When I Was Cool (2 page)

Growing up on Long Island, my father used to tease me. He said that I knew John F. Kennedy's birthday but that I didn't know his. May 29, 1917—that was Kennedy's; my father was right. But I knew the year John Kennedy was born only because Seymour was born the same year. My mother, Marion, was younger. She grew up
in her own house in Brooklyn, my father in a cramped apartment on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My parents met in the Weiss & Klau building on Grand Street in lower Manhattan. They had a four-year courtship. My grandmother, my mother's mother, Lilly Greengrass, used to call my father “the undertaker” because he always looked so serious and wore dark suits.

They got married in 1950. Only recently did that start to sound like a long time ago. We lived in Brooklyn on Avenue J, in my grandmother's old apartment. She had since moved to South Fallsburg, up in the Catskill Mountains, with my grandfather, a retired furrier. They rented rooms and little apartments in an old house they bought. Eventually, my father moved us to Long Island, around 1960. I remembered watching television on a rolling stand in our new house empty of furniture, our front lawn just sand and rock. Our house stood on filled-in swampland before it was a town named for a tribe of Indians called Merokes (translated as Merrick).

I watched John Kennedy being sworn in as president on television that year, but all I remember is that you could see his breath when he spoke, and I liked how his hand chopped the air as if he were chopping through ice so I could see him better.

My sister was two; I was five. As we watched America's youngest president chop the air, I sat in my fire chief's car and she stood in her crib. My mother was upstairs with the first friend she had made in Merrick, Mary Stamler. Like Mrs. Weiner, Mrs. Stamler was very glamorous looking. I didn't know it at the time but my mother was also beautiful. I do remember that I wouldn't let her get old. When I started to notice her gray hair (I was about seven years old), I asked her to get blond hair. So she went to the beauty parlor and had her hair dyed. She looked like television and the things on it that caught my eye. I never really
saw
my mother then, in those days. But I can see her now.

My sister is named Gella. It had been my father's mother's name before she came to America. They called her Gertrude in America, but Marion thought “Gertrude” was too old-fashioned
and it would be a burden in the playgrounds of Merrick, where we kids played baseball and climbed the monkey bars over the burial grounds of the Meroke Indians. So the name Gella came back to America, as everything comes back, one way or another.

My sister was a smart, dark-haired little girl with cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie blowing his crooked trumpet. She always made the honor roll. I did not. She was always a good girl. She cried the first time she cursed in front of my parents. She hit her elbow and said “shit,” and then looked at our parents and the tears came. They thought it was funny and told her nothing bad would happen just because she had said “shit.” This was only a moment, but it shows what the rest of her life might be like.

I wasn't that way. I was more of a contrarian. If my life was easy, I wanted it to be hard. When it was hard, I wanted it to be easy. Before I knew what the word meant, I wanted life to be “beat,” but I also wanted a hot towel waiting for me when I got out of the shower. Maybe my parents sheltered me with too much love, too much affection—is that possible? Maybe they should have made me go to a conventional college. Maybe I should I have brought my laundry home every weekend. Instead, I sent home Allen Ginsberg's laundry once a month. I started sending Allen's laundry home because when he gave it to me to do, I didn't know how to work the machines.

 

After Philip Weiner went to college, my two best friends on Long Island were Fred Mollin and Neal Warshaw. Fred lived in the older part of Merrick, called North Merrick because it was north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Fred's father worked as the manager of a Key Food store. He was a grumpy guy with three children. Fred was the youngest. He had long, long red hair. He loved music and was something of a genius on the guitar. He wrote songs. I was his manager. I wrote a letter to John Hammond, the record producer who had “discovered” Bob Dylan; he must have taken pity on my terrible handwriting and guessed that what I wanted was for him
to hear my friend. So he invited us to come into the city and play for him in his office at the CBS building.

We took the day off from school. Fred carried his guitar in a big black case. He had his song titles Scotch-taped to the side of the guitar. He played a few songs for Mr. Hammond, who sat behind his desk with the shortest gray-haired crew cut I had ever seen. He liked Fred's songs, but he said he wanted a second opinion, so he called for someone to come into his office. He introduced us to Al Kooper.

