When I Was Cool (31 page)

I read the letter at the donut shop; it already had a few coffee
rings around the edges. The woman who gave it to me liked to come here late at night to think about what had happened. She said that since seminary, it was hard for her to sleep. I added the letter to our “Merwin Incident Report” and took it to the copy shop at the top of the hill near the university, where I had it Xeroxed. I gave it to Allen. We had a copy made for the Naropa library, but someone removed it about a week later.

 

By the time Sanders left Boulder, he looked like an old man. He'd been through hell. He was living with Tom Clark and his family, who were trying not to answer the phone because threats were coming in. Tom wanted to publish the findings of the Investigative Poetry class in the
Boulder Monthly,
but Allen and Anne really didn't want all of that to come out. The younger poets were angry with Tom that he would even think of doing that. But Tom had no allegiance to Rinpoche or to the Kerouac School. Tom liked Gregory's way of doing things—keeping his distance within the circle. Sleeping with one eye open, even among his friends. I also got the feeling that there was no one Tom wouldn't betray for a good story.

I saw Sanders the day Tom Clark took him to the airport. “Goodbye,” was the first thing I ever said to him. We shook hands. Ed was carrying a lot of the paperwork from our investigation in a big shopping bag. We were all a little frightened. Ed had told the class when we first started our investigation that when we opened the file on Rinpoche and Naropa, our first concern should be to define what he called “the area of darkness,” and to bring to that darkness “the hard light of Sophocles,” or something like that. But it was hard for us; these were our teachers, this was our school, and accreditation, we hoped, was just around the corner.

Just think of me, if you will, as I was then: an overheated imagination, a dangerously susceptible heart, a good-natured kid, maybe even a tender soul with a mind full of poesy, constantly in the presence of some of the flintiest (Burroughs
père
), moodiest (Allen), and chilliest (see Waldman, Anne) temperaments around.
Ed's report and the anxiety it was causing Allen put me in a state of despair that seemed only to induce a kind of narcolepsy. I slept like I was still growing. My somber fits had me (when I was awake) playing lots of Bob Dylan records. Playing “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” more than once a day was a sure sign of my misery. Even when I stepped into a restaurant, the one thing I always loved to do whatever my mood, I felt lost and alone.

I suppose that the reason I was eating myself alive was Ed's report and the unhappiness it was causing the Kerouac School. As my two years at the Kerouac School were drawing to a close, I had stopped calling people up. The investigation had made me slide backwards into shyness and found me returning to my old haunts like an innocent, pretending that I knew no one. I was tormented by the desire for company but unable to pick up the phone. If the Kerouac School had taught me anything, it was to think of my teachers as trusty confidantes, to turn up the radio at a party and climb into the Faigos' hot tub with Allen and Peter and a few girls, even if they laughed when the steam made my eyeglasses fog over. I was able to throw my library card over the garden wall and be a primitive youth, at least in the backyard of a suburban house. Maybe I was worried about what was going to happen to me after I graduated. Would graduating from the Jack Kerouac School make me a poet? Would I start to publish? Would I stay on in Boulder or go back to Merrick? I didn't have a clue.

Yet I knew how upset Allen was, and I was afraid that somehow I had displeased him. Around Allen and Bill, even after all this time, I still felt like a schoolboy. Their every word sounded like it was coming from under a dome of gold, even if it was just Allen exasperated with Peter for putting his dirty underwear back in the drawer.

 

After a few weeks into my slough of despond, I finally screwed up my courage and called Allen. He told me he had just been to New York to accept an award for his poetry; he was now getting serious
attention from more academic poetry circles. I think he liked it. He had a habit of surrounding himself with poets who were never that good. Gregory noticed this right away, how Allen often championed the work of vastly inferior poets, some of them just because they were working-class guys who reminded him of Jack Kerouac. They were solidly built and had hair. “That's not enough,” Gregory said, “to let them into Parnassus.” (I loved how he said “Parnassus” in that thick New York accent.)

