A Confederate General from Big Sur

PART ONE

WHEN I FIRST heard about Big Sur I didn’t know that it was a member of the Confederate States of America. I had always thought that Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas were the Confederacy, and let it go at that. I had no idea that Big Sur was also a member.

Big Sur the twelfth member of the Confederate States of America? Frankly, it’s hard to believe that those lonely stark mountains and clifflike beaches of California were rebels, that the redwood trees and the ticks and the cormorants waved a rebel flag along that narrow hundred miles of land that lies between Monterey and San Luis Obispo.

The Santa Lucia Mountains, that thousand-year-old flophouse for mountain lions and lilacs, a hotbed of Secession? The Pacific Ocean along there, that million-year-old skid row for abalone and kelp, sending representatives back to the Confederate Congress in Richmond, Virginia?

I’ve heard that the population of Big Sur in those Civil War days was mostly just some Digger Indians. I’ve heard that the Digger Indians down there didn’t wear any clothes. They didn’t have any fire or shelter or culture. They didn’t grow anything. They didn’t hunt and they didn’t fish. They didn’t bury their dead or give birth to their children. They lived on roots and limpets and sat pleasantly out in the rain.

I can imagine the expression on General Robert E. Lee’s face when this gang showed up, bearing strange gifts from the Pacific Ocean.

It was during the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness. A. P. Hill’s brave but exhausted confederate troops had been hit at daybreak by Union General Hancock’s II Corps of 30,000 men. A. P. Hill’s troops were shattered by the attack and fell back in defeat and confusion along the Orange Plank Road.

Twenty-eight-year-old Colonel William Poague, the South’s fine artillery man, waited with sixteen guns in one of the few clearings in the Wilderness, Widow Tapp’s farm. Colonel Poague had his guns loaded with antipersonnel ammunition and opened fire as soon as A. P. Hill’s men had barely fled the Orange Plank Road.

The Union assault funneled itself right into a vision of sculptured artillery fire, and the Union troops suddenly found pieces of flying marble breaking their centers and breaking their edges. At the instant of contact, history transformed their bodies into statues. They didn’t like it, and the assault began to back up along the Orange Plank Road. What a nice name for a road.

Colonel Poague and his men held their ground alone without any infantry support, and no way out, caring not for the name of the road. They were there forever and General Lee was right behind them in the drifting marble dust of their guns. He was waiting for General Longstreet’s arrival with reinforcements. Longstreet’s men were hours late.

Then the first of them arrived. Hood’s old Texas Brigade led by John Gregg came on through the shattered forces of A. P. Hill, and these Texans were surprised because A. P. Hill’s men were shock troops of the Confederate Army, and here they were in full rout.

‘What troops are you, my boys?’ Lee said.

‘The Texans!’ the men yelled and quickly formed into battle lines. There were less than a thousand of them and they started forward toward that abyss of Federal troops.

Lee was in motion with them, riding his beautiful gray horse, Traveller, a part of the wave. But they stopped him and shouted, ‘Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!’

They turned him around and sent him back to spend the last years of his life quietly as the president of Washington College, later to be called Washington and Lee.

Then they went forward possessed only by animal fury, without any regard now for their human shadows. It was a little late for things like that.

The Texans suffered 50 per cent casualties in less than ten minutes, but they contained the Union. It was like putting your finger in the ocean and having it stop, but only briefly because Appomattox Court-house waited less than a year away, resting now in its gentle anonymity.

When Lee got to the rear of the lines, there were the 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters reporting for duty. The air around them was filled with the smell of roots and limpets. The 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters reported like autumn to the Army of Northern Virginia.

They all gathered around Lee’s horse and stared in amazement, for it was the first time that they had ever seen a horse. One of the Digger Indians offered Traveller a limpet to eat.

When I first heard about Big Sur I didn’t know that it was part of the defunct Confederate States of America, a country that went out of style like an idea or a lampshade or some kind of food that people don’t cook any more, once the favorite dish in thousands of homes.

It was only through a Lee-of-another-color, Lee Mellon, that I found out the truth about Big Sur. Lee Mellon who is the battle flags and the drums of this book. Lee Mellon: a Confederate General in ruins.

The Tide Teeth of Lee Mellon

IT IS IMPORTANT before I go any further in this military narrative to talk about the teeth of Lee Mellon. They need talking about. During these five years that I have known Lee Mellon, he has probably had 175 teeth in his mouth.

This is due to a truly gifted faculty for getting his teeth knocked out. It almost approaches genius. They say that John Stuart Mill could read Greek when he was three years old and had written a history of Rome at the age of six and a half.

But the amazing thing about Lee Mellon’s teeth is their strange and constantly moving placement in the many and varied dentures those poor teeth briefly get to call home. I would meet him one day on Market Street and he would have just one upper left tooth in his face, and then I’d see him again, months later on Grant Avenue, and he’d have three lower right teeth and one upper right tooth.

