When I Was Cool (29 page)

47. A Woman with No Heart

I failed. My first year at the Kerouac School was coming to an end, and I flunked the first assignment Allen had given me at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics: I couldn't keep Gregory away from his drug dealer. I had tried. I tried everything. I tried talking him out of going into Denver and spending all his money. I told him, “What if something happens to you? Think of your kids if you have an overdose.” It didn't really occur to me that as far as Gregory was concerned, getting high was the only place in the world where he felt comfortable, now that he was forgotten, or not as famous as his famous friends Ginzy and Burroughs. It was also a way for Gregory to have a kind of permanent vacation from the slavery of having to make a living. Gregory's boss-hating attitude was the most extreme I had ever seen. It didn't help that Allen was making the Kerouac faculty plow their money back into Naropa, especially now that the scandal involving Rinpoche and W. S. Merwin might hurt future enrollment. It would be a happy miracle if Gregory could only finish his book; there was more money in it for him if he could.

Gregory had been a beautiful young man. Anne Waldman had told me that when she used to see him walking along MacDougal Street, his black curly hair and impish smile would take her breath away. Allen was always saying what a gorgeous kid Gregory was. But the years of wandering and drug taking had taken something out of him. Butterflies in youth, maggots at the end.

It wasn't envy, really, that Gregory felt toward Allen, but whatever it was it seemed like a pendulum that swung between aggression and depression. I didn't like hearing Gregory swearing at Allen behind his back, or calling him names. If Gregory could have been a ghost, free to haunt Allen and Bill, he would have shown his resentment in boundless mischief. As it was, he acted out in front of Allen, accusing him of abusing his authority at the Kerouac School and not promoting his friends' work so much as using it as a way to control them, a way of supervising how famous
they
could get.

I couldn't stand up to him anymore. He said if I let him go down into the hole of his addiction one more time, he promised me he would finish the book, and even write a letter of apology (“you could write it, I'll sign it,” he said) to the entire Kerouac School faculty, apologizing for trashing the apartment they had given him. It seemed too good to be true.

It was. If Allen found out, I would be one dead poetry student. They would never trust me again. Nonetheless, I decided to go with Gregory—at least I could sit in the car so he wouldn't be given a parking ticket, proof that I had let him return to the junkies' trading post, a place as exotic in my imagination as any jungle in the Amazon, crawling with strange animals and natives with blow darts. Besides, I was curious to see what it was really like. I wouldn't have to avoid talking about it with Gregory,
I would know.
If a swindle took place, or if he lost some serious money to these people, he would be able to talk to me about it. Maybe he'd have more respect for me. I wouldn't seem like such a virgin to him. That was, after all, the big difference between us. Gregory's past had everything in it, whereas my biggest setback occurred when my high school guidance counselor had left a packet of vocational school brochures for me just at the time when I was starting to think about applying to colleges.

 

We set out at night, Gregory looking for a church. The semester was almost over and summer was just around the corner—you
could smell its hot breath hovering in the air. “A church,” he said, “with a tin roof.” Allen or Neal, maybe it was, had taken him there one night. We found it. As we pulled up to the curb, the car scraped the sidewalk as if we had hit a sandbar.

I thought I would just stay in the car and wait for Gregory to get his drugs, but he told me to go instead. He said he had a bad feeling about what would happen if he went in, so he sent me. I couldn't believe his gall. I looked over at Gregory. I must've looked like I wanted to kill him; I certainly felt like it.

I got out of the car. Gregory said that the guy I was looking for would probably see me first and come out of church or around the corner. Gregory said that he was expecting me.

That's when I realized this had all been planned in advance. Gregory said that the guy I was looking for was very nervous about these kinds of transactions, and that I should try not to blink or look nervous. Suddenly, my eyelid started twitching like mad. It had never done that before.

I approached my destination. No one appeared. I walked into the church. Sanctuary! No one was going to kill me there, I thought.

The church was very hot. I could hardly breathe in the little alcove. There were a lot of candles burning in little glasses. I was alone. The altar of the church looked like a horizon very far away.

Suddenly, someone put his arm on my shoulder from behind. There was a small space between the candles and the door. I turned around. It wasn't a priest or someone who had come to say his prayers at the end of the day. It was a sandy-haired guy with blue eyes who smelled like he had been working under the hood of a car. He smiled and his gold tooth caught the light from the burning candles. I recognized him. He was one of Billy Jr.'s friends, one of the Westies.

