When I Was Cool (12 page)

15. Gilgamesh in Boulder

“The first thing Stella said to me when I came to the funeral,” Gregory, smoking furiously, began, “she said, ‘Gregory, why didn't you come sooner? Jack wanted to see you. Why didn't you come when he was alive?'

“I told her, ‘How do I know when people are gonna die?' I have no idea. I wrote out a poem and stuck it in Jack's jacket, but there was already a piece of paper in there. I didn't read it. I wanted to know who else thought of that, putting a poem in there. Maybe it wasn't a poem—maybe it was a cleaning bill.”

Before Gregory could finish his story, Allen interrupted, telling Gregory about his plans to show a rough cut of
Renaldo and Clara
at Gregory's apartment after the concert, but Gregory wasn't interested. He didn't want to see
Renaldo and Clara,
he wanted to meet Calliope and get high. He turned to me and said he was thinking of a great way to get money, and that he would discuss it with me tomorrow. Allen left, in a hurry to make it to Denver in time for the concert. I was left alone with Gregory, Max, and Lisa, his sullen wife.

He handed me two poems he said were meant for his book. He said one of them was a love poem to Shelley, which he wrote after having a dream in which he and Shelley were married. He said he never has thoughts like that in real life, but he has them in his sleep. I wondered why that wasn't a part of real life.

Gregory then informed me that my first job was to read the epic of
Gilgamesh
; he said he couldn't work with anyone who didn't know it. Furthermore, we would discuss it. I was supposed to read it to Max and his mother. With that, Gregory headed for the door, no doubt on his way to find Calliope and score some dope with some of my money.

Lisa didn't try to stop her husband from leaving. She just took Max in her arms and went upstairs. Max started crying. Gregory sang something from
La Traviata
to Max from the bottom of the stairs, and then he was gone.

“Gregory left this book for you,” Lisa told me from the top of the stairs. “You have to read to us till we fall asleep.” I climbed the stairs, a little apprehensively, picked up the book, and sat on the edge of her bed. Max was being breast-fed by his young mother. I tried not to look.

Gilgamesh,
I found out later, was a kind of bible for Gregory—he loved quoting from it. It was the first book he was going to teach at the Naropa Institute. He already told me that he wasn't interested in my poetry—not yet, anyway. I thumbed, or as Allen liked to say,
thrummed
through the book, which I thought was kind of skinny for an epic. Gregory later said it was a shame we couldn't read it in Sumerian. Or rather, that he couldn't.

I started reading aloud: “Of him who knew the most…who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled…” Max stopped breast-feeding and sat up in bed, leaning against his mother, with his wild bird's-nest hair, and Lisa with her sad eyes like those of a gypsy fortune-teller in a storefront window in Atlantic City.

Gilgamesh was a hero of the twenty-seventh century before Christ. He was a god of the underworld. No wonder Gregory loved him, having first read him in his prison cell. Statues of Gilgamesh appear in ancient burial rites—he's a kind of god of the dead.

I glanced over at Max and his mother; both of them were fast asleep on the great rumpled bed. There was no withstanding the power of Gilgamesh, I thought, “neither the father's son, nor the wife.” I slunk down and read in a corner of the bedroom. I started to understand why Gregory loved the story of Gilgamesh so much. It was close to his heart because it was so close to his art: it was the story of Gregory's life as Allen Ginsberg's friend.

Gilgamesh is a work of about a thousand lines. Gregory seemed to know each one by heart, I would later discover. In the story, there is a Wild Man who is created by the gods because he's the only one who can match Gilgamesh. They become best friends and travel together. Both Gilgamesh and the Wild Man go on a journey searching for fame, but Gilgamesh wants true immortality. He wants unending fame, unending life. The Wild Man is not interested in that kind of quest.

It suddenly dawned on me: Everyone keeps thinking that Allen is the Wild Man, but he's not
—he's
Gilgamesh. Hadn't Rinpoche told Allen that he was too in love with his fame and his notoriety? Isn't that why he had made him go upstairs and chop off his beard, which Allen had saved in a cigar box? Gregory was always teasing Allen about wanting to be a rock star, about using his enormous energies in the wrong way, to serve the wrong master, as Gregory liked to put it. “Ginzy could be a great poet,” Gregory would confide in me, “but he's a terrible judge of his own poems.” Once Gregory asked Allen to show him what he considered to be his greatest poems. Allen gave him poems like “Punk Rock Your My Big
Crybaby,” “Blame the Thought, Cling to the Bummer.” Gone were “Supermarket in California” and “Sunflower Sutra,” and in their place was a dreadful poem for Anne Waldman called “Pussy Blues.”

