January 8, 1983

The gray falls away and leaves the day alone for me to remember you, wearing emotions like a long, loose cape. The sea drones on as usual; the gulls are content to bicker at the other end of this reeking stretch of beach. I'm buried to my neck in fear. The eyes behind me never blink; they know every strand of hair on my glass head; they know every word spoken in my nightmares; and they know the curve of my scarred nose and the teeth I lost a few years ago (they spend their dark wet days in some utopia). Finegan came today to build a castle in the sand, and dozed off, woke up - muttering something about an aunt he had to talk to up on Market - and never finished the castle. The shadows of thousands of kites pass across the beach when I blink. And closer to the shore, near the kid fishing (...fool might as well eat a car battery) is a woman with a small child, a boy. He keeps looking at the guy with the pole; keeps putting his foot in the seaweed to his right; keeps pulling on his mother's arm. The calm sea chants me to sleep every night and wakes me just as easily every dawn...with the cold slithering up my pantlegs and sleeves. I piss at the trash can and look for the most recent newspapers blowing around this vortex of concrete near the beach. I find yesterday's Examiner. I read the classifieds and walk the meandering path which the surf provides. Your face becomes some icon, swelling up out of the ocean when it's dark...I hear you call when the waves crash, when the sand tumbles down the caverns of my endlessly looping dreams (: a herd of elephants strolls leisurely out of the trees across the highway; you're riding the foremost like some wild jungle princess; I crouch behind the pissed-against trash bin and watch as you lead the beasts down the cement steps onto the cool beach. Your skin is brown and smooth and your muscles are toned. Clothing is simple: a tan loin cloth and the remains of a football jersey, damp and pulled tight against your breasts....) The waterfall sound of traffic from the road resembles a smaller version of the ocean; the result is a constant rising and falling of tension at the shore and a simultaneous echo from the blacktop ribbon of othertime, the road.

Barrett came with his flute and his smoke so we sat near the smoking warmth of the fire that stuggled in the trash bin. I strummed my derelict guitar while he spun pipers' dances, sending them skipping along the sand ...His hair is long again (neglected) and his eyes are as dark and round and enchanting as ever, like some dark bird's. The paint under his fingernails glows black and gold and red: He's painting again. The tune was sad and familiar, as if he'd been doing it for years; which in fact he has; he did it long before he ever came to this trashed-out city. It's slower now than it was before. Every note curls around every other; they lace together and tremble against the sea wall and return saltier, splintered. The pulsing ocean is octaves lower. The highway harmony is diminished. The fog horns no longer moan hopelessly to one another.

(Rita visited us on the beach today. I heard her footsteps behind me; they pushed the sand apart with nervous feet...she took my neck in her hands, so cold, and leaned against me, kneeling, and put her tongue in my right ear...I closed my eyes and reached behind me, tracing the back of her thigh with my hand. Her black cape fell away and her right hand found my chest, tracing the outline of my nipples with her thumb and index finger. I turned and)

January 10, 1983

How many times do you fall before you don't try to get up anymore? Three? Four? A thousand? It's a line, a fine line - common sense. You look away, and the tin sound of sunlight dances in distant streets, insistant. Rain falls in gray, far away. You look away and the sound of sunlight dies in the street; an infant cries (it echoes in the alleys) helplessly through a labyrinth of corridors leading all ways at once.... a city of alleys, hallways and cloistered lost voices (for lost voices). The beach breeds memories of impossible times...an secret murder, a mammoth sun commanding the sky, a back-to-front journey through novels incompletely read (characters in suspended animation), nameless voices and stillborn embraces. The shore calls out, the sun's refections like glaring eyes. Recently I walked this stretch of coast for three days and didn't find an end. Finegan's sand castle cities dot the shoreline like architecturally advanced outback anthills. All sand and dampness, gone with a high tide, they are there again, in slightly different form, every morning. A kite lies mangled on the downside of a low dune, its tail knotted and muddy; its plastic material flutters in the wind and its fractured spine of pine has pierced a jellyfish. In winter the kites rarely come out, but in the summer they paint the sky over the beach with colorful dancing and battles of vicious, insect skill.

