Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/50

RV 42 (BIG SUR42) in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore—All the premonitions tying in together.

Monsanto sees that I’m terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I’d walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa’ing at the sight of everything)—He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin—Of course he cant know since I didn’t tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk—The death of “little brother” Tyke indeed—Monsanto seeing me so downcast says “Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks—or are you just gonna get drunk again”—“I’m gonna get drunk yes”—Because anyway there are so many things brewing, everybody’s waiting, I’ve been daydreaming a thousand wild parties in the woods—In fact it’s fortunate I’ve heard of the death of Tyke in my favorite exciting city of San Francisco, if I had been home when he died I might have gone mad in a different way but tho I now ran out to get drunk with the boys and still once in a while that funny little smile of joy came back as I drank, and melted away again because now the smile itself was a reminder of death, the news made me go mad anyway at the end of the three week binge, creeping up on me finally on that terrible day of St. Carolyn By The Sea as I can also call it—All, all confusing till I explain.

Meanwhile anyway poor Monsanto a man of letters wants to enjoy big news swappings with me about writing and what everybody's doing, and then Fagan comes into the store (downstairs to Monsanto’s old rolltop desk making me also feel chagrin because it always was the ambition of my youth to end up a kind of literary businessman with a rolltop desk, combining my father