When I Was Cool (11 page)

He loved Thomas Chatterton, read him in prison. I, too, was obsessed with Chatterton, the seventeen-year-old poet genius who pretended to have found the long-lost, Old English manuscripts of a poet named Thomas Rowley, but in fact had written them all himself on old church parchment. Unable to support himself in London, he bought poison with the last few coins he had and died in a garret. I was in love with Chatterton's story. Gregory had brought Chatterton into even more romantic glory by reading him in a prison cell.

Gregory was only twenty-six when Bunny Lang discovered him living on the streets of New York, completely destitute. She asked the members of the Poets Theatre to take up a collection to pay Gregory to take care of the theater. He wanted to sweep up after everyone had left, to look for wallets and loose change. Gregory always seemed to be able to get people to take care of him. Bunny Lang arranged for him to live in a room kept by a young novelist at Harvard. Gregory made him construct a tent made out of dyed sheets and hang the sheets on metal poles for Gregory to live under at Eliot House. He continued to wear mostly black, though recently Calliope tried to get him to wear brighter clothing.

I was afraid to show him my poems, and dreaded the idea of giving a poetry reading at which Gregory might be present. I knew he talked back to the screen, as it were, shouting down other poets, confronting them about being phonies. “You're not a poet!” he had once yelled at Archibald MacLeish when he ran into him at Eliot House.

In Gregory's apartment, I saw a copy of an old play I'm sure he had written for the Poets Theatre called
In This Hung-up Age.
Beauty is a character in the play; she's a pill-popping saxophone player. Poetman is her opposite. I didn't want to turn into poetman, “a little magazine type with social complaints.” I knew that Frank O'Hara loved Gregory's poetry, and that made Gregory even more of a legend to me.

O'Hara had the kind of sophisticated life I wanted to have in New York. At least I thought he did. His friends were all in love with him. Men and women. He didn't even seem ambitious for his poems, which were great anyway and seemed so tossed off, though of course they weren't. When he died after being hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island, an accident that sounds almost as lightheartedly strange as his own poems, he was barely forty years old. He died in 1966.

Ten years later, Gregory, O'Hara's friend, was standing on the grass waiting for me to give him some money. It sounds silly now, but at the time it was as if I had a physical connection with Frank O'Hara through his friend Gregory, and that's why I wanted to give Gregory the money. It was like buying a kind of membership that was going to get me into a world, not just a club. It was a world I thought I could live in forever. Like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
though I didn't fight sleep, I wanted them to come and get me. I wanted to speak their language, to sound like them, to dress like them, to be as open to the world and to experience the world as they did. I wanted their hipness and confidence to cover me like a blanket—I would awake calm, and hopelessly hip and new. But as someone once said, whistling in the dark hardly ever becomes music, and Gregory wanted his money right now!

“The funeral,” I said, five one-hundred-dollar bills fanning out in my hand.

Gregory took the money and stuffed it in his pants pocket. Then he sat down on the grass and began to tell his tale.

“I saw Jack in the funeral parlor, everyone was there,” he said. “I
wanted to take him up out of the coffin and throw him against the wall or something. It was a Buddhist or a Zen idea I had. I thought Jack would like it if I just took him and flung him across the room, like when John Barrymore died and all his buddies, Errol Flynn and W. C. Fields, they took him out of the funeral home and brought him back to Errol Flynn's house and they played poker and drank with him in a chair. A real Irish wake. I mean, it's just a body.”

Gregory stopped and put his reading glasses on as if he could see his thoughts better.

“I would've been arrested, probably sent back to prison—or worse, the funny farm.” Gregory peered at me over his reading glasses. “I know you're scared of me, but I'm not dangerous,” Gregory continued, putting his hand on my cheek.

“I thought at the time you should end this medieval agony, the hypocrisy of the funeral! People in mourning for something that no longer exists. That was it. That's the last shot,” Gregory said. “The last shot: I had to do something for my friend, my dear friend, but it only occurred to me when he was dead in his box.”

Suddenly the brick, drive-through bank looked like a crypt. A sliver of moonlight hung in Gregory's hair. He stopped talking, got up, and he and Calliope disappeared into the night.