Syd once brought a kite he had found and silently joined the others standing ankle-deep in the surf. It unfolded in the salty sky, a great octopus, twenty feet wide with eight slithering cellophane legs. He had to struggle with the twine just to keep on his feet. The other kites looked small and ridiculous next to the octopus with its purple eyeballs and multi-colored body and legs of yellow and black stripes and glittering silver tips. Syd never said a word; he stared intently up at his octopus, the slightest trace of a grin at the edge of his mouth. After five minutes he took out his pocket knife, cut the twine and watched the octopus float out over the bay, descend, and disappear. He turned and walked away as the kiters stood around, silent, staring at him while their kites, forgotten in the spectacle, sliced away at each other. Syd lit a cigarette and stood by the trash bin. We spoke quietly for a few minutes. He was fixated on the idea of a jungle within the city's main park. He walked away into the blue pine trees and evening fog and out of sight. The park is where he slept until the tent came.

January 12, 1983

Pages of dreams which were lost in the winds of that early Wednesday morning have eluded me...they keep me looking, though. I feel deep inside me that they found their way-either out into the ocean or into the flames of the trash can. Rita loves the look of oblivion I get when I'm sitting on the concrete stage among the blue pine. We've made love there many time. Just bring a blanket - concrete's tough on the knees and ass. Men in suits come and watch from time to time. The city doesn't change. Sure, slowly it crumbles into the ocean, grain by grain, sperm by sperm, scab by scab, sneeze by sneeze. But it doesn't change. The valley is gone. The ocean remains. Above the clean disappearing beach is the infected city, draped in a green fog, smelling like stale urine in an old blanket.

The cold and wet get to my feet through the beat-up tennis shoes; a layer of course sand clings to my jeans. Out of the fog again I see the elephants with their slow ritual walk. Shouts from the surf shift my attention...movement at the very edge of the fog, men with rifles; uniformed figures and boiling haze become a billowing nightmare veil. I walk in the opposite direction; the shouts and the elephants are soon lost in the surf sounds and the slimy air.

Later...

I walked and walked away, long after the sounds of paramilitary training exercises had faded. I found myself near the spot where the Captain buried his time capsule in the sand a few months ago. He dug the hole as deep as he could, which wasn't very deep, since the deeper he dug, the more water came out of the sand and filled it in. After a while he had a muddy mess six feet wide and a few feet deep. He put a sign on the spot once it was filled in again: "Don't dig here until 2090 AD. There's a Time Capsule buried down under. Leave it alone." He put a couple of my things in there: a cassette with some of my songs; and my copy of Rigadoon. He put one of Syd's Carnaby Street shirts in, along with some beads, and one of those round mirrors that had fallen off his Telecaster when he had staggered and dropped it off the roadside ledge and onto the highway (It had been one of those days...). Finegan had wanted to put some sand in the capsule, but Tristan thought that it might be regarded as an insult by future archeologists. So Finegan submitted a pair of round spectacles he didn't want anymore and a lock of golden hair in a silver snuff box.

(She was gone to me. Out of my reach. So, once her face had become a dream, I could no longer speak to her. In the dream, I would watch her...the beauty of her green eyes...I would just watch her...her brown eyes...watch her...blue eyes...her....eyes (what color were they?) and so I would stare until she'd lose her temper. But I could no longer speak to her. Finegan said she was a character escaped from a book which Borges had written and published under a pseudonym. --From his book to your dreams, he said. Finegan never read anything, so his claim while slightly poetic was nonetheless suspect (But where had he heard of Borges?). I didn't tell him so. It didn't seem to matter. When I thought of her as a liberated assemblage - the animated life of previously one-dimensional printed words and phrases, a writer's phantasy who had somehow become awakened and emerged from a novel whose author was not who he claimed and whose plot was undoubtedly a mathematical code tossed off with darkly playful genius - I felt better. The way Finegan told it, the book was a red-herring-filled tale concerning one Kate, an inhabitant of an unnamed bay city somewhere in South America. She is a singer. Cleared of a crime (murder) of which she believes she is guilty, Kate discovers that her lover committed the crime. He has not only allowed her to believe that she had committed the murder but also to be arrested for it and convicted of it. The details that followed, as explained by Finegan, were increasingly complex, labrythine, and Finegan (who I soon realized was making it all up as he went along) conceded finally that Kate was not the woman in my dream.