This was Gregory's drug dealer? I never had much respect for Billy's friends. Billy was so smart; he loved to read; he wanted to be Mark Twain. The Westies seemed like idiots—the more they drank, the more drink they poured into Billy, and the more idiotic they seemed.

The Westie was staring at me. He didn't seem too interested in his money or in giving me the glassine envelope with Gregory's ticket to paradise in it. “How much is that worth?” he asked, pointing to the chain around my neck. “What is it anyway?” He put out his hand, and I leaned back. “You don't have to be afraid of me. I'm not going to hurt you. Fuuuuck.” He must've added that for reassurance.

I never liked wearing jewelry. My father never even wore a watch or his wedding band. I'm not sure he even had one. But my parents had given me a mezuzah, which I sometimes wore on a chain around my neck.

“What's in it? What's it for?” the Westie asked.

“There's a tiny scroll in it,” I said. “It has Hebrew writing inside. I wear it for good luck. It's like a Jewish rabbit's foot.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Some are. This one isn't.”

I wondered if he also noticed the veins in my neck throbbing with fear.

“I want it,” he said. He was going to try to tear it off my neck. I could feel the chain getting hot as he began to pull, as if he could pass the chain right through my neck. I tried not to look at him. I looked at his tropical shirt instead: hula girls standing on the backs of dolphins. I wanted to run out of the church, but he held the chain of the mezuzah in his hand.

I don't know why but for some reason, when I left Gregory in the car, I'd taken with me a small bag of things I just bought at a drugstore—shaving cream, toothpaste, that sort of thing. I managed to get out a can of deodorant and I sprayed it in the Westie's face. I sprayed him up and down and from left to right. It was like I was making the sign of the cross in deodorant spray.

He let go of the mezuzah. I left him sprawled out like Thomas Becket on the floor of the church, with all the candles burning. I ran back to the car. I pounded on the window for Gregory to let me in.

Back in the car, Gregory said I was a lucky bastard because that particular Westie was “not a Corsican.” In Gregory-speak, that meant that he wasn't any good. I didn't bring up the fact that
Gregory had set me up with this creep to begin with, who could've had a gun with him for all I knew. Finally, out of sheer exhaustion, I told Gregory that for someone who was always complaining about not having enough money, his habit was sucking him dry.

“Just think of the money you'd have if you didn't spend it on drugs,” I told him. “And by the way, you've got a windfall coming because I ran out of the church without handing over the money.”

Gregory looked through his money as if he had just won the lottery, as if he couldn't believe his good fortune. When we got back to Boulder, he used the cash to have flowers sent to his wife, and to Calliope, and he took me to a great dinner at John's restaurant, with its white tablecloths and fresh-cut flowers on the table. Gregory ordered an expensive wine, and for once I wouldn't have to use my father's credit card to pay for the meal.

Seated comfortably and enjoying our meal, Gregory started talking about drugs. He said, “Drugs aren't beat” (though Gregory had never really liked the word “beat”). “The problem with drugs is that they're like a woman with no heart. You keep trying to appeal to her, but she doesn't hear you. She doesn't really return your affections, not for very long.”

Gregory got treated like a great man at John's. He sat at the table swathed in a kind of Roman dignity. I couldn't figure out if it was because he seemed to suddenly have come into a lot of money or if they knew who he was: a great poet, for that's what his face looked like by the restaurant's candlelight.

48. King of the Cats

Like Jean Marais, the man in Jean Cocteau's
Orpheus
who sat in his car and listened to messages from the underworld, Billy sat in his room like the incarnation of a hookah in an abandoned harem. Billy sat alone with his thoughts bubbling to the surface. I noticed that all his furniture was missing. He didn't even have a nail left from which to hang himself.

Billy had huge gambling debts. He was drinking so much by now that his apartment looked like a liquor store filled with empty bottles. He was turning into a character from Dostoyevsky. In fact, Billy was turning into Dostoyevsky himself, a genius of waste and sorrows. His creditors had come and taken everything out of the apartment, even Billy's beloved couch, what he referred to lovingly as his “barge of sufferings.” His favorite hat had disappeared into the couch and he'd forgotten to retrieve it, so even his hat didn't belong to him anymore.

When I first met him, certain things used to make him come alive. A good joke, James Cagney on television, his memory of the owls he'd once seen swooping through Grand Central Station. I thought that my telling him about spraying one of the Westies with deodorant would cheer him up, but even that failed to register on his Dead End Kid face. He was like one of those Central Park carriage horses at the end of its usefulness, unresponsive to the crop, impervious to any thrill.

