Loon Lake Read Free

a vision of things, who could say more than how he felt or what was so unfair or who he was going to get someday. And invariably he was a socialist or a communist or an anarchist and he’d call you brother or comrade this fellow and he was always contemplative and didn’t seem to mind if anyone listened to him or not. Not that he was wise or especially decent or kind or even that he was sober but even if none of these in those fitful flashes of lucidity like momentary flares of a dying fire he’d say why things were as they were. I liked that. It was a kind of music, I lingered by the edges of the city with the hobos and at night that grand and glorious civilization now had walls all around it we were on the outside looking up at this immense looming presence, a fortress now it was a kind of music to point to the walls and suggest why they would come down. And if you didn’t have a true friend, someone in the world as close to you as you were to yourself, this kind of music was interesting to hear. At night you smelled the river in daylight you didn’t, I smelled the riverscum and felt the mosquitoes and followed the shadows of the great rats who butted right through the tar-paper shacks and dove into the shitholes, and some poor tramp on Sterno would suddenly present with incredible grace an eloquent analysis of monopoly capitalism. It would go on two three minutes he’d take a swig eyes would roll up in his skull and he’d pass out falling backward into the fire and he’d roast his brains if we didn’t pull him out his hair smoking his singed burned hair. Wide awake again he’d tell us more.
    But it was here I also learned about California. In California you could eat the oranges off the trees, along the seaside boulevards the avocados fell when they were ripe and you found them everywhere and peeled them and you ate them on the seaside boulevards. When you were sleepy you slept on the sand and when you were hot you went wading in the warm Pacific surf and the waves lit up at night off the shore with their own light. And off beyond the waves was a gambling ship.
    I decided to go to California.
    Armed only with his unpronounceable last name, he went down to the freight yards to begin his journey. He confuses this now in his mind with the West Side slaughtering plant such atomized extract of organic essence, such a perfumery of disembowelment, that in the fetid blood spumed viscera mist above the yards helplessly flew flights of gulls schools of pigeons moths bats insect plagues all swirling round and round in a great squawking endlessly ejaculative anguish.
    I found a door that slid open, got it wide enough to slip through, climbed in, pulled the door almost shut behind me stood in the darkness breathing triumph. The car lurches again, almost stops, begins to roll, I was thrown into something that moved. I look around my private car my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness, soot and pungent cinder begins to flow through the boards, that railroad tang, my eyes see all around the perimeter of my private car a cargo of youths. We are the shipped manufacture of this nation there must have been thirty or forty of us in that car gradually my eyes made out fifty sixty sitting on the floor by the dawn in eastern Pennsylvania at a siding in the chill frosted morning a hundred of us jumped and ran when the bulls came shoutingahead from the engine. Later alone in the tall weeds of another crossing a toot and leisurely around the bend bell-clanging another stately red ball my chance I make for it all around me from the weeds a thousand like me leap I thought I was alone.
    I let it go. All my gaunt brothers in my own rags carrying my roped valise hopped the freight. I watched it go. I put up my collar pulled my cap down on my head stuck my hands in my pockets and headed north up the road.

 
    Come with me
Compute with me
Computerized she prints out me
    Commingling with me she becomes me
Coming she is coming is she
Coming