William Jay Barker (1926-2017)
from Junior Birdman
Junior Birdman was written by the poet, novelist, actor, and raconteur William Jay Barker and published under the pseudonym "Billy Bones" in the 1960s. Distributed principally among friends, the book has long been known as one of the great "forgotten" texts. It was never published commercially, and copies are difficult to locate today. A few passages are reprinted below.
Set in the 1950s and the early 1960s, the novel concerns a group of friends freeing themselves from the conventions of American life. In a world reminiscent of Kerouac's, their adventures take them to Los Angeles, Acapulco, New York, Fire Island, Paris, and elsewhere. Few works equal Junior Birdman as the record of an era when the United States was moving away from the conformity of the 1950s into the freedoms of the 1960s. Near the end of the novel, the narrator says, ". . . the industrial exploitation of sex and the impending wave of eroticism in publicity and in films puts a question mark in all our lives: the liberation of the sexes and the need for a new morality." That "new morality" is the book's primary focus.
These selections from Barker's novel were printed earlier in Talisman and are reprinted here in memory of Barker's passing.
----------
At night the spider streets stretch forever through L.A. as you drive bemused down the straight maze: going nowhere because coming from nowhere. Is there a greater emptiness between the stars? You are but the brain of this machine which glides by the years of telegraph poles. You think of the buzz from Amelia Earhart. “Where is Everybody?” Somewhere ahead the Towers of Watts spin spin away from the mickey mouse town, patchwork cones of the immigrant’s aspiration caught short at the inevitable end of America: the Pacific Ocean.
* * *
The screen door wheezes in the waterboy, and you waken remembering the rootless oasis of your life. Already over the CahuengaPass the sea-hum loudens as the dragonfly cars skim the freeway. Picking your way back along the cotton field of your night, you collect the tufts of receding dreams. Sacrificing the innocence of the April morning you do up the roach that lies like a spaceship in the moon crater of the blue glass ashtray looming before your left-turned head. Below eye level the column filched from the Coloradoghost town graveyard spirals upward in support. You look straight down now beyond the twin peaks of sheeted feet at the elegant surface of the sterile little desk: the bronze girl beneath the palm, the trompe l’oeil goody box, the porcelain lamp: and you decide to do your letters now before the day drifts. You must get to the laundromat and to the Hughes Market, and not forget lunch at the Hollywood Orvieto with your agent and two little chicks waiting to hatch for real. On the gritty terrace all the tables pretending to be in Europe will hold money talk, me talk; the wine will come halfway through the tepid counterfeit cuisine; and you will exchange polite French formulas with the abacus-eyed manager. You will miss the great oak that has made way for the air-conditioned wing: you will consider instead the white glare of the Esso Station across the way; and you will watch the shoals of flicker people patrolling hazy Sunset Boulevard. Up and at’em.
* * *
Byron you met in the steam room of the Easton-D’Orr gym; at once his rangy athlete’s body turns you into Antinous; his face is made of Mom and apple pie. He grins sideways as he skips down from the marble slab to your right and bends over in the corner to hot up the steam. Your throat tautens as lean buttocks flex above almost El Greco legs. Your body shakes out its moisture and inside the cage the trapped throb hurts. You find yourself arguing the merits of the Eames chair and contemporary design: he is an architect after serving two years in Japan with the navy: he is square but his grass roots round him out. You go to Kowloon’s for cantonese duck and after you get him back to his short, a model T., the Tom Sawyer eyes are anxious. You will see each other again the day after next and work out together. As he drives away his crewcut head leans purposefully into the windshield.
* * *
New York New York, the Jersey flats, the Pilsudski Highway, a huge ear of Dionysos holding music lovers harkens to arriving and departing planes between blasts of Beethoven’s Fifth. Any fifth here is bound to he bourbon. Miracle, a silent taxidriver whooshes you soundlessly to the birthday party. There are balloons, champagne, white flowers everywhere. Rocky creates when you walk in. He really does look like the gingerbread boy, Mother Dash is all Spanish and high-combed, an island queen welcoming the mutineers. It s good in this light decor to let the too too solid melt. As for the resolution and the dew, you’ll think about that tomorrow. You are faithful to Cynara, to cinerama. After a while you no longer notice the two shifting lines between the middle and the sides.
