When I Was Cool (13 page)

18. The Lineages

Allen was always creating lineages where none really existed. He had an elaborate system of codifying groups of writers, creating circles within circles, like Dante, with the original Beats at the top in a kind of
Paradiso.
Whenever he was working on his lineages, he reminded me of an obsessed Mormon climbing the branches of his family tree, or a mathematician working out Fermat's theorem on a cocktail napkin. The covers of phone books and stray pieces of paper beside Allen's bed were filled with crossed-out names and names reinstated from exile. The New York School, which was really—let's face it—Frank O'Hara and his friends Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery; the San Francisco Renaissance, which included Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, and Michael McClure; the Black Mountain poets Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Then there were the “mid-American poets”— Allen's “Wichita vortex poets”—comprising Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett, all of whom had known each other as teenagers in Tulsa.

Allen kept another category he called simply “Women”: Diane di Prima (who had been married at one time to Leroi Jones), Alice Notley (Ted Berrigan's wife), and Bobbie Louise Hawkins (who had been married to Robert Creeley, the one-eyed poet who would come to the Jack Kerouac School and try to teach me how to drive).
It occurred to me that even the women Allen bothered to mention in his lineage were the wives and girlfriends of the men poets he knew.

Then there were other categories, like third world (Miguel Algarin and Miguel Piñero of the Nuyorican café), gay and political poets, the meditation practitioners, and the music poets. One thing nearly every category had in common was that Allen had put himself in each one. He had written out his own name in every category, with the exception of the women's section. Allen's name was never crossed out, even in the category of ecological poets. Allen, who threw a temper tantrum when the landlord of the apartment complex had asked us to recycle soda cans. “I can't separate plastic from aluminum,” Allen had shrieked one afternoon. “I can't tell the difference, and besides, I have important work to do!”

Ginsberg was always fighting with his ego. After all, hadn't Allen written once in a poem that he wanted to be the most brilliant man in America? I think he
did
want that. He also wanted to be rid of his ego. But he craved attention. That's also why he had come to Naropa, not just to rest his weary, world-wandering bones but to have students and lovers, in order to feed the lineage. “Meat for the synagogue,” he would say. “The best teaching is done in bed,” Allen was always reminding me.

He wanted to make love to his students, seduce them, and be seduced by them, to whisper Shakespeare and Milton to young men who had already fallen for Allen through his poetry. For Allen, the great teacher was Socrates. Allen used Eros to teach Whitman. What better way to receive knowledge than laying your head on the teacher's belly, like playing a tape to learn a language in your sleep?

At first, Allen's sexual candor scared me. I wasn't a prude. I certainly didn't want to be one. After all, I didn't want to have to disappoint him. I wanted Allen to love me without taking me to bed. I was starting to think that was impossible.

“Would you like to join in the fun?” Allen asked one night before jumping into the hot tub with Peter, both of them already naked.

“I'm here to protect Burroughs,” I said.

“What from?” Peter asked. “He hasn't needed anyone's protection so far.”

“He sure does now,” I said. I don't know why I said it. Maybe I was thinking about myself, or maybe because Burroughs always looked so sad to me. People always thought of him as the toughest
hombre
in literature, the man who saw everything and who sees everything in the future, all of it terrible. I never thought so. I thought Burroughs, Allen, even Corso (liar, poet, thief, and lifelong junkie) all shared a kind of crude tenderness, an almost habitual gentleness. It just wasn't universal. It was limited to their relations with the people they knew, the people they felt “normal” with. Burroughs, with his sad bony face, looked like someone who you would've thought was solely responsible for the atomic bomb. Allen Ginsberg had a heart as a big as a refrigerator.

Then there was Patrick Chandler, a musician who often accompanied Allen on his reading tours. He was a young, longhaired, skinny kid who had followed Allen to Naropa and who had a beautiful girlfriend with a name like a Dylan song—Ruthie. She looked like a gypsy. I hadn't been able to put two words together to talk to her. She never wore shoes, like Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa.
She and Patrick seemed very much in love. Yet Allen seemed to love Patrick.

