It was like clay but nervous and fidgeting. I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this, having nothing better to do with my time.

Banners of My Own Choosing

Drunk laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, it makes no difference. I return to this story as one who has been away but one who was always destined to return and perhaps that’s for the best.

I found no statues nor bouquets of flowers, no beloved to say: ‘Now we will fly new banners from the castle, and they will be of your own choosing,’ and to hold my hand again, to take my hand in yours.

None of that stuff for me.

My typewriter is fast enough as if it were a horse that’s just escaped from the ether, plunging through silence, and the words gallop in order while outside the sun is shining.

Perhaps the words remember me.

It is the fourth day of March 1964. The birds are singing on the back porch, a bunch of them in an aviary, and I try to sing with them: Drunk laid and drunk unlaid and drunk laid again, I’m back in town.

Fame in California/1964

1

It’s really something to have fame put its feathery crowbar under your rock and then upward to the light release you, along with seven grubs and a sow bug.

I’ll show you what happens, then. A friend of mine came up to me a few months ago and said, ‘You’re a character in the novel I just finished.’

It really set me up when he said that. I had an immediate vision of myself as the romantic lead or the villain: ‘He put his hand on her breast and his hot breath fogged up her glasses,’ or ‘He laughed as she cried, then he kicked her down the stairs like a sack of dirty laundry.’

‘What do I do in your novel?’ I said, waiting to hear great words.

‘You open a door,’ he said.

‘What else do I do?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Oh,’ I said, my fame diminishing. ‘Couldn’t I have done something else? Maybe opened two doors? Kissed somebody?’

‘That one door was enough,’ he said. ‘You were perfect.’

‘Did I say anything when I opened the door?’ still hoping a little.

‘No.’

2

I met a photographer friend of mine last week. We were making the rounds of the bars. He took some photographs. He is a careful young photographer and conceals his camera under his coat like a pistol.

He doesn’t want people to know what he is doing. Wants to capture them in real life poses. Doesn’t want to make them nervous and begin acting like movie stars.