Beatniks
When I was growing up, my heroes were the beatniks.I loved Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg … just saying their names would give me hope. “The Beat Generation,” I’d say to myself, caressing it like a touchstone … a life beyond my shadowless youth…. I loved their tales of Neal Cassidy, too. … For the Beat generation, Neal was the man: hipster, criminal, lover, con man …. they all wanted to be him. “Let’s go,” Neal said. And the grand wild sound of bop … was alive in the land.
Neal Cassidy, hero of Jack Kerouac’s books, twitched … with energy — bebop and youth… promise and sweat … muscle and sex …. Something always waiting … just around the corner. “Somewhere along the line,” Jack wrote … “I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line … the pearl would be handed to me.”
Oh yes, I said … moaning for the day … when I would rush down joyous alleys with them … older brothers who would show the way. I yearned to be like them, to go … and go … and go.
So as soon as I turned 18, I headed for San Francisco … grew a mustache … bought cigarettes … rolled across the Golden Gate, and looked in North Beach for them.
But the Beats had already left.
And Neal had fled, ahead of the women, ahead of the law, ahead of the locomotive roaring up his back. Neal had fled to Mexico, where other old gringos had gone before him. Neal in Mexico … for the last stand.
He died there, too, on the railroad tracks between Celaya and San Miguel. Died in the desert highlands, counting the railroad ties, died outside San Miguel counting the ties to Celaya. “We won’t get hung up because we know time,” he told Jack. “Everything will be alright because we know time … We know time, we know time, we know time.” And on he went, San Miguel to Celaya … on the tracks.
But he was an old gringo then …time an angry locomotive running up his back.
Irv told me about it. He said Cassidy … had gone off to count the railroad ties … couldn’t stop. He just kept walking and counting … and walking and counting … until he dropped. He got hung up. And time stopped.
He was a tight wire by then …. always flipping a five-pound hammer in the air, watching it spin, and then catching it again … and flipping it and catching it … again. He flipped that hammer … over and over, strung out on speed, twitching and jerking, tossing the hammer, jerking his head — behind him he heard locomotives — tossing and twitching, jerking and catching and flipping and catching again.
When I finally got to San Miguel … 30 years later … Irv was the only beatnik left …. Irv had stopped to live in the dust beside Neal’s railroad tracks. “Let’s go,” they said. But Irv stayed … in the dust beside the railroad tracks.
“It’s easy to get stuck here …. In San Miguel, time slows down, we don’t feel it passing …. There is no pearl … no corner, no future; there is nowhere to run.”
Irv first came to San Miguel in a ’49 Chevy from Chicago … all the way fast … Took art classes … lived wild and young … like Neal and Jack.
But he looked into the eyes of Lupe … gusty winds pushed him against walls … shadows flashed with heat … he didn’t understand.
“Tu y yo, puro calor”…. Her eyes held him, her hands touched his chest. She stood small and close … caressed him with her breath. He thought he could save her.
Irv met Lupe … where trucks park on cobblestones beside the railroad tracks …. met Lupe where they splash sidewalks … with buckets of water and soap … where fumes of diesel taste of votive candles and sweat … of beer and cigarettes. When they met, Lupe was already married and divorced … two kids … wild but a Mexican … defiant but a Mexican … martyr to a thousand harsh commands.
“My mother ruined everything that ever made me happy.” … He wanted to save her. “I will do what I have to to survive,” she said. … He nodded his head … but didn’t understand. Stone and dust. He paid in blood.
“Ni modo,” she said, “Asi es.” Nothing to be done, that’s the way it is, no future, no pearl. A shrug. But her love was desperate … because Lupe knew time. She jumped in his arms and wrapped her legs around him, buried her head in his chest, wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t look up …. in the dust beside the railroad tracks, in the dust beside the tracks.
To love Lupe, he became a Mexican. Ni modo … he shrugged. Ni modo. To support Lupe and her kids, he worked: the smell of candles on the wind, miracles that come … only after your life … has been given.
30 years later, he’s the first gringo in San Miguel … to collect Mexican Social Security. Love and work, love and work; a wall of stone … Lupe’s hard legs … around his waist.
And what work it was!
Irv and Lupe sold horses’ skulls covered with pieces of mirror glass. Big skulls everywhere in their workshop flashing broken faces back … in the dazzling desert light.
They cut the glass into tiny rectangles … glued them all over the skulls — covered them with mirrors, filled the world with reflections … cut up their hands.
For years they sliced their fingers. Shards on the tables, blood on the glass, thousands of cuts. For years, sitting side-by-side, they mingled their blood on the floor of the workshop.
That’s how Irv became a Mexican. With cut and bleeding hands. Not like other gringos, locked up in themselves, carrying hammers or guns, alone with no work and no true love, following the railroad tracks.
Side by side, Irv and Lupe in the dust, bound by the miracle of their bleeding hands.