Toward the end of the spring semester, Allen invited me to a party. He said we should talk about Ed's investigation and what else Tom Clark planned to do to ruin the Kerouac School. I went with Allen. It was in a student apartment full of lots of kids trying to act grown up. Almost immediately they began asking questions. “Was it true about Rinpoche and what happened?”

Allen patiently explained to them that the so-called Merwin incident had indeed happened, but that things like individual rights didn't really exist in a situation like that. He surprised me a little by saying that Merwin got what he'd deserved by going there in the first place.

I could tell Allen was getting angry. He said that Trungpa was a revolutionary, in that he was in some sense challenging the foundations of American democracy, and that, anyway, democracy was a failed experiment—the atom bomb proved that. “What Trungpa was up to was a new experiment in monarchy,” he said.

I saw Tom Clark at the party. He was listening to Allen, who didn't notice him right away. Tom approached Allen, and it looked like they still might be friends. Tom asked Allen if he would be willing to do an interview about the Merwin problem, about religion and poetry. Allen didn't want to do it. Clark had interviewed Allen once before for
The Paris Review,
an historic interview in fact. Allen wasn't shy, but he didn't want to be interviewed for the
Boulder Monthly
; he wanted his interview in a more respectable forum, like
Playboy.

That spring semester I had taken a class Allen was teaching on the prophetic books of Blake:
The Book of Urizen, Jerusalem.
A few days
after the party, we left class on a night that felt like Yom Kippur. We walked out into the cool mountain air. Tom Clark was waiting. He told Allen that the interview had to be
now.
People wanted to hear from Allen Ginsberg on the Kerouac School's first big scandal. Allen agreed, and we walked back to Allen's house on Mapleton.

Peter was there with his schizophrenic brother Julius, who was visiting that week. Julius roamed through the house like a skinny ghost in a checkered shirt, stopping to stare at something on the wallpaper. I felt like there were two tragedies going on in Allen's house at the same time: one was the pain of the Rinpoche / Merwin incident, the other was Peter.

The Orlovskys never seemed ready for this world; they were like incarnations of its suffering. There were four children raised in poverty by a deaf mother. Julius and Lafcadio had both spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals. Allen was the one person they seemed to trust. I always thought that Peter would have wound up just like his brothers but for Allen's love and devotion. Allen was able to look after Peter, to “handle” him on Peter's days and weeks of locking himself in the bathroom and crying. Allen had had all that experience with his mother's schizophrenia.

Now that Peter had taken up with Juanita Lieberman, Peter's emotional absences, the weird vacancies that would cross his face, making him unapproachable, almost catatonic like his brothers, became a real crisis for Allen. “Now I'll have two babies to support,” he complained, referring to Peter and Juanita's plans to move in with Allen and start a family.

It sounded familiar. That's the same language Carla had used with me after she decided to send me out of her life.

Peter had just made dinner for his brother when we all came into the house. He was doing the dishes and preparing to put out the garbage. Peter cleaned out the house like he was cleaning out the Augean stables, but I understood how he had gotten himself dismissed from the army for “mental disturbance” (when he was asked to clean out his barracks, he had tossed out everything he considered ugly—including guns and helmets—and then hung
curtains and painted sunflowers on the soldiers' lockers). Peter sang to himself, but in a very loud voice, while Allen spoke softly into Tom's tape recorder in the living room, driving Tom crazy by making him turn it off and on every few minutes, while Allen considered what he wanted to say, “for posterity.”

I liked helping Peter with the dishes; I liked to do the chores that would keep me from having to offer an opinion, anything not to get sucked into the Merwin whirlpool, where I could feel myself getting old just thinking about it.

Sometimes, despite his quiet, reasonable tone of voice, his sane manner, Allen could say some very outrageous things. That was a source of his power—his quiet mania, his well-mannered, apocalyptic thinking.

