When I Was Cool (28 page)

Gregory said that, for him, going to the movies was like going to church. He liked the flood of light radiating from the screen. We saw a lot of old films on Pearl Street. Gregory liked Frank Capra's movies, and films like
Macao
with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. He thought Russell had “unforgettable tits and shoulders. Her shoulders are even bigger and sexier than her tits,” Gregory said. He loved the fact that actors don't grow old. Well, not on the screen they don't. Also, he liked to say that the poor see the same things the rich see when they go to the movies.

“The rich can't save Tara from burning,” he said. “They can't rescue the Count of Monte Cristo.”

One night I saw Carla in the movie theater. She looked right at me, but then walked away. Gregory put his arm around me. It gave me courage, even before the lights came all the way on in the theater. I'd taken on some of the courage—or whatever it was—that helped Gregory get from one day to the next. It's a funny thing, but Carla's contempt for me, her anger, didn't hurt as much. I thought of Gregory watching Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in
That Hamilton Woman.
That's what was playing the night I saw Carla.

“Just let yourself get pulled in,” Gregory said when we slunk into our seats. “In the movies, the world is love. It's like being in your mother's womb, and you can see your father—his shadow— as he comes into the room, and you know your mother is glad to see him.”

It was a pretty weird thing to say to me at the time, but somehow it worked. I felt almost like myself again.

 

W. S. Merwin was a well-known poet, for what that's worth in America, which means he still must feel pretty lonely—an ant
crawling up an American anthill. It can be pretty discouraging. Allen was fond of quoting Shelley about how poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I was discovering, however, that poets could be a pretty resentful bunch, possessors of bad attitudes. “Heap Big Jackasses,” Billy Jr. had said about the poets who came and went through the Jack Kerouac School. The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty, just like anybody else. And even when you think they should be sticking together, they stick out like a bunch of sore thumbs in the eye of the great American night. Geniuses and artists banding together—that was the idea behind the Kerouac School, though Allen was now starting to get a lot of criticism from the poets more acceptable to the academy, Merwin being one of them. Some said Allen was just using Naropa to find jobs for his friends. “What's wrong with that?” Allen cried out when he heard that the National Endowment for the Arts had refused his application for money for the Kerouac School. “Do they want to punish me because my friends happen to be some of the greatest writers and poets of the twentieth century?” Allen seemed really perplexed. I couldn't tell if he was asking me or telling me.

I tried to cheer him up with a Sam Goldwyn story that I had read about in Oscar Levant's autobiography,
Memoirs of an Amnesiac,
a book that Jack Kerouac had loved, all about Levant's famous breakdowns and his legendary nicotine habit and coffee drinking (up to fifty cups a day, like Voltaire). He was an addict of everything. “I'm going to hold my hand over my heart,” Kerouac used to say, “like Oscar Levant faking a heart attack.” The story was that lawyers hired by Sam Goldwyn told him that he couldn't keep hiring his relatives for high positions at MGM because he would be accused of nepotism. “You mean they have a word for that?” Goldwyn had asked, incredulously.

Allen was in no mood for jokes. I'm not sure he even got it, any more than Sam Goldwyn had. All I knew was that this business with Rinpoche and W. S. Merwin had something to do with sex.

46. Allen's Secret

People wondered about Trungpa's love life. Allen said you had to do what the teacher told you. That was part of crazy wisdom. He said that you had to trust the teaching.

Merwin had a beautiful girlfriend. The previous summer they had gone on a retreat with Rinpoche and other Buddhist practitioners. Merwin had requested permission to attend Rinpoche's seminary, a kind of sleep-away camp for his most advanced students. Besides Allen and Peter, Merwin was the only other poet to have attended one of Rinpoche's seminaries. Merwin had been to Naropa before, as Allen's guest, but he was totally unfamiliar with Buddhist teachers, and his Hawaiian girlfriend, a woman named Dana Naone, knew even less. Trungpa evaluated applications to his seminaries like a college admissions officer. He apparently took great pleasure in turning people down. But Merwin's application was approved, and for a $550 tuition fee he was invited to join the seminary, which would gather at a remote ski lodge in the Colorado Rockies.

Something apparently had happened between Merwin and Rinpoche at that retreat. Something had also happened between Dana Naone and Rinpoche. But what? Some people said that Rinpoche had wanted Merwin and his girlfriend to take off their clothes. One friend of Merwin's said it was like Kristallnacht. He said there was a lot of yelling and broken glass. He said it had nothing to do with crazy wisdom or the teachings, just that Rinpoche was just crazy and drunk with power. I heard that a lot when I came back to Naropa for the spring semester of 1977.

