Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/133

RV 123 (BIG SUR123) that it? I never found out! let’s call my mother longdistance in Utah and tell her that!”—And he rings up his mother way over there, on Billie’s phone bill, and here I am bottle of port wine in one hand and butt in mouth talking to a Basque ex con’s mother in Utah telling her in fact reassuring her “Yes I believe it’s a Basque name”—She’s saying “Hey, what you say? who are you?” and there’s Perry smiling all glad—A very strange kid—It’s been a long time in fact in my literary sort of life that I’ve met a real tough hombre like that out of jails and with those arms of steel and that fevered concern that scares governments and makes officials pale, that’s why he’s always put away in prison this type of man—Yes yet the type of man the country always needs when there’s a little old war started by an aging governor—A real dangerous character, in fact, Perry, because tho I appreciate his poetic soul and everything I realize looking at him he’s capable of exploding and killing somebody for an idea maybe or for love.

Some of his own friends ring Billie’s doorbell, everybody seems to know I’m there, they come up, they are strange anarchistic Negroes and ex cons, it seems to be some sort of gang, I begin to wonder—Like a ring of fevered sages, the Negroes are intense and crazy and intellectual but they’ve all got those strong muscular arms again and all have jail records yet they all talk as tho the end of the world depended on their words—Hard to explain (but will do).

Billie and her gang in fact, with all that fancy rigamarole about spiritual matters I wonder if it isnt just a big secret hustler outfit tho I also realize that I’ve noticed it before in San Francisco a kind of ephemeral hysteria that hides in the air over the rooftops among certain circles there leading always to suicide and maim—Me just an innocent lost hearted meditator and Goop among strange intense criminal agitators of the heart—It reminds me in fact of a nightmare I had just before coming out to the Coast, in the dream I’m back in San Francisco but there’s something funny