Night Beat (68 page)

A FEW HOURS later, around 2:30 A.M., I received another call, telling me that Tim had died at 12:45. I headed back to his house.

The lights were still dim in his bedroom. On a nearby chair sat Trudy Truelove, staring at Tim. “I’ve decided to stay with him until they remove him. I’ve decided to be his guardian.”

Tim was laid on his back, dressed in white, the red blanket turned down. His mouth was wide open, frozen in his last exhaled breath. It looked as if he was calling out silently. Somebody had placed a large orange flower in his hand, its petals reaching up to his face.

Soon, the room filled with several people. We stood there for a long time in silence, until we were told that it was time to say our goodbyes. The mortuary people had come to claim Tim’s corpse.

One by one, the people in the room approached Tim, some touching and kissing him, others whispering last words. When it was my turn, I went up to the bed and looked down at him. I hadn’t been able to tell before, from the darkness in the room, but his eyes were wide open, and when you looked into them, it was as if they were looking back into you. I bent over, gave him my kiss, and then turned and left the room.

ONE NIGHT NOT LONG before Leary’s death, I took LSD for the first time in twenty-five years. I guess I’d just grown curious after spending so much time around Tim, but I felt I also owed it to myself. I’d left psychedelics on bad terms, and that had never felt right. It was time, once again, to see what they held for me, what might be revealed after so many years.

I lay on my bed in the dark, listening to Bach’s
Goldberg Variations,
and once more, death came to visit. I saw what seemed thousands of faces. They were all in agony, and then they died, and were swimming in straits of beauty and grace. Their suffering, I saw, was inevitable. And so was their dying. And so was their release. Once more I saw death move around and through me, and this time I did not try to hide from it. I lay there and cried, and somehow I felt a great comfort in what I’d seen.

I thought about this experience as I sat in Leary’s bedroom at three in the morning and studied him in his death. As I implied earlier, I’d always been terrified of death—even to be near it. When I visited the funeral homes to see my father, my mother, my brother, lying in their coffins, I took short glances and got away quickly. I never touched my loved ones as they lay dead. I don’t think I could have.

Sitting with Leary, I realized something had changed—and maybe it had been a gift on his part. His greatest achievement, I believe, was to ask the people he knew to face the darkest part of themselves, and to be willing to be there with them—to interact with them, to guide them—when they reached that place. I can’t say whether he ever faced the darkest parts within himself in that same way—maybe it never really happened until that last day and night. And if that was the time, I’m glad there were good people there for him.

Being around Leary had taught me what nothing else had: that encountering death did not always have to be an experience of freezing horror. In those last hours, Timothy Leary could still be a good therapist.

I looked at Tim lying there in his death, his eyes hollow, the skin on his face already sinking, and I was reminded of something Rosemary once told me. It was a story about one of the last times she saw Leary before he fell ill. “I’d gone to New Mexico with him,” she said. “He was lecturing there. He’d gone to the bar to pick up some drinks, and I was standing out of the light. And just the way the light hit him in the bar, and illuminated the planes of his face—he was so beautiful. And it was the old face. I mean, the one from years ago. I don’t know why. It was just the way the lighting hit him. Beautiful bones.”

I sat there in the dark, looking at Tim, thinking of Rosemary’s words.

Beautiful bones, I thought. Even in death, beautiful bones.

allen ginsberg: for the fucking and the dying

F
or many of us, Allen Ginsberg’s death came with such suddenness, it proved to be a mind-stopping jolt—like learning that a guiding star had just been torn from the night sky and hurled to some unreachable void. Perhaps those final days seemed like a rush to darkness for the seventy-year-old poet as well—though it was no secret that Ginsberg had been suffering from liver disease during the last few years. Always a man of candor, he admitted to the pains and losses of aging in poems and interviews over the last decade. For that matter, it seems that Allen Ginsberg had been contemplating the meanings that come from death’s inevitability for nearly the entirety of his writing career. In 1959, in “Kaddish,” his narrative poem about his mother’s decline and death, Ginsberg said to his mother’s memory: “Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century. . . . ” And in 1992, he wrote of himself:

Sleepless I stay up &
  think about my Death
—certainly it’s nearer. . . .
If I don’t get some rest I’ll die faster

As it turned out, it was only seven days before his death that Ginsberg learned his illness had turned worse—that it was now inoperable liver cancer. Hearing the news, Ginsberg returned to his apartment in New York’s East Village and proceeded to do what he had always done: He sat down and wrote a body of poems about the experiences of his life—in this case, about the imminence of his end. One of these poems—a long, hilarious, and heart-affecting piece called “Death & Fame”—ran in
The New Yorker
the week following his demise. In the poem, Ginsberg envisioned hundreds of friends, admirers, and lovers gathered at his “big funeral,” and he hoped that among the eulogies, someone would testify: “He gave great head.”

