When I Was Cool (21 page)

I told both Burroughses about Allen's theory that there might be a spy coming to Naropa, or one already here at the Kerouac School. Bill said with authority that it was unlikely. He said that George Lincoln Rockwell, who had been the head of the American Nazi Party, probably spoke at rallies made up of nothing but Jews from the D.A.'s office and FBI agents, goose-stepping and giving him the fascist salute. Billy laughed.

“He's probably got about two real followers; one's completely deaf and the other is marginally literate and thinks the swastika is an Aztec symbol,” Burroughs added.

I saw what passed for a smile cross Burroughs's face. It was like the crack in a mummy that appears after a thousand years. Burroughs had the newspaper with him. I think the pope was in Poland. Burroughs started to talk about communism. He said it was doomed to failure because it was being run like the phone company. Then there was silence. Silence for a long time. Our food arrived, and the two men started eating across from each other, Billy staring into his bowl of matzoh ball soup and Bill looking at his Reuben sandwich, unwilling to take it on.

“I am seized with the panic of one buried alive,” Burroughs said, in his best W. C. Fields imitation. He pushed the sandwich aside. It occurred to me that I'd never really seen Burroughs eat anything. Like a vampire, he sat staring at his food. I expected him to say, “I only drink…wine.”

To my relief, Gregory appeared, rolling through the skinny aisle between the elevated booths on one side and the counter on the other, holding Max and looking like he'd gotten some sleep for a change. He appeared at our table, saving me from the cone of silence I was trapped under. Suddenly, I felt sad at having to leave the two of them alone in the restaurant, gulping down all that dead air. Gregory reached out to pull off some of the melted cheese from Bill's sandwich. He ate some and fed some to Max.

“Bill,” Gregory said to Burroughs, “you are always Bill and always will be. We are the Daddies of the age.”

As if summoned by the Muse, I followed Gregory out the door, like Sabu following Ganesh's curled trunk away from the mountains and toward the teeming city.

33. “The Death of General Wolfe”

I wasn't prepared for what awaited me in the car Gregory had shanghai'd for our trip to the Denver museum. The car contained all the chaos of Gregory's life. Gregory had had three children and four wives, plus his current girlfriend, Calliope. There was Max, climbing out of his mother Lisa's lap to recline in the well above the backseat like that famous Manet painting of Olympia. Like Olympia, Max didn't have any clothes on—Lisa had just removed them, probably because they were wet. Calliope was also there; she was going to drive us. Miranda, one of Gregory's two daughters from an earlier marriage, was also in the car. Miranda was Gregory's New York daughter. (He had recently started writing poems about her. “She walks in grace like a sharp New Yorker,” Gregory said. He wanted me to put that into one of his poems. He really dug “her proud walk.”)

I squeezed myself into this leaky lifeboat, and soon we were
bouncing along while thermoses of lemonade and whiskey, not to mention Max's bottle, were passed around the overheated, noisy car.

Gregory saw himself in some way as a Romantic poet; it wasn't just the nineteenth-century diction that he loved, but the epic battles, the grottoes of hell, quarreling gods. He wasn't ashamed to talk about the poet as a Great Messenger. Gregory believed in his calling as a poet. I was starting to feel that it gave him permission to live this messy and hopped-up life, one that, in some ways, was exciting to be around. Around Gregory, I sometimes felt drawn into a whirlpool, undone by my own curiosity to find out what it would be like inside the belly of the whale, to strap on Mercury's sandals and jump not just into the symbols of life but into life itself.

The trust-fund Buddhists I was meeting in Boulder, who kept talking about crazy wisdom, well, it was as if they were just looking for an excuse to misbehave. Sad to leave college, they needed another reason to go crazy in the world. But Gregory seemed like crazy wisdom incarnate—or was he just crazy?

To Gregory, the gods were real. Looking at himself in the rear- view mirror, sitting beside Calliope, Gregory spouted, “Hermes, you orphan god! Behold Nunzio, Behold Gregory…I take back all you took! My beautiful hair is dead.” Gregory was intoning his old poem as he checked the gray hairs sprouting on his scalp, like someone checking his garden after a rainstorm.

Gregory, I thought to myself, you don't have to worry about your hair, you still have so much of it, and you're sitting here in this chariot with your wife and your girlfriend—not many men I know could say that.

I know that Gregory believed that time was robbing him. His street-kid life was no more. He was becoming more and more preoccupied with time passing. He kept referring to himself as “a penniless legend.” He was feeling more and more like Villon, his brother in crime and poesy. Both orphans, both altar boys “attending the priest's skirt.”

Gregory wanted to know how much it would cost to get into the museum. “Kerouac, you know, said that line, how ‘everything
is his, everything belongs to him because he's poor.' It's bullshit!” Gregory said.
“Nothing
is mine. Here I am, a prince of poetry and I'm made to roam the world, with women and Jews.”

