When I Was Cool (32 page)

Julius was picking his nose by now, and examining it. I lost interest in Peter's leftovers. Suddenly, a middle-aged couple appeared in Allen's living room.

They looked lost and a little afraid. They were carrying their suitcases. They put them down and asked if they had the right house. They asked for me. I had forgotten that Allen had wanted me to invite the parents who were going to be in charge of Parents
Weekend to stay with him at the house on Mapleton. There wasn't much I could do to stop them from coming. Now they were here, wiping their feet on the doormat.

Allen had recently played host to his two completely useless nephews, who wore their hair like a curtain so that I never actually saw their faces and who hated everything. They had responded to Allen's suggestions to go out and find a job by telling him how many awful things can happen to you while working—cans of peas falling on your head if you become a stock boy, getting mauled by a vicious dog if you take the civil service exam and become a postman, and so on. He put up with them because Allen liked having family around him. His stepmother, newly widowed, was a frequent guest in Boulder. He could be cranky and become irritated with them, but he liked the fact that they were around. It made him feel like the paterfamilias. Allen Ginsberg, the godfather of poesy!

There was a trickle of blood coming out of Julius's nose. I noticed Allen had come back from the bathroom with his pants unzipped. I looked over at the middle-aged parents who had arrived with their suitcases; a look of misery came over the husband's face. It was as if standing in Allen's foyer had brought back a bad dream. I probably made things worse when, like Lurch, I stepped up to the parents and said, “I'll show you to your room.” I had everything but a candelabra.

“Where do you sleep, young man?” the woman asked me.

Her husband interrupted her. “In the dorm, Betty, of course.”

“We don't have dorms at the Kerouac School,” I replied. “I sleep in my coffin. What a lift it gives you!” Gregory would have been proud of me.

50. Plutonium Blues

My head, like life itself, was in shambles. My parents weren't going to make it to Parents Weekend. It was just as well. The entire weekend ended up being about the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

Rocky Flats was a big deal. It was owned by the Rockwell Corporation, and Allen was obsessed with it. The facility was in Golden, Colorado, and they made triggers for plutonium bombs. Allen even wrote a poem called “Plutonian Ode” and made it the title of one of his books. No one liked having the Rocky Flats facility so close to Boulder and the Kerouac School. Anne wrote a long poem she liked to perform all about plutonium and what a long shelf life it had. Allen invited Daniel Ellsberg, the revealer of the Pentagon Papers who at one time had helped to design a fail-safe system for our nuclear program, to come to Boulder and get arrested with him out at Rocky Flats. Allen wanted Ellsberg, Anne, and all the other teachers and students at the Kerouac School—even Gregory—to go to the facility and sit on the railroad tracks with him and meditate. He wanted to stop the trains that were carrying nuclear material to Rocky Flats. They called themselves the Rocky Flats Truth Force.

So one morning Allen, Peter, and Ellsberg drove to Rocky Flats, along with most of the students from the Kerouac School and all of the teachers. Allen was going to read “Plutonian Ode” and Anne was going to read her plutonium poem. Before leaving, we all had breakfast together while Allen explained how just ten pounds of plutonium scattered throughout the earth is enough to kill four billion people.

Just as we were about to leave, Ellsberg told Allen that he wanted to change his pants. He was wearing a very expensive pair
of white pants, and he didn't want to get them dirty sitting on the railroad tracks. We waited while he changed into blue jeans.

Allen asked if I wanted to go and get arrested. I knew that Anne would be angry with me if I backed out, but I didn't care. I didn't feel like getting arrested, not during Parents Weekend. I asked if it wasn't bad timing to go out to Rocky Flats the same day all the parents would be coming to see the school. Allen thought it was perfect timing, because then it would get more attention. Imagine pictures of parents coming to the Jefferson County jail to bail out their socially conscious children, heroes in the war against death! I had written a poem to be read at Rocky Flats called “Einstein's Brain,” about a journalist who comes to the medical school at Princeton to interview Einstein's brain, to ask him how he felt about unleashing such power on the world. It was a prose poem. I meant it to be funny. Allen liked it, although he said something like “you can't exactly interview a brain.” (I was never quite sure if he got any of my poems.) But it didn't matter. He was going to let me read it.

Anne said that if I was going to Rocky Flats to read my poem, I had to sit on the tracks and get arrested like everybody else. She seemed determined to make life hard for me. I was afraid to argue with her. I couldn't imagine winning an argument with someone I thought was so beautiful. But she was an incomplete Venus. She left me clanking my chains, stuck in the same place I always was with her. I decided not to go. A few days before, another Rocky Flats protester had sat on the railroad tracks and the train rolled over him. They had to amputate his legs.

Everyone looked at me like I was a traitor. They left. By the afternoon every teacher at the Kerouac School had been arrested for trespassing on government property. Allen read “Plutonian Ode” from the back of a paddy wagon. At the parents' reception in the shrine room, I realized that all the teachers of the Kerouac School were in jail. I sat at the table by myself. About a dozen parents started asking where their children were.