Al Kooper had played organ on “Like a Rolling Stone” for Bob Dylan. Fred, who was already pale and nervous, started playing for Kooper. Both men looked at each other and smiled. It was the kind of smile mothers have for their children, watching them play in the park. But somehow I knew Fred wasn't going to get his record contract.

Mr. Hammond told me to take Fred to Gerde's Folk City in the Village on West Fourth Street. “It's where Bobby started,” he said. A week later I found out when Gerde's had an open-mike night, and we snuck out of school and took the Long Island Rail Road to Gerde's. You never know who might be in the audience.

Fred said I should get up and read one of my poems. I said no, that it was his night, but I had stuffed a few poems in my pocket, just in case.

There we were, sitting backstage at Gerde's. Fred was tuning up, I was muttering my poems to myself, just in case. Suddenly Fred's father stood there, backstage. He had a murderous look in his eye. I'm sure he was angry about having to drive back into New York City after coming home to Merrick and figuring out where we were. He made Fred put away his guitar and leave with him.

Mr. Mollin drove home with Fred in the front seat. I sat in the back. We couldn't look at each other. Fred looked like he was going to cry. I felt like we had been caught stealing rabbits or something. I leaned over and whispered in his ear. I wanted him to know we would be back and that he was a great songwriter. I hated his father. I thought he was cruel. Fred, who usually talked
back to his parents in a way that inspired awe in us, didn't say a word. (It was always amazing to us how Fred would tell his parents to go fuck themselves, and they didn't punish him for it.) Maybe Fred never got over the humiliation of being dragged out of Gerde's by his father, because at sixteen Fred left school to become a musician. His parents told him he was making a mistake, that music was a nasty business for him to be getting into. He told them they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. Then he made them buy him an electric guitar. They did. He became even more of a god to us than before. Ten years later, Leonard Cohen came to Fred's wedding.

My other friend was Neal. He wore a cape and smoked a pipe. He read Marianne Moore and wrote poetry and took pictures of his girlfriends naked. He was sixteen. But even Fred and Neal were surprised that my parents had let me go to the Jack Kerouac School.

 

I had been accepted as a “summer apprentice,” so there we were, Seymour and I, flying to the Denver, Colorado, airport in the late spring of 1976.

Allen and Peter were supposed to meet us—the manufacturer's rep and his son, the might-be-first graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But when we arrived, Allen and Peter hadn't shown up. My father said under his breath, “This is a great beginning,” but he rented us a car and we drove the sixty miles to Boulder, climbing in elevation the closer we got.

“You can't expect Allen Ginsberg to greet every student at the airport,” I said, secretly relieved. Of course, at the time, I didn't know I was the
only
poetry student, so far, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. As the mountains of Boulder loomed in the distance, I looked over at my father and felt a sudden surge of loneliness, and I was grateful that Seymour had come with me. I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye.

We moved my few belongings into a small, semifurnished
student apartment on Broadway (making me more than a little homesick for New York City). It would prove an ideal location, however, as Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's apartment was in the same complex: a three-story, slightly down-at-heels apartment complex with outdoor walkways that made it look like a prison compound. It's where many of Naropa's students stayed.

I said goodbye to my father, fiercely biting back tears, and he drove back to the Denver airport alone, dressed, as usual, in dark jacket and trousers suitable for funerals.

When I met Ginsberg, his beard was missing. My first meeting with Allen Ginsberg and his beard was gone! It was by that beard—that magnificent untidy brisket that appeared in Fred McDarrah's photograph of Allen wearing an Uncle Sam hat—that I had irritated my uncles, upset my parents, and made a name for myself at John F. Kennedy High School. And now it was gone.

On my first official day at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, I was told to go to Allen Ginsberg's apartment and introduce myself to him. He was wearing a T-shirt with Naropa's logo on it: an image of the karmic wheel. It looked to me like the wheel of a great ship, the kind of wheel you'd tie yourself to during a storm at sea, like the sea captain had on the ship Dracula used to cross the ocean from Transylvania to Carfax Abbey. All these thoughts swam through my brain as I crossed the threshold, my heart racing, to meet my hero—the author of
Howl,
Bob Dylan's mentor, Jack Kerouac's champion and best pal.

