When I Was Cool (16 page)

24. Diane di Prima Loved Food

Once the fall semester was under way, Anne brought Diane di Prima into Allen's class, held in one of the Naropa schoolrooms above the New York Deli on Pearl Street—Boulder's main stem, which filled up with students and tourists most weekends.

She wasn't what I expected. Gone was the little sparrow on her book covers and in those famous photographs—Diane di Prima
didn't look like herself at all. I saw a woman who looked more like someone who'd stepped out of a Brueghel painting. She had long wild hair that hung stiffly down past her shoulders and looked like it had broken many a comb. She was short and built like a middleweight known for punching power, not speed, and she was wearing a tie-dyed hippie dress and a peasant blouse that had once been white but was unraveling at the sleeve. She was standing with a man even shorter than she was, who had long hair and a beard that was so long it seemed to pull down his young face, making him appear slightly hunched over. He made a lot of quick turns of his head and moved in speedy little gestures; he looked like a lawn gnome suddenly jarred awake after a hundred years. I think this was Diane's boyfriend, maybe her husband even.

I didn't know a lot about beauty. I didn't even think I cared that much about it. Some of the Beats looked as I imagined they would—they resembled the selves that had appeared in photographs and on album covers I had studied back on Long Island, or the few times I had seen them on television. I had watched Allen chanting over giggles on the
Merv Griffin Show,
talking about “the planet” before it became a fashionable phrase, a cliché even. Allen had made everyone else on the show look square. He made Arthur Treacher, Merv's sidekick, seem dead as the Greek language. They didn't get him, but I did. We did.

That afternoon at Naropa, Allen stopped talking to the few students in our class, which consisted of some kids who had wandered in off the mall and Naropa students from Dance or Buddhist Psychology who wanted to attend Allen's talks, plus a couple of hard-core meditators I recognized from Rinpoche's wildly popular weekend lectures. (Those lectures were held in the gymnasium of the local parochial school, Sacred Heart. I found them fascinating, though sometimes my attention would wander to the mural above the basketball hoops, depicting Jesus holding his flaming heart in his hands, offering it to the people in the grandstands. Once Rinpoche looked up at it and asked softly into the microphone, in his Tibetan-accented English, “What will they think of next?”)

Allen introduced Diane as a poet from Hunter High School in New York and a lover of Leroi Jones. Diane looked a little upset.

“Allen, I love you,” she said, “but you're always doing that.” Diane was tough.

“What, what did I do now?” Allen wanted to know. “I'm glad to see you.”

“I'm glad to see you, too, but you're always introducing me that way. You do that to all the girls. You need to know who they've slept with to figure out why they're important to you. It's annoying. It's like a tic or something, so cut it out.”

I started scribbling something in my notebook. Anne introduced Diane a little more properly and said that she would be staying with us for a little while. She then announced that I was to meet them after class and show Diane around. Somehow this didn't seem as fraught with peril as baby-sitting Gregory or helping Burroughs move stiffly through a crowd of admirers. Except for Anne, the women who came through the Jack Kerouac School made me feel more comfortable, more able to be myself. I could finally talk to someone without feeling as if I were holding my breath underwater. But it's interesting to see how wrong you can be, and how often you can be wrong.

 

Diane di Prima loved food. I could see that. But she loved talking about it as well. She seemed to remember every meal she'd ever eaten. She even wrote a book about her food experiences. She asked me to tell her about all the restaurants in Boulder. She asked if I could cook, if I liked to cook at home. I didn't really. I liked going out to eat. I told her about the fish at Pelican Pete's, the pasta at Sage's, the exquisite dining at John's restaurant, which people seemed to go to for special occasions. I told her that Burroughs and Jubal seemed to go there all the time.

After her reading, Diane and I sat at an umbrella'd table in front of the New York Deli. We drank coffee and I told her I really liked the babka—they toasted it with a little butter on it. I offered some to Diane, adding that it was fun to share food.

“It's never fun to share food,” she corrected me, before ordering her own strawberry babka. When it arrived at the table, I thought Diane, too, looked a little babka-like. “The two babkas,” I thought, one sitting in front of the other. One big, about to devour the other.

Diane said that the summer reminded her of being a young writer and of drinking iced coffee made out of powdered skim milk, and putting coffee ice cubes into the drink. She was still in high school when she and her girlfriends would wear something they had designed themselves, a kind of slip or half slip that was draped just above the breast and “tied with a sash just under your breasts or around your middle” or on your hips like a flapper. “They were very cool in the August New York city heat,” she said.