Gregory came stumbling in. He wasn't even supposed to be
teaching here anymore. Allen had told him to stay away during Parents Weekend. “Why?” he'd asked. “I'm a parent. I have three children by four different mothers.” He started to tell me, in a loud voice, how he thought there might be something wrong with him because he couldn't stop urinating. Parents looked at each other and if expressions could have sounds attached to them you would have heard an enormous racket like garbage cans being thrown out of windows. They knew something was wrong.

Pretty soon the word had gotten out that most of the Kerouac School and its students had been arrested at Rocky Flats. I looked down at the display of food and faculty books that had been set up on the table; it looked like the wreckage of a carnival. I saw mouths moving, but I couldn't hear a sound. I had blocked it all out.

A policeman came in. One of the parents passed out. I didn't feel so good myself. I handed out flyers about the activities that were planned for the rest of the weekend. I heard the policeman say something about bail, and then I couldn't hear them at all; the parents and the policeman had moved to another corner of the shrine room. It was very quiet at the poet's table. There was nothing left to do but reach for a cracker and some cheese.

 

Allen came back from Rocky Flats filled with an almost messianic zeal about closing it down. He started looking for signs in the prophetic books of Blake about Rocky Flats, pointing out sentences like “The Reactor hid himself thro envy. I behold him. But you cannot behold him till he be revealed in his System.” Blake,
Jerusalem,
chap. 2, plate 43, lines 9–10. Allen was starting to sound like Oral Roberts on a crusade. I was getting worried.

At one of the evening lectures for parents about Buddhism, Rinpoche's handpicked successor, known as the Vadjra regent, gave a talk about the Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata—all about existence as simultaneously void and solid, empty and real. He spoke to the parents about all-penetrating egolessness symbolized by the Diamond Scepter. He concluded by talking about the Six Realms,
all held together in the delusion of time by pride, anger, and ignorance.

This definitely wasn't Nassau Community College. I could take it, but I wasn't sure about my friends' parents. I wasn't sure I had any friends, not after I had bailed on getting busted at Rocky Flats. I sat by myself in the shrine room and watched these parents who loved their children and were giving in to them, even though I could see it was giving them a lunatic headache. From the cradle to the coffeehouse, they had loved their children and were letting them in some way forget about life, by which I mean they were letting them forget about money, how to make it, how to hold on to it. Even if they didn't believe it themselves, they were letting them live more outrageously, more passionately perhaps, than they had ever allowed themselves to live. It made me feel tenderly toward them. It made me miss my own parents, my parents like two ocean liners plowing their way through the sea, while I played shuffleboard on their backs and dined at the captain's table. I wonder if Allen ever felt that way, or Gregory. No, not Gregorio Nunzio, he hardly knew his parents. He had accepted himself right away; he'd had no choice.

51. Carla Redux

It was her faux leopard collar and sleeves that gave her away. I usually took my glasses off when I had to stand up in public and read my poems. Gregory said he was getting to be an old man (not true, he was forty-six when Allen first introduced us) and had to wear glasses to read, but that I was still a young man and should want girls to sleep with me, because I was a poet and girls loved words. The only problem with taking off my glasses during a reading was
that I couldn't see the people who had come to listen to the poems. But I knew that it was Carla from the black sweater with those leopard-skin cuffs—she had come to the student poetry reading that Anne had put together for Parents Weekend.

Several months earlier, I'd had a disastrous reading at the Boulder Public Library. I read with Allen as a kind of opening act. It was after I'd been to New York with Allen and Peter. I came back with a pair of tight-fitting leather pants. Allen said they looked good. He suggested I wear them at the poetry reading at the public library. I did.

Whenever it was cold outside in Boulder, the heat in public buildings was turned way up. I started to sweat the moment we stepped inside the library. Before long, my entire waistband was condensing and a veritable inlet of perspiration was beginning to flow down my legs. The tight leather pants that Allen thought looked so cool—even though I was standing behind a wooden lectern—made me feel like being locked into a sauna.

I kept wiping my brow, and at one point I even interrupted my own reading to go into the bathroom to mop up. It was impossible to take off the pants; they would have to be peeled off me like rabbit skin. I thought I was going to pass out.

I was reading a lot of my most romantic poems. I was swooning, but not from my own love poetry, rather from dehydration caused by my Christopher Street–bought leather pants. Did Gerard Malanga ever feel like passing out when he wore his leather pants and did his whip dance in front of the Velvet Underground? Something tells me he didn't. I had no choice in the matter. While I was reading a poem about the death of a flower, I unzipped my leather pants and began to roll them off me until I had them around my ankles, and I furiously started moving my feet up and down until I was able to completely step out of them.

I finished my sad, romantic poem about the flower, standing behind the lectern in my white underpants and ruffled shirt. Only Allen, who sat behind me on the tiny platform, could see what was
happening. Now, how was I ever going to come back from behind the lectern?

Toward the end of my reading, I kept inching the lectern back, closer to the bathroom where at least I could rush in and put my pants back on. Luckily, Allen came up to the lectern to make an announcement about some upcoming event at the Kerouac School, and I was free to step behind him, grab my pants, and make it back in time to listen to Allen start his reading. I know that he had stepped up to the microphone only to help me, to give me some cover, in every sense of the word. He even seemed more attentive to me in the days and weeks following my combination reading and striptease. I had done something Allen liked to do in the old days, only he would have stepped
in front of
the lectern. I had taken off my clothes out of necessity, because I was burning up. Allen liked being naked as a political act. He and Peter were happy as larks when they were nude. They would take off their clothes at an all-you-can-eat buffet if the line was too long. “They like throwing their meat around,” Anne said. But only in public.