--You have reached a limit, I think, he lectured. You're at the very edge: if you try to stay within one more of your little self-imposed restrictions, you'll suffocate, implode, go nutty.

--Discipline is not restriction.

--Discipline and restriction are not one in the same, I think, he ponificated. Then jumping subjects, he said, --Treatments of all the paintings resulted in complete loss of normal visual color; equipped with magnetized gloves sprouting black wires, and goggles with spring-mounted antenae, the blind would view the paintings hung in little groups by holding their gloved hands near the canvases.

Finegan gets increasingly hard to follow. I quite enjoy his company.)

January 18 1983

A small boy slithered through the damp streets past street people and street venders and a pack of dogs (venturing out even in the daylight now), making his way toward a small corner grocer on Polk where he could get smoke. They were sold out. An anonymous corner gained his attention. Standing there, he looked at passing strangers on foot, moped, car, bus, bicycle.

Later, when he got to the beach, he wished he'd worn a warmer coat. A canvas tent had cropped up since he'd been there last; it was circular and squat, and it didn't look at all sturdy. It was near the old trash can, the one in which he'd found the spiral notebook that now lay in his room (under some clothes) smelling vaguely rotten. A thin man with riotous black hair and no shirt crawled from the hut and stood up, cigarette in mouth.

--That your place? asked the boy.

--Mmm-hmm.

--What happened to the place under the stage in the park?

--Fucking guys with tractors kicked me out a few mornings ago. Gonna turn the whole bloody toilet into a jungle. Can you believe that shit?

--That's great. Who's idea was that?

--S'my idea, brat... Whaddya want, anyway?

--Where'd you get the tent?

--Came in the mail. What's up?

--Got any smoke?

--C'mon in.

The hut was much larger inside, roomier than it had appeared to be from outside. Just the sort of thing the kid wouldn't notice. He and Syd talked through their high quietly, staring at small blotches of filtered sunlight, dappled lozenges, on the surface of every object in the tent. Syd's acoustic guitar leaned stringless against a cardboard box overflowing with damaged cassette tapes (some cracked, some melted, some with the thin tape pulled out and wormed around other cassettes).

The next day Syd found a crate, much like the one in which the hut had arrived, at the front entrance. Addressed to Candice Hutchinson of Noe Valley, the crate was bound with thick twine and packing tape. Syd began to open it, cutting the twine and packing tape with his pocket knife. Inside, wrapped in yellowed cracking asian newspaper and dusty sepia colored fiberous packing materials, was a battery operated crystal chandelier. He didn't hesitate to install it in the tent, at the very center of the dome (which began to sag). Syd looked around the room and noticed for the first time just how large the tent had become. When he had first erected it (upon finding it setting next to the trash can) it looked like a three- or four-man tent on the outside as well as the inside. Now it looked the same on the outside, but inside it was no less than fifty feet in diameter.

That night, the tent glowed with the light of the chandelier. In celebration of the coming of the light, Syd threw a party. There were at least 25 people in the hut during the gathering, which lasted a couple of days, and another 50 people roamed the beach outside. There were singers, musicians, and freaks, talking, laughing, and getting high. Late in the morning after the first night of the party, the postman delivered another crate and stayed for the rest of the day. That was the morning Syd awoke early next to a woman Finegan had introduced to him, with a wink, as Kate. She was stunning even in the gray morning. With laces of light draping her neck and back, she looked like an angel to Syd. He stood up and stepped over sleeping people and pairs of quietly speaking partiers. But when he reached the entrance, it was obstucted by the large crate. The box was much heavier than the previous ones had been; but he managed to push it partially out of the way and squeeze out of the tent. Kate woke up, stood and stretched like a cat, and walked to the entrance/exit to look at the box. She squatted in front of it, looking at the stenciled cyrillic letters.

--Is it another chandelier?

--No. It's too heavy to be a chandelier. Gotta be something else. Can you hand me the knife.