In those last few days, Ginsberg also talked to friends—his lifetime compeer, author William Burroughs; his lover of several decades, Peter Orlovsky; poet Gregory Corso; among others—and he wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton (to be sent via George Stephanopoulus, another Ginsberg friend), demanding, in jest, some sort of medal of recognition. At one point during his last week, he listened to a recording of “C. C. Rider” by 1920s blues vocalist Ma Rainey—the first voice Ginsberg said he remembered hearing as a child. He sang along with it, according to one report, then vomited and said: “Gee, I’ve never done that before.” By Friday, he had slipped into a coma. Surrounded by a few close friends, Ginsberg died early Saturday morning, April 5, 1997.

A quiet closing to a mighty life. Not since the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1980 murder of John Lennon has a certain segment of popular culture had to come to terms with the realization of such an epochal ending. Allen Ginsberg not only made history—by writing poems that jarred America’s consciousness and by ensuring that the 1950s Beat movement would be remembered as a considerable literary force—but he also lived through and embodied some of the most remarkable cultural mutations of the last half-century. As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky, and unyielding in the psyche and dreams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King, Jr.’s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept on the margins. Just as Dylan would later change what popular songs could say and do, Ginsberg changed what poetry might accomplish: how it could speak, what it would articulate, and who it would speak to and for. Ginsberg’s words—his performances of his words and how he carried their meanings into his life and actions—gave poetry a political and cultural relevance it had not known since the Transcendentalists of the 1840s (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, among them) or since the shocking publication of Walt Whitman’s 1855 classic,
Leaves of Grass.
Indeed, in Ginsberg’s hands, poetry proved to be something a great deal more than a vocation or the province of refined wordsmiths and critics. Ginsberg transformed his gift for language into a mission—”trying to save and heal the spirit of America,” as he wrote in the introduction to fellow poet Anne Waldman’s
The Beat Book.
In the process, he not only influenced subsequent writers like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll, but Ginsberg’s effect could also be found in Norman Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself,
in the writings and deeds of Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, in the lives and exploits of 1960s insurrectionists like Timothy Leary, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman. One can also hear Ginsberg’s effect on such current artists as Sonic Youth, Beck, U2, and several of our finer hip-hop poets.

Ginsberg was also, of course, simply a man—at turns generous and competitive, self-aware yet self-aggrandizing, old in his wisdom, juvenile in his tastes and affections, and relentlessly promiscuous though deeply faithful. More than anything, though, Ginsberg was someone who once summoned the bravery to speak hidden truths and about unspeakable things, and some people took consolation and courage from his example. That example—that insistence that he would not simply
shut up,
and that one should not accept delimited values or experiences—is perhaps Ginsberg’s greatest gift to us. Today, there are many other artists who have carried on in that tradition—from Dylan, Smith, and Reed to Coolio, Beck, and numerous others—and so in that way, Ginsberg’s death does not rob us of unfulfilled possibilities, as happened in the horrid deaths of Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G. That’s because Ginsberg’s entire life was a process of opening himself (and us) up to possibilities. Still, Ginsberg’s loss remains enormous. There is no question: We have seen a giant pass from our times. It is only fitting to look back on what he did for us and for our land.

ALLEN GINSBERG was born in 1926, the son of politically radical Russian-born Jewish parents who were also aesthetic progressives (Allen’s older brother, Eugene, was named after labor organizer Eugene V. Debs; Ginsberg also recalled that the music of Ma Rainey, Beethoven, and Bessie Smith filled the family’s home in Paterson, New Jersey). Allen’s father, Louis, was a published and respected poet. Louis and Allen would have many arguments over the years regarding poetry’s language and structure, though in his father’s last few years, the two men often shared stages together, exchanging poems and genuine respect and affection.

But it was Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, who proved in many ways to have a more profound and haunting effect on her son’s life, mentality, and writing. By 1919, she had already experienced an episode of schizophrenia. She recovered for a while and returned to her life as an activist and mother, but when Allen was three, Naomi experienced an intense relapse. She committed herself to a sanitarium, and for much of the rest of her life, she moved from one psychiatric institution to another. During the times she returned home, she would often declaim frightened fantasies about a pact between her husband, Hitler, Mussolini, and President Roosevelt, all involved in an attempt to seize control of her mind. Also, she took to walking around the house nude. Allen—who was kept home from school to take care of his mother on her bad days—would sit reading, trying to ignore Naomi’s nakedness and ravings.

Growing up witnessing painful madness and missing the attendance of a loving mother had an enormous impact on Ginsberg. For one thing, it taught him a certain way of preparing for and dealing with hard realities. In Jerry Aronson’s film
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg,
Ginsberg stated: “I’ve had almost like this screen built, so I could hear people dying and get on with it. . . . I could survive without tears in a sense, so that the tears would come out in a poem later, rather than in an immediate breakup of my world. My world already was broken up long ago.”

