Page:Big Sur (1963).djvu/55

RV 47 (BIG SUR47) with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasnt occurred to anybody in America at all! it’s one of the funniest things Ive ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?”—The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one—In fact in Big Sur I’d instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip—Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, “Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?”—“Let’s go tell him right now!”—“Why of course if we wait another minute and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there’s something gnawing at them, something’s wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!”—We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner.

By now we’re beginning to feel great—Fagan has retired saying typically “Okay you guys go ahead and get drunk, I’m goin home and spend a quiet evening in a hot bath with a book”—“Home” is also where Dave Wain and Ron Blake live—It's an old roominghouse of four stories on the edge of the Negro district of San Francisco where Dave, Ben, Jonesy, a painter called Lanny Meadows, a mad French Canadian drinker called Pascal and a Negro called Johnson all live in different rooms with their clutter of rucksacks and floor mattresses and books and gear, each one taking turns one day a week to go out and do all the shopping and come back and cook up a big communal dinner in the kitchen—All ten or twelve of them sharing the rent, and with that