The city rises, falls, pumps its way through to breaking day, the clatter of garbage pails cymbals heralding the morning after. In an hour or so money will wake up hungry, and human fodder will pour out of the many mouths of Hades. The streets will fill where you are forbidden to walk barefoot, buildings be invested, desks tenanted. Money will feed, and sing, and lull the mind once more. Rooty toot toot how that man could shot. New York, stone tyrannosaurus rex, New York, capital of the world. The Monster World.
* *
Down the sooty steps which are the color of the city and its people, below the chrome glass glare even summer cannot whiten, a base metal token admits you both in one turn of the stile, helped along by the thin Yankee look, like the edge of a dime, which you get from the tax-paying citizen to your right. This is the arena cathedral where the blood rites of the tribe are practiced, where millions of non-poets are processed every day, one of the few places left in Americawhere you cannot possibly be run over by an oldsmobile.
Hoppity skip down the escalator, skim skam along the lavatory walls, straight through floating junkies, your scissor legs dance you into the Minotaur just as its multiple jaws shut on hapless parcels, Achilles heels, and leftover elbows. You are now inside a neon tube palisaded by newspapers sporting what might be human appendages; other arms of which one may never he yours again dangle from boney teething rings: somehow standing, you deaden every sense but the seventh. There is a retractile motion as of a snake sloughing off the dead skin of 53rd Street Station, and Liane is pressed to you like yesterday’s gardenia, so that your chin is now growing into the crown of her head. A sound of trumpets: New York Is A Summer Festival. A dash of angst: Did You Dirty New York Today ? More angst: Does She, Or Doesn’t She ? But reassurance as Queen Victoria’s granddaughter tells us all that Wrigley’s Chewing Gum is in perfect good taste, while across the way a jolly Rockefeller lady offers to show us how to chew it, and eventually maybe Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Snap, popple, crack, we shoot like Wheaties out of the cannon’s mouth, deep into the copper wire womb of Manhattan in Rogers and Hart time.
* * *
The answer is: Whomsoever feels desire, desires what he is not sure of possessing what is not present, what he does not possess, what he hasn’t got, what he lacks. That is what desiring is, what loving is. . . how can love be God, being neither beautiful nor good? Can’t you see for yourself you think love is not a god? What is it then? a demon?” This sounding off a sounding out of the vanity of all human love, carnal passions, normal and otherwise, resting uneasily on an illusion of the senses, an error of the imagination. Reality is a creation of desire and memory; it exists in hope, remembrance and absence rather than in the immediate experience; it is only in solitude or in illness and especially at the approach of death that we may possess it.
To grasp this real life we must return to the depths where what really exists lies unknown, the ocean floor, gems, the desert, flowers. The way is a narrow one, strait is the gate, for to be saved we must first lose ourselves, the ego, let it all go, everything that made our lives, our reason for living, renounce ourselves. Steep hills of introspection, crash landings from the jet-set, that phantom newsprint world.
There is no more urgent appointment than the one you have with yourself. The Holy Grail has but one drop left in it: the spirit of childhood.
* * *
Mexico by Night is a huge jacaranda tree, is a labyrinth of lustral chambers. Every here and there in the blackness a spot lights a moving hand, a cheek, an attentive back. Whispers arch hoarse above stars dancing in your crystal skull: out of your crystal skull, arching hoarse whispers, dancing above stars.
Liane de mis amores, press your new nails against the muscles you make hard. Burn again phosphorus globes of jaguar, hurtling lance of Moctezuma. Music is the rattlesnake, never beginning nor quite ending: flesh the cactus, emanations the quills. Earlier at dinner by candlelight Liane has cut across Rocky’s lines, shooting down tonight’s trick in no man’s land: watch out white boy you don’t wake up in the morning hating yourself.
And/or little mother for not warning good kid we is bad kids. So R. has got the studs on and is trying to ride them into L. or into you if you leave a flank open: no chickening out here so you are all making like iguanas with only a faint fluttering at the throat. When the mariachis swoop down the calle uttering glad cries at your little gringo passel, you and Liane vamoose behind their guitars and sombreros and etcetera and beating on a sleepy cab ask to be brought to the tree. And here you are out of cigarets, but holding, and too much in love to say.