14. Rolling Thunder

“Make sure you get the money,” William Burroughs snarled to Allen. “When a man asks for money you can't back down, you'll lose your self-respect.” Ginsberg had come into Bill's apartment the day after the Naropa dance to tell him that he and Anne were setting out for Denver to attend the Bob Dylan concert that night. A huge storm was expected and the clouds were already passing over us. The sky looked like an iron vault.

I was setting up the mah-jongg table, wondering if anyone had found an extra ticket for me. I was too shy to ask. Bill and his son were going to be playing mah-jongg. I couldn't imagine the two Burroughses playing a game my mother and her girlfriends were playing on Long Island.

“Ask him about the money,” Burroughs said again. Allen had written a letter to Bob Dylan asking him for $200,000 for Naropa.

“He's never going to give it to us, Bill. He doesn't even read letters like that,” Allen said.

“Then get someone to read it to him,” Burroughs snapped.

Allen was put on notice: ask for the money or have Burroughs walk away in disgust. I never wanted to see that happen. Burroughs seemed to live in a constant state of contempt, although I'm sure it was just the way that he talked and the fact that he looked like someone who had never completely gotten over trying to kick his heroin habit. He had the driest-looking skin I'd ever seen. Even his sweat looked dry. It also looked like I wasn't going to get to go hear Dylan under a thunderous Denver sky. The number of people and the number of tickets—the math just didn't look like it was going to come out in my favor.

Gregory could care less. He dropped by Burroughs's apartment holding his baby, Max, who had Corso's wild, dark, curling hair. Max ran around without clothes most of the time. He liked to run upstairs and poop in all the empty rooms. He seemed like one of those children brought back to civilization after years of being raised by wolves in the forests of India. Anne waltzed in, dressed like an Arabian princess for her rendezvous with Dylan. There was something definitely going on there, I thought. How great to be there. At least Antler wasn't invited either. Anne was actually wearing a sari—it was going to become completely see-through in the rain. I was even sorrier that I wasn't going. But Anne astonished me by asking if I wanted to come along.

My heart almost fell out of my chest. I could've kissed her toe rings, her cardinal-red lips. I couldn't believe that Anne, who seemed to all but ignore me, had come to my rescue.

But Allen cut me down from the heavens.

“No,” he said. “I think he should stay with Gregory. He's got to start getting him to sit down to work, and I think he's taking the money I'm giving him and buying drugs again. I don't want the Kerouac School to start out with an overdose of a major poet.”

I didn't know Allen well enough to beg him to let me come to the concert. I tried to make it look like it didn't matter to me, that looking after Gregory and scraping Max's poop off the rug was what I really wanted to be doing that night. In fact, I did want to help Gregory finish the book, but one night out of my sight wouldn't matter, and it was Bob Dylan in Denver! Maybe Allen would go backstage, maybe…I couldn't even begin to finish the thought. I thought of something Allen had told me, how in Big Sur, a poet had taken Dylan to see Henry Miller, who was pretty old even then. When the old novelist asked whoever had brought Dylan, “Would your poet friend like a drink?” Miller's third-person hospitality got under Dylan's skin. “Even my best friends didn't put me down that badly,” Dylan later said. That's what I wanted to tell Allen.

After all, the long connection between Dylan and Ginsberg was one of the magnets that had first pulled me to the Jack Kerouac School. I harbored the secret thought that perhaps Allen's influence would prevail and that Dylan's first teaching job would wind up at Naropa: “The Milarepa Chair in Advanced Poetics—Dylan, Bob, instructor.” In fact, Dylan wasn't even about to answer Allen's fundraising request, at least Allen didn't think so, and now Burroughs was putting all this pressure on him to collect.

Allen did hope that Dylan would show up at Naropa. Allen wanted the movie Dylan was making during his Rolling Thunder tour to have its premiere at the Jack Kerouac School. Allen called it a “dharma movie”—it would later be released under the title
Renaldo and Clara.
Allen had already brought the director out to Boulder.

Allen explained to Burroughs that even after all this time, he didn't think he knew Dylan at all. He wasn't sure that Dylan
had
a self, because of all the changes he'd been through. During the Rolling Thunder Revue, Allen had asked Dylan if he was enjoying himself, if he was experiencing any pleasurable moments on the tour.