He cut the twine and tape and opened the crate: more dust, packing and asian newspaper. When the packing materials were removed from the crate, a battery-powered refrigaretor remained. It was a short model, designed for a cabin or office. But it had been shipped "on" and fully stocked with champagne, cheeses, and freeze-dried Thai weed. There were eggs and milk, butter and bread as well. Syd had some of the party goers help him it into the tent. And then he served breakfast.

A disruption would break everyone's concentration, ending the game. Complete silence and restriction of movement of the spectators was strictly enforced. Tiny light images flitted through the smokey haze of the hut as the four contestants manipulated their two-handed controls, sending their companies of firefly-sized armies crashing and shattering into one another, a foot from the tent floor. The air stank of burnt electrical insulation and zapped ozone, and the one allowable sound nipped at everybody's ears: the click-bzz of colliding pawns. A realistic explosion shook the hut, and the catastrophe carried on (via holograph) as the roomful watched. As one army was completely nullified by another, one player (the loser) stood up calmly and walked out of the gaming circle. Three generals remained: Syd, commander of the Croutons; Chaise, with the Lizard Wizards; and one of the three Melodies, with the Pirahna-Quiche. The Lizard Wizards were losing ground against the Croutons, but Melody's army was proving to be a tougher match than either. Suddenly the flashing sparks stopped and the tent went dark; then from the back of the hut came a series of blips, flickers, and finally a long, painful Zzzrppp-gkgkhh! A moment of silence was followed by a final, pitiful sputter and a small shower of sparks. Someone's drunken foot had found the holographic projector and kicked it over. The game was over. Everyone moved outside to watch Kate's performance, something Finegan had touted all evening as "the Magnificent Rite of Aphrodite." Everyone knew he meant she was going to do a dirty dance. She moved to the heavy beat music of a blaster in the sand, slowly removing her leather mini skirt, black tights, leaving just her white silk g-string. She moved slowly to the beat for a few moments, smiling at the faces in the crowd that formed a circle around her. The authorities, hovering high above in a helicopter since the day before, came in for a closer look. So Kate bent over and wagged her ass, stood erect with back arched, and accepted the cheers. She exited the circle and enterd the tent. The `copter scurried off - presumably to monitor traffic, as rush hour was approaching.

Next day, the postman arrived again with another crate. Syd opened it to find a battery-powered jet pack. The Captain, grinning, readied himself for a test flight. A line of people awaiting their turn formed.

--Not until we've had a thourogh going-over of this contraption, the Captain announced in a fatherly tone. Never can be too careful!

(In the night city a pretty boy stood inside his swashbuckler boots and crimson cape and leather gauntlets; hands on his hips and eyes on the fluorescent crowd. His wide, frail face lacked only mood, full of courage and experience, cold calculation. The silver earring, wide and frail; the black hair, out of control and black, so black it was purple, cropped on the sides to expose two elvin ears. A silent crowd grew impatient waiting for something to happen produced a leader and handed over the implements of war. Pretty Boy walks away under casual disguise. Sancho lights a cigarette and looks over the old maps of an island in a bay not unlike the bay where they are standing on this day.

--Alcatraz, he says, pronouncing the word carefully, licking his lips and glancing over where Pretty Boy had been standing. Whores write against fluorescent vietnamerican ghosts, ghosts haunting suburbia; ah, the power of sperm. Secretaries no more; secretions know more. College is a history book in a piss can, and the oil, well, it burns just a little while longer. Whores write and no one has the green to fuck them so they fuck themselves and wish they'd give birth to good and liquor. Rain comes down like muddy influenza. Chopped apart, the newspapers give away the weekly editions, printed on the gray back side of surplus federal forms (...<> ...) ...they look typed, not typeset, but they are neither; they are carefully hand-drawn. Pretty Boy crashed a party by the beach and drank the wine that drinks a man. The kites (newly arrived in a crate with Japanese stencils) had been magical, or battery powered, equipped with self-destruct devices triggered from the string reels; they lighted the beach like firework that night. Everyone stared up at the fireworks. Pretty Boy's knife winked ruby in the battery powered lightening; the kid fell silently into the pools of blackness so black it was purple. Pretty Boy was gone but not before the Captain repaired the holographic projector and the Wizard Lizards were sent out as a posse. They never returned. The kid recovered.)