* * *
You are Cortes and Liane Malinche, the witch, only neither one of you can speak Nahuatl, and you’re not about to tell her about that mescal she’s drinking, how they wrap a turd in gauze and plank it into the cactus juice to help it ferment, you must be joking, no joke. Let’s cut out this crap, there are ladies present, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself, who do you think you are Lenny Bruce or somebody? Miss Far Out is here in Acapulco and all the plastered cast, she’s been having trouble with her balls, no it’s her bowels and her accent, and she has a lot of fascinating new stories about how the interns carve up the patients in the hospital, and, darleeng, they cut off the wrong leg and she doesn’t think it funny when you ask if it was the middle one, no, no, deepest respect and gloom is required at her diatribe. Your father used to say you suffered from a diarrhoea of words and a constipation of ideas, but, oh, mein Papa, this is samaru vachardnap with a vengeance. Straight from the A hole, giving the other two a rest. A fag hag should stick to business, like bringing home the chuletas, mabbe it would help if you gave her Rocky’s Odorono and Odol concealed in a big bunch of flowers from the market. And Dr. Susuki to sweeten the blow. For didn’t you say to Liane today that the industrial exploitation of sex and the impending wave of eroticism in publicity and in films puts a question mark in all our lives: the liberation of the sexes and the need for a new morality.
* * *
The Morning Beach is squalid, something of whore house sheets clings, and too many customers; the beach boys walk their attributes over our heads, the sand is heavy with intention; Victor aclank with bracelets sits in artful black in a camp chair at the back, aluminum eyes estimating behind the shades; for once he seems sinister, some plutonian visitor come to await tribute. Eliette dares to akimbo your shins, Miss Far Out lashes with her Zen archery book, take your curse somewhere I can’t smell it. Eliette of a sudden becomes the squirrel in Central Park and scurries off: out of your furthest eyelashes you see her wade into the shallow bay. Five minutes later the shore has vanished for the mass of flesh humping from sight the mutilated dangle of Paris ’45.
And so we wave goodbye to lovely Acapulco.
Junior Birdman was written by the poet, novelist, actor, and raconteur William Jay Barker and published under the pseudonym "Billy Bones" in the 1960s. Distributed principally among friends, the book has long been known as one of the great "forgotten" texts. It was never published commercially, and copies are difficult to locate today. A few passages are reprinted below.
Set in the 1950s and the early 1960s, the novel concerns a group of friends freeing themselves from the conventions of American life. In a world reminiscent of Kerouac's, their adventures take them to Los Angeles, Acapulco, New York, Fire Island, Paris, and elsewhere. Few works equal Junior Birdman as the record of an era when the United States was moving away from the conformity of the 1950s into the freedoms of the 1960s. Near the end of the novel, the narrator says, ". . . the industrial exploitation of sex and the impending wave of eroticism in publicity and in films puts a question mark in all our lives: the liberation of the sexes and the need for a new morality." That "new morality" is the book's primary focus.
These selections from Barker's novel were printed earlier in Talisman and are reprinted here in memory of Barker's passing.
----------
At night the spider streets stretch forever through L.A. as you drive bemused down the straight maze: going nowhere because coming from nowhere. Is there a greater emptiness between the stars? You are but the brain of this machine which glides by the years of telegraph poles. You think of the buzz from Amelia Earhart. “Where is Everybody?” Somewhere ahead the Towers of Watts spin spin away from the mickey mouse town, patchwork cones of the immigrant’s aspiration caught short at the inevitable end of America: the Pacific Ocean.
