Move Under Ground | Page 2

over 'til the ink ran off the wrinkled page but only once got around to writing him back. It was too hard to think, being lost in the words of his letters, but they were the only things that kept the horrible roar of the ocean against the cliffs from overwhelming me. No matter what, I couldn't find the Buddha in the rhythmic crashing of the waves anymore, so instead I drank myself into concrete unconsciousness.
In Neal's second letter, the empty spaces between existence became a bit more clear. He could feel it too, how the world was pulling itself apart somehow, and how some dark dream had begun to ooze into the American cracks. He didn't need to say it; Neal was always best understood between the lines. "Far be it from me to suggest that two old Catholic boys take off their clothes, scramble down the bluffs and toss themselves into the foam just to stain the waves red for a precious heartbeat of a moment all to gain the attention of some Three-Lobed Burning Eye, but even when I'm nestled between Billie's legs taking in her fecund smell, I just feel that we ought to . . . " he wrote, but I knew he meant something else. He was trying to stitch something together; he had some weird forlorn hope that he could save the world from what we both could feel was lurking in the Outer Deep. Usually, I thought of smiling old Neal catting between wife and girlfriend, grinning and pretending to write, misunderstanding Nietzsche in the most brilliant of ways, but now I could only conceive of him as some blind fly picking his way along highway webbing. I didn't write him a letter back after that. Not at first.
I wrote at him though, on my old Clark Nova, the one Bill had sent me from Tangiers along with a cryptic note of his own about the little adding machine spring his family fortune was based on. "It only has one end(ing)" he wrote in his junky scrawl and drew me a swirl that I couldn't look at for long without blacking out. So I wrote to Neal, and to Bill too, but through my novel, not ever in letter form. I wrote 'til the letters on the keys were stamped in my pink blood, long scrolls of philosophy and gin-stewed sex, and I'd take the rolls out to the bush, kick my way to the rocky cliff and roll my scroll down to the shore like a challenge to that Dark Dreamer waiting for us all out in the Pacific. He didn't blink. I'd roll the paper back up, take it home and add it back to the pile of scrolls along one of the walls of the cabin. The air smelled sour for Big Sur. I imagined the old gang could read the display even in the spiritual night and fog--which me and Neal and Bill and maybe even Larry and Allen had all been swimming through (but just a touch on those two, Larry being too much the businessman and Allen too degraded and attached to sodomy to really hear The Call).
When I ran out of paper, which was often enough because I could hardly get it into town to get more and because Larry was just nonplused at what seemed to be my output and could hardly keep up with my needs, I meditated and spoke the mantra of Kilaya 'til my throat cracked like August bark. It was Kilaya: the three-headed demon with bat wings who was converted to the protection of the dharma by the compassion of a wise old lama on a hilltop not too different from the one I was on, who came to me as a pale redhead with great loose curls of hair like a forest fire. She had an excellent belly laugh for a little thing (her ribs were like a pile of sticks) and she whispered in my ear, "College boy. College boy, you look so kind and decent," and made little whirls in my own dark hair with a finger. I worshipped her for two weeks and fell asleep to her whimpering up against my chest. We didn't even need to build a fire or light one of the old blubber lamps Larry had lying around in the dust of his cabin; her skin glowed like holy lightning. I made her three times a night and forgot all about the winedark waves hammering against the shattered cliff face for a few days at least.
She was a humble girl, like deities should be, and humored me by frying up the salt pork and licking thick sour mash off the side of my bottle hours after I'd spilled some, and she even