The Metaphysical Ukulele. Sean Carswell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ knew she’d written her final work. It was better than the Star Wars that had come before it. Brackett—whose heroines had never simpered or fainted, melted or whimpered—had taken a lot of the princess out of Leia. She’d given the character some of the old verve Brackett had given Bacall back in the war years. Maybe that dancer’s daughter could do something with those lines. She’d given Han Solo a father who could teach him how to be a man. She made Luke, the whiny little blond kid, into a real hero, one who could best Darth Vader in hand-to-hand combat at the end. And the scenes with Minch were the best. Leigh was certain George would love them.

      Of course, she also knew that some younger version of a Brackett would come along and put a polish on her screenplay. There was no telling how much of a polish, what would get shined up and what would get shined off. She only knew polishing would occur.

      Brackett held the cold ukulele close to her breast, chilling the metastasized blood inside. “I’ll be there soon, Ed,” she said, pushing the studio door open.

      She stepped into the starlight.

       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 СКАЧАТЬ