I’d see him again just back from Big Sur, and he’d have four upper front teeth, and two lower left teeth, and then after a few weeks in San Francisco, he’d be wearing the upper plate without any teeth in it at all, wearing the plate just so he would have a head start on gristle, and so that his cheeks wouldn’t collapse in on his mouth.

I’ve adjusted to this teeth fantasia always happening to him, and so now everytime I see him, I have a good look at his mouth to see how things are going with him, to see if he has been working, what books he has been reading, whether Sara Teasdale or Mein Kampf, and whom he has been sleeping with: blondes or brunettes.

Lee Mellon told me that once in Modern Times, he’d had all his teeth in his mouth at the same time for a whole day. He was driving a tractor in Kansas, back and forth across a field of wheat, and his brand-new lower plate felt a little funny in his mouth, so he took it out and put it into his shirt pocket. The teeth fell out of his pocket, and he backed the tractor over them.

Lee Mellon told me rather sadly that after he had discovered that the teeth were gone from his shirt pocket, it took him almost an hour to find them, and when he found them, they weren’t worth finding at all.

The First Time I Met Lee Mellon

I MET MELLON five years ago in San Francisco. It was spring. He had just ‘hitch-hiked’ up from Big Sur. Along the way a rich queer stopped and picked Lee Mellon up in a sports car. The rich queer offered Lee Mellon ten dollars to commit an act of oral outrage.

Lee Mellon said all right and they stopped at some lonely place where there were trees leading back into the mountains, joining up with a forest way back in there, and then the forest went over the top of the mountains.

‘After you,’ Lee Mellon said, and they walked back into the trees, the rich queer leading the way. Lee Mellon picked up a rock and bashed the rich queer in the head with it.

‘Ouch!’ the rich queer said and fell on the ground. That hurt, and the rich queer began begging for his life.

‘Spare me! Spare me! I’m just a lonely little rich queer who wanted to have some fun. I never hurt anyone.’

‘Stop blubbering,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And give me all your money and the keys to your car. That’s all I want anyway, you rich queer.’

The rich queer gave Lee Mellon $235.00 and the keys to his car and his watch.

Lee Mellon hadn’t said anything about the rich queer’s watch, but figuring that his birthday was coming up soon, he’d be twenty-three, Lee Mellon took the watch and put it in his pocket.

The rich queer was having the greatest time of his life. A tall, young, good-looking, dashing, toothless raider was taking all his money and his car and his watch away.

It would make a wonderful story to tell his other rich queer friends. He could show the bump on his head and point to the place where his watch had been.

The rich queer reached up and felt the bump on his head. It was rising like a biscuit. The rich queer hoped the bump wouldn’t go away for a long time.

‘I’m going now,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘And you sit right where you are until tomorrow morning. If you move an inch, I’ll come back here and run over you a couple of times with my car. I’m a desperate man, and I like nothing better in this world than to run over rich queers.’

‘I won’t move until tomorrow morning,’ the rich queer said. This made sense to him. After all Lee Mellon did appear to be quite a mean man, for all his good looks.

‘I won’t move an inch,’ the rich queer promised.

‘That’s a good rich queer,’ Lee Mellon said and abandoned the car in Monterey and took a bus on into San Francisco.

When I met the young raider for the first time, he had been on a four-day drunk with his confiscated funds. He bought a bottle of whiskey and we went into an alley to drink it. Things are done like that in San Francisco.

Lee Mellon and I yakked up a storm and became close friends immediately. He said he was looking for a place to live. He still had some of the rich queer’s money left.

I said that there was a vacant room for rent under the attic where I lived over on Leavenworth Street, and Lee Mellon said, howdy neighbor.

Lee Mellon knew that there was no danger of the rich queer ever going to the police. ‘The rich queer’s probably still sitting down there at Big Sur,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I hope he doesn’t starve to death.’

Augustus Mellon, CSA

THE FIRST TIME I met Lee Mellon the night went away with every totem drop of the whiskey. When dawn came we were down on the Embarcadero and it was raining. Seagulls started it all, that gray screeching, almost like banners, running with the light. There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship.

Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring morning in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.

Lee Mellon looked at the sky. Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, they stare at the sky. He stared for a long time. ‘What?’ I said, because I wanted to be his friend.

‘Just seagulls,’ he said. ‘That one,’ and pointed at a seagull, but I couldn’t tell which one it was for there were many, summoning their voices to the dawn. Then he said nothing for a while.

Yes, one could think of seagulls. We were awfully tired, hung over and still drunk. One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do . . . seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.

We stopped at a little cafe and got some coffee. The coffee was brought to us by the world’s ugliest waitress. I gave her an imaginary name: Thelma. I do things like that.

