When I Was Cool (20 page)

31. A Spy in the House of Love

One day when I stopped by Allen's apartment to do some filing for him, Allen announced that he thought there might be a spy at Naropa. He didn't say who it was. Was he talking about me? I had no idea. There were few enough students here as it was. Could it be Burroughs, who seemed so in love with the idea of conspiracies, secret documents, government code words,
interzones,
like ones he'd put into
Naked Lunch
? Because the Beats had lived so long on the outskirts of society, I thought maybe it was starting to get to them. What would it be like to always have your mail waiting for you at the U.S. Consul's office or at American Express?
Hadn't Gregory called the only novel he'd ever written
American Express
?

Allen called me up—I had to come over immediately. He explained that the government had been listening to him on the telephone for years. He felt that his mail was often tampered with. He told me about “Cointelpro,” a government, mostly FBI, operation to discredit radicals or anyone deemed dangerous to the permanent government of the United States—business interests, powerful families like the Rockefellers, the Hunts, Henry Luce, etc. Allen had a lot of names. He said that some of these people weren't even all that bad, he said that he once met Nelson Rockefeller and had liked him personally, that he loved art and wasn't stupid. Allen said it was the people who worked for Rockefeller, who “took care of business” for these powerful people—they were the dangerous ones.

I knew from Ginsberg's files that he had been gathering information on the government and its program of misinformation. He said they did it to Martin Luther King and to the Black Panthers. Allen told me all this while we were sitting around the kitchen table sipping Celestial Seasonings chamomile tea. Peter sat with us, listening, nodding his head. At the same time, he was admiring the Sleepytime Tea box, with its happy family of bears—Papa Bear sitting in his rocking chair wearing a nightcap in front of the fire, Mama Bear carrying Baby Bear off to bed.

“You've been staring at that box for a half hour,” Allen told Peter. “What do you see in it?”

“I see the future,” Peter said, “with you sitting in front of the fire and our babies coming to kiss you and their mother goodnight. Do you think you'd like to live in a cave with me, Allen?”

Allen laughed. It was a sweet laugh—a respite from his high seriousness—which I didn't see too often. His crooked mouth made it all the sweeter. Strange that it would come during this gentle- voiced tirade against the government, the CIA, and America's power establishment. It
was
the old Allen, but tempered by his Buddhist meditation, his growing awareness of the other guy's pain and suffering.

Then again, I also wondered if they were all crazy. I know that Allen had gone missing once in the mid-fifties, only to turn up in the deep forests of South America, living with a woman, Burroughs told me, a woman named Karena Shields. Shields had portrayed Jane in a couple of early Tarzan films, and I knew from reading the so-called yagé letters between Allen and Bill that they were practically subsisting on coca leaves and getting incredibly fucked up. I knew that Allen had been given a choice in his younger days between staying at a mental hospital or going back to college. Were the inmates running the asylum at the Jack Kerouac School? Or were my hopelessly scaredy-cat, bourgeois roots beginning to show?

Peter got up and took a giant ironing board out of the closet. He was going to press Allen's shirt and pants for the reading later that night. For the first time since arriving at Naropa, I was going to read my poems, along with Gregory, Allen, and a few other students from the dance and Buddhist psychology departments. I was supposed to be the jewel in their diadem, the student who would come to represent the Kerouac School, the one they exposed to Ginsberg and Corso, to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, to the New York School of O'Hara, Ashbery, and Koch. And, thanks to Anne's friends, the younger writers who had taken up the brunt of my so-called education, I had also read Balzac's
Lost Illusions
and Flaubert's
Sentimental Education,
as well as the “grumps,” as Corso called them, Céline and Ezra Pound. The writer Michael Brownstein, Anne's former lover (the one who usurped her husband, Lewis, while he had gone around the corner for the evening newspapers), taught me those books in one of my classes at Naropa. So while Peter laid out Allen's pants one leg at a time on the ironing board, spitting on the iron like my grandmother used to do in the basement when she came to visit us, Allen continued his spiel about Cointelpro.

Allen said that Naropa could be finished before it even started. He said that I should be on the lookout for anyone suspicious, any-
one who doesn't seem really interested in poetry. (It didn't occur to me at the time that that included just about everyone.) He said that I should keep an eye out at the reading tonight for anyone who looked lost, or hopelessly straight. I thought about how I felt lost and hopelessly straight myself, even though my heart practically leaped like a gazelle in the Song of Songs whenever I found myself sitting in Allen's place or struggling with Gregory over his poems.

