In The Realm Of Absolute Purity

I thought of Perry today while I was having a smoke in Jack Kerouac Alley, surveying the window display in City Lights book store, somewhere between my fourth and fifth pint of Bass Ale at Vesuvio. It’s become a daily ritual for me, sidling up to the bar at Vesuvio for endless beers and enjoying a good book or the company of friends, a motley group of North Beach irregulars: film-makers and poets, strippers and strip club bouncers, harbor masters and retired fishermen, and always, always the out-of-town tourist eager to soak in the fabled saloon’s literary history. (The most often asked question: “Is there a particular place Kerouac used to sit?” The standard reply: “Wherever anyone was buying him a drink.”)

It was the aforementioned good book that made me think of Perry and what he was doing these days. I was reading Paul Auster’s blisteringly brilliant novel “New York Trilogy.” In one of the stories, the narrator, a writer, describes himself thus:

I had begun with high hopes, thinking I would become a novelist, thinking that I would eventually be able to write something that would touch people and make a difference in their lives. But time went on, and little by little I realized that this was not going to happen. I did not have such a book inside me, and at a certain point I told myself to give up my dreams. it was simpler to go on writing articles in any case. By working hard, by moving steadily from one piece to the next, I could more or less earn a living — and, for whatever it was worth, I had the pleasure of seeing my name in print almost constantly. I understood that things could have been far more dismal than they were. I was not quite thirty, and already I had something of a reputation. I had begun with reviews of poetry and novels, and now I could write about nearly everything and do a creditable job … they only had to ask me and I would do it. The world saw me as a bright young fellow … but inside myself I felt old, already used up. What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all. It was so much dust, and the slightest wind would blow it away.

That passage decribed Perry’s career to a tee, except for the fact that Perry, at forty-seven, is closer to my own age than the thirty years of Auster’s narrator. Perry lived in L.A. for twenty-some-odd years, working tirelessly as a freelance journalist — always for trade magazines, like myself, never for the better paying New York glossies — and he did under the table rewrites here and there for direct-to-video low budget movies, almost always involving strippers and/or hookers in Hollywood, a knife-wielding psychopathic killer, and a no-nonsense cop hot on the slasher’s trail.

Last year Perry decided to leave L.A. He told me he couldn’t afford to live there anymore, that “the city” (as if it were a living and breathing entity) had effectively evicted him. Perry had also developed a series of health disasters not dissimilar to my own: psychological maladies, high blood pressure, stress-related skin disorders. It was time, he reasoned, to get out.

“I can always telecommute,” he told me shortly before he left town.

But after leaving L.A. for the gloomy clime of Port Townsend in northernmost Washington state, work began to grind to a halt for Perry. There is something to be said, after all, for bending your elbow at a bar where other writers and editors and movie producers hang out. You have to be there to get the work.

The last time I spoke to Perry, shortly before Christmas ‘05, he was on food stamps and emergency cash assistance and awaiting word on his disability filing.

After reading Auster’s passage this afternoon I couldn’t get Perry out of my mind, how similar his life experience has been to my own. There was Perry, stranded in rainy Port Townsend, and here was I, exiled in San Francisco and, for reasons I have not fully explored yet, longing to return to Los Angeles but without the means or motivation to make it happen. Motivation, or lack of it, is a key theme in my life as I write this.

I stamped out my cigarette butt on an alley cobblestone, and dialed his number on my cell. He answered on the third ring. There was a lot of noise in the background, garbled voices and loud music.

“Hang on,” he said, “I’m in a bar. Let me step outside. I need a smoke anyway.”

We caught up on old times, exchanged gossip about mutual friends, none of whom are doing very well these days.

“Are you writing?” I asked him. No, was the reply. He had not written a word in seven months, neither for hire nor on spec.

“You wanna know what I do all day, Rodger? I get up around noon, I have my coffee, I puke my guts out in the bathroom sink and then I head for the bar and sit with a book all day.”

“What’re you drinking?” I inquired. It mattered. Perry had been told by a doctor a year ago that his liver was severely taxed and that if he did not quit drinking — “or significantly cut back”, Perry embellished at the time, and I knew it was an embellishment — then he would be laying on a cold slab by the time he met his fifty-fifth birthday.

“I cut back on the whiskey,” he told me. “Just beer at the bar. Wine in the evening, at home.”

The conversation was awkward. I felt I was talking to a dead man and, for a brief moment, I wondered if Perry felt the same. My story, after all, was not so different from his own, not so remarkably different from that of thousands or millions of other freelance writers. After a few more minutes of meaningless conversation I felt a gnawing in my gut and an urgency to get back inside Vesuvio and finish my unattended pint, which by now was growing warm on the bar. After a few more hollow words I ended the call, extinguished my cigarette, and returned to the warm, familiar glow of Vesuvio.

I settled back onto my bar stool, ordered a fresh beer, and picked up the Auster novel again. Just as I started to read there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned. It was a bar regular, not one of my favorites, a former ’60s radical with a loud mouth and uncomfortable affiliations with the radical environmental group, Earth Liberation Front.

“I thought you might like this,” he said.

He placed a small slip of paper next to my pint of Bass Ale; written on it was a piece of poetry by Huai-nan-tzu, a Tao poet whose bones have been moldering in the ground for centuries. I sipped my beer and read the words carefully:

Outwardly go along
With the flow,
While inwardly keeping
Your true nature.
Then your eyes and ears
Will not be dazzled,
Your thoughts will not
Be confused,
While the spirit within you
Will expand greatly to roam
In the realm of absolute purity.

I read it again, a half hour later, over a shot of whiskey, then stuck it between the pages of the Auster book.