When I Was Cool (6 page)

5. Notorious

I holed up in my apartment for a few days after that, embarrassed that I was so inadequate to the job of looking after Billy. Then Allen called and, in a husky voice, asked me to drop by the apartment.

I stopped by around eight
P.M
. and found Allen propped up in bed with a bad cold and a fever. Nonetheless, he was going over some work and he wanted my help. With his shirt off and with his beard, which Allen grew back whenever Rinpoche left town, he looked like some Western desperado holed up in a barn. I could hear the big clock on the mantelpiece downstairs ticking off the time. When we weren't talking, each ticking of the clock sounded like a gong.

I noticed a sponge and a big bucket of water beside the bed, which Peter was using to bring Allen's fever down. For the first time, Allen reminded me of his own poetry—his sad poems about
dressing his sick father, the “don't grow old” poems. Maybe it was the wrong time to ask. I'm sure it was. But when you're young, you're either too shy to ask any questions or you pick the wrong time to ask them.

I thought the best time to ask questions of the Beats was while I was still a somewhat fresh recruit. I remember my father telling me not to be shy about asking questions. “They're supposed to be your teachers,” he said.

I had mostly illusions about the Beats when I first arrived at the Kerouac School, but they were beginning to fall away, especially when I considered the miserable condition that Billy was in. Now, I wondered, what gave them the confidence, if not the right, to stand up there and talk to us? They were still at it, after all these years, trying to explain the world: first to each other, then to the world, and now to us. And so I did it. I asked Allen how he got famous.

Allen put down his papers and looked at me. Always the teacher, he launched into a tale he must have told countless times, but one that he still loved telling.

 

It was an irony, I learned, that Allen Ginsberg became America's most notorious poet while he was out of the country, in the mid-1950s, visiting Burroughs in Tangier, traveling with Peter on very little money. That's when he got the word that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the manager of the City Lights Bookstore, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested for selling
Howl and Other Poems
to a pair of undercover cops in plainclothes.

Allen told me that he had been ecstatic about the publication of
Howl
and he made a list of people to send copies to.

“Do you still have the list?” I asked.

“It was all in my head,” he answered listlessly, blowing his nose. “The law is a dangerous thing,” he continued. “I was using the U.S. mail to ‘promote obscenity,'” he said, raising his finger in the air. Allen had sent copies to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden; Ezra Pound even got one at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, special delivery. So
did Charlie Chaplin and his then-wife Oona, in Switzerland. Even Marlon Brando.

“The ACLU saw an opportunity to make a strong case for the first amendment,” Allen explained. “They thought they could strike a blow for free speech.”

All of a sudden, it turned out, Ferlinghetti had retained a team of topnotch lawyers. The obscenity trial began in the summer of 1957. Allen said he didn't think he had a chance; after all, the trial judge was well known as a Sunday school Bible teacher. I wondered if Allen feared that they would never let him back into America. He stayed away from the trial. “Peter and I traveled around Europe,” he said, “sleeping on park benches.”

Peter came upstairs and plunged both hands in the bucket, squeezing out the sponge. He took the sponge and mopped Allen's brow while Allen continued with his story. Peter was completely absorbed with his work of giving Allen a sponge bath, as if I weren't even in the room. I noticed that Peter's usual pink complexion, seen most often on the mountain men who came down into the city after bathing in mountain streams, took on a bilious hue in Allen's sickroom.

“We went by train with our knapsacks, making our way through Europe. We weren't about to give that up to come home for an obscenity trial, not with all the culture of Europe laid out in front of us.” Peter wrung out his sponge and started over.

“We were meeting people like Mary McCarthy and Peggy Guggenheim. I read ‘Howl' to Caresse Crosby in Alan Ansen's living room in Venice,” he said, referring to the widow of Harry Crosby, the famous expatriate and founder of Black Sun Press who had committed suicide in a hotel on Central Park South.

“We visited Dostoyevksy's house. We visited Shelley's grave—”

“Remember when you kissed Shelley's grave and took a clover from it?” Peter interrupted. “And when we went to the Vatican, Allen got mad because there were fig leaves on all the statues!” Peter shouted in that loud voice of his, as if everyone in the room were hard of hearing.

Allen explained how a coterie of literary experts were called to testify in support of “Howl.” He had the rare privilege of having his poem called great and important as part of the court record (most of the poets I knew would have died for that, and would probably die from the lack of it). It started to sound to me like the arrest and trial were the best thing that could have happened to Allen and the Beats. It made them famous.

“What was the verdict?” I asked Allen.