Gregory scrunched up his face and snorted out a laugh. He liked to insult me, or at least see how much I could take. And he really hated it when I tried to be nice to him.

We arrived at the museum. I didn't care what Gregory thought, or how much I'd pay for it later in abuse, so I paid for everyone, and everyone followed me inside.

Gregory and I moved faster than the wind through every wing of the museum, like that scene in Godard's
Band of Outsiders
where the three friends break a record hurtling through the Louvre, a record set by an eleven-year-old American boy named Jimmy Johnson. Max, to Gregory's delight, climbed up on a bust of Homer, unnoticed by the guards, and waved “bye-bye” at a group of Japanese tourists with cameras around their necks. Lisa rescued a shrieking Max from falling.

Gregory took my elbow and we scurried into the room with paintings of Greek and Roman warriors. Gregory stopped and admired them.

“Growing old is nothing new,” he said suddenly, “but I don't know what it feels like yet. I'm not old, you know, not really. Lisa is younger than you!” Apparently, he was still thinking about the gray hairs sprouting on his head. Actually, Lisa was in her early twenties and thus somewhat older than I, but I didn't correct Gregory.

“My son is just two and a half. I will be young for some time to come,” he said, reassuring himself, stealing from his own poetry. “But in twenty years, that's the hard part of the ball game. Lisa'll be in her forties and Max will be in his early twenties. But that's the year 2000. The twenty-first century. Achilles will always be young. I see him that way,” Gregory said. “You see with old eyes,” Gregory admonished me. “You shouldn't worship old poetmen.”

“Look at that,” his old eyes brightening as he stood in front of a painting of a Greek soldier. “Look at that shield and helmet of a
Greek warrior! It might have been Alexander, curly hair hanging around muscular shoulders, leading infantry across a tented landscape!”

Gregory fell out amid all that glorious sacrifice. There was a full moon in the painting that seemed to light up the armor. Gregory said he had always loved going to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to see the knights on their horses, but his friends had made fun of him for going, so he went in secret to admire the ancient power of the knights errant. “I think of wars,” Gregory recited to me in the empty gallery, “tales of mythical wars flowing from the wrinkled mouths of bards.”

Gregory seemed like a man who found himself lucky to still be alive. He usually wrote a lot of poems around the time of his birthdays. Allen said it would be like that. His birthdays would make him think more about his life, his death, the lives and deaths of those around him. It also made him want to have babies. Gregory loved children, or at least the idea of children. He thought each child was a kind of second coming.

Gregory said that he used to dream of dying romantically, like Shelley, but now he was glad he didn't. “Shelley missed a lot,” Gregory said.

Then we found it: a painting Gregory had seen as a boy that he had fallen in love with, the painting he had come here to find. It was
The Death of General Wolfe,
by Benjamin West. Gregory had once seen a reproduction of it in school. It was a painting of a battle in which the British army defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham and effectively took control of North America. The painting depicts the victorious British commander, James Wolfe, dying in the arms of his soldiers.

I knew that painting. My mother had brought it back from the A& P in a hardcover book,
The American Heritage History of America,
volume one. I remembered seeing that painting, spread out over two pages: General Wolfe, his lifeblood spilling out on the ground and the weeping soldiers who loved him. It seemed too corny to tell Gregory at the time that I, too, loved that painting. I thought
he would think I was copying him, or trying to butter him up or something, so I let it go. But it made me feel close to him.

I knew how much of a trial school had been for Gregory. How when Carmine had made him laugh at the planetarium during a class trip, the teacher punished the whole class and denied Gregory and his classmates the stars. I knew Gregory had heroes like Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton, schoolboy crushes he carried with him to this day. All this made sense to me now. That's why it was so hard to get down to work with him—writing down and organizing his poems was too much like school. It's why his output was so scant, especially as compared to Allen's endless production of poems. “But a lot of it is very bad,” Gregory told me, when I asked why he can't just sit down and think of writing poems as his job, the way Allen does it. “Because Allen writes a lot of bad poems,” Gregory said. “And when I am good—I am great. Allen writes because he's afraid to die. I
don't
write, because I want to live.”

We drove home at night through Denver streets, passing nuns coming out of a convent and growling drunks leaning over a highway bridge. Was this the music of America on its two hundredth birthday? Max leaned out the window, his nose in the wind like a dog sniffing the air, looking at the night sky. “Stars,” he shrieked, “star-food!”

Gregory looked happy.

34. Father Death

Allen was going home. He and Peter had to fly back to Paterson, New Jersey, because Allen's father was dying. Six, maybe seven months earlier, Allen's father had been diagnosed with liver cancer. I couldn't stand to even hear about it. I knew Allen was a Buddhist and that Rinpoche had prepared him for his father's death. He told
Allen and Peter what to do. He said that Allen's father had taught him how to live in the world, and now he was given the opportunity to teach Allen and Peter about leaving it.