One night I walked in on Allen without an appointment. I had screwed up my courage, and I was just going to do what the other poets did without thinking: drop in on Allen for a chat and a cup of tea. The apartment was quiet. I wandered over to the corner of the living room where Allen and Peter kept their meditation shrine. A trail of incense still burned from the shrine, with its red cloth, a
zafu
(the square, red-and-yellow cushion for sitting practice), and picture of Rinpoche in a tiny gold frame. A woman's cry came from upstairs.

I thought someone was in trouble.

There seemed always to be people I didn't know in Allen and Peter's apartment, people
they
didn't know, either. I ran upstairs.
Ruthie, Patrick, and Allen, naked as the truth, were rolling around on Allen's bed, with Allen being kissed and fondled by them both. I stood there, like Gregory Corso staring out of his Twelfth Street apartment so many years ago, on the Lower East Side. I was transfixed by the sight of Allen in bed with a woman, and Patrick in bed with Allen. I thought Patrick was straight, and I thought Allen was queer, but Eros had turned everything on its head.

The two of them were biting Allen's nipples like he was a gift from the Chinese—a giant panda in the National Zoo. What would I say to them the next time I saw them at the Naropa school? Did they know I had seen them all together? Maybe I was just being a hopeless square. My thinking was foggy, my mind not quite right, as I crept out of the threshold of Allen's bedroom. Peter was waiting to catch me at the foot of the stairs.

Peter could tell I was distraught. He sat me down and patiently explained to me how Patrick and Ruthie and Allen had been going to bed with each other for years. I asked Peter if Allen's affairs ever made him jealous. Peter said he wasn't jealous and that he liked to have sex with Ruthie and Patrick, too, but that lately he just wanted to have sex with girls. He said again that he would like to have a family.

“I like ugly girls,” Peter said. “I prefer to make love to ugly girls, because they treat you nice and they don't leave you. The sex is better because they are so grateful.”

I wondered if Peter worried about what people would think, especially girls, about his philosophy. Peter said that homely girls made the best mothers. He asked if I was still upset at seeing Allen with Patrick and his girlfriend, and then he laughed. (Peter's laugh sounded like he was clearing his throat; it was more like the imitation of a laugh.) I pretended to Peter that I wasn't scared, or confused, or bothered at all by what I had seen.

I had come to Naropa ready to learn about Blake, to listen to Allen talk about the four Zoas—Blake's four principles of human nature: reason, feeling, imagination, and, of course, the body. But I wasn't prepared for the final Zoa—to see Allen in bed with his guitarist and his guitarist's girlfriend. But why not? I hated my own
prudery. I hid it from the Beats. I vowed to conquer my shyness if it killed me.

Later, much later, after I had been at the Jack Kerouac School for more than a year, I was introduced to Allen's psychiatrist, a handsome, middle-aged Italian woman. The two of us walked to the old cowboy hotel, the grand-looking Boulderado, and we sat on the veranda looking out at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She ordered a gin and tonic and I sipped a scotch and soda. I had never had scotch, but I ordered it because it was the only drink I knew because my uncles were scotch drinkers, so my mother always had J& B in the house for their visits.

I told her about what I had seen that night in Allen's bedroom, and about Peter's desire to be with a woman and to have children. In her thick Italian accent, she said that she thought the books would always get it wrong. She believed that Allen Ginsberg was essentially a straight man, but that he was in love with the idea of being Walt Whitman, in love with the idea of being the holder of a lineage. Without children, she explained, this is how Allen passed down the tradition of Whitman. She thought that Allen wasn't sexually incompatible with women and that he did have sexual involvements and crushes on women. Anne Waldman was his latest infatuation.

“For Allen,” she said, “homosexuality is an incendiary device, a Molotov cocktail to throw into the windows of polite society. The real homosexual of the group,” she added, “was Jack Kerouac.”

Jack Kerouac? The he-man football hero from the hardscrabble shoe town of Lowell? Kerouac, with his ruggedly handsome, leading-man good looks, was the truly gay one among the Beats? Allen's psychiatrist said that Kerouac suffered from the fear that coming out as a gay man would crush his mother; he also thought that it was simply unmanly to be queer. No wonder Kerouac drank and looked so miserable in that photograph Allen had taken of him during Kerouac's last visit to Allen and Peter's apartment, five years before the end of his life.

