Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

One of the driers stopped. A woman sitting under a hair drier and another unwrapping a candy bar signaled with their hands and eyes and candy bar that the machine wasn’t theirs. Dirk touched the arm of a man on a bench with a hat over his face, who was the only other person in the room the drier might belong to, but the man still slept. Dirk removed the warm clothes from the drier, folded them neatly and stacked them in a basket cart. He was throwing his wet clothes into the drier when the man who’d been sleeping before squeezed Dirk’s wrist and said “Don’t any of you people have the decency to wait?”

The telegram read: The girls and I won’t arrive till tomorrow. Husband, parents, complications, love.” Dirk drank a few vodka and tonics and fell asleep, awoke in the dark with the radio on and went outside. He had a Moroccan tea at a Haight Street coffeehouse, where many young people were drawing, writing, playing checkers and chess, talking about police harassment, pot planting, Hippie Hill freedom, the Bach cantata being played, democracy now but total revolution, if that’s what it’s going to have to come to, tonight’s rock concerts at the Fillmore, Avalon, Winterland, Straight. A man sat beside him, pulled on the long hairs of his unbrushed beard and braided matted hair and said “Hey there, joint’s getting real artsy. Very beautiful old North Beach days. Culture with a Das Kapital K. Loonies just doing their dovey ding, am I tight?” Dirk shrugged, the man laughed and patted Dirk’s shoulder consolingly. A girl at the next table shrugged and the man said “Yeah, North Beach si and now the Haight. You’re all gonna burn out famous,” he announced to the house. “Like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, me boys, me best, me fine old friendlies who bade it ballsy and big. So try and refudiate me in five years, fiends, that all of you who pluck to it haven’t made buns of bread,” and he finished his coffee, chugalugged down all the milk in the table’s cream pitcher and left.

Dirk was on his way home when a girl stopped him on the street and said “Can I crash your pad? I’m alone, in real trouble, it’s just me and I won’t be any bother, I swear. The pad I was supposed to flop at won’t let me in. These four guys I was living with there all of a sudden split for Los Angeles — ran off with my records and clothes while I was sitting it out in jail. Look at this. The creepy keeper gave it to me this morning as a sort of graduation diploma and safe-conduct visa out of Nevada.” She showed him a paper that said she’d been arrested and released after five days for vagrancy, loitering, wayward minor, accessory to crime, resisting arrest. “Resisting arrest, bullshit. They just clamped on the cuffs, felt my tits and dumped me in a smelly van. We were selling speed, made our contact, two cats and myself in Carson City — America’s worst dump. Ever been there? Don’t ever go. The creepy keeper said ‘Now I’m warning you, sis, don’t be turning back.’ And when we left the diner with our contact, twenty Feds jumped out of the shadows with guns cocked like puny movie gangsters and threw us against our truck, arrested us all.”

While they walked to his place, she told him she thought she was pregnant again. “I had a kid in Hartford last year, gave it away. My rich German-Jewish father told me the baby was very ugly after he told me how much he was forking over for my bills. Best of hospital service, never had it so good. And he was kind of sweet too, like an overconcerned expectant father expecting his first child, and then, with my society-minded momma, had me committed. But the state released me after four months, though my folks wanted me in for at least a year but were too cheap to pay for a private crazyhouse, when they found I was still getting pills and grass and was caught balling one of Connecticut’s prize mental deficients behind a bandstand during a Saturday-afternoon dance. Ever been to Hartford? Don’t ever go there, either. That’s what they told me in Carson City. Said ‘Don’t come back for six months minimum,’ and I said ‘Six months my ass, I’m never coming back, none of my friends will ever come back, you lost a good tourist trade with us when you locked me up, and this giant Swedish matron, she was very congenial when she wasn’t forcing my box open every ten minutes to see if I was stashing anything inside, she just laughed, laughed and laughed.”

Dirk gave her one of the two tuna fish salad sandwiches he made. She said “It looks so pretty and sweet, lettuce flouncing out of it like a dress, and sourdough’s my favorite of all nonmacrobiotic breads, but no, thanks. With the last kid I gained 46 pounds, I’m ten pounds overweight as it is, so I’m only going to start eating again when and if I find I’m not pregnant. Look at that view. Golden Gate from your own place. Do you ever really look outside — I mean, really? Too much. You ought to raise your mattress to window height, make it with a groovy chick while you’re both stoned on hash and eye-popping the moon. You do all these paintings? Do them on pills? Well, don’t ever get on them, don’t even hold them, they’re worse than anything besides junkie’s junk, which can actually be a good trip the first time but the shits when you have to start paying forty bells a high. You’re a real housekeeper. Just look how clean this place is. You ought to wear an apron — a clean flowery one. I’ll make you one, if you get me some thread things and paint and an old clean sheet. Floor recently mopped, books in place, bed made, not even a curly body hair on the rug, and pardon me for all my luggage”—she lifted her average-sized pocketbook with her pinkie and reset it on the floor—“but I feel utterly helpless if I have to travel light.”

They drank tea, she showered and said she was sorry, but she had soaked his bathroom floor and then drenched a few towels in trying to wipe it up. “When I was living in Hartford, I wasn’t such a slob. In fact, I was a real housekeeper then, also: cooked, cleaned, deveined the shrimp and cracked the crabs, just obsessed with ridding my place of flecks and specks, as my mother is and you must be. But now I haven’t made a bed in eight months, no, nine, except for the five days in Caron City’s most depressing jail. You have kids? You look like you have a half dozen. That you and your boy in the sailboat? Is your wife as blonde as he? I never want kids, never want to get hitched. Marriage is for con men who give charm for money and that Mongoloid I balled who’ll always need lots of help and love. For everyone else, it’s me me me me. My childhood was the worst. My mother’s a hysterical bitch and shrew. My dad’s got a gripe against because he always wanted to screw me and now because he bought me a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes to keep me in Hartford just two days before I split for the Coast. Two cats came by the place I was staying at and said ‘Let’s take you away from all this,’ meaning my apron and housekeeping chores, and I said sure, anything; there wasn’t anything happening in Hartford since I gave that ugly baby away. So I packed those clothes in two valises I stole from the college boys I was living with — they did much worse to me in the past, so don’t even begin to twinge and twist — and we made it across country without a bit of flak, never for a moment being anything but high. I’ve now been in every state but Alaska and Hawaii — Carson City, Nevada, my forty-eighth. And I have no clothes, maybe two dimes in my wallet, my father would just piss if he knew and my mother’s aching to put me away for life. And most everyone who knows me says I’m wasting my time. That I’ve more than a one-forty I.Q. and ought to use that natural intelligence in writing about all I’ve seen and done, but with a humorous aspect to it, as there’s far too much sad seriousness in literature and the world as it is. And one day I will. Just as soon as I land a pad of my own.”