Dreams

From Jack Kerouac
"OH! THE HORRIBLE VOYAGES I've had to take across the country and back with gloomy railroads and stations you never dreamed of--one of em a horrible pest of bats and crap holes and incomprehensible parks and rains, I can't see the end of it on all horizons, this is the book of dreams. Jesus life is dreary, how can a man live let alone work--sleeps and dreams himself to the other side--and that's where your Wolf is ten times worse than preetypop knows--and how, look, I stopped--how can a man lie and say shit when he has gold in his mouth."
(from Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams, 1961, City Lights Books)

I always like old Jack Kerouac. I never tire of him even when he's bad, like the crap he wrote near the end of his life, October of 1969, in Florida, his wife, a woman from Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack's sacred hometown, who was a nurse, older than Jack who was all bloated and puffy by then and looking older than her, solid drunk and plastered most of the time--Jack once called the nightmares he had after drinking beers all night in the Village "beermares" and I understood that because I had beermares, too, in those days--found Jack dead with his head in the toilet bowl, just like Elvis less than ten years later.

So many of the writers I came to iconicize in terms of my own style of life were of the same character as Jack, a character ruled by all sorts of imaginable escapes from the ennui of life--Oscar Wilde called it tedium vitae-- a lot of those escapes made more possible by sipping steadily from some kind of can or bottle containing some form of alcoholic beverage.

So many writers I love did the same thing. Malcolm Lowry, for instance. What a wonderful study he is. A man driven mad by wanting to be a writer. Same as Kerouac. Hell, same as D.H. Lawrence, a hero of mine who now seems so distant and out of touch--I haven't read Lorenz in years. Or Henry Miller, another writer so bound by writing he became his own character. All of these writers are their main characters. Except, all writers are their main characters, aren't they? Certainly the writer that most influenced me--the writer within me's mother--Gertrude Stein-- had to write--driven to writing, and writing like a unraveling dream-machine, writing from the inward self out, writing out the adventures of the dreams that boiled in her head constantly and consistently just like a book of short stories kept on being a book by the expansion of each story into its own story, its novel reason for being, writing being an unfolding of a man or woman and great writers write from another plane--like Hilda Doolittle, and her strange magnificent Moravian-influenced arrangements of words into sensical or nonsensical exposures of something real and really evident in a whole unraveling of dream after dream after dream, until the weave is so strong it becomes almost impossible to tell the dream from the reality, unless of course this whole thing is transcendentally controlled from within like those grand old American writers Hawthorne and Melville knew--their gods writing from within their own solar plexuses since any god there is is our own god, the god of our self, our supermanegos, and writers are writing Gospels--that's all, just like the storytellers of old Mesopotamia wrote Gospels. BOOKS are Gospels.

Malcolm Lowry had sexual problems. First of all, he had a small pecker. That may have been the problem with a lot of my hero writers. Many of them probably had small peckers. This is a generalization now; same as a literary critic or biographer makes generalizations. Like Ernest Hemingway, for instance. He reveals in The Sun Also Rises that that fine book's hero, Jake Barnes, has been injured in WWI. Shot between the legs. The bullet whizzing in from the front, meeting a slight resistance and then exiting fiercely out the other side--passing right between his legs missing him but not missing him really since as it missed him it took a souvenir of him with it--the bullet with surgical precision clipping off his pecker at the root just above his balls. So Jake Barnes (and I read that "Ernest Hemingway") had everything down there...except--he still had his testicles, both still fiery and churning and ready to semenally explode like a supernova; the desires in his solar plexus still the same, still rambunctious with a need to breed--and, of course, given the ironies that writers live and dream for, the most beautiful woman in Spain is madly in love with him and wants to go to bed with him in every scene and yet poor old Jake can't go through with anything involving penetration when it came to, "Oh, Jake, give it to me deep..." Oh shit. Poor Jake.

See what I mean? A small pecker alert goes up in my mind even when it comes to old Papa, the man's man writer who pulls no punches, or paunches either.

Little Bill Faulkner, another one. Weird sex in his books; especially his potboiler, one of the best novels I've ever read, Sanctuary. Popeye's problem in Sanctuary--a young tempting child-woman ready for that Popeye Priapus only to find it has been transcendentalized into a corncob handily available in the old corn crib. What a salacious book that is.

Malcolm Lowry had many sexual problems. First of all, small pecker; second of all, inexperienced; third of all, attended a Brit boy's school; fourth of all, scared to death of getting syphilis after visiting the Liverpool Police Venereal Disease Museum and seeing syphilis-eaten genitals preserved in glass jars; and fifth, once he got the chance--and some exciting Brit literary babes loved this drunken dreamer--Charlotte Haldane, for one--and once he got the chance--and these London freeswinging babes offered him their bodies and their love--and finally a beautiful--I mean scary beautiful-- American young girl writer fell in love with the sober-handsome/drunk-bloated Malcolm and MARRIED him!--and once he got the chance to be what he was in his dreams--he suffered from premature ejaculation. Ironies. Ironies. Writers depend on ironies.