My name is Jesse. Any attempt to describe her would be against my better judgment, but in her own way she seemed to belong in that cafe with steam rising like light out of our coffee.

Helen of Troy would have looked out of place. ‘What’s Helen of Troy doing in here?’ some longshoreman would have asked. He wouldn’t have understood. So Thelma it was for the likes of us.

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. ‘Near Asheville,’ he said. ‘That’s Thomas Wolfe country.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Lee Mellon didn’t have any Southern accent. ‘You don’t have much of a Southern accent,’ I said.

‘That’s right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,’ Lee Mellon said.

I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway, I couldn’t argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

‘When I was sixteen years old I stole into classes at the University of Chicago and lived with two highly cultured young Negro ladies who were freshmen,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘We all slept in the same bed together. It helped me get rid of my Southern accent.’

‘Sounds like it might do the trick,’ I said, not knowing exactly what I was saying.

Thelma, the world’s ugliest waitress, came over and asked us if we wanted some breakfast. The hotcakes were good and the bacon and eggs were good and would fill you up. ‘Hit the spot,’ Thelma said.

I had the hotcakes and Lee Mellon had the hotcakes and the bacon and eggs and some more hotcakes. He did not pay any attention to Thelma and continued to talk about the South.

He told me that he had lived on a farm near Spotsylvania, Virginia, and had spent a lot of time as a child going over the places where the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought.

‘My great grandfather fought there,’ he said. ‘He was a general. A Confederate general and a damn good one, too. I was raised on stories of General Augustus Mellon, CSA. He died in 1910. The same year Mark Twain died. That was the year of Halley’s Comet. He was a general. Have you ever heard of General Augustus Mellon?’

‘No, but that’s really something,’ I said. ‘A Confederate general . . . gee.’

‘Yeah, we Mellons have always been very proud of General Augustus Mellon. There’s a statue of him some place, but we don’t know where it is.

‘My Uncle Benjamin spent two years trying to find the statue. He traveled all over the South in an old truck and slept in the back. That statue is probably in some park covered with vines. They don’t pay enough respect to our honored dead. Our great heroes.’

Our plates were empty now like orders for a battle not yet conceived, in a war not yet invented. I said farewell to the world’s ugliest waitress, but Lee Mellon insisted on paying the check. He took a good look at Thelma.

Perhaps he was seeing her for the first time, and as I remember, he hadn’t said anything about her while she was bringing the coffee and breakfast to us.

‘I’ll give you a dollar for a kiss,’ Lee Mellon said while she was giving him the change for ten dollars of the rich queer’s rock-on-the-head money.

‘Sure,’ she said, without smiling or being embarrassed or acting out of the way or anything. It was just as if the Dollar Lee Mellon Kissing Business were an integral part of her job.

Lee Mellon gave her a great big kiss. Neither one of them cracked, opened or celebrated a smile. He did not show in any manner that he was joking. I went along with him. The subject was never brought up by either one of us, so it almost stays there.

As we walked along the Embarcadero the sun came out like memory and began to recall the rain back to the sky and Lee Mellon said, ‘I know where we can get four pounds of muscatel for one dollar and fifteen cents.’

We went there. It was an old Italian wineshop on Powell Street, just barely open. There was a row of wine barrels against the wall. The center of the shop led back into darkness. I believe the darkness came off the wine barrels smelling of Chianti, zinfandel and Burgundy.

‘A half gallon of muscatel,’ Lee Mellon said.

The old man who ran the shop got the wine off a shelf behind him. He wiped some imaginary dust off the bottle. Like a strange plumber he was used to selling wine.

We left with the muscatel and went up to the Ina Coolbrith Park on Vallejo Street. She was a poet contemporary of Mark Twain and Brett Harte during that great San Francisco literary renaissance of the 1860s.

Then Ina Coolbrith was an Oakland librarian for thirty-two years and first delivered books into the hands of the child Jack London. She was born in 1841 and died in 1928: ‘Loved Laurel-Crowned Poet of California,’ and she was the same woman whose husband took a shot at her with a rifle in 1861. He missed.

‘Here’s to General Augustus Mellon, Flower of Southern Chivalry and Lion of the Battlefield!’ Lee Mellon said, taking the cap off four pounds of muscatel.

We drank the four pounds of muscatel in the Ina Coolbrith Park, looking down Vallejo Street to San Francisco Bay and how the sunny morning was upon it and a barge of railroad cars going across to Marin County.

‘What a warrior,’ Lee Mellon said, putting the last ⅓ ounce of muscatel, ‘the corner,’ in his mouth.

Having a slight interest in the Civil War and motivated by my new companion, I said, ‘I know a book that has all the Confederate generals in it. All 425 of them,’ I said. ‘It’s down at the library. Let’s go down and see what General Augustus Mellon pulled off in the war.’

