To the north a hundred yards was the steep trail that led to the precipice called Dead Man’s Jump, reputedly a hundred feet to the water. Just back from Dead Man’s was a shell and gift shop. It’d been there longer than I could remember and was perched above a network of grottoes and caves, some of which had been used by bootleggers during Prohibition. One tunnel called the Sunny Jim Cave came straight up into the shell shop itself. This was the portal through which the injured and the dead were often transported. Bringing them up through the tunnel was easier than fishing them out with a helicopter or trying to drag them up the rocks with a rope. Public legend had it that the woman who ran the store had catalogued every poor soul who’d ever been carried up through her tunnel.
Lulled and drawn by the falling and retreating waves below, I finally tore myself away. Insidious chanting voices in my head, the palm tree to my left rattling like a snake, and hands out like a tightrope walker, I made my meticulous way back up the grade.
15.Beauty Chasers
ONE NIGHT I HAD A DREAM THAT I HAD GONE TO SEE A MOVIE called Through the Looking Glass that had been made in three Civil War sequences and that I thought was going to be about Alice, who was fourteen years old with slats of sunshine between her legs. But instead it turned out to be someone’s home movies on a lake. When I woke up the Sex and Murder Self-Help Book had formed completely in my mind.
I had seen a typewriter through the window of cabin number 4. One winter many years before, Charles Bukowski, the L. A. racetrack poet, had rented cabin number 4 from my father to work. I was only a teen then and opposed in principal to poetry, so he only seemed to me a pockmarked crank who drank too much. My father did not like him either. Later, after Bukowski got famous and my father and I were shown to be philistines, I would admire him from a distance at any of the three southern California tracks. There he’d be talking with a bartender, standing in a litter of losing tickets, roaming with a plastic cup of whiskey, knit-capped, potbellied, sometimes in high collar or black overcoat, leaning under the eaves blowing the steam off his coffee, the ever-present cigarette burning in his fingers. At Del Mar he stationed himself at the west end of the track by the benches along the rail. He was always alone, the way he wanted it, the way I and Shelly, who admired Bukowski for his father-tyrannized character in Ham on Rye, kept it.
Now thanks to Beatriz I had the very manual Olympia, olive green and solid as a tank, that he’d used to compose South of No North and parts of Factotum. Off the meds, my fingers flew on the keyboard, just like in the old days when I’d had to knock a column out in an hour. The writing sailed along so smoothly I felt like a plagiarist or James Taylor composing “Fire and Rain.” The keys struck faintly through the old ribbon just dark enough for a first draft. It could not hurt that the fingerprints of an uncompromising wino poet were somewhere under my own.
The thought of a self-help book fulfilled me. It was true self-help, especially if it could sell. I conceived it, as philosophy is divided, in five sections: beauty, ethics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, with a side trip into eschatology, the study of last things, like your Chinese wife walking away from you down Stinson beach hand in hand with the vice president of a watch company. Since most people who read self-help seek a substitute for religion, the emphasis would be on ethics. Within metaphysics I planned to discuss laughter, which for many of us takes the place of love. It was the best, anyway that I could do, and it was Shelly’s ambergris, too, his miniature civilization rising above the merciless flood plains, plagues, and invasions of tragedy, his sweet smokestacks and hillbilly crushes and hilarious trees. What was it Kierkegaard said? The more one suffers, the more one has a sense for the comic. Love is no good either unless you’ve been through the wringer.
I should’ve been outlining, but found myself absorbed in the chapter on beauty. Beauty it seemed to me was the real flypaper of destruction. Beauty most of the time was an illusion, a deception, an invitation to a maelstrom. It was Sofia Fouquet believing that art would save her, or that lovely tropical island where I was hospitalized after being stung by six jellyfish. It was the alluring and duplicitous military strategist Alcibiades who “profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries” and eventually led his own Athenians to their downfall. It was sweet-scented Marvelle sitting on a blanket surrounded by rioting estrus-crazed orangutans.
Sweets slept at my feet, radiating remedial waves and cracking powerful eye-watering farts, his paws flipping in a chase dream. After a while he lifted his big sleepy head and said to me: Shelly’s coming up the drive.
What’s he doing here? I asked.
Not feeling well.
Sick?
Mother problems.
I got up and saw his truck through my window. “Shelly baby,” I declared walking down the stairs to greet him. “How did you find me?”
“You told me where you lived.”
“Fair enough. Come on in.”
He followed me up the steps into my 1970s-themed cabin with its faded braided hippie rugs and four-pound black rotary telephone. “Who’s the dog?”
“That’s Sweets, the camp mutt. He won’t bite. Everything all right?” I asked. “You don’t look so good.”
His head bobbled, his mouth turned down. “I’m okay.”
“Keep thinking about that
