HEIDI WAS STRETCHED out on some kind of wooden platform at the intersection of Sun and Moon Streets. It was right in front of the large brick edifice that once belonged to a local Jewish merchant. That was in the interwar years, before the Great Death. She was stretched out there in the sunlight, with her rear exposed and also her back. The rest of her bundles of clothes were bunched up around her knees and neck. The wind blew through her gold hair. I wondered what I should do about the whole scene. I walked around her on the platform and examined her. I wondered if I should take things a step further. But didn’t she have a boyfriend? Prince Hans of the Seven Isles? I left and walked farther down Moon Street.
Smith had opened a new café a few doors down from the Bhutanese restaurant. He called it “Smith’s Espresso.” A large ceramic cup was suspended from a hook above the door. Inside, there were just a few tables and a coffee machine. Smith wore an apron and a old-fashioned cap and fixed me the drink. There was another patron, a college student of about 19, who was from some other country, a Hungarian maybe. He wanted to know about Jack Kerouac. He was reading The Dharma Bums. I told him of my personal connections to the legendary beatnik, and how I had once interviewed the bartender who sold Jack many a drink in downtown Northport on Long Island. He had told me that Kerouac was a bad drunk. “And he gave me a copy of his book, Tristessa. I couldn’t make any sense of it,” he said. “I threw that junk away.”
“Can you imagine? The old fool bartender threw an autographed copy of Tristessa into the trash bin.” “Tragedy,” the Hungarian said. He had written a haiku to Gary Snyder but hadn’t heard back. He had on a sky blue scarf fixed around his neck, though it wasn’t particularly cold. He had light hair and blue eyes, and looked sort of like he belonged at a 1970s ski resort. I imagine that such stylish accoutrements were necessary for the up-and-coming hipster set.
After I left Smith’s Espresso, I decided to stretch out my legs. I peered down Moon Street and saw Heidi still sprawled out there, with her milk white buttocks in the air and autumnal sunshine, and went the other way. I found my way to the Botanical Gardens, and two ladies came out of the hedges and greeted me. They were both highly manicured and treated women, belonging to the town’s caste of the upwardly mobile and aspiring nouveau riche. The kinds of women who had marvellously sculpted eyebrows, buffed fingernails, and pants that seemed to perfectly stick to every contour of their legs and hindquarters. Friendly, but somehow of another tribe, as I too belonged to some other tribe, the Tribe of Kerouac.
They started to pepper me with questions. They wanted to know if I was good in bed or, rather, their friend Gunna, who worked in the market, who had red hair, and red paints, and red freckles, and barely spoke, needed to know. Badly. Somehow sex had never come up between us, but now I understood that it was actually all about sex. Everything had always been about the sex all along. The only question was if I would be willing to give it. The answer was a tentative yes, I told the two ladies outside the Botanical Garden. I doubted, for a second, just a second, in my lovemaking abilities, and if I would be able to please Gunna as she needed.
The way that Gunna needed to be pleased.
north! 