Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Sunday. A great heat wave descended; it was a beautiful day, the sun
turned red at three. I started up the mountain at three and got to the
top at four. All those lovely California cottonwoods brooded on all
sides. I felt like playing cowboys. Near the peak there were no more
trees, just rocks and grass. Cattle were grazing on top of the Coast.
There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with
a great wall of white advancing from the legendary Potato Patch where
Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through
Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would
hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with
a bottle of tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women
standing in white doorways, waiting for their man; and Coit Tower, and
the Embarcadero, and Market street, and the eleven teeming hills. Lonely
Frisco for me then---which would buzz a few years later when my soul
got stranger. Now I was only a youth on a mountain. I stooped, looked
between my legs, and watched the world upside down. The brown hills led
off towards Nevada; to the South was my legendary Hollywood; to the
North the mysterious Shasta country. Down below was everything: the
barracks where we stole our tiny box of condiments, where Dostioffski’s
tiny face had glared at us, where Henri had me hide the toy-gun and
where our squeaking yells had transpired. I spun around till I was
dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice.
“Oh where is the girl I love?” I thought, and looked everywhere, as I
had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the
great raw bulge and the bulk of my American continent; somewhere far
across gloomy crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown
steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California
is white like wash lines and empty-souled---at least that’s what I
thought then. I’d learn better later. Now it was time to pursue my moon
along. In the morning Henri and Diane were asleep as I quietly packed
and slipped out the window the same way I’d come in, and left Marin City
with my canvas bag. And I never spent that night on the old ghost ship,
the Admiral Freebee it was called, and Henri and
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