I said I would do my best.

 

I was nervous that night at the reading, which was held in the living room of a beautiful home on a street filled with old trees, which had to be a hundred years old and gave wonderful shade. I walked to the reading with Gregory. I told him about what Allen had said, about Cointelpro, about how the government might have sent a spy to attend classes at the Kerouac School.

“Maybe it's Allen,” Gregory said. “He seems to be getting a lot of official recognition, and he always seems to have money. He even knows the police chief of Chiapas,” Gregory reminded me. It was Burroughs who told me that, to a stupid person, Allen looks like a communist.

When we arrived the living room was filled. There must've been about two hundred people throughout the house, which was owned by one of Rinpoche's most devoted followers, a young woman whom Gregory pointed out to me as the heiress to a discount department store fortune. She welcomed everyone and then she introduced Allen, who was going to be the master of ceremonies. Anne was there, of course, with her contingent of exotic- looking women and pretty men. I noticed Anne's manager, Linda Louie, her husband Mickey, and their baby Hadrian, named after the emperor or the wall—whichever came first. A young woman with dark hair in an old-fashioned hat pinned with a veil was seated between Linda and Mickey. She was eccentrically dressed. She wore a kilt. She had a round pleasant face and reminded me of
Brenda Vaccaro, an actress no one hears about these days. She was Jon Voight's girlfriend for a while, or at least that's what I'd heard.

Allen was a real
jambon
when it came to an audience. It's why he seemed to love teaching so much. It was hard for him to leave the stage. Originally he was only going to read a small poem, something he had dashed off in the minutes after supper before he and Peter got dressed for the reading. Allen called them his “porch haikus” because he wrote them on the porch as the sun was going down. He read one porch haiku about a guy who cuts up his girlfriend with an ax. I thought haikus were supposed to be about the moon awakening and stuff like that. I guess I was wrong. Encouraged by wild applause, Allen read for another half hour. He read “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby”—the crowd cheered when Allen read “Fuck me in the ass! Suck me! Come in my ears! Promise you'll murder me in the gutter with orgasms!”

After that, I was no longer sure they would like me, or sit still for my love poems, written like French surrealism, with titles like “Portrait of Orpheus as a Young Horticulturist” or “The Water Lily Is Doomed.”

Allen wouldn't get off the stage. They had to carry his chair away from the front of the room with him in it, like he was the groom at his own Jewish wedding. Gregory finally had to say something.

“Ginzy, that's great but give the kid a chance. Miss Christ, we're all gonna be two thousand years old by the time you run out of breath!” It's true that Allen's meditation practice had given him even more of a barrel chest, even more lung power.

Gregory read next. He recited a poem that I had heard before. He never said it the same way twice. The poem was about how Gregory had met this guy in a bar who had asked Gregory what poetry was. It wasn't an existential or a philosophical question. He was just a guy, Gregory said, who had come into some tavern who didn't know what poetry meant.

“I told him,” Gregory said in his poem, which he called “I Met
This Guy Who Died.” “Happy tipsy one night,” Gregory takes the man home so that they both might admire his baby asleep in his crib. When all of a sudden, “A great sorrow overcame him ‘O Gregory,' he moaned / ‘you brought up something to die.'” That's all he read. It was obvious it was one of Gregory's favorite poems. Later that night, Gregory whispered to me that it wasn't just any guy. It was Kerouac, drunk with mortality, who had peered into the baby's crib.

Like the tiny coffin Gregory had written about seeing when he was a young kid on the Lower East Side, being taken away by all those big Cadillacs, Gregory wrote tiny poems about great big subjects like death and time. He had memorized the poem. I was supposed to hold the crib sheet, in case he got it wrong. He didn't.

Then he introduced me, as a poet, as his friend, as someone bathed in that from which he, Gregory, and Allen also bathed: the healing waters of poesy. He said something like that.

I almost fainted with joy. I didn't think my poems were very good. I apologized for them in advance. I read a few. I heard applause. I dared to look up. I read another. I read the one poem of mine Allen seemed to like, even though I had to explain to him who Donny and Marie were. It was a poem about imagining myself a construction worker, taking
The Donny and Marie Show
lunchbox with me to work and sitting out on a girder of an unfinished New York City skyscraper. It was meant to be funny. People laughed. They positively howled with laughter. It doesn't seem that funny now, the poem. It got old fast. But it was new then and people loved it.