Both men turned toward me. “Not guilty!” they shouted, as Peter squeezed the sponge over my head.

It occurred to me that if the
Howl
obscenity trial had occurred today instead of in 1957, Allen wouldn't have missed it for the world.

 

Around the same time as the
Howl
trial,
On the Road
was published. But Jack Kerouac would never recover from that joyful event. Unlike Allen, fame didn't sit well on Kerouac; ultimately, he'd have almost no time to get used to it.

Allen once said that “everything in life is timing,” and that was certainly true of the publication of
On the Road.
Had the novel been published six years earlier, when it was first written, it might have gone unnoticed, but the obscenity trial for
Howl
had put a spotlight on the Beats. Still, no one could have predicted the kind of success
On the Road
had in the fall of 1957—certainly not Jack. “It just exploded—it was the big one. No one knew where it would lead, or that it would lead to Jack just wanting to be left alone,” Allen explained. “The story—and it's true—is a legend now, about how he got off the bus at the Greyhound station in New York, walked along Broadway till he got to Sixty-sixth Street, and bought a copy of the
New York Times.
There he saw a review of
On the Road.
I'm sure it had to have blown his mind. I'm sure he thought, ‘What will become of me?' At the same time, it must have been so exciting. The reviewer compared it to
The Sun Also Rises,
the way Hemingway's novel gave voice to the Lost Generation. Jack said he
felt paralyzed reading the review. The phone didn't stop ringing for years.”

Allen explained how the novel was on the best-seller list for eleven weeks; how Warner Bros. bought the film rights for $110,000, how Marlon Brando wanted to play Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady); how Jack was overwhelmed with offers to write for
Playboy
and
Esquire,
to read at the Village Vanguard, to appear on
The Steve Allen Show.
Kerouac's dark, handsome face became the face of the Beat generation; men everywhere wanted to fight him or to
be
him, and women wanted to fuck him. It was too much, and Kerouac responded by going on a five-week bender. It didn't help that all his buddies were away, leaving him to face fame alone: Peter and Allen in Europe, Burroughs in Tangier, Neal Cassady somewhere in California.

Burroughs later wrote about his old friend that “Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis…[but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he's written, and not his life. We will all die and the stars will go out one after another…”

Then it was Bill's turn. Talk about the criminal boredom of men. Burroughs tried working as a private detective, a bartender, a bug exterminator, and, when all that failed, a criminal.
Naked Lunch
had begun as a series of sketches acted out by Jack and Allen. They used daggers brought back from Morocco and assumed different identities. After City Lights declined to publish
Naked Lunch,
Allen launched a campaign to get it published in the little magazines and periodicals where he had some pull. A few of the sketches thus made it into print, one in the final issue of the
Black Mountain Review
in 1957; the following year,
The Chicago Review
published nine pages (a columnist writing in the
Chicago Daily News
described the nine pages as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I've seen publicly circulated”). University of Chicago officials then refused to publish any more of the novel, which caused the staff of the
Review
to resign and start up their own publication, called
Big Table.
Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso appeared at a benefit
reading to raise money for the new publication so that it could publish the suppressed pages of
Naked Lunch.
The first issue came out in March of 1959, with ten episodes from the novel, and it was immediately seized by the post office of Chicago as obscene material.

However, a year later, a Chicago judge absolved the novel of its obscenity charge, saying that it was “not akin to lustful thoughts.” The judge, incidentally, was Julius J. Hoffman, who ten years later would preside over the trial of the Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, et al.), charged with inciting to riot at the Democratic Party Convention of 1968 in Chicago. At that trial, Allen Ginsberg infuriated Judge Hoffman with his testimony and by chanting on behalf of his friends.

The publisher of the Paris-based Olympia Press (who had published Henry Miller) had originally turned down
Naked Lunch,
but he changed his mind as a result of the publicity and offered Burroughs a contract for $800, and gave Burroughs ten days to hand in a publishable manuscript. He did.

Burroughs later said that the pressure of having to pull the manuscript together in ten days was just what he needed, but when the galleys came back to him in no particular order, Burroughs decided to stick with that. It was as if he had thrown the manuscript up into the air, gathered the pages together, and agreed to have it published that way.

When it finally came out from Olympia Press, in 1959, it didn't get one review. Burroughs had to make up his own review, with an invented critic: “‘The book grabs you by the throat,' says L. Marland, distinguished critic, ‘it leaps in bed with you and performs unmentionable acts…this book is a must for anyone who would understand the sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age.'”

