The Metaphysical Ukulele. Sean Carswell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       The Song at the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole

      The Five of Swords continues to haunt Patricia Geary. He shows up daily. She sits at her kitchen table with its view of bougainvillea creeping along a shadowbox fence. Hummingbirds suck from the pink flowers. Pat pushes aside wayward student manuscripts and the crusty oatmeal bowl that her husband neglected to remainder in the sink. She lays down three cards. The Five of Swords emerges as one. He is a warning or a reminder of ego struggles and pyrrhic victories. Every morning.

      He’s a mysterious character this number Five, standing alone with two swords stacked in his arms and three swords scattered about his feet. Two vanquished fighters wander away.

      Of course, Pat knows how to read the card. She knows what it means and how to apply it to her life, but it’s the artwork on this particular deck that sends her down a rabbit hole.

      The victor who has gathered the swords looks off. Presumably, he’d be a warrior. Who but a warrior would want five swords? But this victor looks more artist than warrior. His shirt is tattered, frayed at the edges, falling apart not with the slashes of enemy swords or the outstretched fabric of a tussle, but threadbare from too many wearings, too many washings. There isn’t a bloodstain to be found on the blouse. Even if there were, Pat is certain she’d read it as red acrylic paint. Or maybe catsup.

      And the victor’s countenance in three-quarter profile, facing the edge of the card while his round, soft eyes glance back at the vanquished: he has the beautiful and innocent façade of a seducer, of a man who tenderly fills his wife’s pipe with opium. Pat knows that face. It originally belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

      Regardless what the card means, Rossetti’s face is the real ghost, the real haunting.

      At moments like this, Pat seeks solace in her ukulele.

      Times haven’t called for this consolation in so long that she isn’t sure exactly where she can find the ukulele. Somewhere in her home office. Somewhere buried deep in the geologic layers, in a strata she dates as 1987. The excavation will take the better part of an afternoon. Just the barrier of dolls, stacked like Day-Glo СКАЧАТЬ