CONVERSATIONS AT THE SMOKEHOUSE

This is a sketch of a particular night; a night dramatic only in reflection. That is, to see in a moment, the foundations for a future. When young it's not the totality of things that makes your decisions but the relation to a few casual moments and overheard conversations.

This was at night, not the deep night, when I stopped at my favorite eatery after work. That had been a particularly bad night at work since I had had to say good-bye to a woman I had been carrying on with. I didn't want to think about it. She was married, I had met her husband, she had brought her two children to work and I knew that whatever fantasies I had were just that. Nonetheless, we would sit at our desks and talk about the Homeric epics. She was a 7th Day Adventist of all things and was reading Homer in a class she took preparatory to her entrance into nursing school.

'What I can't understand is how they memorized all this. It was passed by word of mouth you know?'

I acknowledged that, yes indeed, I had read the Greeks in college and I do remember that the tales of ancient times were passed orally before being written down.

'The other thing that bothers me is that I am a Christian. I believe in God and Christ and I just don't know about these gods running around in these pagan works. What are they? Am I supposed to believe in them like God and Christ?'

'Well, those things are just emotions you know.'

She made a funny face and then turned her attention to her work.

As we left work together we said good-bye for the last time. We paused in the parking lot for awhile, not saying anything, and then she kissed me quickly on the lips and turned and left. I felt bad about it. I am not a home wrecker but she was terribly unhappy, she was loaded down with the responsibilities while her so-called husband tried to be a jazz musician. I have always come to regret these missed opportunities but be that as it may. At the hospital our affair was well-known and attracted many of the woman's friends and co-workers who communicated silently to me, as a passing thought directed to the center of my heart. 'Don't hurt the sister,' they kept saying without uttering a word. 'The sister will take care of you if you don't harm her any.' At those moments, when I felt these silent interrogations, I wanted to wheel around in my chair to see who it was actually standing behind me projecting her thoughts in this way. 'This love has made me crazy,' I thought to myself. 'They are, somehow, preparing me to enter their circle. They are charming me away from anything but the deepest commitment to her'

It was relatively quiet down Telegraph Avenue that night. As always there was a steady stream of traffic and a few pedestrians such as myself. I could not get that kiss out of my mind and suddenly pictured, in a disturbingly eidetic way, how things could have been with the woman who I truly loved. How vulnerable I was to the suggestions of the female! They had their way with me, with my spirit, I was defenseless against it and the knowledge of this humiliated me without question. But, I couldn't live without it so that was the gist of the tale right there. In other words that was the story of my life up to that point. I was 24 at the time. I had found myself working in a large hospital in Berkeley. The job consisted in locating lost accounts. I spent a good deal of the time making conversation with the variety of types that populate the business office of a hospital. If I felt shut in I would go to the roof and hit off the best view of the Bay Area that I had ever experienced. It felt close, the buildings, houses, the way they were clustered and yet I could take it in with one glance. My boss read sado—masochistic novels but that is another story.

So, that particular night, walking down Telegraph Avenue I was in a pensive mood. I had missed an opportunity and yet I was relieved that I would not suffer the sort of pain and humiliation that I had in the past. The past! At 24 there was not much of a past but it felt like a past. My first past you might say.

I stopped at the Smokehouse regularly and the large women who moved inside, by the grill, knew me and would tell me things occurring in the neighborhood. For instance, the fact that the Victorian house that sat next to the Smokehouse had been suddenly taken over by radicals who were willing to wait the month or so before they could be evicted. They would wait the month out, without paying the rent, and then move onward to another unsuspecting tenancy. The radicals were old hat, even in Berkeley, by that time. But some had been so overcome by the wild mythology of the time that they were, now, mere criminals hiding behind causes of one kind or another. Property, to them, was theft so they always found the young, idealistic woman who would take them in. An artist! Always the artist. And after the radicals moved in they would, through a very sophisticated method, force the young artist out of her own place. The police were impotent in the matter, the owner of the house wanted no part of it. And the radicals always came up with a torn piece of paper with the artists signature scrawled on it. Many of the radicals of that era, of course, had gone back into the university. They, too, knew an easy mark when they saw it. But the more proletarian ones, those not able to hide behind professions were far more street wise and committed to a variety of causes.