Paterson had been the lifelong home of William Carlos Williams, the country doctor–poet Allen had sought out as a young man, the poet Allen had asked to bless
Howl and Other Poems
with an introduction. But another poet had lived in Paterson, in William Carlos Williams's shadow. It was Allen's father, Louis Ginsberg.

So Allen had to leave on the next day's flight to Newark. Allen didn't like to fly, and Peter absolutely hated it. They usually ordered lots of those little bottles to drink on the flight and were both completely snockered by the time they landed. But this time they were drinking before the flight.

On the day of his departure, Allen told me he was going to be with his father. I told him how sad I was to hear about his illness, how I wanted everyone's parents to live forever. He said not to worry. Death was poetry's final subject.

“You're going to die one day,” he said. “Get used to it.”

Peter added reassuringly, “Not for a long time.”

I felt better then. The last time Allen had gone back to Paterson it was winter. Snow had covered all the monuments of Allen's youth—Paterson City Hall, the tennis courts in Eastside Park; there was even ice in the Passaic River.

Apparently, Allen's father was too tired to move and required someone with a strong back to lift him. That job, of course, fell to Peter, the nurse in the family. It was Peter who would pull Louis up out of the bath and dress him after they arrived at the house. Allen later told me that while Peter was helping Allen's father get dressed at the edge of the bed, Louis looked up at Peter and with a rueful smile told him, “Don't ever grow old.”

Allen's father had come to Boulder once, soon after I'd arrived, when he was still well enough to travel. Allen had taken him to the Flagstaff House, a restaurant high above the town, and as the first poetry student of the Kerouac School I was invited to go along.
From the elevation of the restaurant, you could see the lights of the town coming on; you felt even closer to the stars that high up in the mountains. Rinpoche was also present that night. We all felt pleasantly tired after a big dinner and sat quietly watching the lights of Boulder through the wraparound glass window. Louis talked. Allen called it bantering.

I liked Louis. He reminded me of my father, if my father had been a poet. He wasn't. He was a window shade salesman. He played the harmonica, picking up cowboy tunes on the radio when he was a boy, so he could play “Streets of Laredo” and “Down in the Valley.” He liked to play the harmonica while driving up to the Catskills, which he dutifully did every other weekend when I was a boy, to visit my mother's mother. He was a good sport about it. I know he secretly didn't want to do it. I was always astonished by how he could drive the car, steer it with his elbows, and play the harmonica. Other motorists would stare at us on the thruway. On the way, we'd stop at the Red Apple Motel and Restaurant for cafeteria-style meals. It was open twenty-four hours a day; I loved the idea of it being open all night.

Allen said he loved twenty-four-hour cafeterias, too. He said Louis would take him to one after visiting his mother in the mental hospital, but they wouldn't talk very much.

My father wasn't a poet, but he had the soul of an artist. He was gentle, quiet, thoughtful. Maybe now I would say his thoughtfulness could have been depression, at least some of the time. Louis seemed like that, too—depressed in a quiet, thoughtful way, not in a can't-get-out-of-bed-or-wash-my-face-to-go-to-work sort of way. My father loved to draw, to make caricatures of people in restaurants. He kept a small memo pad like the ones I used to take to school to write down homework assignments, and he kept his window shade orders in them, but most of the pages were torn out so that he could hand out the caricatures he made of people. When I was older and home from college, he was still doing it. Most of the time people were flattered by the drawings and came over to
ask if he were an artist. “No,” he'd say, “I'm not an artist—I like to eat. This is my son, he's the artist, he's a poet.”

I always felt embarrassed when he said that. It also made me feel like I would never succeed, that I would be a failure if I became an artist, because artists never make any money and often go hungry. I thought of that whenever Gregory talked about himself as “a penniless legend,” someone who has to go through life begging for money.

At the Flagstaff House overlooking the lights of Boulder, Allen's father was talking, remembering something Allen did that he thought was funny and Allen remembered as embarrassing. Louis let out a long sigh. “Is life worth living?”

“Depends on the liver,” Allen replied.

It was an old joke, but Rinpoche thought it was funny; he and his secretary, David Rome, both smiled. “Fathers are the same everywhere,” Rinpoche told Allen on the way out of the restaurant.

Louis had seemed sad and philosophical that night. Now his liver—or was it his pancreas?—was killing him. Allen had always had a difficult relationship with him. Was it jealousy? Sometimes I used to wonder what my father thought about my living in Boulder with the Beats, that he worked so hard and they had this reputation, unfairly earned and simply not true, of hardly working, of being deadbeats. In fact, Allen worked harder than anyone I ever knew. He worked like a one-man poetry factory, and when he wasn't doing that he was promoting the work of his friends, and promoting the Kerouac School. But here was Louis, a serious poet of a different time, and his son had become an icon, a cultural hero, a famous, notorious legend, and, like Gregory had said, one of “the Daddies of the age.” How did that make Louis Ginsberg feel?