“I accuse myself all the time of seducing the entire poetry scene, and Merwin, into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship, which they'll never get out of again, and which will ruin American culture forever,” he said into Tom's tape recorder. “Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters…All the horrific hallucinations of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
are going to come true right now. Right here in Boulder…But with Trungpa…you're talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher. Trungpa said that he was trying to explain to Dana that she should respect her roots by taking part in a classical experience. What he finally told me was, ‘This is an opportunity to turn poison into nectar.' I don't know what happened,” Allen admitted. “So I went to see Trungpa. It didn't bother me too much, but apparently it bugged a lot of other people.”

Allen interrupted the interview to ask Peter to sing a little less loudly while he washed dishes. Julius kept switching a bouquet of flowers from one vase to another; he couldn't quite decide which one “was a better house for the flowers.”

Allen then said he thought that Trungpa was being influenced by the teachers at the Kerouac School. Allen said Trungpa had sounded like a character from a Burroughs novel when he'd told
Dana, “You Oriental slick cunt, why are you hanging around with this honky?” Allen told Tom that he was “looking at it sort of as Burroughs-type humor,” rather than as anything truly sinister.

It seemed pretty sinister to me. I cringed when I heard Allen sounding like Burroughs.

“Everybody was getting very self-righteous,” Allen said, “for Rinpoche to bring up the fact that Dana was hanging around with a white guy. You're not supposed to say things like that. Even if you're a Vajrayana teacher, breaking down all privacy and breaking every possible icon in every mental form, and acting like a poet, no less. I mean you're supposed to out-Gregory Gregory Corso, and out-Burroughs William Burroughs, if you're a Vajrayana teacher.”

For Allen the whole incident was like the story of the snake and the rope, where you see a snake coiled up in a basket and, when you look closely at it, it turns out to be a rope. In other words, the entire world is an illusion.

It was getting late. That wasn't an illusion. The kitchen was filling up with students. I tried my best to hide my feelings, but I thought that Allen couldn't win, that we should be making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible. I mean, in a few days our parents would be here for Parents Weekend; didn't we want them to approve of everything?

Tom's being in Allen's house and Peter's brother walking like a zombie between Allen and Tom and the tape recorder weren't helping Allen's mood. Every one of Clark's questions seemed to go against Allen's grain. The whole issue was becoming about as friendly as a hangnail. Allen looked exhausted, but he was incapable of kicking people out. Even more people came into the house, and soon it was overflowing as students and hangers-on gathered in the kitchen, the living room, out on the porch, in the backyard. Allen became more and more angry, as if all the people in the house were feeding off the problem at hand.

It's hard work, I thought, standing up to Clark's questions, his wise-guy remarks, steeped in vinegar, that came flying through the air even over the head of the innocent. Allen said that Merwin had
been free to leave and free to stay. Rinpoche put himself in danger by having an inexperienced meditator like Merwin even come into a situation like that. The worst thing Allen could say about Trungpa was that he had put Allen into a situation where he had to go through all this
tsouris.

“As if I hadn't had enough with LSD and fag liberation, now I've got to go through Vajrayana! And Merwin, whose poetry I don't care about anyway! With Ed Sanders freaking out and saying it's another Manson case! Ed has a large quotient of paranoia,” Allen explained to Tom's tape recorder. “He's been studying black magic and Aleister Crowley and playing around with all that. I mean, getting into the Manson thing, and then getting into Vajrayana and Trungpa and Merwin, is just made for Ed Sanders. It's even made for my paranoia, because half the time I think, ‘Maybe Trungpa's the CIA.'”

I almost dropped the glass I was drying. Could Rinpoche himself be the spy Allen and Bill were talking about? Allen was on a roll; it just wasn't very pretty. His voice became higher, scratchier, a sign of his irritation and distress. I think he forgot that the tape recorder was on.

“Who are these poets anyway,” Allen asked, “who feel that nobody should be above the poets? That the poets have the right to shit on anybody they want to? That they've got the divine right of poetry? They go around and commit suicide. Burroughs commits murder, Gregory Corso borrows money from everybody and shoots up drugs for twenty years, but he's ‘divine Gregory.' But poor Trungpa, who's been suffering since he was two years old to teach the dharma, isn't allowed to wave his frankfurter!”