Memoirs of a beatnik by Diane Di Prima Read Free Book Online Page A

like and when you come in here again that's what we're doing. Only let me tell you"—sneering now—"Uncle Horace sure does it better."
    Tomi didn't answer. She was simply lying, very white and very still, on the olive-drab carpet.
    My sight was blurry, and all I wanted to do was sleep; I figured I was probably drunk. I went back to the living room and let myself be put to bed by Martha, who saw to it that I had the guest bedroom next to her, on the other side of the house from Tomi and Sweet William.

    April Concluded
    I remembered the warm, sleepy days of last Spring: Spring on a college campus just a year ago, where all of us had been gathered together, working out the various entanglements we had invented in order to elude the great grinning demon of boredom. I had slowly introduced the people of my adolescent New York City world to the Pennsylvania college scene: plump, dark, beautiful Eva from the West Indies, with her knowing smile and her cryptic oracular statements; pale, angular Susan O'Reilley, with her sudden accesses of moodiness, her beautiful voice, her pouting, cynical mouth and innocent baby-blue eyes; and the incredibly vital, electrifying Martine, known to her friends as Petra—a veritable gold mine of the surreal and astounding in action. Petra and Tomi had become buddies at once; the bizarre in Tomi's life appealing to Petra's Spanish desire for the dramatic, the vividly colored. Eva had joined in our highly complex love-dance with her accustomed ironic grace—and Tomi and O'Reilley had fallen in love.
    I recalled the week last summer spent in a cabin on the Massachusetts coast that belonged to Lee's family. We had taken the all-night "milk train" from New York to Boston, arriving in South Station at dawn, eating English muffins and coffee at the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria in the dull pink light, and then catching a bus to the coast. We got there about nine, left our suitcases in the cabin, and went immediately to the beach, eager as one always is to experience the sea.
    The sea was slow and sullen, with low, grey sand dunes and no surf. The tide was out and there were mussels on the rocks, and after a halfhearted attempt to trudge across the muddy flats to the water, we gave up and turned to the more profitable business of gathering mussels. We piled a great stack of them onto a blanket and, the beach being deserted, stripped to the skin and stretched out on the sand to get as much as we could from the lukewarm New England sun. I looked over all of us with some appreciation before I lay down, taking in the muted picture we made: the curves of our bodies fitting into the lines of the dunes, the varied pinks and browns of our flesh warm against the dull sand.
    It was like being in limbo: the sluggish sea and the flat light, and I think it weighed heavily on all of us, although at the time we were
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    April Concluded
    unaware of it, determined as each of us was to "enjoy" the "beach." At any rate, early in the afternoon the wind came up and we seized the excuse to don our bathing suits and drag our blanket of mussels back to the cabin.
    It was while she was showering in the tiny bathroom off the kitchen that Mara discovered a tick on her shoulder. There had probably been ticks in the dunes we decided, and we all gathered in the large living room in front of the fireplace to examine each other. At first we stuck rather closely to the task at hand, our bodies and the moving shadows that the firelight threw making a series of impressionistic paintings of the room.
    I was examining Petra, passing my hands with great pleasure over the back of her neck and the skin behind her ears, then over her shoulders and back, feeling for the lumps that would indicate the presence of ticks. Mara was meanwhile going over my body. I had turned slightly toward her, and she, lifting one of my heavy breasts with one hand, was feeling under it with the other. As I turned I caught sight of Tomi and O'Reilley: Tomi's mouth was on