Tristessa Read Free

drink—It’s gloom as unpredicted on this earth, I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity’s true and perfectly empty nature.—I know everything’s alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our so-called lives in a sea of worry, meat for Chicagos of Graves—right this minute my very father and my very brother lie side by side in mud in the North and I’m supposed to be smarter than they are—being quick I am dead. I look up at the others glooping, they see I’ve been lost in thought in my corner chair but are pursuing endless wild worries (all mental 100%) of their own—They’re yakking in Spanish, I only understand snatches of that virile conversation—Tristessa keeps saying “chinga” at every other sentence, a swearing Marine,—she says it with scorn and her teeth bite and it makes me worry ‘Do you know women as well as you think you do?’—The rooster is unperturbed and lets go a blast.
    I TAKE OUT my whiskey bottle from the bag, the Canady Dry, open both, and pour me a hiball in a cup—making one too for Cruz who has just jumped outa bed to throw up on the kitchen floor and now wants another drink, she’s been in the cantina for women all day somewhere back near the whore district of Panama Street and sinister Rayon Street with its dead dog in the gutter and beggars on the sidewalk with no hats looking at you helplessly—Cruz is a little Indian woman with no chin and bright eyes and wears high heel pumps without stockings and battered dresses, what a wild crew of people, in America a cop would have to do a double take seeing them pass all be-wrongled and arguing and staggering on the sidewalk, like apparitions of poverty—Cruz takes a hiball and throws it up too. Nobody notices, El Indio is holding eyedropper in one hand and little piece of paper in the other arguing, tense necked, red, fullblast at a screaming Tristessa whose bright eyes dance to fight it out—The old lady Cruz groans from the riot of it and buries back in her bed, the only bed, under her blanket, her face bandaged and greasy, the little black dog curling against her, and the cat, and she is lamenting something, her drink sickness, and El Indio’s constant harassing for more of Tristessa’s supply of morphine—I gulp my drink.
    Next door the mother’s made the little daughter cry, we can hear her praying little woeful squeals enough to make a father’s heart break and maybe it might be,—Trucks pass, buses, loud, growling, loaded to the springs with people riding to Tacuyaba and Rastro and Circumvalacion round-routeries of town—the streets of mess puddles that I am going to walk home in at 2 A M splashing without care through streetpools, looking along lone fences at the dismal glimmer of the wet rain shinning in the streetlight—The pit and horror of my grit, the Virya tense-neck muscles that a man needs to steel his teeth together to press through lonely roads of rain at night with no hope of a warm bed—My head fells and wearies to think of it. Tristessa says “How is Jack,—?—” She always asks: “Why are you so sad??—’Muy dolorosa”‘ and as though to mean “You are very full of pain,” for pain means dolor —“I am sad because all la vida es dolorosa,” I keep replying, hoping to teach her Number One of the Four Great Truths,—Besides, what could be truer? With her heavy purple eyes she lids at me the nodding reprisal, ‘ha-hum,’ Indian-wise understanding the tone of what I said, and nodding over it, making me suspicious of the bridge of her