I knew that poem; Allen had asked me to help him finish it. Allen was attracted to Anne. He used to like to tease her about sleeping with him. He said he sometimes wondered what it would be like to be married to Anne and even to have a baby. I didn't think it was very mature to write a poem to Anne called “Pussy Blues.” He said the last thing you want to think about when you get old is maturity. He said only young people think about that. I felt embarrassed; I told Allen the poem shouldn't come from me. He said it wouldn't.

The poem had evolved out of a session of making up spontaneous blues songs while sitting in the empty bandshell of a park in downtown Boulder. It was the Fourth of July, when the whole nation was celebrating its two hundredth birthday, and we were watching the fireworks going off in the mountains. Allen sang: “You said you got to go home and feed your pussycat / When I ask you to stay here tonight. Where's your pussy at? / Hey it's Fourth of July / Say it's your U.S. birthday / Yeah stay out all night National Holiday / Tiger on your fence / Don't let him get away.” And that became “Pussy Blues.”

Gregory knew that it was Gilgamesh who ventures into the forest to cut down the great cedar and thus win all the glory. “My fame,” Gilgamesh announces, “will be secure to all my sons.” Gregory, I would come to realize, knew that his vagabond life was not conducive to being famous, as famous as Allen. “I've read stories about Allen in the
International Herald Tribune,”
Gregory would later tell me. “I read about Ginzy all the time and think, no dog would eat the kind of food he has to eat. Penguin dust!” he shouted, reciting his own line from “Marriage,” meaning
inscrutable,
the marriage of opposites, the fantastic and the divine, the silly and the stunned. But sometimes he used it as an expletive.

Had Gregory given me the key to his relationship with Allen by leaving
Gilgamesh
behind for me to read, while his wife and child, their heads thrown back and their mouths open in sleep, looked like they were in the netherworld reclining on the couch of death?

And then I read it: the last line in
Gilgamesh
about the one who enters the underworld without leaving anyone to mourn for him (a scribe who wanted his pen to dispense justice in the world): “No dog would eat the food he has to eat.”
Gilgamesh
expressed Gregory's fear that Allen, the world-famous bard, and not Gregory—reprobate and drifter—would wind up emptied out by fame, alone and abandoned by all the young men who would leave him and begin families of their own. Gregory was obsessed with being alone at the end—being “motherless” and even “catless”—but at the time he saw that as Allen's fate, not his own.

I went downstairs, tiptoeing so as not to waken the sleepers. I sat on the couch and waited for Gregory, “the Mad Honeymooner,” as he called himself in his great poem “Marriage,” to come home to his wife. He certainly was raising Max, his latest baby, the way he imagined himself raising a kid in “Marriage”—making a rattle out of broken Bach records, tacking pictures of
The Flagellation
by della Francesca along its crib, and sewing the Greek alphabet onto its bib. Gregory wanted to build for Max's playpen a roofless Parthenon; instead, they all dwelled in an apartment in Boulder with constant traffic of strangers, Gregory's hot, New York City accent filling the rooms.

But Gregory didn't come back that night. I walked home in the early-morning light, “all the universe married but me.”

16. Kerouac's Grave

Anne Waldman hadn't come home after the Dylan concert. Allen must've felt squeezed, jealous from both sides. Dylan didn't ask him to stay, and everyone assumed something was going on between Anne and Bob Dylan. (Anne had a boyfriend, Reed Bye, but I don't think he knew. He was a local guy, a roofer, with an
almost angelic, feminine face. Anne liked beautiful men—men who looked lovelier than their girlfriends. Reed Bye was sweet-tempered and he had a gentle manner, even though he stomped on people's roofs and most days ate his lunch above the treeline. He was writing poetry in his spare time, and Anne was giving him books to read.)

When I saw Allen the next day, he didn't look like he'd had a good time at the concert. He asked what we thought of
Renaldo and Clara,
and I had to tell him that we didn't see it. Sotto voce, I told him that Gregory didn't seem too interested. Trying to sound as if I didn't really care, I asked him about the Dylan concert.