 

It was as if a key had been turned and a door was opened, through which a lot of Allen's enemies now felt free to walk. I came to the Kerouac School unconvinced that Allen could do any wrong. I didn't think much about Rinpoche. He just seemed like the incomprehensible, spooky father of a girl you really liked. But I was starting to think there must be something powerful about what he was talking about, because a lot of powerful, strong-willed personalities were responding to it. They were hanging on his every whispered word, his enigmatic talks, his chronic lateness, his air of gentle menace.

“Here's the ball game,” Gregory said to me one night in the Boulderado Hotel, waiting for Poppy to come to him after earning some money in the big double rooms off the second floor. “Allen's like Jack. They need teachers. They don't think they've got the goods. Jack needed Neal. He said, ‘Here's my teacher.' Jack's first religious instruction—it came from Neal, not the nuns of Lowell,” Gregory said. “Ginzy needed a teacher, too,” Gregory explained. “He'd spent his life rebelling against authority, but secretly Allen admired his professors at Columbia. He could have had that kind of life. Instead, he found something to follow both in Rinpoche and Neal Cassady. Rinpoche is something of an intellectual, with the soul of a voyeur, and Neal? Neal was an exhibitionist with an insatiable thirst for knowledge—and words.” And for Allen and Jack both, Neal's prison-yard torso, his muscles bulging out of rolled- up sleeves, didn't hamper their adoration.

Allen had often mentioned Neal as a kind of teacher to him and to Kerouac. Allen said that Kerouac had once received a letter from Neal about a football game that turned into a letter about his life in Denver. It had thirty, maybe forty thousand words in it. Allen said it became a sacred document to Jack. It was almost as if that letter freed Kerouac to write his great works. It gave him the gift of Neal's style—his relentless, fascinating jabber.

I didn't really understand Neal Cassady. In fact, I found him a little scary, the idea of him, anyway. He reminded me of Jimmy
Gordon, a high school kid who let his girlfriend play with my hair during assembly, who couldn't wait to drop out of school. Jimmy and I were in general math class together, that is, eighth grade math but in high school. I was pretty stupid about numbers. Jimmy was so much older than the rest of us, on account of his being left back so much, that he actually had a job, with benefits, in the ninth grade. And he stole cars, like Neal. I figured that I would have been afraid of Neal Cassady. But Allen and Jack were in love with him.

The end of Neal's life sounded pathetic. He took a lot of psychedelic drugs and drove Ken Kesey's bus, hanging out with hippies half his age. He lifted weights. He tried to talk up his legend, while Kerouac, the artist, ran away from his. Neal had had a kind of scandalous love life. One of his wives was only fifteen years old. The Beats, my teachers, had learned to live with some very complicated romantic situations. Rinpoche's court, for example. This idea of being a courtier in the kingdom of Shambhala was not a problem for Allen, or for Anne.

Rinpoche didn't make any bones about the fact that he wasn't a monk anymore. He had a wife and a couple of young kids, three sons, in fact. Rinpoche's wife, Diana Pybus, was the first woman from America ever to attend the famous Spanish riding school of Vienna. Rinpoche was once warned by one of his teachers about exceeding the limits of familiarity with Occidentals. But that was a long time ago.

Rinpoche and Diana lived in their beautiful mansion on a hill in Boulder, “the wedding cake house.” It had a lot of rooms. I should know. I had to vacuum them all, as part of my job as Allen's assistant at the Kerouac School. He also had a home in Nova Scotia, and property elsewhere in Colorado. The Vadjra guards took care of his every need. I started to think that it must be good to be reincarnated.

Allen believed that I was making a big mistake in not availing myself of the teachings. He thought I should try to meditate, and learn about the Four Noble Truths. Allen had even put the Four Noble Truths to music. He'd get his audiences to sing along with
him: “Born in this world, you've got to suffer. You die when you die, die when you die.” And so on. It was catchy and upsetting at the same time.

In the weeks following what was becoming known as “the Merwin incident,” the Kerouac School was in an anxious state. Mike Brownstein and Anne Waldman tried to deal with it by first asking Tom Clark what he thought he'd accomplish by publishing a story about something outsiders could never hope to understand. But the horse was not only out of the barn, it was off and running, setting records at Churchill Downs. And the barn? The barn was on fire. Something had to be done. While no one knew exactly what had happened to Merwin and Dana on that retreat, the inter- mezzo wasn't pretty.

Allen had other troubles. By now he and Peter had moved from the apartment complex on Broadway to an old wooden house on Mapleton. But if that move had been intended to give Peter more of a gemütlich sense of family, it didn't work. Allen's life companion of twenty years had met a woman. Peter Orlovsky was in love.