‘Great idea, Jesse,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘He was my great grandfather. I want to know all about him. He was a Lion of the Battlefield. General Augustus Mellon! Hurray for the heroic deeds he performed in the War between the States! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! HURRAY!’

Figure two pounds of muscatel apiece at twenty per cent alcohol: forty proof. We were still very rocky from a night of whiskey drinking. That’s two pounds of muscatel multiplied, squared and envisioned. This can all be worked out with computers.

The librarian looked at us when we came into the library and groped a volume off a shelf: Generals in Gray by Ezra J. Warner. The biographies of the 425 generals were in alphabetic order and we turned to where General Augustus Mellon would be. The librarian was debating whether or not to call the police.

We found General Samuel Bell Maxey on the left flank and his story went something like this: Samuel Bell Maxey was born at Tompkinsville, Kentucky, March 30, 1825. He was graduated from West Point in the class of 1846, and was brevetted for gallantry in the war with Mexico. In 1849 he resigned his commission to study law. In 1857 he and his father, who was also an attorney, moved to Texas, where they practiced in partnership until the outbreak of the Civil War. Resigning a seat in the Texas senate, the younger Maxey organized the 9th Texas Infantry, and with rank of colonel joined the forces of General Albert Sidney Johnston in Kentucky. He was promoted brigadier general to rank from March 4, 1862. He served in East Tennessee, at Port Hudson, and in the Vicksburg campaign, under General J. E. Johnston. In December 1863 Maxey was placed in command of Indian Territory, and for his effective reorganization of the troops there, with which he participated in the Red River campaign, he was assigned to duty as a major general by General Kirby Smith on April 18, 1864. He was not, however, subsequently appointed to that rank by the President. After the war General Maxey resumed the practice of law in Paris, Texas, and in 1873 declined appointment to the state bench. Two years later he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served two terms, being defeated for re-election in 1887. He died at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, August 16, 1895, and is buried in Paris, Texas.

And on the right flank we found General Hugh Weedon Mercer and his story went something like this: Hugh Weedon Mercer, a grandson of the Revolutionary General Hugh Mercer, was born at ‘The Sentry Box,’ Fredericksburg, Virginia, on November 27, 1808. He was graduated third in the class of 1828 at West Point, and was stationed for some time in Savannah, Georgia, where he married into a local family. He resigned his commission on April 30, 1835 and settled in Savannah. From 1841 until the outbreak of the Civil War he was cashier of the Planters’ Bank there. Upon the secession of Georgia, Mercer entered Confederate service as colonel of the 1st Georgia Volunteers. He was promoted brigadier general on October 29, 1861. During the greater part of the war, with a brigade of three Georgia regiments, General Mercer commanded at Savannah, but he and his brigade took part in the Atlanta campaign of 1864, first in W. H. T. Walker’s division and then in Cleburne’s. On account of poor health he accompanied General Hardee to Savannah after the battle of Jonesboro, and saw no further field duty. Paroled at Macon, Georgia, May 13, 1865, General Mercer returned to banking in Savannah the following year. He moved to Baltimore in 1869, where he spent three years as a commission merchant. His health further declined, and he spent the last five years of his life in Baden-Baden, Germany. He died there on June 9, 1877. His remains were returned to Savannah for burial in Bonaventure Cemetery.

But in the center of the line there was no General Augustus Mellon. There had obviously been a retreat during the night. Lee Mellon was crushed. The librarian was staring intently at us. Her eyes seemed to have grown a pair of glasses.

‘It can’t be,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘It just can’t be.’

‘Maybe he was a colonel,’ I said. ‘There were a lot of Southern colonels. Being a colonel was a good thing. You know, Southern colonels and all. Colonel Something Fried Chicken.’ I was trying to make it easier for him. It’s quite a thing to lose a Confederate general and gain a colonel instead.

Perhaps even a major or a lieutenant. Of course I didn’t say anything about the major or lieutenant business to him. That probably would have made him start crying. The librarian was looking at us.

‘He fought in the Battle of the Wilderness. He was just great,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘He cut the head off a Yankee captain with one whack.’

‘That’s quite something,’ I said. ‘They probably just overlooked him. A mistake was made. Some records were burned or something happened. There was a lot of confusion. That’s probably it.’

‘You bet,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I know there was a Confederate general in my family. There had to be a Mellon general fighting for his country . . . the beloved South.’

‘You bet,’ I said.

The librarian was beginning to pick up the telephone.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

‘OK,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘You believe there was a Confederate general in my family? Promise me you do. There was a Confederate general in my family!’

‘I promise,’ I said.

I could read the lips of the librarian. She was saying Hello, police? Vaudeville, it was.

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco.

‘Promise me till your dying day, you’ll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It’s the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!’

‘I promise,’ I said and it was a promise that I kept.