Peter saw me after the reading. He said I was a star. People milled around me afterward, those too shy to go up to Allen or Gregory. I was grateful. They asked questions I couldn't answer in a thousand years about poems I hadn't taken very long to write. I was happy. I was sweating. Then a dark-haired woman came up and put a napkin in a glass of water and wiped my forehead. She didn't introduce herself right away. She was grinning and said,
“You were wonderful.” She lifted her veil. Anne and Linda Louie came over to me. Anne said, very tightly, “That was good.” Linda Louie was more generous, and she introduced her veiled friend. Her name was Carla Fannetti.

I'd only had one serious girlfriend so far, so I didn't know a lot about men and women coming together. But this attractive woman who had just mopped my brow looked like she was in love, and she was gazing in my direction. I looked around; there was no one standing behind me.

32. The Six Realms

A few of us—Allen, Anne, Burroughs, Gregory, and I—walked over to Tom's Tavern after the reading. Carla came along with Linda Louie; Linda's husband had taken the baby home.

I never met the Tom of Tom's Tavern. I don't know if he even existed. The tavern was a place where college kids from the University of Colorado came to get drunk, and men who lived in bombed-out cars or in shacks up in the mountains came down whenever they scraped a few bucks together to make a night out of it with a hamburger and some beers.

We all squeezed into a booth. I sat across from Carla. I could really see her for the first time. She had style and sense. She owned her own import-export business. She often had to make business trips to Thailand. Apparently, Rinpoche encouraged his students to start their own businesses. He would often step slowly out of the back of his black BMW, helped by the Vadjra guards, and walk into a community business and make some kind of blessing over it. Then he would look over the merchandise. Sometimes he would buy something as a kind of benediction for the success of the establishment. His aides would come by later and pay for it.

I asked Carla what Rinpoche bought at her store. She thought it was a hand-painted tie or something that he bought as a gift, maybe some “Flash Gordon soap,” which is what Gregory called the oval, scented soaps on display in strangers' bathrooms.

In the smoky and darkened tavern, Carla turned to me and asked how long I'd been at Naropa. She explained that she had come to Boulder because she was a student of Rinpoche's and she wanted to be around other practitioners. She said that she started to “sit” in Scotland, which is where Rinpoche had spent time at a meditation center in the highlands.

I found out that Carla had a past. She had lived with a famous violinist, who was the son of an even more famous violinist, and had traveled the world with him.

I asked if she and the violinist were still together. She said no. She said that studying Buddhism had changed the way she saw relationships. She said that Rinpoche practiced something called “crazy wisdom.”

I had already heard about crazy wisdom from Allen, but I let her explain it to me. She said it meant giving in to your desire so you didn't have desire anymore. I started thinking that Carla wanted to give in to her desire. And that she wanted to give in to her desire to be with me—tonight. Crazy wisdom didn't seem so crazy, but it did seem dangerous—dangerous in unenlightened hands, which included mine, and probably Carla's. The more I heard about crazy wisdom, the more I felt like someone was shaking my hands with a hand buzzer and wouldn't let go. But I was intrigued.

As the poets and their hangers-on huddled together at Tom's, I remembered something Phil Ochs once said. Ochs was a folksinger Allen admired who became a suicide. He once said, “To the losers go the hang-ups, to the victors go the hangers-on.” I basked in the feeling of being included among the poets; it felt good to be chosen for something. It didn't happen too often. In high school, I never made the honor roll, but my sister made it every year. I did get to be president of my junior high school class,
but that was for all the wrong reasons. I think it was because I once had a pizza delivered to the middle of my seventh-grade algebra class, or was it because I had ridden my bicycle down the hall, or because I wore an American flag tie that got me called to the principal's office until my parents came? Or was it because I once fell inside a baby grand piano at a school assembly when I was trying to imitate Jerry Lee Lewis? (The assistant principal had to pull me out by my legs, cautioning me by saying that I had to be protected from myself.) So I felt that being elected class president was like when the people of Paris made Quasimodo the mayor. I even ducked out of the prom, my one ceremonial duty as president, so that I could watch Bob Dylan come out of seclusion to sing on
The Johnny Cash Show.

