Читать книгу The Metaphysical Ukulele - Sean Carswell - Страница 10

Mad Nights of Springtime

In the lettuce fields of postwar America with a cold Pacific fog drifting over the Santa Clara River valley just north of Los Angeles, a young Jack Kerouac wandered into the campsite of itinerant Filipino farmhands. He was not even thirty; not yet on the verge of a fame that would come to destroy him. The farmhands strummed their Catholic hymns on a ukulele. Little Jack, Ti Jean as his blesséd old French Canadian mother called him, felt the air vibrated by song and strings and experienced the satori to carry him into the great nothing. It was beginning and end.

As with any great religious observance, the farmhands kept wine nearby. An old, thin man waved Jack in. The old man’s giant hands were all out of proportion for the bony arms they dangled at the end of. Those hands—too big for picking strawberries or blueberries or any berries but just the right size to cradle a cabbage in his palm—welcomed Jack and pointed to a seat where Jack sat and accepted the circling bottle of wine and sang along. Could they be singing in English? Yes, Jack. It’s “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” with thick pidgin accent. This song so much like the songs of Lowell in that tender childhood, father still alive, brother still alive, everyone alive and in love with this beautiful world that postwar America could now only see as prewar America. Prewar America couldn’t have known they were pre-anything. Nor could the young rootless Jack, wandering on the road that would become On the Road, know he was pre-Kerouac.

So Jack sang along. A farmhand straight out of Hawaii like so many of these farmhands who left the sugar plantations of the Big Five or the pineapple fields with its barbs tearing through every glove and cloth to hunch down in the foggy soil of row crops passed the ukulele along to Ti Jean. The sweet little nun who had soothed Jack’s hands, knuckles bruised from her sisters in the cloisters, by teaching him to play the guitar in those long gone beautiful days of Lowell and now he knew how to hold those slender fingers, so dexterous from days at the portable typewriter, into chords at least guitar chords and those ears so good for dialog could also hear the difference between an A and a G and could find the notes of a scale. Pretty soon the Filipino farmhands taught Jack to play the song that the Mexican farmhands had taught them, a simple three-chord arrangement that invited all to dance not like a sailor but like the captain. Jack played the song. Families of farmhands clapped and sang along and banged blesséd camp spoons against camp cooking tins and swung babes in arms and held sweethearts close in order to dance (para bailar la bamba).

As the wine dwindled down and sweethearts and mothers and fathers with babe in arms lay down to rest for the night and even the thin old man with his giant hands could wrestle only scattered seconds of awakened consciousness between deep snoring rhythms, Jack searched the strings and notes of that old taro patch instrument until he found the chords for “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” He sang it softly to the valley and fields and Filipino farmhands and his lovely Mexican girlfriend in the adjacent camp with her crazy brothers mumbling “mañana” in their sleep. This America.

In the mad nights of springtime Corte Madera many years later, Locke McCorkle gifted Jack a handmade ukulele. Locke made the uke himself, carved the neck from a trunk of sun-hardened myrtle felled right on the property where Locke built his home and the guest shack where Jack and Gary Snyder lived that spring. The back and sides were made of that same myrtle milled down to thin planks matched with a thin piece of ancient redwood for a soundboard. One strum and the air vibrated with the natural sounds of Bay Area, 1956. Jack quickly learned to play folk songs to be sung by the fire and songs para bailar. He played these on nights and parties in McCorkle’s house, Locke and wife nude and dancing with Gary nude with nude girlfriend and nude Allen Ginsberg and nude Peter Orlovsky and even clothed Philip Whalen on the side tapping a nude foot and Jack the itinerant bhikkhu sadly strumming upbeat songs. He developed a way of playing the uke spontaneously. The first note was always the best note. Songs followed a loose pattern of solitary introspection and solitary introspection with mad wild parties in between. All songs sounded similar but each was its own unique experience. Improvisation never to be repeated. Nude Locke and nude Gary and nude Allen and nude Peter and nude women and bodhisattvas all demanded songs they could dance to. Jack’s spontaneous sounds were abandoned during the parties. Structured strumming of pop songs took their place. Later, though, sitting atop his little feather sleeping bag in deep grass next to Gary’s little cabin in the hills with Gary asleep or off with one of his many women, Jack played his deepest painful pleasure in solitary celebration. First note, best note. Always.