The first summer of Naropa, all the poets, writers, and musicians lived in the Varsity Apartments, down the hill from the University of Colorado, where I was staying. Dancers sunned themselves on the catwalk terraces in front of the apartments. Most of the doors were open. I always hated sandals, so I was dressed in shiny black Beatle boots and a short-sleeved madras shirt on my first day at the Kerouac School. At least I was dressed.

Allen was sitting in his living room at a round glass table fit for all meals. My appointment was for lunch. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, white socks, and his shoes were off. He had wire-
rimmed glasses that looked silver. His eyes were red. He kept his hair long, though he had already lost a lot of it. I wondered how anyone could think of him now as Sasquatch, a great hairy mess, a brunette Whitman. With his long hair pulled back and his shaved face, he looked more like the manager of the Stage Delicatessen in New York. (I would go there with my friend Roger Lemay one night in the early 1970s after Allen, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso had all read together at Columbia University. I remember I had the Danny Thomas.)

I was so nervous to be sitting at Allen Ginsberg's table that dust came out of my mouth. It felt as if someone with a shovel was turning ashes over in my stomach. And then Orlovsky came through the front door, carrying two bags of groceries.

Peter looked like childhood drawings I had seen of Hercules. He had a long gray ponytail and a chest that looked like it was full of brine and pickles. He also wore shorts and sandals. Where was his chariot? So this was Allen's lover. His literary wife. I had heard that Allen first fell in love with Peter in a painting. That is, a painting of Peter that Allen had seen in Robert LaVigne's apartment in San Francisco. Peter's fate was sealed when Allen first clapped eyes on him in that painting, and before long they were pledging their life's love to each other late one night in a twenty-four-hour cafeteria. Much later in the summer, I asked Peter about that night. He was drunk, and happy, stepping into a hot tub with a girl. He said he could remember only the coffee and the macaroni and cheese. He said that he and Allen held hands over their dinners. Someone nearby thought they were saying grace. It cracked them up.

Peter put the groceries on the counter. Allen introduced me as a young poet, here to help him. This was what I had come to Naropa for: to become Allen's apprentice. (I remember going to a Young People's Concert, given by Leonard Bernstein. He was introducing “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” He said, “Being an apprentice to a sorcerer, how exciting that would be, but leaving the sorcerer to go out on your own, that would be tricky!” Leave it to Leonard Bernstein to scare children at a Young People's Concert.) I was
going to be Allen's apprentice, I was going to learn to become a poet, to become great, which really meant he was going to teach me to live an epic kind of life. I was nineteen years old.

Peter, in a voice that would always remind me of Lenny in
Of Mice and Men,
asked me if I wanted any tea.

“I just bought Swiss Kriss if you need it,” he said, in those flat tones that made me think—if just for a minute—of brain damage. “Keeps you regular. I told that to Bill. He hasn't moved his bowels since he got here.”

“It's the smack,” Allen said to me, with a tiny giggle. “After fifty years, heroin's given Bill impacted bowels.” The author of
The Nova Express
had trouble moving down the line. Peter didn't wait for me to answer. He simply brought over a pot of tea for us, served on a tray with a peacock painted on it. He put his hands together and bowed. It suddenly dawned on me: Peter Orlovsky was Allen Ginsberg's geisha.

Allen must have thought I was scrutinizing him—I was just in awe to be in his presence—so he apologized for his mouth being tilted to one side, as if he'd had a stroke.

“I was on an airplane,” he told me, “and I was taking two different kinds of medicine. They interfered with each other and when I went into the bathroom on the plane, I saw that my mouth was crooked. The doctor says it will go away eventually. I hate the way it looks. It's hard to kiss.” (I remembered that
Kaddish and Other Poems
had been dedicated to Peter Orlovsky, “in Paradise,” it read, and, “Taste my mouth in your ear.”)