On the other hand, Henry Miller claimed his was mucho grande--so mucho grande it got hard to control, you know, from overheating; in Sexus, Henry has to take it out on the street, he's walking home after a frustrating evening of revelations with his dreamgirl Mona, and give it some air--risky, but, according to Henry, necessary for a man of such proportions--all the while thinking of the beautiful woman he loved and who at he flaunted his large organ and, and here's Henry's irony, she rejects it, one time for a Japanese guy who Henry said, "had a barely perceptible prick" and bragged about how his hand was much more loving than any of the women he seduced.

And that brings to mind the incident Papa reported in his farewell book, a great small wonder of a book, A Movable Feast, where Scotty Fitzgerald asks Papa for a private evaluation concerning the size of Scotty's rod in the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and Papa takes Scotty into the men's room and checks it out coming to the conclusion that Scotty matched up with Michelangelo's David who stands "barely" exposed in the Grand Plaza in Florence (an artist friend of mine said Florence was without a doubt the most beautiful city he'd ever been in and tried to live in--and he was from San Francisco, too--I've never been there except in books--Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun, weird damn psycho-transcendental novel--Hawthorne was writing like Freud before Freud was born!--was my first trip to Florence). If you've ever checked out Mickey Angelo's big David, though big in stature, peckerwise: a little on the wee-wee side, don't you think? So, OK, I see Papa's praise--at least David's not ashamed of his and displays it wee or no wee.

Except I don't dream. I have dreamed, but not in a long time; usually when I'm mired deeply in romantic love with one of the stranger-than-truth women that have been in and out of my life for all of my life I dream--if that love is, you know, of the fiery kind, the highly romantic kind that sets my instincts on fire, then I may dream one or two heavy complicated overstaged dreams usually involving a big huge house full of rooms full of men and my true love going in and out of those rooms and jiving with all those strange men while I chase through the house looking for her, frustrated, of course, by never finding her, though hearing her talking and jiving--and I'm searching for her, trying to attract her--trying to convince her that she should be coming to my room and my room only since I am the only man for her and how I only have room for her, "oh, you dreamer"--I'll have a couple of potboiler dreams, but then that woman will up and exit my stage and another prima donna enters from opposite stage and here we go again.

Freud says we all dream and dream deeply and complicatedly every night and those of us who claim we don't dream are simply suppressing our dreams, hiding them away in the back confines of our subconscious--down deep in the solar plexus--uh-oh, I'm talking Lawrencian psychoanalysis now, not Freudian.

Yesterday I got hit by a truck. You know the old joke, "Did anybody get the license number of that truck that just hit me." Sometimes those people are just waking up from a stone drunk. Or maybe they're coming down off a quartet of Blind Pig tabs (that's LSD to you younger brats). "Was that the Polish Army that just marched across my tongue?"

Jack Kerouac had terrible dreams--constant dreams--LSD dreams without taking LSD, though Jack and Allan Ginsberg were two of the great minds Timothy Leary sent his first samples of LSD to for them to take it and then write a report on its effects on them. Tim sent a couple of blotters to Lennie Bernstein, artists especially, Bobby Dylan, but also to math geniuses and Nobel Prize winners. [The first time I experienced an LSD trip I took five spots off a Captain America blotter--I ended up taking a five-hour shower--I swear--it was the greatest shower ever the history of me being me--and I remember great showers, all of them--many imaginational things happened to me during that five-hour shower. I think I'll write a novel called The Five-Hour Shower.

And I'm avoiding writing about getting hit by that truck yesterday because, I don't know, I'm American enough to have desires to sue in my commercialized head. That bothers me. I despise lawyers--lawyers and I have never gotten along--except when I was in the Army and there two of my best Army comrades were two nice Jewish-boy lawyers from Chi-town--great men--the most brilliant, D.H. (wow, a coincidence, D.H. Lawrence--and D.H. the lawyer), was so brilliant he'd graduated from Yale Law in a matter of months--and they kicked him out once--you know, Yale; the professors there hate students who are brighter than they are, which are most of the students at Yale. I love Yale women--a confession being a confession based on a confession made in New Haven one day near the Elm City Diner and then I looked, I saw, I followed, and then I confessed and confessed admiration and desire for a Yale woman, a woman who walked as though on stilts--I dreamed of her that night after playing blues in a club right around the corner from the Schubert.

Thanks to my friends who read about me getting hit by the truck yesterday; especially my friend who himself last year got hit by a car--you know, the friend I write about in yesterday's "Just Another Day in NYC" post. "...and that's where your Wolf is ten times worse than preetypop knows...."

thepreetypopgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Is Bush not a fool?