RODAK

NINETEEN FIFTY-NINE

A STORY

You could see by his outfit that Russ was a beatnik. He wore creaseless beatnik chinos and a black beatnik turtleneck sweater. On his sooty city feet flopped genuine imported buffalo-hide beatnik Indian sandals in which Russ walked the walk along Bleeker Street, his torso scrunched into a definitively beatnik configuration. Just where his uncombed hair terminated its blasé cascade down his beatnik brow, it fashioned a dark fringe across the heavy frames of his black beatnik shades. Russ displayed the merest fuzz of a beatnik goatee on the defiant knob of his uncleft chin. It was always “Bird” and “Diz” with Russ, who was just coming from having tuned his bongos. There was a hint of Chianti on his unbrushed beatnik breath.

As Russ was on a quest, he composed a little beatnik battle hymn as he marched along oh so hip Bleeker Street; a hymn that was mostly muttered into the world through the Gitanes-stained rings of his perpetually indignant nostrils:

“Into the yawning maw

of the black-bellied and Holy Worm—Go!” he sang,

        “Go!

                    Go!

                                Go!”

Russ stopped.

Before a sidewalk-situated wrought iron café table, he was arrested and transfixed by an instinctual inner voice: Chick! it said. Alone? it asked. Yes, it replied. Beatnik? Maybe. NYU, maybe? Maybe. Maybe both? Perhaps. Leotard? Black! Hair? Steam iron straight. Eyes? Downcast. Red-rimmed? Well… Slight bruisy tinge below the lashes? Well… Ah! Book? Mailer. The Deer Park. Go for it? Go for it. Yes!

Russ craned his beatnik neck in order to peer surreptitiously over his shades at the empty-and-only-other chair at the chick’s table.

She glanced up from her book. “Expecting someone,” she answered, although he hadn’t asked.

Somewhat abashed by his quarry’s evident clairvoyance, Russ nevertheless managed a cool beatnik nod in the direction of the cup on her table. “Cappuccino?”

“Sanka.”

Despite this evil omen, Russ smoothly unreeled a length of line baited with blatantly beatnik philosophy: “Ah. Well. I had just, like, been wondering, y’know, if you might, like, remember if it’s, like, being or, like, essence?”

“I’m sorry?” she blinked.

“That precedes,” he clarified. “As in, like, lee E-tra et lee Nay-ant?”

“I’m afraid that I don’t speak a word of Sar-tra,” she admitted.

“Ah. Well…” Russ commiserated, aiming a stiff beatnik digit at the crimson spine of her paperback. “Mailer?”

“Page three,” she shrugged, hoisting the tome an inch or two above the tabletop by way of demonstration.

“Oh.”

“Still hopeful of instigating some fruitful beatnik communion, Russ tried a beatnik musical allusion: “Salt pea-nuts!” he sang. “Salt pea-nuts?”

“Thank you, no. Tendency to migraine.”

Unwilling to give up, regardless, Russ shifted, albeit with waning optimism, into the recitation of some quintessentially beatnik verse: “I, like, saw the best, uh, minds of, uh, like, my, uh, generation, y’know, like, destroyed by, uh, madness, like, starving, uh, hysterical, naked, like, dragging themselves through the, uh, y’know, Negro streets at dawn, looking for, like, an angry fix…”

“How perfectly awful for them,” she said.

“Them?” he asked, hopefully.

“For the Nee-groes.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Them.”

“Precisely. Through whose streets…”

“Yes. Well.”

And now, as a last resort, Russ opted to cut straight to the central issue of this increasingly angst-ridden conversation, by tossing out the fundamental tenet of beatnik sociology: “F-free love?” he croaked.

“At just whose expense?” she frowned.

“Dig it,” Russ sighed.

And so, his question answered, his quest thus renewed, Russ resumed his march up beatnik Bleeker Street:

“Up! Up! Up!

Into the black and Karacul-curled

crimson-rimmed and shaggy chute

of the Most Holy Conundrum,

        Go!

                Go!

                        Go!”

he sang.