...of exasperation

The meeting is not eventful, of course, both girls keep their silence and hardly look at each other so it’s all me and Dave Wain carrying on with the usual boloney and I see that Cody is really very sick and tired of me bringing gangs arbitrarily to his place, running off with his mistress, getting drunk and thrown out of family plays, hundred dollars or no hundred dollars he probably feels I’m just a fool now anyway and hopelessly lost forever but I don’t realize that myself because I’m feeling good - I want us to resume down that road singing bawdier and darker songs till we’re negotiating narrow mountain roads at the pitch of the greatest songs.
I try to ask Cody about Perry and all the other strange characters who visit Billie in the City but he just looks at me out of the corner eye and says ‘Ah, yah, hm,’ - I don’t know and I never will know what he’s up to anyway in the long run: I realize I’m just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason far away from anything that ever mattered to me whatever that was - Always an ephemeral ‘visitor’ to the Coast never really involved with anyone’s lives there because I’m already ready to fly across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either, just a travelling stranger like Old Bull Balloon, an exemplar of the loneliness of Doren Coit actually waiting for the only real trip, to Venus, to the mountain of Mien Mo - Tho when I look out of Cody’s livingroom window just then I do see my star still shining for me as it’s done all those 38 years over crib, out ship windows, jail windows, over sleepingbags only now it’s dummier and dimmer and getting blurreder damnit as tho my own star be now fading away from concern for me as I from concern for it - In fact we’re all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom for nothing - And small talk at that, like Billie saying ‘I always wanted a nice fireplace’ and I’m yelling ‘Don’t worry we got one at the cabin hey Dave? and all the wood’s chopped!’ and Evelyn:- ‘What does Monsanto think of you using his cabin all summer, weren’t you supposed to go there alone in secret?’ - ‘It’s too late now!’ I sing swigging from the bottle without which I’d only drop with shame face flat on the floor or on the gravel driveway - And Dave and Romana look a little uneasy finally so we all get up to go, zoom, and that’s the last time I see Cody or Evelyn anyway.

[Big Sur, Kerouac, J.]