Fairfax Marin population about three thousand circa 1979.
Back to California by bus again, and at Bones’ invitation, to an apartment where he was living with May in Marin, the small town of Fairfax, not far from Norma and Kim and her young daughter Amaris:
As I continue this narrative I feel an excitement growing. I’m now approaching ‘the shores of light’, where the first stray leaves of what became a regular journal begin to appear. I have these papers intact and in hand and each one is a great stimulus to my memories, a sketch waiting to be filled out and pasted, a snapshot from the moment, illuminating this life story.
Here’s an example. It was a few months into this trip that I wrote one of my first poems, ‘To Amaris’ one sunny afternoon on a lawn chair in Norma’s back yard, watching Amaris, then six years old playing with another girl. I remember getting pen and paper and quickly writing out the short poem and then reading it to her and her friend. I can see them standing there as I read it, and the other girl, I suppose a little jealous, asking me for a poem for herself, and sad when I told her it wasn’t that easy, that I had to know her better.
The child and I became close friends over the next few months. I had one red notebook at the time and let Amaris draw pictures in it, which I still can gaze upon with fondness. Here's the poem:
Amaris is always pretty,
When she’s happy, when she’s mad,
When she’s playful like a kitty
When she’s quiet, tearful, sad.
Long and delicate and tender,
Fair and slight and slim and slender.
Her face is like a pale moon.
Her eyes two pools of dark maroon,
So deep that poets must beware
In looking, lest they start to stare
And never stop, but in them drown,
Trying out their depths to sound.
Her nose is smug, her lips can pout,
And do when there is cause about.
Her feet are small, a little bit,
But on them pretty shoes just fit.
And best of all, her mind most rare
Encased in golden strands of hair
Swim dreams and stories, light as air.
There is a small town in the wooded hills of Marin called Fairfax, quaint, quiet, a lovely place to live. It’s near the middle of the peninsula with nothing further west of it except trees, till you hit the beaches. It’s close enough to the ocean that in the summer there’s a thick fog every morning that doesn’t dissipate until ten or eleven. This is the place that attracted Norma years before. Now Kim lived with her and it cast the same spell on Bones and May when they chanced to visit. They rented a two-bedroom apartment there and asked me to be their housemate.
So this is where I went and moved in, a small bedroom all my own, a kitchen and living room with a balcony overlooking the residential street. This time I brought with me an old Fender Stratocaster guitar purchased at a great bargain in Niagara Falls. The shopkeeper sold it for three hundred dollars, excusing it for being so old and worn, not realizing that, like wine, it improved greatly with age. I could never play it well so I brought it to share.
I spent about three months there but don’t remember much as nothing much happened. Bones and May were so in love they were in something like a hibernation stage, rarely coming out of their bedroom even in the hot summer. Kim and Norma would drop by some evenings. Kim now had a job at a Seven-eleven near Norma’s, sitting and reading the magazines all day. Norma still worked the copy center, the only employee, her kid with all her toys spread out on the floor on Saturdays. She ran the shop informally.
All I did was read, walking to the small public library and devouring its shelves. I read a good biography of Malcolm Lowry at the time because I remember trying the experiment of drinking some gin every night for a few weeks. Kim came by and would join me in this experiment. It didn’t take. But I tried it because I was so impressed by the biography I’d just discovered, by Douglas Day. It was so well written I liked it as much as reading ‘Under the Volcano’, which I polished off the same month. Something about him kept sticking in my mind, a life so shattered for ten years in Mexico and the most amazing, complete alcoholism, yet able to move to Vancouver Island and produce what many called, ‘the best novel of the twentieth century’. It didn’t make sense, so I wrote a poem about it:
Malcolm Lowry
For one fleeting moment this morning
I felt my old powers again,
Like a sunburst through clouds, without warning
‘twixt my second and third glass on gin.
I recovered my vastness of thinking
And remembrance of all I had been,
But I knew that the moment was fleeting,
So I stirred and I reached for my pen.
I’ll recount my proud youth and first glory,
All the praises my works ushered in
And I’ll spin to the end my whole story,
My long trek through the quicksands of sin.
But a thirst and a fog came upon me
As I reached for my fourth glass of gin.
Another book that impressed (and also disturbed me) was Francis Farmer’s, ‘Will there ever be a Morning’, recommended by May. Strange that I can only remember the books that had some event associated with them but we had no T.V., so I read.
One night I do recall. Bones and May had purchased some speed and took off to some motel to hole up for the night. I invited Kim and Norma and her child to come over and spend the night with me, just for a change of scene, and they agreed. We sat up doing a few lines and drinking, (Norma didn’t indulge) and Norma set up a bed with quilts and blankets she’d brought on our living room floor. They went to bed and I went to my room still very awake and with more lines. For the first time in what was to become a weekly habit later on I began writing down my thoughts, not just random ideas or quotes as I sometimes jotted on scraps of paper, but a long prose exposition of my current beliefs, filling about ten pages. I have it still and just reread it, the philosophy of a young and inexperienced youth of twenty four, fumbling to find words to define himself to the world and to frame some purpose for himself, not well done and hardly recognizable as me. But at least it was a beginning.
In the morning, (I stayed awake all night) when I heard Amaris wake up, I did something that was definitely me to this day. I poured her cereal and sat with her at the kitchen table. The others were still asleep. I’d just reread that week Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. It was on my mind and I thought this was just the story to entertain her. I gave her quite a detailed version of it, lasting half an hour. I remember how she paused at certain points from eating her cereal, her spoon frozen in mid-air, deep in thought, with a very puzzled look on her face. But she listened on and liked the story I think, for the love of the sister for her brother.