Locke’s wife sewed a padded bag for the ukulele, specifically designed to cradle the soft redwood soundboard and hold the uke close to Jack’s revolutionary rucksack. With rucksack on back and Locke already at work for the day and Locke’s wife and children cleaning away to the sounds of the living room hi-fi, Charlie Parker spinning at 78 rpm, Jack knelt in honor of the Corte Madera innocence that would soon be lost (could he know this at the time?) in a summer of desolation and an autumn of scandal and explosion.

On Desolation Peak, Ti Jean barely touched his ukulele. He stared at the redwood grains and dreamed of Corte Madera and the parties and the friends and the social life that on the peak had been reduced to nightly radio conversations discussing muffin recipes. Jack traced the flaming patterns of myrtle waving along the neck. He picked up the ukulele and dreamed of times playing with farmhands and beatniks, or of playing guitar with nuns or toying with a cuatro for the lovely Esperenza Villanueva. The first note was no better than any other note because no Desolation Peak note was played into the silence that surrounds us all for eternity.

On the way down the mountain, Jack found the dharma in charity by giving his ukulele to a wild, beatific Oregon wrestler with shoulders so much like Gary’s sculpted out of logging and trail adventures in the rainforest west of the Cascades. The wrestler drove Jack as far south as Grants Pass. Jack said goodbye to both wrestler and ukulele with a “Blah” that he understood to say it all.

Back in San Francisco, without the spontaneous uke to keep him rooted, Jack fell into wine and howling poets. His old pal Greg Corso had migrated west to join the madness. Corso spent most days chafing the patience of Allen and Peter and especially Kenneth Rexroth for whom Kerouac was all too happy to chafe. Neal Cassady had moved back in with wife Carolyn and two kids, back to working for the railroad and embracing the work/produce/consume ideology of Ike Eisenhower and William Levitt and even aspiring to shortcut his way in like a Midnight Ghost funded on winnings at the horse track. Allen’s “Howl” was finally being heard and not only heard but (could they know then?) hunted down by Captain Hanrahan of the San Francisco PD in hopes of saving the children of SF from the greatest minds of a generation who blew and were blown by ecstatic bikers. The machinery was too much for Jack.

When Locke finally met a woebegone Jack on the North Shore, Locke seeking a pre-workday meal and Jack ending a wild night in search of eggs enough to soak up a belly full of Tokay, Jack nearly burst into tears (Catholic guilt). Locke took Jack to a nearby diner and purchased two plates of ham and eggs. Locke shoveled eggs potatoes ham into his hungry mouth. Jack used fork to push his eggs around the porcelain, crashing from ham to hash brown. Locke wouldn’t speak of the ukulele. Truth be told he was disappointed. Sure the ukulele was Jack’s to keep or give away as he saw fit but really for the forty hours Locke spent milling and carving and sanding and gluing and rubbing oil into the wood and the twenty-seven hours Locke’s wife spent cutting and padding and sewing the case, the ukulele was Jack’s to keep only. Locke held his disappointment inside and smiled his beatific Buddha grin and said, “You have no idea how good these hams and eggs is. If you had any idea whatsoever how good these hams and eggs is, you’d quit your sulking and dig in.”

Jack mumbled, “These hams and these eggs, them hams and them them eggs.”