“Pleasure. Pleasure?” Dylan said. “What's that? I never touch the stuff.”

Allen left Burroughs's apartment and went back to his place to get ready for the concert, with me following behind. I could tell that Allen was nervous about seeing Dylan again. He said he never really felt secure in that relationship. He said that he had gone through a painful stage of being in love with Bob Dylan. “He was skinny and had a big nose like you,” Allen said to me while getting dressed for the concert.

I had always hated my looks, but Allen comparing me to Bob Dylan made everything all right, even Allen's making me stay home and picking this of all days and all nights to nail my feet to the floor as Gregory's keeper.

The two men liked to tease each other. Allen said that Dylan brought out a sarcastic streak in him that he didn't know he had. Allen teased Dylan a lot about religion, about God. “I used to believe in God,” Allen once told him. “Well, I used to believe in God, too,” Dylan had said. “You write better poems if you believe in God, Ginsberg.” He didn't want to have to ask Dylan for money.

Sometimes they went for years without talking. Allen said he was too shy to call Dylan. He wrote him letters that Dylan ignored. Then one day Dylan called him, answering Allen's letter on the telephone. Allen had written to Dylan telling him how much he loved his song “Idiot Wind,” calling it “a national rhyme.” Allen sang a phrase to me while pulling on his socks, a blue and a black one. “Idiot Wind / blowing like a circle around my skull / from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” Allen said that was Dylan's favorite line in the song, too. Allen said it appealed to the Buddhist in him. The craziness on the left and the right. Allen said that Dylan was a great poet—the Walt Whitman of the American pop song—and instead of dedicating his book of songs
First Blues
to
Rinpoche, he thought it really should have been dedicated to Bob Dylan. Allen said it was always heartbreaking and thrilling to see Dylan. He thought he and Bob Dylan should have been lovers.

I didn't know what to say. I could tell he'd be upset if Anne stayed in Denver and spent the night with Dylan. “I introduced them,” Allen said.

Gregory just didn't share their adoration of Dylan. He couldn't care less. “Everyone thinks Bob Dylan is writing about
them,”
Gregory once told me. “I don't give a shit if I'm
in
a Bob Dylan song—I just want some of the royalties! I told Dylan I'd write him a poem for one song's royalties. I'll write him a beautiful poem in exchange for the royalties of ‘Just Like a Woman.' That song's about Ginzy anyway. The woman in the song is really Allen—not about his being a faggot, just about his unrequited love for Dylan. Now you don't feel so cheated about that five hundred dollars, right?”

 

Allen said he wanted to take me somewhere before driving to Denver for the concert. If he sensed that I was disappointed about not being invited to meet Dylan, he didn't show it. As we left the apartment, the threatening sky had opened up and the rain began to pour. As we headed back toward Naropa headquarters in the rain, Allen said he wanted to go to the shrine room, to sit. That meant he wanted to meditate. I could tell whenever Allen was nervous or anxious about something. He always thought meditating would help. Sometimes he meditated when he thought his ego was getting too big. He was under a lot of stress: Everyone seemed to want something from Allen, especially his students. Eventually there would be quite a few. Sometimes kids would show up for registration without any money, and Allen would ask why they had come to school without funds. “I had a dream that I should come see you,” one said. “I read ‘Howl' and it changed my life. I thought maybe you needed someone to come take care of you.” Sometimes young gay men would show up hoping Allen would take care of them, or at least make it easier for them to come out to their
parents. “Would you tell them?” they'd ask. Sometimes Allen gave them money to go back home. Sometimes he took them to bed, then told them to go back to school and get married.

I thought most of the time Allen took all that attention with a lot of humor. Rinpoche certainly helped Allen take a more humorous view of himself and of his fame. Before meeting Rinpoche, Allen wasn't known for his sense of humor. You could never tell him a joke. He would always ask you questions about it—why the person in the joke did a certain thing and not another. Peter had a better sense of humor, but then he'd had a much sadder life.