* * *
The screen door wheezes in the waterboy, and you waken remembering the rootless oasis of your life. Already over the CahuengaPass the sea-hum loudens as the dragonfly cars skim the freeway. Picking your way back along the cotton field of your night, you collect the tufts of receding dreams. Sacrificing the innocence of the April morning you do up the roach that lies like a spaceship in the moon crater of the blue glass ashtray looming before your left-turned head. Below eye level the column filched from the Coloradoghost town graveyard spirals upward in support. You look straight down now beyond the twin peaks of sheeted feet at the elegant surface of the sterile little desk: the bronze girl beneath the palm, the trompe l’oeil goody box, the porcelain lamp: and you decide to do your letters now before the day drifts. You must get to the laundromat and to the Hughes Market, and not forget lunch at the Hollywood Orvieto with your agent and two little chicks waiting to hatch for real. On the gritty terrace all the tables pretending to be in Europe will hold money talk, me talk; the wine will come halfway through the tepid counterfeit cuisine; and you will exchange polite French formulas with the abacus-eyed manager. You will miss the great oak that has made way for the air-conditioned wing: you will consider instead the white glare of the Esso Station across the way; and you will watch the shoals of flicker people patrolling hazy Sunset Boulevard. Up and at’em.
* * *
Byron you met in the steam room of the Easton-D’Orr gym; at once his rangy athlete’s body turns you into Antinous; his face is made of Mom and apple pie. He grins sideways as he skips down from the marble slab to your right and bends over in the corner to hot up the steam. Your throat tautens as lean buttocks flex above almost El Greco legs. Your body shakes out its moisture and inside the cage the trapped throb hurts. You find yourself arguing the merits of the Eames chair and contemporary design: he is an architect after serving two years in Japan with the navy: he is square but his grass roots round him out. You go to Kowloon’s for cantonese duck and after you get him back to his short, a model T., the Tom Sawyer eyes are anxious. You will see each other again the day after next and work out together. As he drives away his crewcut head leans purposefully into the windshield.
* * *
New York New York, the Jersey flats, the Pilsudski Highway, a huge ear of Dionysos holding music lovers harkens to arriving and departing planes between blasts of Beethoven’s Fifth. Any fifth here is bound to he bourbon. Miracle, a silent taxidriver whooshes you soundlessly to the birthday party. There are balloons, champagne, white flowers everywhere. Rocky creates when you walk in. He really does look like the gingerbread boy, Mother Dash is all Spanish and high-combed, an island queen welcoming the mutineers. It s good in this light decor to let the too too solid melt. As for the resolution and the dew, you’ll think about that tomorrow. You are faithful to Cynara, to cinerama. After a while you no longer notice the two shifting lines between the middle and the sides.
The city rises, falls, pumps its way through to breaking day, the clatter of garbage pails cymbals heralding the morning after. In an hour or so money will wake up hungry, and human fodder will pour out of the many mouths of Hades. The streets will fill where you are forbidden to walk barefoot, buildings be invested, desks tenanted. Money will feed, and sing, and lull the mind once more. Rooty toot toot how that man could shot. New York, stone tyrannosaurus rex, New York, capital of the world. The Monster World.
* *
Down the sooty steps which are the color of the city and its people, below the chrome glass glare even summer cannot whiten, a base metal token admits you both in one turn of the stile, helped along by the thin Yankee look, like the edge of a dime, which you get from the tax-paying citizen to your right. This is the arena cathedral where the blood rites of the tribe are practiced, where millions of non-poets are processed every day, one of the few places left in Americawhere you cannot possibly be run over by an oldsmobile.
Hoppity skip down the escalator, skim skam along the lavatory walls, straight through floating junkies, your scissor legs dance you into the Minotaur just as its multiple jaws shut on hapless parcels, Achilles heels, and leftover elbows. You are now inside a neon tube palisaded by newspapers sporting what might be human appendages; other arms of which one may never he yours again dangle from boney teething rings: somehow standing, you deaden every sense but the seventh. There is a retractile motion as of a snake sloughing off the dead skin of 53rd Street Station, and Liane is pressed to you like yesterday’s gardenia, so that your chin is now growing into the crown of her head. A sound of trumpets: New York Is A Summer Festival. A dash of angst: Did You Dirty New York Today ? More angst: Does She, Or Doesn’t She ? But reassurance as Queen Victoria’s granddaughter tells us all that Wrigley’s Chewing Gum is in perfect good taste, while across the way a jolly Rockefeller lady offers to show us how to chew it, and eventually maybe Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Snap, popple, crack, we shoot like Wheaties out of the cannon’s mouth, deep into the copper wire womb of Manhattan in Rogers and Hart time.