January 24, 1983

Syd and I sat near a fire we didn't start. We hadn't spoken a word for what seemed like days. I sometimes looked at him and caught myself wishing he had been the person he never really was (if he had ever been that person, even for a moment, it would have been a moment of great stress), the person he could never be, the person that had never been more than a legend. His eyes stared into the fire, we flowing with anxiety, like wet suger. He had an idea of what I was thinking...that it is difficult to feel something which threatens to erase the reality of the he that he knows from the inside. Perhaps in erasing the hero with his help we would be able to speak, to be friends, though Syd would have gone by that time; I'd have let go of his Madcap arm. Kate sat next to us, strumming the stringless guitar and singing to herself. One of Finegan's castles loomed near the edge of the light. He fell the previous night, bitten by the cruel ruby blade of a pirate who has since become a prince among the northbay canyon clans of fluorescent office plumbers (buggers - that is, surveillance). Syd's hurdy-gurdy lay in the sand, broken by the drunken foot of a bumbling party goer. The batteries that powered the chandelier, the refrigerator and the jet pack were all dead.

January 25, 1983

(asian fever cold in the eyes - slick with slime - that look at a shore of years from now...the weeds are pregnant again with insects which hatch and turn to eat the weeds which spawn from the shit of insects...the water seeks to shield itself from the pale sun; the sand is teeming with fish that continuously vomit their insides out onto the surface of the ocean. This flaming death-from-within is an ulcer; an ulcerous eye whipped by barbed wire drops mucous from its iris.

There are networks of networks of networks (of networks of...), each ghost walks a path, wearing side-blinders and little tank-tracks for shoes. Even couples have their own individual tracks (they may accompany one another for a time, but soon the two will switch tracks and sputter on into the daylight glare alone, never looking back...); to be a switchmaster is to have the old ulcer of the heart and brain, but that's what comes with the lust for power; worry is a fringe benefit, your raisson d'être. The jars of aspirin hold out for the lifetime of the morning hours and the stress-techs refill them when you're away for lunch.)

June 20, 1983

The beach washed away: Yesterday the final strip of sand, a last hold out complete with straw hut and trash/piss can, dissolved and gave its little dose of muck to the muddy ocean which climbs daily. The water comes up to the sea wall now, splashing over onto the crumbling highway with ambitious persistence. Sitting on the platform across the street, Kate, Rita (lovely Rita) and I watch as the tide which seems to nibble incessently at the coastline as far up and down it as we can see. Behind us: the rumble of busy tractors. They work like patient elephants night and day to build the jungle. Earlier, we stood at the edge, scanning the area of the beach where the Captain had buried his time capsule, assuming that it would not remain buried and would perhaps float to the surface of the sludge close to the wall. But if it had come up in the arc of our vision, we were not there to see it. We could not have missed it: a bright red capsule, three feet long and a foot in diameter. (To have made love then on the platform seemed almost right, those many months ago, when we found ourselves here before. But looking back I remember sensing that Kate and Rita were in two very uncomplimentary moods. Besides, I had been exhausted after the eternity I had spent dodging the Pretty Boy's ruby blade in the nightmare that had ended the party. Drowsily high on the last bit of smoke, I fought the sleeplessness, but the sun was high, an altar eye in the fog, and I had the two beauties but it was a distracted interlude, with the dull groan of tractor and beast behind us and the muted green pall that now passes for mornings here on the beach.)

June 25, 1983

It's been six days since the hut sank into the surf, a pathetic spectacle we all watched from the edge. I have seen pieces of the tent bashed against the rocks up the beach, and bright orange plastic packing tape snaking around in the water nearby. I noticed that even the seawall crumbles, and soon the road will begin to disappear. It will be some time before the idiotic jungle is under attack. Every moment is puncuated by the singular aroma of crumbling concrete. Yes, there is a smell to it, the friction of dust against skin against cloth against city-a place apathetically encircled by an orchestra of thick whispers tuning up and warming up for the final performance.