Billy had taken to gambling out of desperation. It was the last vice he could find. He awaited his nightly poker games the way other men wait for love, nervously, impatiently. He bet on horses. Offtrack betting had just come to Denver.

He even bet on bicycle races, including the one sponsored by Celestial Seasonings, the tea company that was started in Boulder
in Mo Siegel's backyard garden. I think that even if Billy had had a run of good luck as a gambler, he would have given the money away, or spent it on booze and pot. He seemed to like the fellowship of losers. Billy was a realist, though, even for a gambler. He believed in the healing power of calamity, the idea that you leave yourself without any safety net, that you run away from the demon that's chasing you by climbing up a tree and sawing off the limb you're hanging on to. Billy was the collateral damage, the refugee in the war against himself. He sat in his damp, empty room with a pack of cards and let Allen and Old Bill arrange to get his furniture back.

When it came, Billy just got up from the floor and let them put the couch back where it had been before. He looked for the hat. There it was, beneath the huge pillow—his threadbare cap. He pulled it over his head, a strange look in his eyes. His pale, unhealthy pallor looked even worse in the nearly empty room.

And then I saw it: the bitter smile. Some part of him liked doing this to Allen and Old Bill. He was punishing his father. Here was this undiscovered genius whom the poets seemed to recognize. But what did it matter? They were unable to help him. Billy was a prince of the Beat tribe. Anne certainly treated him this way. I was a lot nicer to her than Billy, but she could hardly give me the time of day. Billy, with his mute eloquence and his shabby clothes—he was going to be Old Bill's heir.

I wouldn't bet on it.

 

Billy said that while I was in New York he had heard that they were closing down the operation at the Boulderado. Some of the women were becoming emotionally involved with the men who came to see them, and that was too much for Lydia, the madam I'd met at one of Carla's parties. She was a Holocaust survivor, so it was hard to dislike her, but I did.

Lydia didn't like the emotional entanglements that were getting in the way of her business. “It's because they're babies,
they're not professionals,” she complained to Billy about her girls. “They have orgasms while they're working, for Chrissake!” But it didn't sound like a house of pleasure, not anymore.

Billy said that he couldn't afford to go there anyway, but that now there'd be no place to work. He had always liked to go there to write. “It was Yaddo,” he said, referring to the famous artists' colony in upstate New York, “only with pussy.” Not that it mattered to Billy Jr. He seemed to care only about the pack of cards fluttering inside his chest. That would be his ticket out—the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. That's what he was preparing for.

Allen had talked Burroughs into allowing for Billy to receive a kind of stipend from some of Bill's books. Jubal, Bill's scary assistant, didn't like the idea. Naturally, they wanted
me
to tell Jubal about their plan. So I went over to Burroughs's apartment and knocked on the door.

Jubal had never liked me. I always felt he was just waiting for an excuse to kill me; now he'd have it. I was relieved when Calliope opened the door. When she wasn't with Gregory, Calliope was with Jubal. I looked at her for a moment in the doorway. “Goodbye,” I said.

“Goodbye?” she replied. “Wait, where are you going?”

“I came to see Jubal, but he's not here, so I'll go. I have a taxi waiting at the corner.” That was going to be my excuse for getting out of that house, and to discourage Jubal from killing me.

It was starting to rain. It did that a lot in Boulder in the late spring, especially when you were stuck outside. Suddenly, the sky would become as dark as the inside of a hat and the rain would come. Calliope invited me in. Now my hope of not finding Jubal at home was in ruins.

“He's upstairs. He's practicing darts and polishing William's guns.”

“Don't bother him, Poppy,” I said. “Just tell him that Allen's going to talk to Bill about setting up a little trust fund for Billy so that he can pay some of his bills. Just think, he'll be able to buy breakfast with the proceeds of
Naked Lunch.”
I didn't realize how dumb that sounded until I'd said it. Calliope smiled at me, but it
was the mocking smile of a statue, one that could have been called, “Beauty Looks at an Idiot.”

