Page 113

By Jack Joseph Smith

From Four to Four in L.A. I smacked up my 1950 Plymouth Named Empty Closet by Scarecrow White... Actually that was after drinking 26 approximent pints of Lancer's Vin Rose at the Santa Monica Boat House with Mister Animal and The Prankster However I got to Freeway Fuller To watch Eric Hoffer on T.V. with his philosophy With that Fuller and I departed to the Venice midnight beach for a gallon of Red Mountain in the nude in the waves Later I went to be alone at the flat of Conneely, and sat down at a wicker table by a window somewhat attached to the stroller cement before the sand And began what turned out to be 300 pages of memory On the spot: I might have captured the diary of it all But was interupted by a phone call from El Paso It was Animal and Prankster They'd flown up to Texas for the worship of the binder And were in a movie theatre Giggling at Bonnie and Clyde It was four in the morning From a four in the afternoon beginning But even after hanging up I couldn't go to sleep For while in the last American city I started to see My own American contemporary brain

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A drunken, rambling night in Los Angeles becomes the start of a 300-page memory project and a moment of suddenly seeing one's own mind as part of America.

The poem moves through wine, cars, freeway television, beach drinking, a late-night apartment, and a phone call from Texas with the loose, accumulating energy of someone talking while still half inside the night. Specific names and places give the account a diaristic immediacy, but the real turn comes when the speaker cannot sleep and begins a 300-page memory project. The final recognition of an "American contemporary brain" turns a messy anecdote into self-diagnosis, as if excess, memory, media, and wandering all belong to the same national consciousness.

Claude

'From Four to Four in L.A.' narrates one long day and night: the speaker smashes his '1950 Plymouth / Named Empty Closet', drinks '26 approximent pints of Lancer's / Vin Rose', watches Eric Hoffer on T.V., swims 'in the nude in the waves' at Venice, then sits at a wicker table and begins '300 pages of memory / On the spot:' until a 4 a.m. call from El Paso interrupts him.

The poem reads like a breathless diary entry, its short lines tracking a drunken, comic odyssey through named places and friends. The real turn is the writing itself, begun spontaneously and cut off, and the separated last line, 'My own American contemporary brain', makes the self the final subject of the night's vision.