Carla said that Rinpoche was always surrounded by a court. Because he had grown up in England instead of Tibet, he had come to admire the English system, and he modeled his spiritual kingdom, called Shambhala, after the English court. Rinpoche's wife actually had ladies-in-waiting and he took some of them to his bed, although some of his consorts were married to his students and members of his court. Carla told me that most of the men whose wives Rinpoche had slept with considered it an honor that Rinpoche had chosen them. Carla said that she wasn't interested in Rinpoche in that way, but she still considered him a great man and enlightened. She said that Rinpoche had helped her with her fears, and she did seem unafraid of the world.

One of her shoulder straps slid off her shoulders. It was a thin black cord and it looked sexy where it had fallen. She had a voluptuous figure. She seemed more interested in me than in the famous writers at the table. She had a youthful face, although she said she was thirty, which made her practically a wizard of age in my eyes. She had raven hair and a strong jawline that gave her a look of maturity and dignity. Hers was a face full of contrasts—listening quietly when Burroughs was holding forth, then becoming animated when Gregory said something outlandish to Anne.

As usual, Carla wasn't making a big impression on Allen or
Peter or Bill. They wouldn't have been interested in her anyway. I liked that.

Carla asked if I was having a good time. She asked me what I thought of my teachers, with most of them sitting right there. Carla had that quality that F. Scott Fitzgerald gave to his flapper heroines: she had “moxie.” That was the word I thought of when I looked at her. She also seemed to be jumping out of her skin just to talk to me.

Carla took out a leopard-skin wallet to pay for her drinks. I noticed that she had on black fishnet stockings and a jacket with a faux leopard collar. I felt like I had discovered the illegitimate daughter of Mike Hammer and his secretary Velma, the one he was always flirting with and promising to settle down and marry. The one he tries to save before the world blows up in
Murder My Sweet.
Then it hit me. Through all the chatter at the table, I remembered the French movie director Jean-Luc Godard. One of my teachers, Michael Brownstein, had handed out a mimeographed copy of an interview with him in English; he said it was essential reading. It was a great interview. In it, Godard gave his formula for love: it was time + poetry = love.

We had a black waiter that night in Tom's Tavern, which was rare for Boulder. When he walked away with our order, Burroughs suddenly said, “Did you know that Warren Harding was a quadroon? Did you know that, Allen?”

Allen mentioned that Bill wasn't drinking these days, but I had seen him drunk and weepy in his room. Jubal was a bad influence on Burroughs, I thought. He seemed to be keeping him under his thumb, which was easier to do with bottles of whiskey and the drugs that Jubal brought into the house. Perversely, Jubal kept a set of “works”—spoon and needle—wrapped in a Buddhist prayer cloth. He kept it hidden in Bill's house. I wanted to tell Allen, because I feared it could wind up getting Bill arrested, humiliated in his old age. But Jubal said Bill needed heroin to survive because he'd been dependent on it for so long, and to stop now would kill him. Jubal said Bill's doctors knew all about it.

Carla told Burroughs that she had spent a lot of time in Tangier, buying things for her store. She said it was a magical place. Once she was in her hotel room and couldn't sleep and so she opened the window to let the night air in. Suddenly, she heard a sound like no other she'd ever heard; she looked out and saw a wild horse running on the beach.

Burroughs answered her, thank god. I was afraid the women at the table were all going to be ignored, because Allen and Burroughs usually ignored them. Except for Anne, who was paying attention to her friends, to Nanette and Calliope and Kitty.

Burroughs told Carla that Tangier was his dream town. “In the mid-forties,” Burroughs said, “I had a dream in which I came into a harbor. When I looked around, I felt completely at home; I knew instinctively in my dream that that was the place I wanted to be.”

The waiter came back and placed a small shot glass in front of Bill. Burroughs finished the story by saying that toward the end of his time in Tangier, he went rowing on a lake and came into a harbor he recognized as the one in his dream.

Gregory, his glasses flying from the lariat around his neck, suddenly got up and left the table, with Calliope following him out the door. Too many people crowded the booth, I thought; too close quarters. Gregory's fear of crowds—his fear, Bill says, of death in the moment—must have kicked in, and he was out the door.

“Why doesn't he just have a good cry?” Anne asked when Gregory bolted. “We're all here to comfort him,” she said, laughing. It sounded like a good idea to me.

“Did you know,” Bill drawled, “that tears rid the body of poisonous wastes, like sweat and urine? In jaundice, your tears are bright yellow. In short, grief or despair causes metabolic poisons to accumulate. The old idea that someone who is greatly afflicted must cry or die has a sound basis in human biology.”

