New World a-Coming, Ch. 39
1955: The "Six Poets at 6 Gallery" Reading
Stokes speaks
I was there in San Fran that night of the Six Poets reading at the 6 Gallery—though if you go by the number of people who claimed later to have been there, the room must have been a lot bigger inside than it looked from the outside. I knew Gary from the Merchant Marine—we had served on the Sappa Creek together—and I visited him in Marin when I shipped in that September of ‘55. I didn't know much about the other poets but I knew that Gary was part of a bunch of writers and walkers who sent each other letters and would catch up in person whenever one of them hitchhiked through another's town.
The 6 Gallery was one of those typical North Beach artsy joints; used to have been a gas station I think. Concrete floor that still showed the stains from the grease pit sand: walls with various avant-garde paintings hung unframed on the bare plaster. There was an old beat up piano but it didn't see use that night I was there.
Other people have written about 6 Reading—Kerouac did too, in The Dharma Bums—and everybody had their own bit of mythology going on. The reading was actually great and Ginsberg—little skinny fellow with short hair and glasses—reading “Howl” was intense as everybody remembers it. I'm not sure just anybody could have followed up that performance, because it was so intense and the whole audience got into it—well, from the intensity all the jug Burgundy they had drunk, with Kerouac and Cassady shouting Go! Go! like the jazz scenes in On the Road.
But Gary managed it: I think he figured that trying to match the intensity or even the duration of “Howl” was the wrong way to go, particularly at the end of an evening. So he read from his translations of Haida myth: those poems’ coolness, the short line, and the physicality of the language (even though Rip Rap was several years in the future) made a good counterpoint, not only to Allen's intensity, but also to “Howl”’s nightmarish modernity. In a way, Gary's “The Berry Feast” captured the Pacific Rim orientation in his poetry the way “Howl” did for Allen's Beat/Whitman East Coast riffs.
In bearshit, find it in August
Neat pile on the fragrant trail, in late
August, perhaps by a larch tree,
Bear has been eating the berries.
high meadow, late summer, snow gone
...
When
snow melts back
from the trees
bare branches knobbed pine twigs
hot sun on wet flowers
green shoots of huckleberry
breaking through snow.
Everybody’s had a crack at describing the evening, but for me, actually, the aftermath was more rewarding and memorable. Gary and Phil Whalen took us to their favorite restaurant in Chinatown, Sam Wo’s--that's the kind of local knowledge that Gary appreciated, just like knowing the places in the San Fran markets where he could buy Asian mushrooms and horse meat for his stews. At Wo’s, Gary had a favorite table and a favorite seat, near the back, with a good view of the people around the table but also an eyeline to the door, so he could monitor who might walk in.
At that time in North Beach, it was the Chinese places that stayed open the latest. By ’55 Gary could get around in Chinese pretty well: part of his studies at Berkeley, and the waiters were intrigued by this gwai lo who could speak even bad Cantonese: there was one who was mercilessly funny in mocking Gary’s accent. Even so, a lot of us let Gary order—most of the poets were too drunk, between Kerouac’s Burgundy at the 6 and the plum wine at the restaurant, to care about which food came, as long as it was cheap and plentiful.
He was already divorced from Alison, though he still talked about her a lot , and I hadn’t yet read the “Four Poems for Robin,” even though he and Robin had been together before the War. But he never lacked for girls in the scene who found him intriguing and sexy (one of them rhapsodized to me about how there were “always clean sheets on his bed”, savvy young fox knew how to make women comfortable). The poets were all shouting and laughing, and it was noisy anyway. Gary was just as animated as everybody else, sitting at the end of the table at Sam Wo’s, about halfway down the room, warm and sweaty even on this foggy October night, a jar of Baijiu at his elbow, chasing the booze with beer, his eyes quartering the whole place.
But there was one corner table whose occupants he studiously avoided looking at. Two women, or maybe one woman and one man—it was a little hard to tell. They weren’t the usual Beat girls with black tights and dark eye makeup like Time liked to caricature—both were short-haired, and wore dark loose clothes, but these two were way too aware, too attentive.
The darker-skinned woman, with the longer hair and dark eyes, was smoking a cigarette, and for a moment, her eyes caught mine, over Gary’s shoulder, from across the narrow room. She caught me looking, and smiled briefly, and stubbed out her cigarette in a tin ashtray on the small round tabletop. Then she turned to speak quietly into the ear of her companion, who had short-cropped hair like a teenage boy’s, and whose hands rested quietly, palm-down, on the table-top. The small woman looked at me as well, flicked her eyes toward the short corridor at the back that led toward Wo’s kitchen and the toilets, and then slowly, deliberately broke eye contact. Without really knowing why, I clambered out from behind the table, behind the backs of the poets who were leaning across the red-checked tablecloth to shout at each other, and headed for the back.
But as I was passing the two women at the corner table, I saw them both look up sharply, and peer toward the front door. There was a man coming down the room—a tall man with long hair, especially for that time, and a beard, and a western hat on. The poets were too engrossed in each other and their loud conversation, but I saw Gary look up at the new arrival, and his eyes widened.