February 10, 1984

tides changing in my veins, I feel like the waves in a liquor ocean. Days like these are days of waste, days to leave behind. I'm so damned tired of days like this. (The distance defines itself...a far off fog horn shakes the concrete caverns lined with sleeping cars). I sleep as much as possible. The old lady wakes me up with her muddling upstairs, dishes clattering and shuffling of the furniture. The walls and ancient mop boards creak as the old building sways in electric breezes.

God damn this hangover. I know better than to look for aspirin. Just stay horizontal for a little while longer, and it goes away. It goes. Last night, I stared out the window for a long time. My mind was on nothing, but I felt that something was behind this false calm I felt...memories didn't come as clean images to me. I didn't let them; I kept them off in the shadows, ignoring the faint, gentle tapping of branches on the window. A storm drenched the city below, the cold not letting go of the scurrying ghosts I wished I could see in the streets. I would have cried at the sight of some news - a newspaper, even one of the old pamphlets - something to feed what was left of hope. My neck cramped again, and so I sat in the smelly chair with the ratshit stains, my feet up on the radiator, my head as far back as possible, me eyes close.

previously....

Syd's frame cut phantom shaped shadows across the gray sand. It was mid-morning, the sun perched upon the wind-sculpted pines above the beach.

--Arnold, do they really plan to dig up the park?

--S'what they say..the papers.

--And start a jungle, he smiled. My dreams have been answered, Arnold. It'll be great fun!

As we spoke in the breeze, a low-flying `copter approached from the north.

--Must be the mail drop! Syd said excitedly.

Buzzing wind and sand clouds beat at us, sting skin and burning eyes, but we laughed just the same. A huge crate, which hung from a cable below the `copter, was lowered gently next to the tent. The `copter buzzed up and out of sight.

--What is it this time? I asked.

He was tearing at the packing tape, prying open the wooden slates with the claw end of a hammer.

--Looks like a VCR or a television, maybe...or....

The three remaining sides of the crate fell open simultaneously. Syd and I stared at the aquarium, which bubbled happily, and watched as the octopus propelled around its tiny space excitedly, perhaps stimulated by the sudden exposure to sun and activity.

The beach was dying. Each day the shore shrunk, the ocean climbed closer to the road. Syd noticed the changes only after his tent flooded early one morning. His waterbed was surrounded by water. Televisions and toasters bobbed out the opening of the tent, along with battery-powered refrigerator and a woman sleeping soundly on an air-filled rubber mattress. Syd waded out of the tent, following the girl on the mattress. Finegan was arriving in waders and a rainhat.

--You really do look ridiculous, Finny. He began to urinate into the swill, careful to avoid floating valuables and girls on rubber mattresses.

--What do we do?

--I don't know about you, but I'm moving back to the park, jungle or not. They gathered everything they could - television, VCR, portable toilet, soggy electric guitars - and loaded it into Finegan's bike trailer. While Finegan peddled toward the park, Syd strapped on the jet belt and ascended. From the air, the city looked strangely peaceful and empty. The park was only across the crumbling highway, so Syd did not stay aloft for long. He floated down to the south end of the thick pines and picked a small clearing in which to land. Dried pine needles and a few insects scattered as he set down. The tent went up quickly. Syd filled it with the still-soggy junk and jetted back to the beach, leaving Finegan, his bike and trailer, and the tent behind.

A salt moving sea bed rose over city and no one live there anymore. The memories of a park-turned jungle-turned underwater grave yard come from Syd, an old, overweight, eccentric; a man whose early years (from age 18 to 22) were spent on the beach - in a tent, a magical tent - where he lived, breathed, painted, and lived, more or less, the legendary life of a psychodelic artist.

Syd's painting a scene of San Francisco at the end of time, which as a matter of fact approaches. San Francisco is being swallowed up by the ocean and no one cares enough to wonder why.

March 23, 1983

Some years later, an elderly man with dark eyes and wild graying hair laborously made his way up the incline of a quiet city street. He smoked long yellow cigarettes; his face was relaxed but hinted a tendency toward deep thought - perhaps not a recent occupation but one that had been lifelong.