Roy Scarbrough writes stuff and drives a forklift in Oregon.

Full-frontal Ferlinghetti

For the longest time I prized a little boy's drawing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti with an enormous dong. The boy could have been the poet's grandson, or a son, or a nephew. I don't remember which. I've been meaning to call around and ask. Like a lot of things,  I keep putting those calls off.  I think the boy was pre-school age, first grade at the most. You could tell that much by the picture. This boy's picture was something with which we promoted a poetry reading.

I no longer have the Ferlinghetti dong drawing.  Like too much art, it is lost. The drawing was one of those crude things a college boy leaves behind in the parents' home that gets tossed out in his absence.  I blame myself. I left it behind, and I left it behind out of context to the recollections that it belonged. Apart from those recollections, the drawing was clutter, and my mother did not like clutter. It's days were numbered. Now I only have the story, and a picture I later drew from memory.

I was a freshman at the community college in Redwood City. I was in this class called "Small Group Communication."  With this class you earned a transferable speech credit to the four-year-insitution of your choice by sitting around in a group and communicating.  We graded ourselves, and invited poets and writers to read.

One of the poets we wanted to hear read was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. To make that happen one of us would go knock on his door in San Francisco and invite him to our class.  I wish I could say I was the one who knocked on that door. I wish I could say I was there.  Within the Coney Island of my mind I've thought about what happened many times. I've thought about it enough times to forget that I was not there.


Ferlinghetti was home with the little boy that day. The boy was there in the room doing little boy things while talk proceeded on the matters of scheduling and arranging the reading.

Yes, he would be willing to read, but his agent would have a fit if he read for free.. That is, unless it was a benefit event. He would do that. The reading would be open to everyone on campus, in the auditorium. The small group would become a big group. A donation jar would be set out on the edge of stage.

Someone would have to print some posters. Did he have a photograph?

No, not handy, or a least not anything he liked.

Did he have any other ideas for a poster?

Sure.

"Draw me," Ferlinghetti said handing the boy a sheet of typing paper and a marker. "Make it icky."

Ferlinghetti's head was a circle with eyes, nose, ears and a row of teeth. Ferlinghetti's body was a simple rectangle with legs and arms attached to shoulders and hips at the corners. Ferlinghetti's arms and legs were narrow loops with claw-like hands and feet attached to the ends

"No, that's not icky enough", Ferlinghetti said pulling on his beard. "Make it more icky."

The boy sat down with the sheet and marker again, scrawled a scraggly beard on the chin and hung a big penis and testicles between the legs.

"Yes,  that's icky enough now," Ferlinghetti said.

Our poet showed up at the reading dressed like an old lumberjack. I was there for that, and that's the way I remember it.  Ferlinghetti was big, bearded and  bald. He wore a flannel shirt and work boots. We sat in comfortable auditorium chairs.  We listened, sometimes laughed, all the time trying to take as much as we could of each startling line before the arrival of the next startling line.

...The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself...

Here is some of the reality we saw: The World War II Navy subchaser captain who became a pacifist after seeing Nagasaki's blackened ruins,  this howling 1950s obscenity trial defendant, this drummer of beat and bringer of City Lights to San Francisco and Firenze.  We could see the fiction too: The  Lorenzo Monsanto who tried to save Jack Kerouac in Big Sur.  Altogether this was more than we could take away in one sitting.

We each were like Feringhetti's dog, listening with heads sideways cocked, listening for the master's voice inside the great gramophone of puzzling existence.