Headquarters

THE OLD HOUSE where I took Lee Mellon to live, provided, in its own strange way, lodging befitting a Confederate general from Big Sur, a general who had just successfully fought a small skirmish in the trees above the Pacific Ocean.

The house was owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, but it rained in the front hall. The rain came down through a broken skylight, flooding the hall and warping the hardwood floor.

Whenever the dentist visited the place, he put a pair of blue bib overalls on over his business suit. He kept the overalls in what he called his ‘tool room,’ but there weren’t any tools there, only the blue overalls hanging on a hook.

He put the overalls on just to collect the rent. They were his uniform. Perhaps he had been a soldier at one time or another.

We showed him where the rain came from and the long puddle leading splash, splash down the hall to the community kitchen in the rear, but he refused to be moved by it.

‘There it is,’ he said philosophically and went away peacefully to take off his overalls and hang them in his ‘tool room.’

After all it was his building. He had pulled thousands of teeth to get the place. He obviously liked the puddle right where it was, and we could not argue with his cheap rent.

Even before Lee Mellon made the old place his official San Francisco headquarters in the spring of years ago, the building was already occupied by an interesting group of tenants. I lived alone in the attic.

There was a sixty-one-year-old retired music teacher who lived in the room right underneath the attic. He was Spanish and about him like a weather-vane whirled the traditions and attitudes of the Old World.

And he was in his own way, the manager. He had appropriated the job like one would find some old clothes lying outside in the rain, and decide that they were the right size and after they had dried out, they would look quite fashionable.

The day after I moved into the attic, he came upstairs and told me that the noise was driving him crazy. He told me to pack my things quickly and go. He told me that he’d had no idea I had such heavy feet when he rented the place to me. He looked down at my feet and said, ‘They’re too heavy. They’ll have to go.’

I had no idea either when I rented the attic from the old fart. It seems that the attic had been vacant for years. With all those years of peace and quiet, he probably thought that there was a meadow up there with a warm, gentle wind blowing through the wild flowers, and a bird getting hung up above the trees along the creek.

I bribed his hearing with a phonograph record of Mozart, something with horns, and that took care of him. ‘I love Mozart,’ he said, instantly reducing my burden of life.

I could feel my feet beginning to weigh less and less as he smiled at the phonograph record. It smiled back. I now weighed a trifle over seventeen pounds and danced like a giant dandelion in his meadow.

The week after Mozart, he left for a vacation in Spain. He said that he was only going to be gone for three months, but my feet must continue their paths of silence. He said he had ways of knowing, even when he wasn’t there. It sounded pretty mysterious.

But his vacation turned out to be longer than he had anticipated because he died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn’t quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America.

Poor devil. I heard that it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

Though his physical appearance was months away, Lee Mellon’s San Francisco headquarters were now secure. They took the old man’s things away and the room was empty.

There were two other rooms on the second floor. One of them was occupied by a Montgomery Street secretary. She left early in the morning and returned late at night. You never saw her on the weekends.

I believe she was a member of a small acting group and spent most of her spare time rehearsing and performing. One might as well believe that as anything else because there was no way of knowing. She had long ingenue legs, so I’ll go on believing she was an actress.

We all shared a bathroom on the second floor, but during the months I lived there, she passed.

The other room on the second floor was occupied by a man who always said hello in the morning and good evening at night. It was nice of him. One day in February he went down to the community kitchen and roasted a turkey.

He spent hours basting the bird and preparing a grand meal. Many chestnuts and mushrooms were in evidence. After he was finished he took the bird upstairs with him and never used the kitchen again.

Shortly after that, I believe it was Tuesday, he stopped saying hello in the morning and good evening at night.

The bottom floor had one room in the front of the house. Its windows opened on the street and the shades were always drawn. An old woman lived in that room. She was eighty-four and lived quite comfortably on a government pension of thirty-five cents a month.

She looked so old that she reminded me of a comic book hero of my childhood: The Heap. It was a World War I German pilot who was shot down and lay wounded for months in a bog and was slowly changed by mysterious juices into a ⅞ plant and ⅛ human thing.

The Heap walked around like a mound of moldy hay and performed good deeds, and of course bullets had no effect on it. The Heap killed the comic book villains by giving them a great big hug, then instead of riding classically away into the sunset like a Western, The Heap lumbered off into the bog. That’s the way the old woman looked.

After she paid her rent out of the generous thirty-five-cent-a-month government pension, there was just enough money left over for her to buy bread, tea and celery roots, which were her main sustenance.

One day out of curiosity I looked up celery roots in a book called Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, by that goddess of American grub, Adelle Davis, to see how you could keep alive on them. You can’t.

One hundred grams of celery root contains no vitamins except 2 mg. of Vitamin C. For minerals, it contains 47 mg. of calcium, 71 mg. of phosphorous and 0.8 mg. of iron. It would take a lot of celery roots to make a battleship.