It was the eternal suppertime in Park Avenue penthouse apartments. With On the Road a bestseller and Subterraneans and Dharma Bums hot on its heels and every TV talk show host hungry to drag a drunken Jean-Louis Kerouac in front of a camera as a spark to the Society of the Spectacle, Ti Jean wore his forty-dollar sport coat and headed into Manhattan to dine with Steve Allen. Steve played his piano like an old American patriarch in his Upper East Side loft apartment with direct elevator access while his wife Jayne cooked dinner. Jack refused to read poems to Steve’s accompaniment, though they’d recorded together and performed live on television together already. Jack had time to feel ashamed and to feel the pain of his failed rucksack revolution straying far from its prophecy. Instead, he had drifted in front of the eyes of thousands of Americans staring at the same thing and on some nights that same thing was him and not his thoughts or his poetry but his drunken disheveled look in his forty-dollar sport coat clashing with barbershop haircut and slacks bought three-for-a-dollar at the local Goodwill. Jack relented not to perform his poetry but to play Steve’s ukulele. It was not a taro-patch, straight from Hawaii and played in the fields to songs sung in pidgin accents nor the holy ancient redwood myrtle handmade by ancient bhikkhus but a mass-produced, Arthur Godfrey model ukulele made in Chicago for people to purchase and never play after watching Godfrey’s music hour. They ate fine pork chops with green bean accompaniment. They played songs and told stories. Steve offered Jack a bottle of brandy as sacrament. After many glasses, Jack got drink drunk he got. He came to like old Steve a little better. Holy Steve, forever flawed, forever seeking enlightenment. For Steve alone Jack twisted his face and pointed finger to the sky in honor of the bodhisattva comedian Dayton Allen and recited the mantra, “Whyyyyyy not?”

Jayne asked Jack about recording with jazz saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn and Jack told her of carrying his great holy suitcase full of handwritten haikus to the recording studio where Zoot tooted and Cohn blown and that bebop tick tock jazz filtered through. Only Zoot and Al didn’t stick around for the playback and Ti Jean huddled in a corner and cried. When he retold the story, he left out the crying. He held his Arthur Godfrey ukulele close and plucked a perfect note to salve the seething wound that the brandy could no longer sooth. That moment coincided with holy American patriarch Steve Allen and his long-suffering Jayne thanking Jack for a wonderful night as a way of saying, “Jack, it’s time to go now.” But Jack undaunted borrowed black telephone and rang an army of beatniks to roam Manhattan streets forever in a southerly direction.

Three years Jack spent holed up with his mother on Long Island and fame surrounding him and television appearances and penthouse patriarchs and beatniks hanging on to a phony lifestyle that was honest in books but lost in translation to action when actions became repetitions instead of spontaneous. Finally, he heard that engine calling all cars back to the end of the land sadness, end of the earth gladness. He used his mother’s phone to ring Lawrence Ferlinghetti over at the now-canonized City Lights Bookstore where they hatched a plan for Ti Jean’s surreptitious slide through San Francisco and down to Big Sur where the real writing, the poetry of “Sea,” could commence. He was to arrive by cross country train with a ticket this time, indoors with no flapping arms or beatific bums saying prayers to Saint Theresa, and call the saintly City Lights using an alias. Lawrence would shuttle Jack disguised in fishing hat and slickers down to the cabin near Bixby Bridge where they would dine with Henry Miller. No wine but intoxicating conversation. Only Jack didn’t call first but stumbled into City Lights where the fishing hat and slicker proved no disguise and a three-day bender commenced. First drunk, best drunk.

One fast move took him by bus to Monterey and cab to Bixby Creek where he passed out in a field with an ornery old mule licking his face. Henry Miller had given up on Jack four days earlier. He needed no other introduction. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was done waiting. Saintly City Lights called. He gathered Ti Jean up and took him to the grocery store to amass dry goods and perishables and escorted Jack to the cabin before heading north up the Pacific Coast Highway. Jack was left alone in the cabin. He wandered the fields. He listened to the sea. He practiced haikus written to the ornery mule:

Pacific patriarch

reincarnated from Manhattan penthouse

lick my face—sploosh!

He also found Ferlinghetti’s perfect heavenly ukulele carried back from days of a Pacific theater that performed a new tragedy and endowed the survivors with ennui and existential void. For three weeks, Jack played his spontaneous uke. He carried it down Bixby Creek to a cave overlooking the ocean roaring with choruses of waves fifteen feet high. The sea air and hours of spontaneous strumming took its toll. Iodine crept into the glue holding the blesséd ukulele together. It choked Jack’s deep breath. He felt his own glue returning to liquid form. One fast move and he was gone.

What remained was not, was never the air Ti Jean vibrated on his own.