I’d wander the streets amongst the Tenderloin crazies, all these scattered armies of bums and whores and criminals and I’d think: Hell, I’m not so bad off. My brand of insanity’s not nearly as desperate as theirs. At least I could hold down a job, crummy as it may have been, and manage to keep a roof over my head. I had a bed to sleep in, a bath to wash in, a chair to sit in, a lamp to read by, paper and pens and a typewriter upon which I was blessed to write whenever I pleased. Not a bad way for a young writer to live: simple, pared to the essentials. Just the way it ought to be. All a young writer needed was a little money, just enough to keep from actually starving to death. Hell, I figured I could go on living like this for years–as long as I was able to keep writing, which was all that really mattered anyway.
I was taking everything in. I’d step over the wastrels on the sidewalks and go into the crummiest of the neighborhood bars. All the worst, most depraved bars in the city were in my neighborhood, from the Tenderloin flats out to Polk Gulch and down on into the old dwindling Skid Row streets just south of Market. What unbelievably crazy places! A lot of the buildings that housed these dives were old turn-of-the-century relics, rollicking barrelhouse juke joints, sport houses, dingy dusty ancient ornate mirrored outback saloons. Leftover gold-fever honkytonks straight out of America’s Wild West. I had thought these sorts of places had disappeared a hundred years ago.
I was surprised to see people still living like this in our modern age, gathered together in these crumbling brickwork and stamped tin shelters, existing outside of and utterly apart from the ordered workaday world. These people roared and roiled each night as if the apocalypse was at hand, full up to the rafters with brawling soldiers and sailors, longshoremen, railroad men, cowboys, ex-cops, disbarred lawyers, aging floozies, bikers, yeggs, toothless trannies, B-girl grannies, defrocked preachers on the lam. All these unaccountable lunatics all jammed in together filling the air with insane ranting and imprecations. A mix of atavistic California rabble exploded straight out of the perfervid imaginings of Bret Harte, Jack London, Dash Hammett and Hunter Thompson. All these bizarre characters stranded here on the westernmost edge of the continent, this was remnant mythical outcast America—wild, brawling and free. I felt like a lone witness to the last rites of a brutal, dying religion.
I raised toasts and shared drinks with these people. Lunatic whores offering themselves to every paretic in the place. Blowjobs and fistfights in the back alleys. I saw men thrown through doors, men beaten, men taking knives to one another, men bleeding, men pissing themselves, men being descended upon by pickpocket harpy whores from hell. Here in these ancient tin-shack bars the ethos of the Wild West still reigned.
A cadaverous preacher in blue and white corduroy ambling out of mesquite rangelands to appear suddenly, in tall blue Stetson, easily two heads higher than any man in the place. Irascible eyebrows like broomstraw, sideburns the color of weathered cedar. Burnt prairie grass in his soul. Drinking Ten High whiskey. Arroyo dust in the creases of his hands. He spotted me across the bar. He smiled, a mouthful of broken gravestones. A Gideon Bible sat on the bar.
“You’ve heard the Good Word, son?”
“Some time ago.”
“You have then. And are you a good man?”
“At times.”
He frowned. “Men don’t question anymore whether they’re good men. They only question whether they’re happy men. Are you happy?”
“I don’t question it.”
His eyes guttered like two small flames surrounded by outer darkness. Lit by something out of and beyond all Time.
“The Good Word, son, the Good Word.”
He lifted the Bible.
“Whensoever an ungodly man crosses me I make sure they hear the Good Word before I send them along.”
“Yes?”
“They all hear the Good Word eventually, son, I assure you. No ungodly man knows anything but what the Good Word says and but what the Good Word tells ‘em.”
He opened the book. The pages were gone. Instead there was carved a little space, a grave created, and inside the little grave an ornate nickel-plated derringer. He lifted out the pistol and laid it on the bar. He smiled and leaned in towards me. “Son, I never have trouble once I give them a taste of the Good Word…”
All this fed into the visions of the ghosts in my head and the ghost of myself that I had felt myself to have become. All these hidden ghostly worlds were real to me now, exposed to me at last. I was a part of it, taking it all in, putting it all down, alive inside of it all. I opened myself up to everything.