 

Juanita Lieberman arrived at the Kerouac School during one of the registration periods for the spring semester. She was painfully shy. I was meeting prospective applicants for the next summer session at Naropa. Peter's class was still mentioned in the catalogue, even though, after his crash course in cunnilingus and strawberry jam, his class had been canceled. Nonetheless, Juanita expressed an interest in it.

She was the daughter of a Park Avenue psychiatrist. She was plainly—almost shabbily—dressed, wearing a torn green sweater, dungarees that came down only to her ankles, and old tennis shoes. Her appearance made no secret of the fact that she hated makeup and wasn't dressing for the pleasure of men. She had a sad face. It was always a little red, as if she had just been crying. She looked like she was suffering from some invincible melancholy. I waved Peter over and introduced them.

I left the two of them alone in the hallway of Sacred Heart, the parochial school where the Naropa registrations always took place. That was the whole story. That evening, during Allen's poetry reading welcoming the new inmates to Naropa, I saw Juanita napping on Peter's shoulder. Like two bedraggled immigrants staring into the sea, Peter and Juanita sat there oblivious to everything. Juanita didn't even seem interested in the other writers who had come to see Allen, even the presence of Ken Kesey, who had driven out from Oregon with his friend Ken Babbs in a big Cadillac to visit a woman named Felice Duncan, with whom Kesey was having a “same time, next year” love affair that had been going on for twenty years.

As soon as Kesey arrived at Allen's house on Mapleton, he went into the bathroom. We all just sat there and listened to him pee; it took forever. Then someone broke the silence by saying that Kesey urinated with a sense of eternity, like a sailor.

Felice lived in Boulder and had become a Trungpa student. At first, I felt badly for her. I thought she lived for these visits from Kesey. They were both big, tall as trees, powerfully built—a good- looking couple. Kesey made Felice Duncan wait a long time for their night together, but she never griped about it. She waited for her lover with all the forbearance you see on those Mexicans waiting for a bus in Los Angeles, with the patience of saints. I wondered if Felice dreamed about Kesey, satisfied with not going to the bottom of life with him. Well, I guess life sometimes throws you off the path, and you just have to change your plans.

Gregory was right again, the disgraced Gregory. “You have to hurry—death is chasing you and it's closer than you think. There's a lot to do in a short time.” So I didn't blame either Felice or Juanita. They had all those noises inside them, too.

 

Peter was practically living with Juanita by the end of the first week of classes. Was Allen going to have to support Peter and Juanita, and maybe a baby? First he had to worry about losing the Kerouac School, and now Peter. What about their pact, the one they had made to look
after each other, even in paradise? I guess Peter must have decided that paradise will have to wait, while he searched for it on earth. Of course, Peter never had any intention of leaving Allen—it would have to be the three of them, or the four of them. I know that Allen didn't like to go to bed alone, and Peter was beginning to spend less and less time at home and more and more time sleeping with Juanita and going out with her friends. When you saw them all together, Peter looked like Hercules attended by the maidens.

I would have done almost anything to please Allen. I had arrived at the Jack Kerouac School wanting to learn how I could become Allen Ginsberg; but I ended up wanting to take care of him. We hardly spoke about not going to bed together. Early on, when I'd had my chance, I always left. I always walked home in the evening, wondering what Allen was thinking after I'd left him alone. I had seen the poems he was writing now, the things he was confiding in his journals, his fears about Peter leaving him, about getting older, about not being attractive. Relying on his fame to take boys to bed. I didn't want him to take my refusals as some form of rejection. It was like a wound we had to keep dressing every time I said no.

One night after Allen asked me to stay, he started to cry. He seemed lost in his private darkness. The big, two-bedroom house was empty except for the two of us.

Allen was already in bed when he called out to me to come in and sit on the bed and talk. He reached out and hooked his fingers through one of the empty belt loops on my pants and pulled me closer to him. He kissed me on the mouth. I gently pushed him back on the bed and tried to say something sweet, something to comfort him. At the time, it felt like the end of the world, as if we were the only two people left, with no one else to confide in. All of his fame seemed to disappear for me inside his own unhappiness.

A time comes when you are just alone. No wonder it had been hard for Allen to do what Rinpoche asked—shave off that beard, stop wearing black, buy white shirts and a tie, go on retreat, and just be the Allen who takes out the garbage. At moments like this, I'm sure he sought comfort in retracing his steps as a great man in the world,
returning to those moments when he was more certain of who he was and what the world expected of him. Peter's taking up with Juanita, and my rejection of Allen, must have left him feeling like someone fated to go back over his life, again and again, in the lonesome dark.

I kissed Allen's hand and let it go.