One hundred grams of celery root has for its grand finale, in Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, three grams of protein and the dramatic total of 38 calories.

The old woman had a little hotplate in her room. She did all her ‘cooking’ in there and never used the community kitchen. A hotplate in a little room is the secret flower of millions of old people in this country. There’s a poem by Jules Laforgue about the Luxembourg Gardens. The old woman’s hotplate was not that poem.

But her father had been a wealthy doctor in the 19th century and had the first franchise in Italy and France for some wondrous American electrical device.

She could not remember what electrical device it was, but her father had been very proud of getting the franchise and watching the crates being unloaded off a ship.

Unfortunately, he lost all his money trying to sell the electrical devices. It seems that nobody else wanted to have the things in their houses. People were afraid of them, thought they would blow up.

She herself had once been a beautiful woman. There was a photograph of her wearing a dress with a decolletage. Her breasts, her long neck and her face were quite lovely.

Then she was a governess and a language instructor in Italian, French, Spanish and German, the border languages, but now, Heap-like senility covered her and there was only an occasional scrap of meat thrown in to break the celery root tyranny of her last days.

She had never married, but I always called her Mrs I liked her and once gave her a glass of wine. It had been years. She had no friends or relatives left in the world, and drank the wine very slowly.

She said it was good wine, though it wasn’t, and talked of her father’s vineyard and the wine that came from those grapes until the thousands of unpurchased American electrical devices had withered the vines.

She told me that the vineyard had been on a hill above the sea, and she liked to go there in the late afternoon and walk down the shadowy rows of grapes. It was the Mediterranean Sea.

In her room she had trunks full of things from olden times. She showed me an illustrated book full of hospitals put out by the Italian Red Cross. There was a photograph of Mussolini in the front of the book. It was a little hard to recognize him because he was not hanging upside down from a light post. She told me that he was a great man, but that he had gone too far. ‘Never do business with the Germans,’ she said.

Often she wondered aloud what would happen to her things when she would be dead. Some old salt and pepper shakers with people on them. A bolt of faded cloth. There hadn’t been time in 84 years to make a dress or some curtains out of the cloth.

They’ll put them inside a celery root and then discover a way of making battleships out of celery roots and over the waves her things will travel.

The community kitchen was on the bottom floor in the rear of the house. There was a very large room attached by its own entrance to the kitchen. Before the retired music teacher went to Spain, there was a quiet, typical middle-aged woman who lived in the room, but she left the door from her room to the kitchen open all the time. It was as if the community kitchen were her kitchen and what were strangers doing in it. She was always coming and going and staring.

I liked to cook my meager bachelor meals in privacy, but she always watched. I didn’t like it. Who wants to have a quiet, typical, middle-aged woman watching you boil a pathetic can of beef and noodle soup for dinner?

After all it was a community kitchen. When she was cooking in there, I thought it was perfectly natural for her to leave the door open, but when I was cooking in there I thought she should have kept the door closed, for after all it was a community kitchen.

While the music teacher was busy dropping dead in New York, the woman moved and three young girls took the room. One of the girls was quite pretty in a blonde athletic sort of way. The other two girls were uglies.

There were all sorts of men flocking around the pretty one, and because she couldn’t handle them all, the other girls got a lot of attention.

I have noticed this pattern time and time again. A pretty girl living with an ugly. If you don’t make the pretty one, you’re aroused enough to take on the ugly. It throws a lot of action into the corner of the uglies.

That room off the kitchen became quite a hive. The girls had come from a small college somewhere in eastern Washington, and at first they allowed their attentions to be taken up by college and post-college types, mostly the clean-cuts.

Then as the girls grew more sophisticated, as they acclimated themselves to the throbbing pulse of a cosmopolitan city, their attentions naturally switched to bus drivers.

It was pretty funny because there were so many bus drivers hanging around, paying court in their uniforms, that the place looked like the car barn.

Sometimes I would have to cook a meal with four or five bus drivers sitting at the kitchen table, watching me fry a hamburger. One of them absently-mindedly clicking his transfer punch.

A Daring Cavalry Attack on PG&E

ONE MORNING AFTER Lee Mellon had been living below me on Leavenworth Street for a couple of weeks, I woke up and looked around me. The meadow was fading rapidly. The grass had turned brown. The creek was almost dry. The flowers were gone. The trees had fallen over on their sides. I hadn’t seen a bird or an animal since the old man died. They all just left.

I decided to go down and wake Lee Mellon up. I got out of bed and put my clothes on. I went down to his room and knocked on the door. I thought we might have some coffee or something.

‘Come on in,’ Lee Mellon said.