In the early sixties, Barney Rosset, the pugilistic publisher of Grove Press and the
Evergreen Review,
was fighting fourteen censorship trials over Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer.
Once those trials were settled, Rosset was able to republish
Naked Lunch,
in 1962. Writers like Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller championed the novel, and it was soon accorded a place in the
literary pantheon as a kind of grotesque masterpiece. The book— a phantasmagoria of cannibalism, homosexual violence, graphic hangings, and ejaculations—was banned one more time, in Boston, and it reached the Massachusetts Superior Court, where a majority of the justices ruled that
Naked Lunch
was not obscene. It was the last literary work to be suppressed by the U.S. government or any government office.

As Allen would later tell us in class, describing the effect of
Naked Lunch
on the world of the 1960s, “the word had been liberated.” For Allen, it was more important than D-Day.

As for me, I never could read
Naked Lunch.
I didn't like reading about ejaculations. It wasn't that I was a prude, but I preferred Flaubert's
A Sentimental Education
; that was the dirty secret I carried around with me at the Kerouac School. I preferred Flaubert to flagellation. And you know what? So did Bill Burroughs.

I would soon discover that the book Burroughs slept with under his pillow at night was Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage.
Burroughs had a streak of gentility, of elegance even, belied by his scorched-earth prose. It was as if Burroughs's novels simply turned the body inside out, so that the cancer was made visible. But he read Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington for pleasure.

6. Ginsberg Saves His Beard

Within a few weeks Allen had regrown his beard. He kept it more closely cropped, but he was beginning to look like a member of the Russian mafia.

Rinpoche was coming over. He lived in a beautiful Georgian-style mansion that his followers called the Wedding Cake House.

A gray Mercedes pulled up outside Allen and Peter's apartment.
The Vadjra guards were the first to leave the car. They were the young security officers who protected Rinpoche wherever he went. Dressed in identical-looking black suits and carrying walkie-talkies, the Vadjra guards were students of Rinpoche's who were given some training in martial arts and meditation to aid in their awareness of all potential situations.

They opened the door for Rinpoche and he moved slowly out of the backseat of the car. They accompanied him into the apartment. Peter had cleaned house like a demon. He even cleaned the sidewalk in front of the house with a toothbrush. Allen had taken a bath and a shower, and he was wearing his best suit and the pin he was given upon his induction into the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. It was like inspection at military school. Allen made sure my shoes were polished and that I had worn my seersucker suit. Peter was wearing sandals, but with socks. He was making tea.

Rinpoche was coming for one of his poetry lessons, which Allen gave him from time to time. They wrote three-line poems together: Ground. Path. Fruition. One idea embodied in each line. Allen's latest City Lights book was dedicated “to Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche Poet”: “Guru Death your words are true / Teacher Death I do thank you / for inspiring me to sing this Blues.”

Rinpoche was a practitioner of what he called “crazy wisdom.” Allen loved that phrase. It seemed to mean that Rinpoche could do whatever he wanted, and his students would study it and try to learn a lesson from it.

“I still think you're too attached to your beard,” Trungpa told Allen as soon as he arrived. “I think you should go upstairs and cut it off again.”

Allen looked unhappy. “But I don't want to cut it off.” He stamped his feet like a little boy. “I just grew it baaaaaack.” He even said “whaaaaa,” imitating a baby crying. But he went upstairs anyway to shave it off.

I was left on the couch in my seersucker suit. Peter was sitting
with Rinpoche, and the Vadjra guards were situated throughout the house, as if the president were upstairs taking a leak. Peter tried making small talk with the leader of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

“I haven't been with a woman in thirty years,” Peter said. “That's a long time not to taste pussy, don't you think, Rinpoche?”

“Too long,” Rinpoche said.

I couldn't tell if Peter was a genius or a complete idiot. When I saw the movie
Being There
with Peter Sellers, I thought that Jerzy Kosinski must have known Peter Orlovsky. Peter's honesty was painful to watch, like someone trying to walk after a stroke.

I suddenly remembered that
Head of the Poet Peter Orlovsky
was the name of Robert LaVigne's painting that Allen had seen before meeting Peter in Foster's Cafeteria in San Francisco so many years ago. LaVigne had painted Peter's giant head on a canvas four feet by six feet. Peter, from a Russian family, looked a lot like Sergei Essenin, the poet who married Isadora Duncan and who had once prowled the halls of the Plaza Hotel, naked, wielding a pistol. Essenin was one of Allen's heroes; he kept a tape recording of Essenin declaring his poetry to a Russian throng in the 1920s. Whenever Allen played it, he cried. Essenin slit his wrists in a hotel room and wrote his last poem in his own blood. Allen once recited that poem to me, his eyes filling up with tears: “In this life, there's nothing new in dying, / But nor, of course, is living any newer.” He said the poem is called “Goodbye, My Friend, Goodbye.” I thought at the time that you would really have to be a serious poet—if not a great one—to give a title to a poem after you had slit your wrists.

