American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (14 page)

Three days later the padded bag arrived. A neighbour took it in and gave it to me when I made my return from the flat in St Leonards-on-Sea, where I had been writing up my Croydon field trip. Circumstances had recalibrated my approach. What was becoming clear was that biography was the biggest fiction of all. At every point where I was present, off-stage, significant details were wrong. Those readings didn’t happen in the Albert Hall. This woman was never with that man. Memory is like the Old West; the dead are always crossing back and forth from Arizona to Mexico, Tombstone to Nogales. Olson on the Atlantic Seaboard: Gloucester to Washington. Then further south to Florida Keys, to Yucatán. Lowry up and down the Pacific Rim, Los Angeles to Vancouver. Through drink and derangement, poets raid the forbidden zone where animals have no shape, flesh splits into bubbling magma, fountains run with sand:
how to
escape?
How to bring logic to the bounty of sleep? And when it is done, as Lowry discovered, his place found, characters identified, reason will cut you down. Through its special agents, the critics and editors. Customs men requiring ‘la mordida’.

On to my desk tumbled two Corso tapes, a Burroughs tape, the BBC radio script, and notes from the afternoon when we confronted – not too strong a word – Gregory Corso. Also: photographs of Huncke with spider plant. And Corso, head thrust forward, ski-jump nose, tongue out, like a gargoyle from Notre-Dame. Huncke: so civilized, contained, precise in recall and terminology. But alien too, another species. Corso confined: raw, challenging. A prisoner of authenticity looking for a new angle, a dropped gold coin. Dark arriviste. Street kid on the make. Allen Ginsberg’s adopted changeling. With no excuse but poetry.

Had Pavel spotted me? Had one of the other contacts I’d sounded
out reached him with my message? There was no card. All I knew was that I wouldn’t play the tapes. They belonged to another project. I glanced at the old script. And flinched. It was wedged so precariously in the wrong time.

In New York bookstores with their racks of Irish Romanticism, their elephantine diet primers, a man stands in a corner babbling about Gary Indiana. It’s better when we walk, cutting rapidly through the ethnic contour lines as we move down the numbers towards the Lower East Side. That haunting smell that cinema can’t deliver: hot-chilli chickens rotorized in peanut-butter kerosene. White smoke from pyramid towers. Shady neighbourhood bars. Honking horns. Suspect limousines with darkened windows.

It wasn’t easy to make contact with Gregory Corso. The phone calls went back and forth. Clinic days. Museum days. We walked beside the river in a gusting wind. Surveillance shops, detective agencies. I snapped the producer outside Badlands Adult Video
.
Meat-market trucks.

Corso lives a couple of flights up from the street with a pair of bookdealers. Gregory is the Joe Pesci of the Beat Generation, a flute of restless energy. He refuses to talk sitting down, he prison-paces the small, single-bed cell.

At sixty-six he’s the youngest of the daddies, the founding fathers. He’s worried that literary brokers are nudging him out of the picture. He insists: ‘I am the poetry I write.’

You like Corso right off. The problems arrive later when you get to know him. He trades on harsh beginnings. The Italians, the mob. A standard heritage construct: Sinatra, spoiled-priest Scorsese. The faces at the bar in
Mean Streets
and
Goodfellas
are where the poet locates himself when he’s making his pitch. A sixteen-year-old member of the Walkie-Talkie Gang who ripped off $64,000 from the safe of the moneylending Household Finance operation. On a roll, Gregory rebranded himself in a zoot suit louder than a confession. He squeezed $7,000 into his jacket and took off for Florida. Later he would write about how dollars leaked away, slippery as
mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ A dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he says, ‘doesn’t come with instructions.’

Anecdotes are part of the texture, the literary pension plan. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he sat in all-night automats and dyke bars, Horn and Hardart, yapping with Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, hipsters admired the vigour of their discourse. Now, at a period when Beat Generation revivalism threatens to turn the whole circus into another Bloomsbury Group, Corso has succeeded in opting out – while producing a ceiling-threatening mound of cardboard boxes packed, so he says, with unpublished typescripts.

He is identifiable in the Annie Leibovitz line-up for
Vanity Fair
in December 1995, arm in arm with Chairman Ginsberg, but he’s the only one of the veterans who looks as if he’ll be walking home after he’s pocketed cash payment for the shoot. Notice the dirty trainers against the sheen of David Amram’s patent-leather hooves. Notice the billowing untucked shirt. The weight of belly. Ferlinghetti, in broad-brim jungle hat, is an audition for the granddad of Indiana Jones. Corso tilts, letting long hair flop. He knows just how to put his foot on the fender of a car.