“It was great then in New York,” she continued, warming to her subject, “wearing these Isadora Duncan clothes and sleeping with girlfriends on mattresses on the floor, drinking iced coffee with the windows open. She later wrote about it in
Dinners and Nightmares
: “Sometimes a breeze would enter the room and the gathering of maidens would sigh and sit on their mattresses and make their plans about being great artists and having passionate love affairs, and then we'd fall asleep, like sirens on a rock.”

Diane spent the afternoon talking about her life in New York. She spent the hour it took to eat our babka talking about how much she loved Oreos, and how one winter in New York that's all she did was eat Oreos, and that it used to be her favorite snack while reading Dante's
Divine Comedy.
“Oreos can make you fat,” she said. “That's the only problem with food, Oreos especially. Even if you don't eat anything else and you think, shit, how can I get fat? I haven't had breakfast or lunch or anything like that, but I was kidding myself. Oreos make you fat!” She wrote about that, too.

She asked me if I was going to finish my babka. I said no. She moved our plates around so that her empty plate sat in front of me, and my unfinished babka sat in front of her. She finished it.

Diane said she was sleepy. It had been a long trip from San Francisco, and she wanted to see her apartment. But before leaving
the deli, Diane leaned over and said she was going to teach me how to write a play with a pair of dice.

“There are certain rules you have to know,” she confided, but she felt sure that I would learn quickly. She said it was a good way to pass the time. She said that you make it up out of things close at hand—she used the radio and Elizabethan plays (a collection that she kept by her bed). She said she wrote this while waiting for one of her lovers to come to her apartment with a bottle of wine. He was going to teach her how to eat clams, to open them after they've been steamed and pick out the flesh with a tiny fork.

As we left the deli and headed for the apartment reserved for her visit, Diane said she would visit me at Allen's apartment soon. She heard that I'd be looking after the place once Allen and Peter had gone out to California for a reading. She'd teach me the playwriting technique then.

The thought of being alone with a woman in Allen's apartment reminded me of waiting for my first girlfriend to come over after my parents had left for my grandmother's bungalow in the Catskill Mountains. As soon as I was old enough to convince them I could stay home alone, I did. I would call up Rosalie and tell her that the coast was clear. The doorbell ringing a few minutes later would make my heart practically explode. Ten hours wooing her, as Gregory would say, then—the constellation of the stars.

25. Billy and Tangier

As the fall weather settled in, Billy Burroughs looked worse. A sad- looking guy, he looked even sadder as the weeks flew by. A skinny guy who used a rope to keep his pants up, he seemed skinnier than usual. I thought his skin looked gray—blue and gray, the color of ash. There was some kind of bump in his neck. Something was
wrong. The only one who didn't seem to notice was his father. But Billy was used to his father not knowing what was wrong.

Billy liked his privacy, but when he got tired of that he wanted somebody to talk to. His friends, the Westies or whatever they were called, seemed to come to him only for alcohol and grass. They also liked his beatnik pedigree and hanging out with the son of the man who wrote
Naked Lunch.
I guess, in that way, they were a lot like me.

One day after my poetry class, Allen asked me to buy groceries for Billy because he didn't seem to have enough strength to walk through the aisles of the supermarket. You didn't have to be a brain surgeon to know that Billy needed a doctor.

His father finally agreed that we should visit the surgeon in Denver, the one they had made me call when I first arrived in Boulder. Trouble was, he was a psychic surgeon.

“He operates without cutting you open,” Burroughs explained in Allen's apartment one afternoon. “They manipulate the body from the outside, they palpate and they remove without using the knife. It's been known to be successful in a number of cases.” I told Allen that I thought Burroughs was dreaming, that Billy really looked sick. It was always a case of too little, too late where Burroughs and his son were concerned.

The next day, I carried a bag full of groceries up the steep walk to Billy's apartment, which you could pick out from the street because the window was decorated half in an orange karmic flag from Naropa with a mythical, fire-breathing dragon on it, and half with an old pirate flag bearing a skull and crossbones.

Billy's shopping list sounded like a condemned man's idea of a great last meal: steak and ice cream, ingredients for a malted, Hershey's chocolate syrup, and A1 meat sauce. He also needed lots of milk and cans of tuna for the cats that wandered in and out of his apartment, like the cats in Hemingway's house in Key West.