He said that the concert was held during a driving rain, and that Dylan sang “Idiot Wind” as a tribute to Allen. He sang “A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall” while it was falling.

As a kind of consolation prize, Allen brought a few of us together that evening to watch scenes from
Renaldo and Clara—
Billy Burroughs, Barbara Dilley, some of the Vadjra guards. But watching the movie only made me sad. I saw Allen beaming during the scenes he and Dylan were in, but I thought they were making fun of him. He took Dylan so seriously, he loved his music, he thought of it as great poetry. In the movie all the musicians called each other “poet,” as if that were the highest compliment you could make to someone. I, myself, was beginning to wonder. I did, however, like the fact that Dylan had brought his mother on the tour. Some people said that whenever Bob sang “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),” Mrs. Zimmerman would stand up and say, “That's me!” I thought that was incredibly cute. Allen liked it, too. “The mysterious Bob Dylan had a chicken-soup, Yiddishe mama,” Allen told me, “just like us.”

Allen said the most touching and moving experience for him on the whole tour wasn't in the movie. It was a visit with Dylan to Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. I know Allen was a Buddhist, and most Buddhists are cremated, but Allen dug graves. I don't mean with a shovel; he liked visiting them. He went to Poe's grave in Baltimore. He went to Apollinaire's grave in Père
Lachaise in Paris. At Jack's grave he and Dylan stood and read a section from Kerouac's
Mexico City Blues,
which was the first thing by Kerouac that Bob Dylan had ever read, when he was still a young man in Minnesota.

According to Allen, the poems in
Mexico City Blues
are really Buddhist poems, in that they're about the ego as an invisible man that wreaks havoc. You try to catch the ego as it leaves footprints in the snow, but it's too fast and too tricky. You just have to sit still and be patient, and wear it out. That's what Allen said I should do.

Allen and Dylan sat down on Kerouac's grave, and Dylan played Allen's harmonium, then he played a slow blues tune on the guitar. Allen said he made up a song on the spot about Kerouac as a kind of Horatio figure, his skull peering over the horizon looking back at Allen and this musician in a white hat, the two men sitting on Kerouac's chest, bothering his heavenly rest. The graveyard was littered with fallen leaves, and Dylan picked up a leaf that had fallen directly onto Kerouac's grave and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Which one of the
Mexico City Blues
did Dylan read?” I asked Allen.

He didn't remember. All he remembered was that he had picked out a poem for Dylan to read, but that Dylan had turned the page back and forth and decided to read the one on the opposite side of the page. Then Allen remembered the one he'd picked out. He went to his bookshelf and opened
Mexico City Blues
to the poem he had chosen for Dylan and read the lines, “The wheel of the quivering meat conception / Turns in the void.…I wish I was free / of that slaving meat wheel / and safe in heaven, dead.”

There was another poem Allen had especially wanted to hear Dylan read to Kerouac's soul in heaven, a kind of list poem that names all the sufferings of existence. It ends with Jack kissing his kitten on its stomach, which he likens to “the softness of our reward.”

I was sitting with Allen on the floor of his apartment. The movie had ended and all the other students and Vadjra guards had
left. The carpet was gray as the ground in Lowell in winter. It was like being at Kerouac's grave. It was like being on the Rolling Thunder Revue. For me, sad about being left out of the concert, it was enough.

17. Last Words

The country was cleaning up after its giant birthday party, presided over by Jimmy Carter. There were still crushed cans of Billy Beer in the streets. Allen was gearing up for the first reading of the Jack Kerouac School, and he wanted everything to come off perfectly.

Antler was going to read from his book
Last Words
; he and Jeff were still carrying “their baby,” as they called the book, still in manuscript form. It wasn't going to be published for at least a year. It was as if Antler and Jeff had conceived this book during some demented literary honeymoon. I couldn't believe they talked about it like that. Did William Faulkner talk about
As I Lay Dying
as if it were a fetus? I doubt it. But Antler did. At least on the days when he talked.

Allen introduced him. The reading took place in the shrine room. The Naropa High Command were all there, turned out because of Allen's pull with the Buddhist establishment at Naropa. Rinpoche kept everyone waiting for two hours. When he finally showed, he was with Osel Tendzin, his Vadjra regent, the man who would take over the teachings if Rinpoche died or decided to return to Tibet. (Not very likely, I thought.) The Vadjra regent's real name was Thomas Rich, and he once sold cars in New Jersey before coming to Naropa. A lot of the Buddhist students said he was a great meditator and Rinpoche's greatest student. He and his wife had just had twin boys, but there was a lot of talk and speculation that Osel Tendzin was gay.