The Kerouac estate has a six-figure annual turnover (and rising, fast). Ginsberg’s papers have gone to Stanford University for more than a million dollars. Burroughs, in retirement, advertises Nike, and is visited by European camera crews and rock royalty. Ginsberg and Burroughs have been elevated into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The double-page Leibovitz portraits of Burroughs sculpt him as a Roman senator, a death mask. But Corso remains agentless. ‘I’ve no mamma, no papa, no dente, no casa.’ Disinvited, by Bill Clinton, to join high-achieving Italian-Americans, such as Nicolas Cage, Scorsese, at the feast held in honour of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Corso is the typecast outcast. His worry was that his father, seeing him on the cover of
Newsweek
, would think he was going straight to the electric chair.

We talked for more than an hour. When Gregory’s fired up, he
flows. He described himself as a ‘graduate in orphancy’, abandoned by a youthful mother who fled back to Italy, leaving him to a series of foster parents, who would pass him on like a bad debt: bedwetter, thief. An early epiphany was the memory of bathing with one of the surrogates while a stream of golden light burnished her thick pubic fleece. ‘I remember the black hair on her cunt and the water. Now that’s a good shot for a two-year-old.’

Corso lived rough, tracing eidetic visions in the clouds, lions stalking the roofs of tenements. He matriculated in petty crime, boosting radios. He was incarcerated briefly in the Tombs and defined as insane. He spent ‘three frightening sad months’ in Bellevue. And without the middle-class Lowry option of checking out as soon as he had enough material for a book. The early Corso poems are about his mother and the sea. Or gangsters, suicides: ‘When you’re dead you can’t talk. Yet you feel like you could.’

This was the sketchy biographical outline I carried with me, that New York afternoon with Pavel Coen and his recording machine. As research, I viewed Corso, in tweedy sports jacket, performing at the Albert Hall readings on 11 June 1965. I watched the video. American poets, abroad, wore suits and ties. And didn’t worry about being sponsored by the CIA. I read freewheeling interviews in fugitive magazines. Corso answered the old inglorious questions as if he were hearing them for the first time.

Now he has moves to make, before we settle to our chat. It is an experience to cover the East Side with someone who belongs. Gregory describes himself as a spy on life, a peeper but never a fink. Before he met him for the first time in the Pony Stable, a West 12th Street lesbian bar, Corso watched the unknown Ginsberg, in a room across the street, making love to a woman the young Gregory masturbated over on his release from prison. Complicated erotic relationships were congeries of nameless arms and legs. Shared mattresses. The street poet carried a manuscript with him as protection. He sat for hours with the lights out.

Begging for postage stamps, then dodging from a fast-food
joint where he tries to get a bet down on credit, the wired poet bumps – as if by arrangement – into a tall, slender man in a dark ‘European-cut’ suit, a white silk George Raft scarf around his neck. ‘Hey,
Gregory
, how’s it going? You still spending Christmas with us?’

‘Ooooh, man, hot dude, that guy,’ he whistles through the missing teeth. ‘Mafiosa, hot shit.’

Circuit completed, Gregory’s back where we found him: bifocals on the end of nose, reading and scowling, babysitting an empty bookshop, while he waits for the owners who keep a roof over his head to bring back the necessary package.

Corso remains in childhood territory, a couple of blocks from the Hudson River, in an apartment shared with Roger and Irvyne Richards, the dedicatees (‘slayers of homelessness’) of his most recent volume,
Mindfield
. Huncke and Peter Orlovsky also hang out at the book room as living exhibits, marginals whose work has never quite been accepted into the official canon. Self-imitation is a rough trade. They sign anything put in front of them.

Retired upstairs, Corso paces his borrowed cabin’s length, inflating confession into boast. White open-necked shirt, loose black waistcoat. Grey hair to shoulder. He’s sockless in scuffed white casuals. Footwear is important. ‘Don’t take off your shoes.’ That’s what they told him when, aged seventeen, he arrived at Clinton State Prison in Dannemora. Any session with Gregory opens with a restatement of the three golden rules. ‘Hang on to your shoes, you’re walking.’ ‘Don’t serve time, let time serve you.’ ‘When you’re outside, and you’re talking to two people, make sure you see three.’

