When I Was Cool (10 page)

13. Last Gasp &/Or Gasm Sock Hop

I had managed to survive the summer session at Naropa and the fall term was just around the corner. On August 11, there were at least five hundred people in the shrine room the night of the Naropa sock hop, to inaugurate the Jack Kerouac School. Allen, Burroughs, and Anne had held a conclave to come up with the perfect name for the event: they emerged with “Last Gasp &/Or Gasm Inaugural Night.” It was printed on posters and people from town were invited to come—they needed more bodies in the room.

Large red banners featuring the karmic wheel hung from the rafters. Charlie's combo stood on a makeshift stage. “Don't get up, gentleman, I'm just passing through,” Burroughs told Allen and me as we sat on the edge of the small stage waiting for Rinpoche to arrive so the festivities could begin. That night, the Jack Kerouac School would finally come to life as a full partner of the Naropa Institute. The core faculty would be presented to the rest of the school: Allen, Bill, Gregory, Anne, and the young poets she had brought from New York: Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, and Dick Gallup, who formed what Allen called the Second Generation New York School.

All the teachers and students stood at attention and bowed from the waist as Rinpoche entered the room. He was dressed like a colonial governor, in khaki pants and a rich, cream-colored silk shirt with epaulets. As usual, he was holding a fan, which he furled and unfurled in the overheated shrine room.

“Ladies and gentlemen”—his voice a hoarse whisper into the microphone held by one of the Vadjra guards—“welcome to
Naropa. I hope you will partake of each other's wisdom, of the golden sun of dharma. Welcome to the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics.” I noticed he'd forgotten “Disembodied”; I wondered if he did it on purpose. (Peter said Rinpoche was enlightened and didn't fear death.) “I will turn the festivities over to Allen.”

Allen was handed the microphone and he introduced Anne Waldman, who looked very sexy; she had so many bracelets going up her arm that she looked like that Man Ray photograph of Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress who loved poets and lived in the 1920s and who took black lovers. I used to study her photograph. I fell in love with her picture. But Anne, like Nancy Cunard's photograph, was unapproachable. She seemed to inhabit a world I knew only from the outside, the glass between us thick and impenetrable.

Allen introduced the other teachers. William Burroughs stepped from the darkness into a spotlight, leaning with both hands on his cane as if he were going to break into “Putting on the Ritz.” The younger poets, Allen's “second generation,” made the first-generation Beat poets look like chaperones. It reminded me of the sock hop scene in
Bye Bye Birdie.

“I want you all to meet the first graduating class of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,” Allen announced. All of a sudden, the spotlight Burroughs had been standing in seemed to swallow me up, blinding me. I felt the heat of it on my face. I stepped back to look at my fellow poets, the other students, Allen's army of apprentices. I saw nothing. No one. The room was strangely quiet. Charlie Haden's bass played a kind of funereal chord. I was alone. I was it. Naropa had dozens of students of dance, music, meditation, calligraphy, religion, but the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics had no student body except for mine, the one that stood trembling in the glare of the spotlight.

Anne thought of rescuing me from my embarrassment, but she only made it worse. “Who would like to dance with the Jack Kerouac School's first student?” she asked. For a moment I felt I was in junior high, terrified of being picked last for the team. And then another thought crossed my mind: if I was the only poetics
student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, how could this institution survive? Would we all go bankrupt, and would I be sent packing back to Merrick? Would Ginsberg, Burroughs, Waldman, Corso & Co. have to fold up their tents and return to the steaming streets of the Lower East Side? I had a feeling they were as desperate to remain in the austere, beautiful foothills of the Rockies as was I.

Mercifully, Barbara Dilley, who headed the dance department at Naropa, crossed the room, snapping her fingers to Charlie's bass beat, high-stepping over to me. She pulled me out of the spotlight and spun me around the dance floor, ending my embarrassment and my end-of-Naropa fantasy. I felt as if I might crack in two from relief and joy. All the other dancers, students, and wallflowers fell in around us. The shrine room suddenly filled up with music, with talk, with real life. Barbara flung me back into the crowd. A woman whose father was the richest man in Boulder, owner of the biggest department store in town, kicked off her shoes and kissed me on the mouth. She was wearing a dress with zebra stripes on it. I lost her when she leaned her head against Charlie's bass so the sound could enter her head even faster. Then the Naropa secretary, a woman named Monica whose husband was not a student of Rinpoche's and who disapproved of Buddhists, came up to tell me something.