Allen would play the tape on an old reel-to-reel, looking over at Peter sitting up straight in his chair, hands splayed out on his thighs, like he was posing for another portrait or had become a piece of Russian sculpture. Allen would gaze at Peter's beautiful Russian head and hair as if Essenin himself were in the room with him.

Allen and Peter had an unusual relationship. They had taken a
vow, a kind of marriage vow, but Allen seemed to have hundreds of lovers, young men from the streets of Boulder and Naropa students, and Peter wanted to have a family. “But,” Allen later told me, “I'd have to support Peter, his wife, and a baby. I'm too old for that. At the same time,” Allen said, “Peter can't live on his own, he doesn't know how.”

I don't think anyone in the Orlovsky family was ready to live on his own. Allen showed me a photograph he had taken of all the Orlovskys seated together on a bed. Allen was a wonderful photographer; his Leica, which he kept in an old-fashioned brown leather case, was never far from his hand or eye. When Peter visited his family some years earlier, Allen took their picture.

It was a terrifying sight, like a picture out of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from Underground.
Peter's mother, Katherine Orlovsky, sits on the rumpled bed in a housecoat, barefoot, completely deaf from a botched mastoid operation, the nerves of her face severely damaged, looking like Charles Laughton. Peter's brother Lafcadio, in slippered feet, sits next to shirtless Peter, Lafcadio's hand touching him tenderly around the neck. Katherine holds Lafcadio's hand, and Lafcadio's half sister, Marie, stares sullenly at the camera, barefoot in a polyester dress. Marie had once lived with Allen and Peter for a time on the Lower East Side. She had to quit natal nursing school because she started hearing voices. “The voices traded in filthy gossip,” Allen said. “She would roar things at people from the window of the apartment.” The Orlovskys all lived together on a lonely road somewhere on Long Island, cashing their various disability checks, spending a small fortune in taxicab fare to do their errands and to go to the supermarket, which they did all together, never wanting to be separated. I remember Peter looking over our shoulders at the picture, beaming with pride at his family. He told me that another brother, Julius, lived in a group home with patients from the state hospital at Binghamton. “It's run by a nice woman and her husband,” Peter said. “Mr. and Mrs. Finch. Like the bird, only they have a large family, not of birds, of patients, and my brother is one of them.”

Now, sitting in Allen's living room across from Rinpoche, Peter struck me more and more like John Clare, the nineteenth-century English poet who loved nature and a girl named Mary, slept outdoors, and always ran away from the madhouse to return to his rural English village. Clare suffered from a delusion that he was Lord Byron. His poems are full of misspellings, like Peter's, he spent time in the madhouse, like Peter, and he loved nature, like Peter. And, like Peter, he “kept his spirit with the free.” Peter was luckier than John Clare, though—Peter had Allen. Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in the asylum, and he continued to write about nature and his village, Helpston, as if he still lived there. Like John Clare, Peter too was reckless with his poems. “It would be hard,” Allen said, “to rescue Peter's poems from all the places they might be—guitar cases, the backseat of cars, old notebooks. It's time to preserve Peter's poems,” Allen said with great tenderness, as if to say, “I've preserved Peter all these years, why not his poems?”

Did Allen know that Peter liked talking to me about his affection for “girls,” as he called them? Peter often said he wanted to get married. He said he had always wanted to, but that he took a vow with Allen and could never leave him. Peter said that in the beginning he was simply too shy to tell Allen that he liked girls and wanted to have a family of his own. He was getting over his shyness now, he told me.

 

A lull fell over the conversation. Then Peter asked whether or not Rinpoche was going to come to the first Naropa dance, and if he was going to bless the first Naropa class. He then pointed to me.

“That's Sam Kashner,” Peter said. “He's our first Naropa poetry student. Allen says he writes good poetry but no one can understand it. I like to write simple poems. Poems about compost heaps, and trying to remember what pussy tastes like. Sam doesn't write poetry about that.”

Rinpoche nodded and smiled.

Allen was taking forever shaving off his beard. It was a shock to see him so obedient. They had known each other for about five years, Allen and Trungpa. Trungpa liked to tell the story of Allen “stealing” his taxicab in front of town hall; Allen had just wanted to get his father, who was sick, off the street and back into bed.