I opened the door and Lee Mellon was in the sack with a young girl. Their entwined feet were sticking out one end of the bed. Their heads were sticking out the other end. At first I thought they were fucking and then I could see that they weren’t. But I hadn’t been far behind. The room smelled like Cupid’s gym.

I was standing there and then I closed the door.

‘This is Susan,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘That’s my buddy.’

‘Hello,’ she said.

The room was all yellow because the shades were pulled down and the sun was shining hard outside. There were all sorts of things thrown all over the room: books, clothes and bottles in cleverly planned disorder. They were maps of important battles to come.

I talked to them for a few minutes. We decided to go downstairs to the community kitchen and have some breakfast.

I stepped outside in the hall while they got dressed, and then we went downstairs together. The girl was tucking in her blouse. Lee Mellon hadn’t bothered to tie his shoelaces. They flopped like angleworms all the way down the stairs.

The girl cooked breakfast. Funny, to this very day I remember what she cooked: scrambled eggs with scallions and cream cheese. She made some whole wheat toast and a pot of good coffee. She was very young and cheerful. She had a pretty face and body, though she was a little overweight. Buxom is the right term, but that was just baby fat.

She talked enthusiastically about In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. ‘Those poor fruit pickers,’ the girl said. Lee Mellon agreed with her. After breakfast they went upstairs to talk about their future.

I went downtown to see three movies in a Market Street flea palace. It was a bad habit of mine. From time to time I would get the desire to confuse my senses by watching large flat people crawl back and forth across a huge piece of light, like worms in the intestinal track of a tornado.

I would join the sailors who can’t get laid, the old people who make those theaters their solariums, the immobile visionaries, and the poor sick people who come there for the outpatient treatment of watching a pair of Lusitanian mammary glands kiss a set of Titanic capped teeth.

I found three pictures that were the right flavors: a monster picturehelphelp, a cowboy picturebangbang and a dime store romance picture I love you, and found a seat next to a man who was staring up at the ceiling.

The girl stayed for three days with Lee Mellon. She was sixteen years old and came from Los Angeles. She was a Jewess and her father was in the appliance business down in Los Angeles, and was known as the Freezer King of Sepulveda Boulevard.

He showed up at the end of the third day. It seems that the girl had run away from home, and when she had used up the last of her money, she called Poppa on the telephone and said that she was living with a man and they needed money and she gave her father the address where he could send the money.

Before the girl’s father took her away, he had a little chat with Lee Mellon. He told Lee Mellon that he didn’t want any trouble from this business and he made Lee Mellon promise never to see her again. He gave twenty dollars to Lee Mellon who said thanks.

The Freezer King said that he could build a fire under Lee Mellon if he wanted to, but he didn’t want any scandal. ‘Just don’t see her any more and everything will be all right.’

‘Sure,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I can see your point.’

‘I don’t want any trouble, and you don’t want any trouble. We’ll just leave it right there,’ her father said.

‘Uh-huh,’ Lee Mellon said.

The Freezer King took his daughter back to Los Angeles. It had been a fine adventure even though her father had slapped her face in the car and called her a schicksa.

A little while after that Lee Mellon moved out of his room because he couldn’t pay the rent and went over and lay siege to Oakland. It was a rather impoverished siege that went on for months and was marked by only one offensive maneuver, a daring cavalry attack on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Lee Mellon lived in the abandoned house of a friend who was currently Class C Ping-Pong champion of a rustic California insane asylum. The classifications of A, B or C were determined by the number of shock treatments administered to the patients. The gas and electricity had been turned off in 1937 when the friend’s mother had been tucked away for keeping chickens in the house.

Lee Mellon of course didn’t have any money to get them turned back on again, so he tunneled his way to the main gas line and tapped it. Then he had a way to cook and heat the place, but he never quite got the energy to put the thing under complete control. Consequently, whenever he turned the gas on with a hastily improvised valve, and put a match to the gas, out jumped a six-foot-long blue flame.

He found an old kerosene lantern and that took care of his light. He had a card to the Oakland Public Library and that took care of his entertainment. He was reading the Russians with that certain heavy tone people put in their voices when they say, ‘I’m reading the Russians.’

There wasn’t much food because he had little money to buy it with. Lee Mellon didn’t want to get a job. Laying siege to Oakland was difficult enough without going to work. So he went hungry most of the time, but he wouldn’t give up his PG&E security. He had to scuffle for his chow: panhandling on the streets and going around to the back doors of restaurants, and walking around looking for money in the gutters.

During his extended siege he abstained from drink and didn’t show much interest in women. Once he said to me, ‘I haven’t been laid in five months.’ He said it in a matter-of-fact way as if he were commenting on the weather.

Do you think it’s going to rain?

No, why should it?

Susan arrived one morning over at Leavenworth Street and said, ‘I’ve got to see Lee Mellon. It’s very important.’

I could see that it was very important. She showed how important it was. The months had gathered at her waist.