When we arrived at the Naropa building, I didn't want to go into the shrine room. I had avoided it ever since I arrived at the Jack Kerouac School. I think I'd absorbed some of my parents' worry that I would become a Buddhist. They knew that Allen chanted
om,
and that he was Jewish, but that he was also a Buddhist.

The shrine room frightened me. It shouldn't have. It was quite beautiful really, with hundreds of red meditation cushions, a yellow sun in the middle of each one. It was a large room made to look like a Tibetan monastery, with mandalas hanging on the walls, and dragons breathing fire on bright yellow cloth. Allen felt at home there. He said that synagogues made him feel anxious and inadequate.

I worried about what would happen if I went into the shrine room, took off my shoes, and sat on the meditation cushion. I thought of my mother and my grandmother, and I suddenly realized that today was Friday, and they'd be lighting candles for the Sabbath. My mother wasn't even all that religious. After lighting the candles we'd sometimes all go out to the Flagship Diner in Freeport for bacon cheeseburgers. We were those kind of Jews. (That was then; she keeps kosher now.) My mother hated “the black hats,” as she called them, the ultra-Orthodox Jews who threw rocks at your car if you drove through their Borough Park neighborhoods on a Saturday.

Allen liked asking me about my Jewish parents. He said being Jewish was one of his mother's obsessions, so maybe that was why
he turned his back on it. Naomi had suffered so much, and had made him suffer: maybe that's why Judaism caused him so much pain. He said seeing Hebrew letters in a prayerbook recently made him weep.

“I never understood the Jews' fear of death,” he once told me. He said that Buddhism made him think of death all the time. I told him I was a
kohen
, and that I wasn't allowed near a dead body. I said that if I were a religious Jew, I wouldn't even be allowed at a funeral, which was okay by me.

“What about your own funeral?” Allen asked.

We stepped out of our shoes and left them at the threshold. In the beautiful, empty shrine room, which smelled like old shoes, incense, and Johnson's floor wax, Allen put me down on a meditation cushion. He straightened my back, he lit some incense, he bowed toward the elevated area where Rinpoche often sat, which had framed portraits of all the lineage holders. Allen said he wanted to initiate me into sitting, so that I wouldn't be so afraid of it.

Before we began, though, we talked about the Dylan concert. He must have sensed how badly I wanted to go.

“You know, Sam, you'd be doing me a great favor by looking after Gregory,” he said. He added that he was hoping the rain would lift, and that he would be released of his longing for Bob Dylan's approval. I thought of that old song by Rodgers and Hart, with the line, “unrequited love's a bore.” I hoped Dylan loved Allen and appreciated him. Allen was like an Indian alone in the shrine room praying for rain, except he was praying for the rain to stop. He thought meditating would help remind him that he should just enjoy the concert and not worry so much.

“If you stay and watch Gregory,” he told me, “I have a surprise for you. I've arranged for us to watch the movie Dylan and I made together.” He said that Sam Shepard wrote the screenplay for
Renaldo and Clara
(in 1976, I didn't know who Sam Shepard was), but that he, Allen, had created many of his scenes with Dylan. We were going to watch it at Gregory's house after the concert, projecting it onto one of Corso's blank walls.

“Gregory doesn't feel the same way about Dylan as the rest of
us,” he explained. “Gregory distrusts people with a lot of money, especially artists with money.” I supposed that was because Gregory never knew where he was going to sleep from one night to the next. For a long time, when he lived in Europe, Gregory's address was just the American Express office. Once he was arrested for sleeping in the Parthenon.

After I tried sitting for a while, and Allen prayed for the rain to stop and to be delivered from Dylan-longing, he dropped me off at Gregory's apartment, as if I really were the baby-sitter.

Allen said goodbye and kissed me on the lips. Gregory ran up and kissed Allen on the lips, too. Baby Max, his soggy diaper dripping, clung to my leg and sat on my shoe. He liked to hold on and have me jump up and down like a pogo stick. Max's mother was a dark, very young woman. She didn't say very much. Calliope was nowhere to be seen.

Apparently, Gregory felt like he had to keep earning my $500, so he decided to tell me what Kerouac's wife had said when he showed up at Jack's funeral. “This'll be it,” Gregory said, “this will square us.”