Walking home through the rain—I didn't really have a cab waiting for me—I noticed the mountains of Boulder. I had forgotten about the mountains. I was surrounded by them, but I'd never really seen them. They were brown with black rings of earth that reminded me of my father's fedora, the hat he liked to wear to work. I know they were only foothills, but they were mysterious, jutting up into the sky, full of foxes and fugitives eating scraps left by hikers, and mountain couples who washed in the creeks and lived, god knows where, in abandoned shacks that had once housed miners cooking trout in a iron skillet. (I don't think I'd yet seen an iron skillet. I grew up surrounded by Teflon.) I was so blinded by Allen's fame and Burroughs's scary reputation that I couldn't see the mountains for the giants that were living at the base camp, which is what Boulder really was, a place to live before you went up into the ever thinning air.

When I got home the phone was ringing. It was Jubal, and he was angry. He shouted into the phone that he didn't care how Bill threw away his money. He claimed that he saw right through Allen and Bill, Billy Jr. and me. Jubal told me that his mother had been killed by his father, and that his father had shot himself, leaving Jubal in possession of a secret for making a fortune. Jubal said that his wishes came true at the very moment he utters them. He told me that he was about to wish Billy Jr. dead.

For a few days after that, the slightest sound outside my apartment made me jump. “Take away Jubal's meanness, his talent as a writer of Westerns, his success with women, and what have you got?” I once asked Gregory.

“You've got you!” Gregory said, laughing to himself. “You've got you.”

There was a noise at the door. It sounded like a tree branch scratching against the wooden banister on the tiny porch in front of my apartment. Then I heard a short cry. Jubal trying to lure me onto the front porch, so as to plunge one of his darts into my chest? Shoot me with one of Burroughs's brilliantly polished guns?

It was a cat. It was Gregory's gray cat, Horace, named for the Roman poet who wrote odes. Under Horace's front paws—one blue and one gray (Civil War paws?)—was a note: “Take care of Horace and he'll take care of you. Don't let him die, or I will have sex with your mother. Love, Gregory.” I took Horace inside. I had a terrible allergy to cats. Horace always made my eyes tear and a scarlet streak flare up on my neck.

Gregorio Nunzio was a
gattari—
at least, that's what he called himself—a lover, a feeder, a stroker of cats. He fell in love with them while wandering in Rome. Feeding strays in doorways, Gregory would fall asleep among the cats of the Colosseum, before being chased away by the
polizia.
“If Allen is the king of May,” Gregory once said, referring to the student coronation of Allen in Czechoslovakia in 1965, “then I declare myself to be the prince of the Piazza Argentia”—the City of Cats Gregory discovered when he lived in Rome, thinking up his poems among the hundreds and thousands of wandering cats scratching and screeching among the marble ruins.

Now Horace was mine. Gregory had left him, as well as something else wedged inside the screen door: his new collection of verse. The book was finished. No title yet. I picked up the manuscript with one hand and held Horace in the other. Horace weighed more than the sum of Gregory's poems.

Gregory claimed he had found Horace as a kitten wandering the English cemetery in Rome, where Keats was buried, that he was purring and pawing Keats's inscription: “One whose name is writ in water.” I didn't believe him, but now it didn't matter. I had the finished book he had promised, and I had Horace. I would have to take care of them both.

A few nights earlier, the ax suspended over Gregory finally fell. Gregory got himself and the Kerouac School in trouble again by going with Calliope and Jubal to the Blue Note, a nightclub that had just opened up on the mall on Pearl Street. The Go-Gos were appearing for two nights. Gregory, who knew nothing about pop music and couldn't care less, shouted out that he and the Go-
Gos—all five of them—should have sex in their hotel room. He shouted that having sex with a great poet would only improve their musical abilities and their access to the Muse. He kept interrupting them from his seat. I don't think the Go-Gos knew who he was, just another heckler, another drunk they encountered on the road.

He caused such a ruckus that the businessmen around Rinpoche who were trying to keep Naropa afloat got wind of it and gave Allen the unhappy news that Gregory would have to go. The faculty had almost fired him when he'd trashed his apartment; now they had no other choice. It fell to Allen, his friend of nearly thirty years, to tell him to get lost, to leave the Kerouac School, for the sake of the school itself and its chances for accreditation. He was out.

Where would he go? How would he live? Gregory really had nothing to declare but his genius. The croupier of Gregory's fate seemed to be pushing all of Gregory's chips off the table. He had simply run out of chances.

Gregory would never completely disappear, however. After being let go he still hung around the fringes, occasionally teaching other people's classes; between the cup and the lip, there would always be room for Gregory. He would still appear suddenly at a party or pop up at a reading to heckle the performing poet, a thousand phrases whirling around in his brain and then finding a launching pad out of that nearly toothless mouth.