The big man didn’t even look at him. He continued toward the rear, and stopped near the corner table, half-turning so that he could see down the long narrow restaurant at the same time. Then after a moment, he turned and looked down; there was a faint smile in the craggy eyes under the shadows of the Stetson’s brim. He was close enough to me that his voice, though very quiet, carried very clearly, almost as if there was a little space of silence around his words. He had an accent I couldn’t identify.
“Rina… Ani. You are both still beautiful.”
The boyish small woman smiled up at him, and said, equally quietly, “Well met, Colonel. It’s a long time since Ed’s lab.”
And then she suddenly twisted in her seat to stare at me—I was stuck awkwardly between the big man and back corridor, trying to look as if I were still trying to get to the toilets that lay beyond the kitchen. The Colonel made no move to let me by, and instead looked down at me: I was conscious of his height and bulk.
And then he spoke.
“You’d be Mr Stokes. I understand from the General that you’re to be trusted. Come outside.”
Without waiting for an answer, or looking at me again, he turned and headed for the front door. Behind me, the two women got up from the table and followed: even without turning, I could feel their eyes on my back.
I stepped outside, and there was the Colonel, to one side, in the shadows under the shuttered doorway of the Chinese grocer next door. There was a black man with him: long graying hair brushed back, and dressed in white clothes—a shirt and loose trousers—that glowed yellow in the fog-refracted light from Wo’s front window. The Colonel nodded, to include both of us.
He said, briefly, “This is Brother Extaberri. He’s a friend.”
The two women joined us in front of the shuttered grocery, just out of the light. The Colonel said,
“You need to see this.” He gestured us closer, and the five of us stood in a small circle, shoulder to shoulder in the dimness. He had a small scrap of what looked like rough brown paper in his hand and he held it up, tilting it to try to catch the indirect light from Wo’s. That wasn’t enough.
The boyish woman Rina said “Wait a minute,” and held up her own hand next to the paper, cupping it as if she were holding an egg in her empty palm. She furrowed her brow, and spoke a few phrases under her breath. Nothing happened for a moment, and then a small flame, like the flame of a butane lighter, appeared over her palm, dancing like a lit candle, in the hair just over her hand; in the thick fog, it glowed yellow and gold. I stared at the flame, mystified, but the Colonel said, impatiently, “Hold it closer,” and tilted the paper again.
By Rina’s light we could see a rough drawing, down in charcoal, of what looked like a castle or stone jail: it was depicted in steep mountains, and it had towers and ramparts, but lower windows down near the ground. Even as we looked, the image seemed to move and blur, as if it were fading into the rough paper. The Colonel spoke sharply “Etsy!” and the black man said a few words of his own, in what sounded like the same language as Rina’s, and the image came back into focus. Not only that, but it seemed to be getting bigger, almost like a movie camera zooming in on the picture. There were bars on the castle’s lower windows, and as the picture zoomed, we saw a face behind the bars.
Another zoom, and now we seemed to be seeing inside the cell: there was a thin balding man with a drooping mustached, and spectacles one of whose lenses was cracked, and he was standing with his hands framing his face, almost as if he were looking at us from the other side of the paper. Then his hands moved, and we saw him speaking, but we heard no sound, even as the picture twitched and flickered.
Ani paused for a moment, peering down at the image in the fog-diffused light of Rina’s flame. Etsy was chanting quietly. Ani’s eyes filled with tears as she said, “Abe? Is that you?” Her voice cracked, but she rallied and said “Doctor, where are you?”
The answer came like a sigh through an old hand-cranked telephone: full of atmospherics and the whisper of static, and out of synch with the image of the man’s face, like an old-time movie whose soundtrack was slipping.
“Ani….yes, Ani, it’s me, Abe. I can’t come to you. After the…night of the fire… the Russians…came for me. I’m there was a burst of static… Gulag, but I have drawn a picture… the Mathiaskloster more static, and a sudden silence; the image froze …need you to… connect… this picture…
A sudden shout made us all jump and look back into the restaurant—the poets were getting drunker and the laughter was louder. Through the fogged-up windows, the interior of Sam Wo’s looked like a little theater; or maybe like a nickelodeon, with images in yellow and gold and black flickering behind the glass. Rina’s little light abruptly went out. The Colonel snatched back the paper, and tilted it to the window, but the image was gone.
The Colonel cursed and shouldered through the swinging doors bak into the room. The interior of the plate glass windows was so fogged that I couldn’t see inside, so I caught the door before it swung shut, holding it half-open so I could see him. We saw him slip through the crowd, heading for the back: for a big man, and a dramatic-looking one with his long hair and beard, he still had the knack of avoiding notice—you’d see him on the street or in a bar or—later—in the back alleys of Ballyizget, and, when he wanted it, he could be damned near invisible. I saw him bend over and whisper into Gary’s ear. Unusually for him, Gary looked startled. And maybe even a little scared.
Behind me Rina said something—sounded like a curse—in that unknown language, and then Etsy finally spoke, the first words in English I’d heard him say, in a pronounced Haitian accent. His voice was urgent.
“Brother Ibrahim, he gone. Old Ones coming.”
And behind us, in the dark end of the Chinatown back street, out of nowhere and without warning, there was a flash of light, and a roll of thunder.
END OF ACT II