‘I don’t know where he’s living,’ I lied. ‘He just left one day without leaving a forwarding address,’ I lied. ‘I wonder where Lee Mellon is?’ I lied.

‘Have you seen him around town any?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘He’s just vanished,’ I lied.

I couldn’t tell her that he was living in Oakland in terrible poverty. His only comfort being that he had tunneled his way to the main gas line and was now enjoying the rather dubious fruit of his labor: a six-foot-long blue flame. And that his eyebrows were gone.

‘He’s just vanished,’ I lied. ‘Everybody wonders where he went,’ I lied.

‘Well, if you see him any place, you tell him I’ve got to see him. It’s very important. I’m staying at the San Geronimo Hotel on Columbus Avenue, Room 34.’

She wrote it all down on a piece of paper and gave it to me. I put it in my pocket. She watched me put it in my pocket. Even after I had taken my hand out of my pocket, she was still watching the note, though it was in my pocket behind a comb, beside a wadded up candybar wrapper. I would have bet that she could have told me what kind of candybar wrapper it was.

I saw Lee Mellon the next day. He came over to the city. It had taken him nine hours to hitch-hike from Oakland to San Francisco. He looked pretty grubby. I told him about the Susan business, about the importance she had placed on seeing him. I told him that she acted and looked pregnant. Was, for my opinion.

‘That’s the way it goes.’ Lee Mellon said without any emotion. ‘I can’t do anything about it. I’m hungry. Do you have anything to eat around here? A sandwich, an egg, some spaghetti or something? Anything?’

Lee Mellon never mentioned Susan to me again, and I of course never brought up the subject again. He stayed over in Oakland for a few more months.

He tried to pawn a stolen electric iron over there. He spent the whole day going from one hock shop to another hock shop. Nobody wanted it. Lee Mellon watched the iron slowly change into a one-legged moldy albatross. He left it on the bench at a bus stop. It was wrapped in newspaper and looked like some garbage.

Disillusionment over failing to pawn the iron finally ended his siege of Oakland. The next day he broke camp and marched back to Big Sur.

The girl continued living at the San Geronimo Hotel. Because she was so unhappy she kept getting bigger and bigger like a cross between a mushroom and a goiter.

Everytime she saw me she asked me anxiously if I had seen Lee Mellon, and I always lied, no. The disappearance had us all wondering. What else could I say? Poor girl. So I lied breathlessly . . . no.

I lied no again no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no again. I again no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no Lee Mellon. He has just vanished from the face of the earth.

Her father, the Freezer King of Sepulveda Boulevard, disowned her. He argued in the beginning for one of those Tijuana abortions that have a fancy office and an operating room clean as a Chevron station. She said no, that she was going to have the baby. He told her to get out and paid her a monthly stipend never to come back to Los Angeles. When the baby was born, she put it up for adoption.

At the age of seventeen she became quite a character in North Beach. She quickly gained over a hundred pounds. She became huge and grotesque, putting on layers and layers of fat like geological muck.

She decided that she was a painter and being intelligent she realized that it was much easier to talk about painting than to actually paint. So she went to the bars and talked about painters of genius like Van Gogh. There was another painter that she always talked about, but I have forgotten his name.

She also took up smoking cigars and became fanatically anti-German. She smoked cigars and said that all the German men should be castrated slowly, the children buried in snow, and the women set to work in the God-damn salt mines with no other tools than their tears.

Long after she’d had the baby, she would come up to me, waddle up to me is the right way of stating it, and ask if I ever saw Lee Mellon around. I would always say no, and after while it became a joke between us because she knew I had been lying, and by now she herself had seen Lee Mellon, found out the score, and didn’t give a damn any more, but she still asked me, ‘Have you seen Lee Mellon around?’ but now she was lying. Our positions had been reversed. ‘No. I haven’t,’ I could say truthfully now.

She went on a kick of having babies for a few years. She turned herself into a baby factory. There’s always someone who will go to bed with a fat broad. She gave the babies up for adoption as soon as they were born. It was something to do with her time, and then she grew tired of this, too.

I think by now she was twenty-one, prehistoric, and her fad as a character in North Beach had run its course. She had stopped going to the bars and talking about painters of genius and those bad Germans. She even gave up smoking cigars. She was attending movies all the time now.

She wheeled those by now comfortable layers of fat into the movies every day, taking four or five pounds of food in with her in case there should be a freak snowstorm inside the movie and the concession stand were to freeze solid like the Antarctic.

Once I was standing on a street corner talking to Lee Mellon and she came up to me. ‘Have you seen Lee Mellon?’ she lied with a big smile on her face.

‘No,’ I could say truthfully now.

Lee Mellon didn’t show any interest at all in our little game. He said, ‘The light’s changed.’ He was wearing a gray uniform and his sword rattled as we walked across the street.