Here's a piece out of my journal, when I first moved into Steve's and the week before Lindsay moved in:
I don’t have the exact date, but towards the end of September I moved to Steve’s empty pad with a telephone call and spent the first days there holed-up, hidden and drug free. We moved the poker table back and the games went on. He had a living room with a bay window and a couch against it, a kitchen behind that, then a bedroom and bathroom behind that, the bottom floor of a skinny house, with one other unit upstairs the same size. The staircase to that unit was in a large entryway inside the front door, so large it was a room unto itself with a piano in it.
He had perfect privacy, as his front door was on the side of this entryway. The house was dilapidated, (being a hundred years old) but still had class, signs of its former glory in the decorative moldings in each room and a defunct, tiled fireplace and mantel in his living room. This mantel had an assortment of objects on in, who knows how old or for how long or put there by whom. The objects were covered in dust and might have been left by residents of decades past. Steve was no duster, no cleaner or re-arranger, (as many are). You could walk in and put a nickel on the corner of this mantel and be sure you’d find it still there a year later, (perhaps even a decade later). That was Steve. He had his priorities and stuck to them. Eating, beer drinking, work, guitar playing, poker games, partying and impressing women. I admire a man with such a fixed agenda and predictability. It shows sanity, regularity.
The week I moved in I took my rolled-up picture of the ‘Dutch Girl’ to a print and frame shop right next to ‘Moe’s’, had it glassed and framed as it deserved, for thirty dollars. Then I hung it above the mantel where it fit beautifully. Here’s my entry:
“Tues.. Oct. 9th.: I’ve been reading an anthology to find a fit inscription for the picture of a sitting girl done in charcoal by my old friend Bruce. From the moment I saw it I fell in love with it. Despite other’s valuation of it, or his talents, I’m endeared to it beyond measure. I don’t know why. I’ve put it up on Steve’s wall and shall watch the reactions of others. But should all be ‘nonplussed’, I shall still love it to idolatry. It might even inspire stories or poems. There’s something in it, some rare quality that mystifies and charms me. I could fall in love with that girl and I dream of her. The closest verses I’ve seen so far that honor her are from Shakespeare:
She never told her love
But let concealment, like the worm in the bud
Feed on her damask cheek, she pinned in thought
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
The face has some sad beauty in it, not explicit. It’s pensive but not positively sad. The aspects of a look well drawn can far surpass the words we frame to catch a mood. She expresses mostly silence in soft hues, contemplation and goodness waiting. And it has seduced me to a fascination. I wrote this inscription under it in black ink, using my best handwriting. In different degrees of light it changes aspects, distinctly, or else I hallucinate. Yet both visions are the same, it’s called ‘imagination’.
In the first week there, laying on the couch and looking at this strange wall for hours on end, like an invalid recuperating, I wrote this poem, one of my best: ‘The Mantel’.
A pale vase that sometimes knew a flower,
A tambourine that sleeps upon the wall
Above a wooden horse that seems to cower
And frown at some hard purpose to recall.
A knife assailed by rust, but cased in pearl
With still a glimmer of its former sheen.
A little, painted picture of a girl
Who’s pretty smile no wrinkles shall demean.
Two books propped by a clock that’s never wound
All three incapable of any sound.
There would be voices there if we had eyes.
Their wisdom only whispers to the wise.
Yet all these objects are with life instilled
Out of the hands and minds that they portray,
The dusty vessels where some spirit spilled
That would not happily be sunk in clay.
Here’s my first entry at Steve’s place. It explains much:
“Here I am at Steve’s, subletting his pad for three weeks. I’m out of the warehouse for good, amazingly happy, (to be alive) with at least fifteen pages of revelatory conversations on record. (I don’t know why I underestimate this so much; it was more like a hundred. Perhaps I’m still in a daze writing this). I left the warehouse at 6 p.m., Jim and Margaret sitting on Jim’s floor as I said ‘goodbye’, in a sort of final awkwardness not expected or necessary. But so it fell out. Then to dinner with Mike M. at the ‘Villa Hermosa’, he high since Friday, (this was Sunday eve). He came back to my new pad from .11 to 1 a.m. while I abstained. Then he wakes me up at 7 a.m. knocking on the window with a friend. I let them in. Their excuse is that they need a guitar string, (which I had). They do more lines rapping away, urging me to join in their party but I refuse and yawn, all tired. I go back to bed at 8:30 a.m. when they take the hint and split.
I have a new outlook now, needing less chemical or social stimulation for a high, as art takes over this votary with a new enthusiasm, filling me with a natural energy, satisfying desires, subjugating all”.