The conversation jumped from Caryl Chessman to the Scottsboro boys to Allen's writing of “Kaddish,” which was provoked by someone at the table asking for ketchup, which led to someone else talking
about tomatoes, which resulted in a question for Allen about the reference to the “first poisonous tomatoes in America” in that poem. Allen said that it was a reference to Russian immigrants, like my grandmother, at the turn of the century who had never seen tomatoes before; they stayed away from tomatoes, thinking they were poison.

It suddenly occurred to me: the best minds of Allen's generation were sitting at Tom's Tavern, and I was sitting with them, included by all except Anne, who hardly spoke to me.

My triumph at the reading that night seemed to annoy Anne. She didn't seem to feel about it the way I thought she would, that I was representing the good work of the Jack Kerouac School and that people seemed to respond to my poems. I thought she would take some teacherly pride in that, but I was wrong. Anne's circle of exotic women and exotically pretty boys seemed impenetrable to me. She spent most the evening talking about what a sensation her two handsome protégés, Stephen Low and Brad Gooch, had been back in New York at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. It seemed like she was going out of her way to say that my achievement here at the Kerouac School somehow didn't count.

I walked Carla home. I asked her if she'd heard Anne on the subject of the St. Mark's reading, hoping that Carla wasn't also discounting my triumph. She answered me by telling me about the Six Worlds. She said it was a Buddhist concept that helped to explain human nature. Carla said that the Six Worlds, or Six Realms, were Heaven, Human, Hungry Ghost, Hell, Animal, and Angry Warrior Realm, that they were all held together in the delusion of time by things like pride, anger, and ignorance. She explained vanity was one of them, and that Anne, like all of us, suffered from that. Carla said she had a Buddhist painting of all the realms, and she'd like to show it to me.

My vanity realm wanted to come up and see it, but my fear realm held me back.

I said it was late and that I'd already taken up too much of her time with my poetry.

She asked me if I'd like to go out with her to a Mexican restaurant one night, in a nearby town, with a beautiful cherrywood bar from the old cowboy days of Colorado. She would drive us.

Before I had a chance to answer, we came to a street filled with older homes and Carla stopped beside a carriage house. “This is where I live,” she said. She kissed me. She touched the back of my head with her small hand and brought my head a little closer to hers. And then she disappeared into her house.

I walked home through the dark, empty streets of Boulder. A breeze from the mountains seemed to push me home a little faster. In a few days I would go to Carla's place of business, sit in a rattan chair with a price tag on it, and watch her conduct business in the human world—a realm I knew so little about.

The next morning I was supposed to go to Billy Burroughs's apartment to pick him up for lunch with his father. He had asked me to come along, but I didn't want to. Gregory and his wife were going to come by, with Max, and we had planned to drive into Denver to a museum. Gregory wanted to see a show with paintings about warfare, depicting soldiers from Achilles to General Patton. I didn't want to miss the chance to go with them.

Besides, I preferred playing with Max to spending time with Billy and Bill Burroughs. Max wasn't famous. He wasn't crazy. He didn't make me nervous. He was just a little boy who liked to make funny noises, who thought I was funny without having to be witty.

Around eleven-thirty in the morning I went by Billy's apartment. He was drunk or stoned, or both. He said he didn't want to go and have lunch with his father.

“Old Bill can be a prick. He's just a shitkicker,” Billy said. “My father should've been an overseer at a plantation. He missed his calling.” Billy suddenly switched to a Southern accent, saying, “The smell of magnolias pervades the old manse and I see Old Bill sittin' outside with a shotgun pickin' off pickaninnies.”

I didn't know if I could handle this. We walked over to Burroughs's apartment and then to the New York Deli. On the way, I walked between father and son, who had nothing to say to
each other. At the deli, we scrambled into a booth. That is, I scrambled and Billy folded himself into the seat, practically putting his head on the table and rubbing the menus together like he was trying to start a fire with them, Boy Scout style. “Old Bill” took his time, seating himself with his customary arthritic abandon, leaning his cane against the side of the table.

“Where's Harry Belafonte?” Bill growled, referring to the handsome, light-skinned black waiter we had had at Tom's the night before. Burroughs was mixed up about what restaurant we were in. It was the first time I wanted Gregory to show up on time and take me with him.