 

At the Parents Weekend reading, I spoke to Carla for the first time since our breakup. She said she had come to the reading because she remembered how my poems had drawn us together once before, and that thinking about them had suddenly changed her idea of me. She didn't hate me anymore.

It was hard to know what to make of that remark. Was it something she said as a joke? Was it a profound statement of her real feelings? Was she over the bodily pain, the mental suffering, or was it regret for the past? Was she warning me about the future? The fact that I never really knew this woman was brought home to me by her appearance that night at the library. There were so many different explanations for our love affair that, at the end of it, nothing was ever really explained.

I loved her voice, which was slightly husky and sad. I listened to her words and in my head translated them all into feelings, into
pure emotion. I couldn't believe that this was the same woman who had brought down the iron gate that kept me away.

I made the mistake of telling her about my life since we'd stopped seeing each other. I told her how awful it felt to know what she was going through and still not be able to tell her how much I loved her and was concerned about her. But I think I said those things for selfish reasons, to awaken some kind of pity in her. I was staking all my hopes on this moment.

She surprised me. She seemed to encourage these thoughts. When she touched my arm, I was like a sponge in water, absorbing her tenderest feelings.

“I don't want to mislead you,” Carla said. “I want to spend the night with you, but that doesn't mean we're going to be together tomorrow and the day after that.”

I knew I couldn't do that, which was a novelty for me. In all my time at the Kerouac School, when it came to having a sensation I never thought about it twice. I even had sex with my teacher Larry Fagin's girlfriend, Susan Noel, the one Peter Orlovsky called Susie Christmas. I could never quite figure out why I did it. Perhaps I was secretly angry about all those dinners Larry was charging on my parents' credit card. Or was it contempt for my own shyness around girls? Someone once called youth a glorious beach at the edge of blue water, where women seem to be always available to us, their beauty freeing us from the falseness of our dreams.

I was so serious about poetry, so serious about the world, that I was missing the point. Allen was missing the point, too. Shouldn't pleasure and happiness come first? Why, then, send Carla away? Why do we refuse to be cured of the disease of loneliness?

I didn't know what to do. I felt like dashing my brains against the brick facade of the library. Often, when you are strong enough to think about such things, you wish you could reclaim the words once said to you, just as you wish you could reclaim the people themselves and ask them, “What were you trying to tell me?” I was never smart enough, not then, anyway, to know what was
going on. I certainly couldn't keep Gregory away from drugs. Or bring Billy and his father together. Or find out why Anne never really dug me, or make Allen less insecure, despite his incredible fame. Perhaps we all lose our true companions. Allen lost Jack; Gregory lost his youth in prison; Bill lost Joan, the one person who, even in her craziness, probably loved him; and Jack lost them all behind the door of his mother's house. Had I just spent two years in the valley of the lost men?

 

In the end, I didn't send Carla out into the night. My love for Carla was taking a long time to die. It was Gregory—banished, disgraced Gregory—who told me, “Go after huh” in his New York street kid accent. “Go after huh, don't let huh get away!” I figured everything had already fallen apart. Everything about Carla was mixed up inside my head. Her mixed signals were mixing me up.

Allen always had a broken heart. It helped his poetry. As for Burroughs, I wasn't sure he had a heart at all. He was like those target cutouts you see on a pistol range, the black silhouette of a man. Curiously, it was Gregory who was more reliable on the subject of love. It was Gregory who sent me out after Carla.

“Let me tell you,” Gregory said. “Love is the whole ball game. There isn't really anything else.”

I ran out of the shrine room after Carla. There was the rain again, the rain that falls alike on the lovers and the lost. I asked her to stay until all the parents had left, until the rain stopped, until I could lean her against a tombstone in the old Boulder cemetery and, stealing a line from Gregory's great poem “Marriage”: “woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky.” I thought you could talk like that, then, when you were young and in love with the weird, sweet complications of your own heart.

Carla stayed. I went home with her. She put Brian Eno's
Before and After Science
on the record player, ambient music for the pretty sleep that comes after love.

The Kerouac School was finally up for accreditation. A team of
about seven men and two women from the Association of Middle Colleges arrived in Boulder to observe the Kerouac School during a typical week. They started their work the day that all my teachers in poetics, the administrators, and most of the students were to be arraigned in Jefferson County on the Rocky Flats trespassing charge and for interfering with government activities. The special prosecutor rode to the courthouse from the airport with Allen, who had come back that morning from a poetry reading in the Pacific Northwest.

Attendance was pretty sparse that semester anyway, so Peter had the idea to recruit some of the vagabonds from the mall to sit in the classrooms and look like they were taking notes, five dollars for every hand that went up with a question. Thank God, Allen overruled him.

Accreditation would finally come, though the Kerouac School would have to wait.