Naomi’s problems—and her absence from the home—also brought out a neediness and uncertainty that stayed with Ginsberg in many ways his entire life, and that affected how, as a child, he made connections between erotic incentives and emotional fulfillment. Ginsberg often related how, during the lonely nights when his mother was away, he would cuddle up against his father, Louis, Allen rubbing his erect penis against the back of his father’s leg while Louis tried to sleep and ignore the activity. Finally, Naomi’s mental problems also made Ginsberg both more afraid of his own possible madness and also more sympathetic about the troubles of others—and it left him with a fear of shadows and ghosts and as a person prone to seeing visions. By the time he was eleven, Allen was already writing about these matters in his early journals, and he discovered something that gave him a certain comfort and strength: Words, unlike so much that surrounded him as a child, were something he could have dominion over, something that could express his thoughts, something he could take pride in.

But for all the loneliness and fearfulness that characterized his childhood family life, Ginsberg also inherited his parents’ clear intelligence and much of their political compassion. By the time he was sixteen, he was also coming to the realization that he was attracted to men sexually; in particular, he worshipped a high school classmate who left Paterson for Columbia University in New York City. In 1943, Ginsberg received a scholarship from the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Paterson, and he promptly headed for Columbia.

Ginsberg arrived at the university planning to study to become a labor lawyer, but two differing intellectual milieus changed that course. The first was Columbia’s formidable English studies department, which then included Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling; Ginsberg became enamored of these men as mentors and soon changed his major to literature. Over the course of the next year or so, Ginsberg also met another group of men—some of them fellow Columbia students, closer to his own age—and it was this fraternity that turned his life around and that would function as a sort of secondary family for much of the rest of his life. Among these men were William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and a football star with literary aspirations named Jack Kerouac. The bond that developed between them transformed not only their own destinies, but also those of future generations. In particular, Ginsberg and Kerouac seemed to share a special connection. Both were haunted by their childhoods—Kerouac had an older brother, Gerard, who had died young, and Kerouac’s mother used to hold Jack as a child and tell him,
“You
should have died, not Gerard.” But the most important thing these men shared was a sense that, in the mid-1940s, there were great secrets lurking at America’s heart, that there were still rich and daring ways of exploring the nation’s arts and soul—and that there was a great adventure and transcendence to be found by doing so. Indeed, America
was
about to change dramatically, but the significance of that change wouldn’t be fully understood or reckoned with for another twenty years. In 1945, the nation emerged victorious from the horrors of World War II and would enter a long era of new prosperity and opportunity; the new American life, many politicians and critics declared, was now the world standard of the
good
life. But all this came at unexpected psychic costs: The knowledge of the possibility of nuclear devastation changed all the possibilities of the future. Plus, for all the nation’s victories abroad, there were still many battles unwaged at home—including the delicate question of minority rights. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the rest of their crowd were beginning to be drawn to some decidedly different ideals and hopes. They heard the music of bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Thelonious Monk, they tasted the visions of marijuana and Benzedrine, they prowled the reality of Times Square. A new world—a world still largely underground—was being born, and they had keen eyes and a keen need for it.

The friendship that developed among them was complex, sometimes tense, sometimes loving, but what held it together for so long was a shared desire to inquire—in matters of the mind, of aesthetics, and of the senses. In time, this group became the nexus for a literary and artistic community known as the Beat Generation—the first countercultural movement that would have a major impact on America’s popular culture. But all this was still years away, for before Beat became a movement or style, it was simply the way these men chose to live their lives, to examine their own experiences and their view of things both internal—like the spirit—and external, like the night and music and sex. Sometimes these men related to each other sexually (Ginsberg later told stories of he and Kerouac jacking each other off after a night of drinking; years later, Ginsberg also had an affair with Burroughs). Mainly, the group would spend nights consuming alcohol and mild drugs (though Burroughs soon turned to heroin), staying up until dawn, talking about the poetry, visions, and madness of Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, Céline, Genet, and Baudelaire; about how language might learn from jazz; about what was truly holy and what was truly allowed in one’s life. Along the way, the group derived a certain ethos and aesthetic that they called the New Vision: It relied on stretching one’s experiences, finding truths in distorted realities, in sexual pursuits, finding spirituality in the lower depths of life, and most important in making a commitment to an extemporized manner of living, writing, talking, and risking. Somewhere during this time another friend of the group, a bisexual junkie prostitute, Herbert Huncke, referred to them as “beat,” meaning
beat down, wasted.
Kerouac saw in the word another possibility:
beatific.
In time, the term went both ways: Beat came to stand for the idea that to discover one’s true self and the self’s liberation, you first had to descend into some of the most secret, used up, and bereft parts of your heart, soul, body, and consciousness. Consequently, Beat became hard-boiled and loving at the same time, erotic and spiritual. Later, Ginsberg would write Kerouac: “I can’t believe that between us . . . we have the nucleus of a totally new historically important generation.”