“Call your mother. She said to call when you get a chance.”

Call my mother? I couldn't believe it. I guess I should've gotten my phone installed already instead of just relying on Naropa's office phone. Well, she can't ruin my reputation, or so I thought, because I don't have one yet. “Just give her time,” the bluebird of unhappiness whispered in my ear, the one that I seemed to carry on my shoulder. How do you stay alive when you're dancing with Beat poets and your mother calls?

A band of Naropa musicians, Charlie's students really, had nudged their teacher off the stage and took over, playing loud. The shrine room floor, always polished and shiny as a mirror, squeaked with all the dancing and general jumping around. Rinpoche had
long gone but Allen and Peter stayed behind. Allen wasn't a big dancer, not at all, but he liked watching the kids move, and he always found someone to go home with.

I headed for Monica's office to make that call back to Long Island, to reassure my parents that they hadn't made the wrong decision to let me go to Naropa. They didn't quite know what to do—my parents had never really had the chance to go to college. My mother had dropped out of Stern College for Women in New York to go to work during the Second World War after her brothers were drafted, and my father had been working, supporting his brother since the two were orphaned at a pretty young age.

My parents had never tried to stop me from writing poetry; they never really censored my reading, except maybe once, when on a trip to my grandmother's in the Catskills I bought a Signet paperback copy of
Goldfinger,
and my father, after thumbing through the book, decided it “wasn't for me.” I was twelve years old at the time. It was the movie tie-in version of the book, with the woman's body painted gold, wrapped around the front and back covers. Later, at my grandmother's, I saw my father reading the book at the kitchen table; he stayed up half the night finishing it.

My parents secretly liked the fact that I wrote poetry and admired writers more than baseball players. They thought that would mean I would do well in school, but I don't think they counted on my wanting to
be
a poet. Allen Ginsberg was something of a controversial figure in our house. His beard and hippie countenance, his radical politics, some of the obscenity in his poems must've troubled my parents, but when I called home from my first semester at Hamilton College, miserable, homesick, and unable to convince any of my teachers to let me do an independent study on Neal Cassady and his influence on the Beats (“a guy who stole for a living?” my adviser at Hamilton said; “he's just a petty criminal”), I just knew I had to go to Naropa. And my parents, they didn't stop me. They probably had their hearts in their mouths, but they let me go.

I left the dance to find the telephone. My parents were a bit like
Allen's, I thought, as I made my way to the office to call my mother. A quiet, sensitive father, the soul of an artist under his suit jacket and tie; a lively, outspoken mother, a kind of bully of almighty kindness: They drove me crazy but I loved them for their indulgences, now becoming too many to mention.

Outside the shrine room, in the foyer, I ran into Gregory and Calliope, who were sharing a cigarette. Gregory was holding a cat and he waved me over, a conspiratorial look on his face. He had a plan.

“You're not used to money yet, kid, so you don't know the first thing about life. Sit down.” I kept standing.

“Five hundred big ones,” he continued, warming to his theme. “That's what you're worth to me. I'll write you a poem for five hundred big ones.”

I wanted to like Corso. I loved his poems. I loved the fact that he took pity on strays and gathered them up in his arms, that, as allergic as I was, his apartment was full of cats. Gregory wrote about missing his cats: “My water-colored hands are catless now / I am catless near death almost.” He seemed calmer with a cat cradled in his arms. But I saw how he sometimes lashed out, and he wouldn't give up this rant about the five hundred dollars. He certainly didn't try caressing it out of me.

“Look, I'll sell Calliope to you,” he said. “She likes screwing poets. I've made a careful study of this. How much would you pay for her?” Gregory asked me. “Now you might think she'd go to bed with you anytime, but she won't,” Gregory explained. “I made a little study of you, too. I know that Ginzy's set it up so that you can watch me. I'm a great poet, I don't need some kid looking out for me. All you care about is my writing, am I right? Of course I'm right.”