I later learned that Billy had come to Boulder because he needed to be somewhere safe. It was his father who had sent for
him. He explained that Burroughs, whom he always called Bill, had done this before. When Billy had turned fourteen, Burroughs had decided he wanted his son back. At the time, Burroughs was living in Tangier and Billy was living in the lap of luxury with his grandparents, sleeping in a sleigh bed and having his clothes laid out by a servant. He hadn't seen his father in at least two or three years when he was summoned to Tangier.

Billy told me that Burroughs was living there with two men at the time. He said it was a strange feeling to see this strange man in a business suit waiting for him at the airport. Once they arrived at Burroughs's little villa, Bill Sr. had very little to say to his son. “He practically ignored me,” Billy said. “I was just a fourteen-year-old squirt, very American, and very un-hip.”

Billy had had to put up with a lot. The two Englishmen sharing the house with Burroughs kept coming into Billy's room to try and have sex with him. Billy said that after his first night in Tangier, he found one of the men, Ian, sitting on his bed. Ian took Billy's hand and tried to put it on his crotch. “I pulled my hand away from Ian's lap,” Billy said. He told me this story while sitting up in bed smoking a joint.

After I brought the groceries into the apartment and put them away, some of Billy's so-called friends arrived. They took out their long clay pipes and turned the tiny apartment into a kind of opium den, throwing the pillows and cushions from the couch onto the floor. Billy recalled how, when he was in Tangier, Burroughs had made one of the Englishmen take Billy down to the Casbah to pick out a pipe.

Billy's apartment now looked like his description of the house in Tangier. It was a complete mess, with flickering lightbulbs and not an inch of unused floor space.

The long bowls came out and little vials of something that looked like tobacco were unscrewed and tenderly tapped out into the clay bowls. Billy asked me to share his pipe. He said that in Tangier he ate something called
majoun,
some kind of grass that you
chew on and then swallow. Billy liked to say that it “will stone you into the middle of next week, possibly next month.” I refused, the hypochondriac in me rising up. Marion would have been proud.

Curiously, though Billy's apartment was a mess, the little space where he wrote was a kind of pristine shrine. He said he had gotten that from his father. Burroughs had a sort of college or bunk bed in his bedroom in Boulder, which was very spare and clean. Billy said he only remembered a painting by Brion Gysin in his father's room in Tangier, a haunting painting of the moon, which turned the room into a kind of permanent nighttime. Burroughs also had an orgone box in his Boulder apartment, in which he would sit “like Eichmann in his glass booth,” Billy said, and smoke
majoun
or pot—and after a few hours he would pounce on the Underwood and write.

Seeing Allen and Gregory was nothing new for Billy—he'd grown up with these men coming in and out of his life. He described how, in Tangier, the existentialist, expat hippies, who “looked as if they hadn't seen daylight for years and were dressed entirely in black—dark hair, black circles under their eyes,” would hang around just to catch a glimpse of William Burroughs. They would watch him enter a club called the Casbah. Dressed in a suit, a long skinny tie, and a fedora, Burroughs would sit down with a glass of tea served to him on a tray. He sat motionless, in his right hand a cigarette burning down to his fingers, his lips parting to inhale the smoke. “Old Bill,” Billy called him. “My dad.” Then he'd laugh. He understood the absurdity of it. “I was still reading comic books and science fiction then,” Billy said.

Billy admitted that his father's maternal instinct came out when he prepared a kind of chicken soup for his son, but even then he made it with so much pepper that Billy said it had tasted like whiskey.

In the middle of his disquisition on his father, Billy started nodding off, his words leaning over and falling against each other like drunken sailors on shore leave. I couldn't quite understand him.

“He didn't care what I did, or where I went,” Billy mumbled, half asleep. And then, rousing slightly, he continued, describing a
time when he went around stoned in Tangier, perching himself precariously on a cliff covered with trees growing sideways out of the rock. “I'd sit there smoking grass and waiting. I thought maybe Old Bill would come looking for me, and we'd have a heart-to- heart talk.”

One night in Tangier, Billy explained, someone came into his room and told him that he was too young to know what he wanted, but what he really wanted was to go home. “Don't live in a house with a bunch of fags,” one of the expat hippies told Billy.

“Does my father want me to stay?” Billy had asked him. When there was no answer, Billy repeated the question. As he recounted this tale, I saw beads of sweat on his brow, the clay pipe falling out of his hand. “Go to my father's room and ask him,” Billy had told the hippie. “Ask him, does he or doesn't he want me to stay.”