At last, Allen emerged clean-shaven, like the first day I saw him several weeks earlier. I noticed he had cut himself pretty badly on one side of his face. It made me mad at Trungpa. Rinpoche, I think, loved Allen, but I would later conclude that he wanted some of Allen's fame and some of the same devotion that people felt for Ginsberg. Trungpa might be enlightened, but I came to believe that he also harbored some old-fashioned, Western-style jealousy. He was pushing Allen to improvise most of his poems and to let go hippies of his ego. He came up with a phrase he liked to use on Allen and on his friends: “Ginsberg resentment.” He said that all American had it. He warned Allen to prepare himself for death.

I came to Naropa because I wanted to meet the writer who, in the 1950s, told off America, who said sarcastically that his mental health depended on
Time
magazine. I fell in love with “Ginsberg resentment”—the aggression and anger in Allen's poetry was a beacon to my aggrieved teenage life. I carried those City Lights books to school in my pants pocket. My heart was in my pocket, right next to
Howl and Other Poems.

But it was Allen Ginsberg made gentle—pacified by Rinpoche, sent on retreats where he had to sit and meditate all day and couldn't write—that I found waiting for me at Naropa. The CIA-mafia-FBI paranoia of the Chicago Seven Trial now seemed to be a kind of dream. Had I made it up in junior high school just to express my own weird angers, to feel better about my life?

After the Vadjra guards had cleared the room and helped Rinpoche out of his chair and down the stairs, Allen kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie. I went upstairs to bring down some of the work we had put away for Rinpoche's visit. I went into the bathroom to tidy up—it was one of my jobs.

A cigar box peered out at me from a stack of towels. I lifted up the striped towels and reached for the box. I opened it. It was full of what looked like curly iron filings, like that game where you dragged the filings with a magnet along the face of a man to give him a beard. That was it. These were the hairs from Allen Ginsberg's famous beard. The beard that his ego was too attached to, according to Rinpoche. I put the box back between the beach towels.

When I came back downstairs Allen looked at me, as if he knew I had found the box. “No one will recognize me without the beard,” he complained. “I'll be the most famous, unknown poet in America. No one will come to the Jack Kerouac School if they don't believe I'm here.”

“I believe you're here,” Peter said.

“Me, too,” I said. “But I still like ‘Ginsberg resentment.' That's why I came here.” Allen smiled. I think it was good for his ego to hear that.

 

If Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Cassady were the core group of the Beats, added to that were two muses, Orlovsky and Herbert Huncke. Some people thought that it was Herbert Huncke who had first introduced the word “beat,” or the idea of it, anyway. Huncke was a writer, but first and foremost he was a thief and a junkie. His character appears in Kerouac's first novel,
The Town and the City,
as well as
On the Road
; there are glimpses of him in Burroughs's early dime novel,
Junky,
which he published under the
nom de needle
William Lee (a book that Allen always loved for its “just the facts, ma'am”–style of storytelling; he called it a “dry classic”). Ginsberg wrote about Huncke, too, who walks on the snow-bank docks with his shoes full of blood in the middle of “Howl.” Kerouac got a lot of stories from Huncke and thought he was a great, natural storyteller.

Later, when I had the occasion to meet him through Allen, I thought Huncke was scary. He appeared in Allen's apartment one
night, hunched over the kitchen table, and with his death's head he looked like Yorick holding out his own skull and talking to it. He kept talking about how the law is a dangerous thing, how he hated honest work, how honest work is for suckers. What he really was, though, was a sucker for crime. He seemed to love the idea that he was a criminal, or that people thought of him as one. Whenever Allen spoke of him, it was with veneration, the way women in a small Irish town talk about the parish priest. Huncke said this, Huncke once did that. He seemed like the kind of person who could have murdered someone once, somewhere. Huncke seemed to believe that more people would go into crime as a profession if it weren't for the risks involved. The
idea
of Herbert Huncke might have been exciting, but Huncke himself scared me.

I don't think Huncke really liked Allen, and Allen's veneration for Herbert made me wonder about his judgment. Whenever Allen left the room, Huncke seemed to attack his old friend, although Ginsberg had often given him money and had looked after him. Huncke complained that “life's been hard for all of Allen's friends, but not for Allen.” He said that Allen had been living off his friends, not with money but by
living off their lives.
He said, “Allen's a big talker, but he's really timid, really careful. That's why he's a big deal now, and here we are standing with our hands out—it's a nice little gimmick.”