* * *
The answer is: Whomsoever feels desire, desires what he is not sure of possessing what is not present, what he does not possess, what he hasn’t got, what he lacks. That is what desiring is, what loving is. . . how can love be God, being neither beautiful nor good? Can’t you see for yourself you think love is not a god? What is it then? a demon?” This sounding off a sounding out of the vanity of all human love, carnal passions, normal and otherwise, resting uneasily on an illusion of the senses, an error of the imagination. Reality is a creation of desire and memory; it exists in hope, remembrance and absence rather than in the immediate experience; it is only in solitude or in illness and especially at the approach of death that we may possess it.
To grasp this real life we must return to the depths where what really exists lies unknown, the ocean floor, gems, the desert, flowers. The way is a narrow one, strait is the gate, for to be saved we must first lose ourselves, the ego, let it all go, everything that made our lives, our reason for living, renounce ourselves. Steep hills of introspection, crash landings from the jet-set, that phantom newsprint world.
There is no more urgent appointment than the one you have with yourself. The Holy Grail has but one drop left in it: the spirit of childhood.
* * *
Mexico by Night is a huge jacaranda tree, is a labyrinth of lustral chambers. Every here and there in the blackness a spot lights a moving hand, a cheek, an attentive back. Whispers arch hoarse above stars dancing in your crystal skull: out of your crystal skull, arching hoarse whispers, dancing above stars.
Liane de mis amores, press your new nails against the muscles you make hard. Burn again phosphorus globes of jaguar, hurtling lance of Moctezuma. Music is the rattlesnake, never beginning nor quite ending: flesh the cactus, emanations the quills. Earlier at dinner by candlelight Liane has cut across Rocky’s lines, shooting down tonight’s trick in no man’s land: watch out white boy you don’t wake up in the morning hating yourself.
And/or little mother for not warning good kid we is bad kids. So R. has got the studs on and is trying to ride them into L. or into you if you leave a flank open: no chickening out here so you are all making like iguanas with only a faint fluttering at the throat. When the mariachis swoop down the calle uttering glad cries at your little gringo passel, you and Liane vamoose behind their guitars and sombreros and etcetera and beating on a sleepy cab ask to be brought to the tree. And here you are out of cigarets, but holding, and too much in love to say.
* * *
You are Cortes and Liane Malinche, the witch, only neither one of you can speak Nahuatl, and you’re not about to tell her about that mescal she’s drinking, how they wrap a turd in gauze and plank it into the cactus juice to help it ferment, you must be joking, no joke. Let’s cut out this crap, there are ladies present, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself, who do you think you are Lenny Bruce or somebody? Miss Far Out is here in Acapulco and all the plastered cast, she’s been having trouble with her balls, no it’s her bowels and her accent, and she has a lot of fascinating new stories about how the interns carve up the patients in the hospital, and, darleeng, they cut off the wrong leg and she doesn’t think it funny when you ask if it was the middle one, no, no, deepest respect and gloom is required at her diatribe. Your father used to say you suffered from a diarrhoea of words and a constipation of ideas, but, oh, mein Papa, this is samaru vachardnap with a vengeance. Straight from the A hole, giving the other two a rest. A fag hag should stick to business, like bringing home the chuletas, mabbe it would help if you gave her Rocky’s Odorono and Odol concealed in a big bunch of flowers from the market. And Dr. Susuki to sweeten the blow. For didn’t you say to Liane today that the industrial exploitation of sex and the impending wave of eroticism in publicity and in films puts a question mark in all our lives: the liberation of the sexes and the need for a new morality.
* * *
The Morning Beach is squalid, something of whore house sheets clings, and too many customers; the beach boys walk their attributes over our heads, the sand is heavy with intention; Victor aclank with bracelets sits in artful black in a camp chair at the back, aluminum eyes estimating behind the shades; for once he seems sinister, some plutonian visitor come to await tribute. Eliette dares to akimbo your shins, Miss Far Out lashes with her Zen archery book, take your curse somewhere I can’t smell it. Eliette of a sudden becomes the squirrel in Central Park and scurries off: out of your furthest eyelashes you see her wade into the shallow bay. Five minutes later the shore has vanished for the mass of flesh humping from sight the mutilated dangle of Paris ’45.
And so we wave goodbye to lovely Acapulco.
