The Subterraneans

the kindest jazz musician there could be while being and therefore naturally the greatest

we went to the Red Drum to hear the jazz which that night was Charlie Parker with Honduras Jones on drums and others interesting

“But baby you said that the other night and you were two hours late and you don’t know what pain it caused me to wait.” (Pain!)—

Ah sad Mardou with little dark eyes looking with pain and had waited all night in a dark bed and the drunken man leering in and I rushed down in fact at once to get two cans of beer to straighten up

exclaiming “Oh Arial you dear—you are going to be—you are so famous—you wrote so well—I remember you—what—” whatever and now unrememberable and drunkenness

and we sitting in there, further beers, the horror the unspeakable horror of myself suddenly finding in myself a kind of perhaps William Blake or Crazy Jane or really Christopher Smart alcoholic humility

and drunk as usual at one point to prove something I stood on my head in the pavement of Montgomery or Clay Street and some hoodlums passed by

And in those days her love meaning no more to me than that I had a nice convenient dog chasing after me (much like in my real secretive Mexican vision of her following me down dark dobe streets of slums of Mexico City not walking with me but following, like Indian woman)

I would like to accuse myself of bastardliness—such tests—briefly I can name two

Sometimes when she speaks and I have my head under hers on the pillow and I see her jaw the dimple the woman in her neck, I see her deeply, richly, the neck, the deep chin, I know she’s one of the most enwomaned women I’ve seen, a brunette of eternity incomprehensibly beautiful and for always sad, profound, calm—