The Jack Kerouac School turned out in force: the teachers— Bill, Anne, Allen, of course—and the second-generation Beats— Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, Larry's wife, Susan Noel (whose name Peter Orlovsky could remember only as Susie Christmas). Peter was there with one of his “ugly girlfriends,” a young woman who was really quite sweet looking, an exceedingly tall and skinny redhead named Denyse King. Also present were about two hundred Naropa students from the various meditative disciplines, from flower arranging to archery to Buddhist psychology.

The reading finally began. But before Antler could get through even half of
Last Words,
Gregory decided to live up to his reputation as Wild Man. With Max on his lap, he leaped into that void Allen was always talking about.

“What are you not saying that you're kind of hinting at?” Gregory yelled at Antler after he'd finished one of his poems. “I mean that was beautiful, but so what? Do you think you have some monopoly on the way people check out of this world? What do you know, you're just some fag who likes to piss in the river, so you like nature! Well, take a shit in the woods and call it poesy!” Antler turned white as Gregory's rant became a rave. “Tell me something about life, tell me something about Molotov cocktails! Why don't you two get married, climb into the most bull-dykey outfits you own, maybe even a suit with pants, drop a cigarette on the floor and say, ‘Oh, shit.”

“Shut up, Gregory, let him read!” Allen tried shouting Corso down. Even Rinpoche stopped fanning himself with his fan so he could listen. This was gonna be good. “You don't have to have everyone hate you. Do you want to make the worst possible impression?” Allen yelled at Corso.

At that moment, I hate to admit it, I fell in love with Gregory. I thought he was wonderful. I thought he might kill me at almost any moment and not lose any sleep over it, but I loved him anyway. And then Gregory turned on Rinpoche, who was sitting serenely at one end of the room, slowly fanning himself and smiling his half-smile.

“You had a serious thought,” Gregory said to Rinpoche, “but
you blew it. Write down all your thoughts for five years and then see if you have any left!” Gregory told the holder of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. “Then go for a hike on the weekends, and maybe you wouldn't come up with a major philosophy but you'll need new shoes, and while you're being fitted for them, you know, while your foot's in that metal foot with the black heel on it, you just might hit on some philosophical beliefs that could form the basis of a cult, then
he
[pointing to Antler] could join you and, dig it, you could save us all this bad poetry!”

Gregory was on fire. Even Max was smiling. He knew his father was swinging like Tarzan from tree to tree, and he started to shriek with happiness and run in and out of the rows of students and teachers sitting on the floor. Max flung off his little pants, and Gregory let him run wild and naked in the shrine room.

“Actaeon, hey Actaeon!” Gregory yelled at Antler. “You look upon the divine with a mortal's eyes!” Gregory kept comparing Antler to Actaeon in the Roman myth—the hunter, a mortal who accidentally stumbles upon Diana bathing in a stream. To punish him for his trespass she flings a handful of water in his face, causing antlers to sprout from his head. Actaeon is not only turned into a stag but the hunter's own dogs chase him down and kill him. He, apparently, was not worthy of gazing on a Divine.

For Gregory, myths were real; he invoked them and called upon them like an ancient Roman poet. Antler looked
furioso
; even his beard looked like it was about to catch fire. He looked as if he couldn't go on. In fact, he couldn't. He handed his manuscript over to Jeff, who finished the reading.

At the end of the program, Allen announced that there was going to be a party at Jane and Batan Faigo's house. They were a couple who taught tai chi at Naropa. Jane was short and chubby with a beatific blond face; her husband was from the Philippines, skinny with long hair and a sad face that flashed a gold tooth when he laughed, which was almost anytime he heard Gregory open his mouth. Jane and Batan were Gregory's guardians at Naropa. I was only his keeper, Allen's spy in the house of love.

I passed Gregory on the way out of the shrine room. I don't know if he saw me trying not to smile when he went after Antler, but I think maybe he knew how pleased I was, how weirdly proud of him, even though he was impossibly rude. As I filed out of the room, Gregory winked at me. The Wild Man had let me in on the joke, just a little.