Once when Allen was developing some of his photographs, I stood by his side in the small darkroom in the basement of the
apartment complex. I watched as two of the many photographs that Allen had taken of Jack began to appear in their chemical baths. Side by side, in two separate trays, two images began to appear of Jack, just seven years apart. They looked like two different people, and in some sense they were. The earlier photograph, taken against Burroughs's garden wall in Tangier in 1957, just after
On the Road
was published, showed a cautious, handsome man wearing a newsboy's cap, a plaid lumberjack shirt open at the neck, with the glimpse of a T-shirt underneath. It must have been chilly in the garden of Burroughs's villa. Kerouac looks alert, smart, somewhat suspicious, but independent and ready for whatever the world will throw at him.

Right next to that image, under the red light of the darkroom, the second picture came into focus. This one was taken in Allen's East Fifth Street apartment on the Lower East Side in 1964. Kerouac sits in a chair next to his packed bags, holding his head in his right hand. He's wearing big, heavy dress shoes and a bulky checked sports coat that looks as if his mother had picked it out for him. But it's his face that haunts me—the face of a broken, heavy man waiting at a bus station who has made too many wrong decisions. He's scowling, lost in some sad, deep memory. Allen wrote, “The thing about this picture is how much Kerouac had begun to look like his late father, a kind of W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror.”

I remember Peter telling me that he and Allen had given Jack a “blow job, as a going-away present” the last time they saw him, but Jack had just sat there without enjoyment, scowling and bored as the two men huddled together between his legs. It was simply too late for pleasure, too late for anything to make Kerouac happy.

Jack Kerouac never made it to the Jack Kerouac School. I was starting to think he would've hated it, but he might have at least liked the mountains of Boulder. Allen said once that Kerouac had wanted a quiet old age, a kind of hermitage in the woods where he could write his books. Because Kerouac was so important to Allen, he was the invisible dean of Naropa.

On the Road
had brought me here, even though I didn't drive or even have a license. But I wanted to be Jack's passenger. I thought the trip was still on. For Kerouac, Neal Cassady's death in 1968 in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, never really happened. Everyone said that Jack kept expecting Neal to come back—or at least to call him. It was dawning on me that, in the same way, that's how Jack existed for Allen. He wasn't really dead. How could he be? Perhaps that's why the name of the school made so much sense to Allen, even though he always seemed to be a little embarrassed about it.

I didn't know then that Kerouac had moved in with his mother and had died in Florida, a place he loathed. I didn't know he hated hippies and was proud of our troops in Vietnam. To honor Kerouac, I thought, I should probably have joined the army! I learned later that Jack was put out when someone had suggested that
On the Road
had helped give birth to the hippies. Boulder was certainly full of them now, their ponchos filling the parks on weekends, like one enormous, scratchy Mexican blanket that just made me sneeze.

And it was Kerouac's books that had turned Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Gary Snyder—and so many others—into myth. Kerouac had intended
On the Road
to be one long, shambling book of his life, with the same characters running through all of the books. It was the “maiden aunties” again—the editors and legal departments—who had made him change all the names from book to book. But it didn't matter; I knew them all. By coming to Boulder and entering the Jack Kerouac School, I wouldn't be taught just by Allen Ginsberg, but by Leon Levinsky of
The Town and the City,
Irwin Garden from
Vanity of Duluoz,
Alva Goldbook of
The Dharma Bums,
Carlo Marx from
On the Road,
and Adam Moorad from
The Subterraneans.
And it wasn't just William Burroughs crying over Jack London that I had witnessed, it was Old Bull Lee from
On the Road,
and Bull Hubbard from
Desolation Angels.
It wasn't merely Gregory Corso reciting
Gilgamesh,
but Yuri Gligoric in
The Subterraneans,
and Raphael Urso, one of the
Desolation Angels.
They were all here with me now, at the Jack Kerouac School— not disembodied, nor merely ashes, like Neal. The film of death no
longer obscuring my eyes, I could see their genius flashing wildly before me and even hear sweet singing above what Allen liked to call “the ingrate world.”