, perpendicular to one of the windows like the bottom of a ‘T’. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Johnny knew it was night; four hours after Fingers dropped her off and asked him to take care of her. The female – and that’s all she was – laid there, head propped up on the cushions of the sofa-bed, opened, but uncovered. The sickly white blue-tattooed arm of the woman was draped over her clammy forehead. Red blisters and scratches on her underarm; couldn’t be seen if she knew there was a mirror. She was young. She wouldn’t dare, couldn’t dare look at the wreck she had become. And such a young lady, pleasant faced, attractive, too thin but potential, long light brown hair now matted; it shouldn’t have come to this, but it did. Johnny was willing to come in this wreck. It had come to this.

The pre-tuned guitar Fingers plucked holding the pick in the only two fingers he had left. He played Musslewhite slide-guitar with the top of an aluminum mixed-drink shaker wedged over the stump of where his left hand had been. Slide guitar was as natural to him as a split fingered- slider was to Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown nicknamed "Three Finger" or "Miner.” Did he throw well because of it? He didn’t know because he had never thrown any other way. Fingers was like that, too. The Delta blues he played, with the red-felt lined guitar case in front of him on the street. The endless line of Saturday tourists waited behind the matinee rope slung up Powell Street down to the turntable just before Market Street.

Fingers had a captive audience for “Born Under a Bad Sign,” which he was, and “Sittin’ On Top Of The World,” which he wasn’t. Occasionally, someone’s father would acknowledge his well-intentioned daughter with a quarter and point her towards Finger’s cash case. Usually, the fear of approaching a fat, handless, Samoan with a guitar on the street was enough to make a child think twice, but fingers had such a sincere sweet smile. Johnny could almost bread the father’s lips as he told his child that he would do it himself if he could squat under the barricade and get back on line before anyone took his spot. Most tourists tried their best not to look at or hear Fingers at all. The line felt longer and longer as each cute cable car filled after being pushed around the turntable by happy volunteers to return up Powell Street to Fisherman’s Wharf without them on it. To be stuck in front of Fingers listening to another heartfelt rendition of “Summertime” in the heat of a San Francisco summer was more painful than being stuck upside-down on top of an amusement park Ferris wheel.

When Fingers berated the crowd for being “cheapskates,” minutes passed between songs without donations. He’d go into another rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind Than to See You with Another Man.” Parents cringed as their kiddies with balloons tugged at their pants and asked what the fat hand-less man in the Tom Sawyer hat meant by that. Could he really go blind that way? Did he once say that he’d rather lose his hands than to see her touch another man?

Johnny Livewire stood behind Fingers selling popcorn and ice-cream through the storefront window of 23 Powell Street, popping a kernel into his mouth from the gay nineties machine out front. Fingers, who begged him for lemonade to wet his whistle, said Rochelle was at his decrepit van broken down near the tracks in the Mission District. He had to move her to a safer place. Could Johnny take her in one night until the treatment center opened on Monday morning? Sight unseen, the deciding factor for Johnny was that she was a “she,” a person with sex-able parts, however degenerated they might be.

It was not that Johnny Livewire wasn’t having any relationships with women in San Francisco; he was just in a drought at the time. Joanne Mooney was too insistent ion his love and attention. She called all day long. Gail had moved on up the coast to Eureka bringing with her Tarot cards intact after being his lover for a while. Jesse from Brooklyn was offended by Johnny hitting on her while her boyfriend was out on an errand. Cindy had enjoyed Johnny’s one-night thrill before she headed back to Oakland across the Bay Bridge to her morning news job at the country and western radio station. Janis would do, and he could say that he helped her, too, that he meant well giving her shelter for the night letting her crash at his pad. It wasn’t working out. Every time Johnny tried to unbutton the blouse around her breasts she asked him what he was doing.