I had to say something. If only because I didn't want Calliope to think I was a wimp, being bullied by Gregory. She did look great, she was sexy, and I didn't want to feel humiliated.

“Why does any of this worry you?” I asked Gregory.

“Worries
you,”
he repeated.

“Worries me?”

“I don't give a shit about you. I don't ask
you
a lot of questions,” Gregory said, moving his jaw up and down like he was gumming a piece of turkey at a mission dinner. “I need five hundred dollars; now what would you require of me for five hundred big ones?” At the word “require,” he made a flamboyant gesture and spun every syllable out, like he was a French nobleman with a handkerchief in his sleeve. Very theatrical.

So I blurted out, “Tell me about Frank O'Hara. Tell me about Kerouac's funeral, Allen said you might tell me. I'll give you five hundred dollars for that!” I couldn't believe what I'd just said. My curiosity was the only thing I could trade with Gregory. I wasn't about to let him sell Calliope to me, as much as I secretly and idiotically hoped she would like the idea.

“You do think things out, don't you?” Gregory asked. “Sit down. You might as well hear this from me. Jack's funeral was a traffic accident.”

I could hear Charlie Haden's deep bass thrumming from the shrine room, and I felt a pang of guilt for not calling my mother back, but I really wanted to hear this.

“There were too many people,” he continued, stroking the cat. “I'd been to a funeral parlor before. I once saw a child's funeral. The tiniest coffin I ever saw. Mrs. Lombardi's son—he was one month old. It was in Rizzo's funeral parlor. I saw it in its coffin. I wrote a poem about it, about its small purplish wrinkled head.”

Corso stopped, took a deep drag off the cigarette Calliope was holding, and scrutinized me. Then he asked for the five hundred dollars.

I didn't have it. How was I going to get five hundred dollars? This man spent three years in prison! But Calliope saved me. (Women I didn't know seemed to rescue me just in the nick of time.)

“Gregory, that's not enough. You're cheating him,” Calliope said, putting out her cigarette in the tiny glass bowl filled with rice
and a stick of incense on a small shrine table in the lobby. She must've thought it was a sand-filled ashtray like the ones in front of hotel elevators.

“Ten black Cadillacs hauled Mrs. Lombardi's month-old son away,” Gregory continued, ignoring Calliope, “to the cemetery. They had a high mass for it.”

I thought it curious that Gregory would tell me that story. He didn't know what an impression his poem “Italian Extravaganza” had made on me. It was just a couple of lines, but I never forgot it. It was obvious now that neither did Gregory. Abandoned, orphaned by mixed-up kid parents, the little coffin was sort of Gregory's childhood—his was over too soon, too.

“I'll tell you about the other thing, after you give me the
moh-
ney,” as he called it, drawing the syllables out. “My life isn't free, it isn't open to the public, you know.”

I had my father's Diner's Club card; my mother made him give it to me for emergencies. This was definitely an emergency.

“Okay, come with me,” I told Gregory and his girlfriend.

The three of us went down the long skinny staircase, leaving Naropa to go outside onto the crowded weekend mall at night. I took them to one of the drive-through banks where I cashed the checks my parents sent me to keep life and limb together while I received my sentimental education from the Beats. Gregory and Calliope played on the grass like a couple of young lovers, though Gregory was old enough to be Calliope's father, maybe even her grandfather.

“Don't give him your money until he tells you,” Calliope said.

“Okay, okay,” said Gregory. “This is the perfect place.” And right there on the grassy patch next to the drive-in bank Corso acted out Jack's funeral, even his thoughts while viewing the casket and talking to Jack's wife.

Gregory Corso could've been a great actor. Al Pacino would make a great Corso. Corso would've made a great Al Pacino. It's no accident that Gregory came into the picture as a writer at the Poets
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's where he met Frank O'Hara and the other poets. He was a kind of protégé of Bunny Lang, the eccentric doyenne of the Poets Theatre, the sun around which all the poets and artists seemed to revolve. O'Hara had written about the three of them—Bunny and Gregory and Frank, in costume, bowing to one another and to the audience. He said they looked like jinxes. Gregory, though older now, still looked like the jinx O'Hara had remembered him to be.