On Route 66 — Butchie Billie Bondar

On Route 66

Butchie Billie Bondar

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.]

Butchie Billie Bondar never thought of himself as a poet. He used to say that the poets you read in books were fakes. “Poetry,” he’d drawl, “lives in the wind. Real poems fall like dandelion seeds on a concrete highway, and before you can gather up the words, they blow away before your very eyes.”

opus dopus
at the one and only
Sargasso poetry convention
ridiculous Rick and sum friends
sat in bill barney’s solar-powered invention
Somewhere out on route 66

As the sun was setting
After a very hot day,
Amanda pruiit asked
“what’s the point of writin' down poetry
anyway?”

Donnie dougall chuckled
And started to sneer
Then cleared his throat and said
“guess there ain’t no pointyo being here”

“ain’t here fer duh poetry”
said the chubby Amanda
“here fer duh poets
cause they got sweet things t'say”

I was feeling kinda bluesy with that
'til cat Caitlin took me by the hand
and walked me round the bases
not once but twice

a bunch of musicians showed up
sometime round midnight
and they played the old songs
that no one remembered

Butchie Billie wrote that poem sometime in the early sixties. There was a different feeling in the air those days. It was like we were all waiting for something catastrophic to happen. Billie used to say that if everyone had any sense they would leave America and live in Fiji, and even when we’d tell him that there would be too many people to transport and that the island would probably sink into the sea, he held onto the idea like a steel trap on the leg of a coyote.

One story that circulated up and down the road had Butchie Billie going to San Francisco in '54 to confront Allen Ginsberg. But Ginsberg thought Billie was just a mad desert rat and wouldn’t see him. So Butchie Billie would ride some old Schwinn bicycle that he’d stolen from a schoolyard, stand outside Ginsberg’s place, and howl obscenities all night long. The story goes on to tell how Ginsberg even wrote a poem based on Butchie’s irrepressible desire to stop the publication of poetry.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg wrote in his best poem, and most of us agreed that he was referring to Butchie Billie. Only later did Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a guy who ran City Lights Publishing, figured that out and insisted that Ginsberg address the dedication and parts of the poem to some guy named Carl Solomon.

Carl Solomon was some dude in a mental institution, and I guess someone thought he would be a better representation of the insanity that plagued America than Butchie Billie would be. On the road, we all knew that the original was written to Butchie Billie Bondar. No one represented the insanity of America better than Butchie did.

Butchie Billie Bondar wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime. He’d write them on scraps of paper and then just toss them into the street. “Leaves,” he’d say. “Just like Whitman, you know, Leaves of grass blowin’ in the wind.“ Another one of Ginsberg’s friends, a folk singer of some note, stole that last phrase from Billie, but no one will admit it to this day.

Billie shacked up with a string of women up along the road. He’d stay with them for a week or less in cheap motels, and he’d never come out for more than an hour or so. If you asked what was what, the women would always say the same thing. “He’s working out a problem.” But the truth was that Butchie Billie would spend his days writing poems on scraps of paper before and after hours of sex behind the door of his hot motel room. I know, for a fact, that lots of those girls still have Billie’s poems somewhere. But no one seems too keen on giving them up. Maybe they think those scraps of paper are worth money, and they probably are. It just seems, now, like we’ll never know for sure.

When Butchie Billie Bondar stayed with me in Flagstaff for a month to sober up from a year of drinking bourbon and Kool-Aid, he left a bunch of his poetry hidden under the floorboards in the back porch. Most of them are like the one I’ve already showed you. They always seem incomplete, like they were fragments of a giant puzzle that ran through Billie’s mind.

He’d write:

flat frog
i am roadkill
lying beneath the
front whells
of an automobile
until you kiss my cheek
and say
"wake up, it's time to go"

Here’s another:

cock jockey
family time has a pattern
a ritual
manstroller
femaleroller
babybowler

oh the thunder of the ball down the alley
excites me inside my jeans so much
that i feel a gush

the only storekeeper that matters is the one who took the day off
feigning sickness or health, it barely matters

but oh how the sound of falling pins
makes my legs quiver and i feel
the urge to grab hold and ride
the white bulbous maniac to the
end of time

And here’s the one I like the best:

grateful dead
i live with corpses
the one in the kitchen
is family fresh
smells a little
but soon, the rot will disappear

i live with corpses
the sad songs
that the late night radio station
plays
rock around the clock
be bop a lua
maybe baby

i live with corpses
pictures stapled to the wall
a dead daughter
a loving grandmother
'seems a little unfair

No one really knows what became of Butchie Billie Bondar. It’s true he enlisted in the army so that he could go to Viet Nam, not to fight he’d say, but to send back poems from the front in the letters that the GI’s were allowed to write and post for free to their loved ones. Maybe he died there, or maybe he just stayed there for the rest of his life.

No one ever said Butchie Billie Bondar was any great shakes of a poet. But he wrote from his heart, and he didn’t write poetry as a ticket to fame and fortune. He was just a guy who turned words over in the coffee grinder of his mind. I wish I could tell you more, but the last I heard from him was in a letter that he sent from Nam. Inside was a picture of Butchie Billie standing in his fatigues in front of a demolished Flying Banana T helicopter and nothing else. I got it in ’68 and I’m glad, but to be truthful, I’m not even sure how it ended up in my mail because on the envelope, he had written just one word:

The Back Story:

This is the last story in a collection of stories that I wrote about people whom I met or imagined I met along Route 66, that famous highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles.

I must admit that this story was written quite some time after the first six, and you can probably see a few differences between this story and the others.

The obvious difference is the poetry, which I wrote in the character of Butchie Billie, especially for the story. Butchie Billie's poetry is not what one might call traditional, and it is littered with spelling and writing errors, because I didn't want Butchie Billie to care too much for convention, especially the conventions of writing. In my mind, he was above, below, or beyond formal education (you decide), and I wanted his poetry to capture some of the chaos of the times. Above all else, he was the consummate mixture of road warrior, poet, philosopher, and vagabond.

All the details regarding Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Carl Solomon, as well as the sideways allusion to Bob Dylan, are not historically accurate — just part of the fiction.

In some ways, Butchie Billie Bondar's character is drawn from a fellow I met at university, whom I suspected was either stark raving mad or a genius and whom I came to see as the brother I never had. He was an American living in Canada during the late sixties, and he was free and clear of the draft, until he suddenly decided to leave university and go to Viet Nam. So he went, despite my repeated attempts to convince him not to go. After that, I lost contact with him. Still, I always wondered what became of him, and so I wrote this story to solve that dilemma festering in my imagination.

The envelope at the end of the story never really came to me, except as a part of this story. The idea did give a voice to my site "Postcards From Purgatory," since I have long believed that the struggle to create art is somehow connected to an appreciation and understanding of both good and evil, of both Heaven and Hell, and is created in a world sort of mid-point between the two. The Catholics call that place Purgatory, and for most of my life, I've been convinced that this world of ours is just that — a place where our souls kind of get tossed and turned like ribs on a grill until the good Lord decides whether each of us gets to take a ladder into Heaven or slides down a snake into Hell.