Allen loved Louis's second wife. She was probably what Allen's mother would have been like if she hadn't become schizophrenic at age forty—“croaking up her soul,” as Allen called it, varicose- veined, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling the police, locking herself in the bathroom with
razor and iodine, her chosen weapons of self-murder, “coughing in tears at the sink.” In contrast, Allen's stepmother was a kind of Jewish angel who gave Allen and Louis much love. They were lucky, I thought, to have her.

When I first met Louis, I thought he might be hard to love. Behind his thick eyeglasses, he seemed lost. I know that he never quite understood Allen; some of Allen's fame bothered him. He might have been embarrassed by it. One night Allen told me that he had lunged at Louis when he was a much younger man and they'd had a fight. He thought he would kill him; it was like a psychotic break, but they never talked about it afterward.

Louis was eighty years old when Allen and Peter flew back to be with him. Allen said he thought his father looked frail the last time he'd seen him, “his cheek bonier than I'd remembered.” Allen wrote me a few postcards from Paterson; they were very sweet and sad. He seemed changed by the experience of caring for his father. He said it was an ordeal just to get Louis ready for bed, but that Peter was strong and determined to make him comfortable. Once they got him into bed or into his easy chair, “from which it was harder and harder to get up,” Allen wrote in his postcard, Allen would read to his father from Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality”: “…trailing clouds of glory do we come / from God, who is our home…”

“That's beautiful,” Louis told Allen, “but it's not true.”

Rinpoche loved that story when Allen told it to him. I told my parents about it, reading them Allen's card over the phone.

“Sad,” my mother said, “not to be able to feel that way on your deathbed.”

Louis died, and Allen came back in some ways a different man. I saw it in the poems he was writing, poems about love and loss, not just about caring for his father in those last weeks but poems about lovers, about growing old as a lover, about not being able to get it up, worrying about going to bed alone. And I think that Peter's search for a girlfriend and his desire to have a family was beginning to worry Allen. He felt it was a fantasy of Peter's that
they would all live like the Sleepytime Tea bears, cozy in a little cave in the Rocky Mountains. So Allen returned from burying his father frightened of being alone.

When I next saw Allen, I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me. I thought that if ever there was a moment to kiss him and hold him, this was it. But I didn't want to have sex with Allen. I wanted to please him, but had always turned down his advances. I hadn't yet made it into the hot tub with Allen and Peter, like the young dancers and meditation students who thought nothing of taking off their clothes and diving in, kissing Peter and soul kissing Allen. I felt like the shy one at the orgy.

I helped put Allen to bed that night. He was drunk from all those tiny bottles of alcohol he and Peter must've had on the plane. I took his clothes off the way Peter must've done for Louis to get him ready for bed. Then I went downstairs. Allen's poem of a few weeks later, given to me to type, read, “Now I lie alone, and a youth / Stalks my house, he won't in truth / Come to bed with me, instead / Loves the thoughts inside my head.” Was that about me?

 

Allen thought it was so American, so crazy, so gridlocked that his father would be buried in a family plot near Newark Airport under a Winston Cigarettes sign off Exit 14 of the New Jersey Turnpike, in B'Nai Israel Cemetery, which used to be a paint factory. Nearby were some farms, with the wires of the Penn Central Power Station buzzing overhead.

“What's to be done about death?” Allen wrote in his notebook. “Nothing. Nothing? Stop going to school No. 6, Paterson, N.J., in 1937? Freeze time tonight, with a headache, at quarter to 2
A.M
.? / Not go to father's funeral tomorrow morn? / Not go back to Naropa teach Buddhist poetics all summer? / Not be buried in the cemetery near Newark Airport some day?”

Flying home, somewhere over Lake Michigan Allen had thought about Rinpoche's advice to realize that death is one of the aspects of
impermanence, and that the life his father had given him was not a bad thing for the world. He said that Louis had been a teacher his whole life; death would make him more of a teacher.

Allen said he had written “a blues” while flying back from seeing his father. He said he thought the blues was the only way to talk about death and grief, so he wrote his “Father Death Blues” sitting in the airplane, like a prince of Shambhala above the clouds.

Back in his apartment, Allen took out his harmonium, a musical instrument like a little church organ, and placed it on his lap. The harmonium case had stickers from all the places it had been with him. Wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, Allen played the harmonium by pressing the hand pedal toward him and pumping it with air. He started to sing. “Hey Father Death, I'm flying home / Hey poor man, you're all alone / Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going. Father Death, Don't cry any more / Mama's there, underneath the floor / Brother Death, please mind the store…Pain is gone, tears take the rest.”