Corso loves this notion of the invisible third, the guardian angel. All his sins are forgiven if he’s an actor in a pre-scripted drama. ‘It’s the mirror that changes/not poor Gregory.’ The shadowy third is the silent witness at the table. Today that role is performed by the man with the microphone, Pavel Coen, scribe to the Court of Thieves. And the person you can rely on to lose the evidence, to bury this small chapter of Corso’s legend. As Burroughs said, ‘If you wish to conceal anything, you have only to create a lack of interest in the place where it is hidden.’ Croydon. Where else? Put a
yellow-eyed Madagascar lemur in the window of
Forbidden Planet
, among the blockbuster merchandise, and nobody will pay the slightest attention.

The meeting with Ginsberg was the crucial one. It would be a lifelong bonding. They were the two acknowledged poet heroes of the Beat Generation. ‘The poet and the poetry,’ Corso stated, ‘are inseparable.’ Ginsberg, careful of his career, but working hard to promote his friends, continued to support and nurture Corso – even when he had to be expelled from the Cherry Valley Farm for his refusal to abstain from alcohol. And heroin. Their relationship was not faggot, Gregory assured us. ‘He sucked me off, but that was it. I didn’t want to put my mouth where men go to the bathroom.’ It all began, this wary hug, with rear windows. Ginsberg, the lover Corso watched from his eyrie, invited the younger man to share the woman of his fantasy, Dusty Moreland.

What mattered most to the Beats was the intensity of visionary experience. Corso, who had a thing about doors, was lying on his bed one day when he saw the knob turning, the locked door opening. It happened a second time on Crete:
skinless light
. He was young, clean; he wasn’t dreaming. There was a spectral form pointing straight at him. He wrote a letter to Ginsberg. ‘I saw it, Burroughs saw it – did
you
see it?’ And he received a furious reply. Ginsberg had heard the voice of Blake in Harlem. ‘But what did he say?’ Corso demanded. ‘Niente, no word.’

The New York Beats were peppery, competitive. There were presentational differences with the cooler cats on the West Coast, the Portland Buddhists. Corso could never accept Pacific Rim eco dogma. He didn’t want to be lectured on the divinity of forests. ‘I pounded my fists on a wooden table and said: “
This
is what man does to trees.” ’ It was hard for the sockless city boy to listen to Gary Snyder ‘yakking at Dakota farmers on how to plant potatoes’ without laughing.

Corso decided to bide his time in the 1960s, to sit out the 1970s. He didn’t join in with the essentially West Coast eruption of
Be-Ins, neo-tribalism, communality. The process of marginalization began – in which he was happy to cooperate. ‘Drugs,’ Corso said, ‘were a filthy nurse.’ But they gave structure to a day. If Burroughs used addiction as a way of making contact with alien energies, soliciting viral invasion, then Corso, requiring instant gratification, indulged heroin as part of a long-standing argument with himself. The conversion of a ‘good-looking little wop’, trading on suspect charm, into a toothless seer. The birthday poems and mirror interrogations grew bleaker and bleaker. ‘He’s probably the greatest poet in America,’ Ginsberg said, ‘and he’s starving in Europe.’

There were stories of bad behaviour. Kathy Acker remembers being dumped from a car in the middle of the night, in a Panther-controlled area of Oakland, for refusing to take part in a Corso threesome. There were scuffles outside the Lower East Side bunker where Burroughs was lodged. ‘It’s always like this with Gregory,’ he complained. ‘Wherever he goes it’s always
cops
and everything.’ By now Corso was well on the way to becoming the Joe Pesci of
Casino
; a white-lipped, amphetamine nemesis for Ginsberg’s Jewish De Niro, who was trying to do business, keep the Beat empire moving and growing as a great American resource. Like Las Vegas.

In company with his old rivals, the Black Mountain poets, whom he regarded as ‘mental gangsters, hip squares’, Corso was out of favour, ignored by major publishers. But he was still producing the work; he showed us the cardboard boxes in his cluttered room. He
was
the poem, so there was no way out. ‘Eight years now and I haven’t stole a thing! The world owes me a million dollars.’ No longer ‘randomly young’, how should he live? The language geyser was almost dry. Corso downsized as a sperm bank, a child father for hire. And the bank paid dividends. He accepted the tragedy of bringing life into the world. ‘I like human beings, but I don’t like life.’ He reported Kerouac’s sorrow when confronted by Corso’s infant son. ‘O Gregory, you brought up something to die.’