They bought their hotdogs from a small company in San Francisco who wrapped the dogs with lambskin and that made them pleasant to bite into.

The smell of hotdogs reminded me of a heavy black car my parents use to drive. It had deep seats and wide, thick windows. It was always stopping at hot dog stands and we were always eating hot dogs.

I took my order to the back. There was a white wall that rose in the back and they had cleverly installed heaters along the top so during cool evenings it became a place of refuge. The place was crowded. There were some there that I recognized as they must have recognized myself. There were two tables directly in front of me and as I sat reading the East Bay Express I listened to the conversations of those around me. At one table were a group of people dressed like the administrators at work, those who lived in the suburbs, and they were laughing, they were laughing so hard I could hardly hear what they were saying. It had to do with some program they were taking, some human potential movement that they were going through or had heard about. They sounded like jackals on an open plain. Their pat phrases reminded me of Anne, another woman who had moved quickly in and out of my life. Anne had been an honors student at a private college and became an intern for a famous senator who ended up indicted for taking bribes from Arabs. Anne, disillusioned, moved to Maine and spent one winter along the seacoast nearly going insane for the weather and silence and coldness of the neighbors. Then she went to Boulder but quickly left and ended up, as so many do, in my fair city. Anne was studious looking with a quizzical expression etched eternally on her smooth face. When I met her she was being conducted through a new age 'process' and had a mentor who expressively forbade her to talk about the process. 'It won't work if I tell you about it.' Ah, I thought. A game! A challenge! I will seduce out of Anne some secrets from the process and make her face her own absurdity. Slowly but surely, every evening at work, I began to inquiry about the process. We talked about her childhood, her Catholic upbringing, her famous father, her lovers, her aspirations. Slowly but surely she began to open up about the process and confessed that she didn't have the highest confidence in the high priestess. One memorable night Anne got very emotional and demonstrated how she had gotten on the floor and rolled around the floor in a frenzy tying to drive her mother out of her. 'Is she out? Is she out?' I was nearly frenzied myself.

As I tuned out of that boring and nonsensical conversation two men approached the table at my side. One of them was a kind of Rip Torn character, larger than life, with a peppered beard; a hulking figure with a book in his hand.

'You've got to project, you've got to prove to them that you believe what you write. By god, believe what you write!'

The man at his side was a good deal younger. Perhaps about my age. I could size up the situation right away. He was a protegee, he had the look of a protegee and kept his eyes riveted on the elderly man.

'In your words you have implied a cosmology, it is all there. You have to emphasize those things which communicate that cosmology to the audience.'

'Yes sir,'

'Assume that the audience is both smart but confused. It is educated but bourgeois enough not to have taken on the very large questions that drives the poet. They are therefore at your command. You must use that, you must push through what you have learned. What you have learned about ethereal rings, rays of wisdom and all such things. Say it from the gut."

I recognized the poet as a San Francisco Beat poet. He looked awful, as if he were on his last legs. He lived, I found out, in a Tenderloin hotel and wrote passionate political poetry that made him a hit with the academic crowd. He called them 'bourgeous bastards.' An enormous cheer would go up from the crowd. 'The most uneducated welfare mother is better than all you bourgeois bastards put together.' Hoots and howls from the audience.

Even though there was a lot of laughter, that night seemed fairly dangerous to me. I felt myself stripped bare by the thought of my lost love and I was, for the first time, vulnerable to the world around me. It was at that point that I found the Buddhist monk and hobnobbed with him down Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues. He had a tambourine and would hit it with the palm of his hand and shake it as he walked briskly up and down the street, bowing to people and not uttering a word. He would tell me plenty but to the public he was the monk with a tambourine. He told me that in Berkeley he felt a great deal of conflict and wanted people to 'put away their ego trips.'

For my part I simply wanted to avoid the headhunters and jackals and fall in love a few times. In some ways it was a gruesome time where people gave up everything on behalf of phony types from every spectrum possible. Bands of strange people started to emerge and I began to see the Hospital as a refuge from some grasping energy that wanted to pull down and into a maelstrom I wanted no part of. But, whatever happened, I always found time to stop at the Smokehouse and linger in the long hours with the conversations of night.

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