When I Was Cool (33 page)
Authors: Sam Kashner
I walked back to my apartment, remembering how my father had helped me set it up two years earlier. I couldn't even think about dismantling the apartment and moving back to Long Island. Yet slowly, in the days leading up to graduation, I started carting home empty boxes I'd gotten from the giant liquor store and filling them up with books. Those dozens of books reminded me of the many reasons for my coming to the Kerouac School in the first place. I kept Balzac's
Lost Illusions,
one of the first books we read in Allen's class, on my shelf as long as possible. It was the story of a young man from the provinces who comes to Paris to become a poet and a great man of letters. Abruptly, I stopped thumbing through it and put that book, too, in a half-empty box. That's when my apartment
really started to have the odor of departure. I had never used the kitchen very much, but now it looked like I had never even boiled water in it.
It would be hard to leave. I thought of my father, how he and his brother had shared a tiny, one-room apartment in New York City on 178th Street in Washington Heights after their parents had died shortly after coming to America. Seymour had been only fifteen at the time. It was strange to think of him living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, the great bridge named for the father of our country. My father lived in that room with my uncle until his wedding day.
My parents used to ask me about Allen's mother and father, almost as if they wanted to be reassured somehow that Allen's parents were like them, that maybe they shared with Allen's parents the suspicion that America was still a dangerous place, and not the paradise it seemed.
I couldn't take being alone with my thoughts anymore, the wreckage of my half-packed apartment all around me, so I bolted and headed toward Pearl Street. It felt good to be with people who didn't just commune with the dead like so many of my relatives. “Is Allen a self-hating Jew?” my father once asked me when I was back home briefly between semesters. They were always suspicious of his Buddhism and his Hindu chanting. Having written “Kaddish” wasn't enough for them. It was the only poem of his they would recognize.
In a used-book store in Boulder, Allen and I had once found a discarded page from an old Hebrew prayer book. It was sticking up out of a spy novel where someone had used it as a book marker. When Allen saw it, he called it to the shopkeeper's attention. I remember being a little embarrassed, but he and Allen searched the entire shop to restore the page to the book it belonged to. I was secretly proud of Allen that he wanted to find a home for the page of Jewish prayer. When they couldn't find it, Allen's eyes filled with tears.
I told Seymour this story. I wanted him to know that, beyond Allen's Buddhism, beyond that river was the ancient village of Allen's Jewishness. He knew it; I know he felt it. He always cried when he recited “Kaddish,” written for his unfortunate, schizophrenic mother, Naomi. He knew the wellsprings of his Jewishness as he knew an old friend. Allen Ginsberg, this
om
-chanting Buddhist meditator, gave me a sense of my own Jewish faith in a way that no rabbi, Hebrew teacher, or bar mitzvah lesson ever did.
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The day of graduation arrived. It had taken me four years, just as if I'd gone to a regular school. The ceremony was to be held at night, in the shrine room, which made me realize that I still hadn't really meditated. Despite Allen's warning me to “start sitting or I wouldn't graduate,” I'd managed to avoid the banner-lined room for two years, except for a dance or an occasional talk by Rinpoche.
As the shrine room filled up with students, faculty, and proud parents, I looked around and noticed there weren't many poets graduating with me from the Kerouac School. A poet named Dan Goldstein, however, was one of them. Besides being a devoted poetry student, Goldstein was an incredible thief. He could steal anything. Allen used to say, after telling him it was wrong to steal, that Dan was “the reincarnation of Neal Cassady.” In fact, his parents were Jewish furniture salesmen in Toronto. He came from money, but he liked to steal. He was the official thief of Naropa. He stole things for Jubal and for Gregory. Books were his specialty. He single-handedly cleaned out the University of Colorado bookstore. Not surprisingly, his favorite poet was François Villon. Now we were graduating together, about to receive our official diplomas from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Rinpoche was late. Very late. He gave the shortest talk of his career. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “when you go out into the world, have a little dignity.” He told us to be brave, to have courage, and to conduct our lives like a samurai sword: with straight backs made of impenetrable steel and, as in the edge of the sword, with
hearts sharp as a razor but open enough to be moved. He then took out a samurai sword and waved it around. I saw Anne duck; she was sitting with Allen and Gregory and Bill on the stage of the shrine room. Rinpoche then turned to Allen, who called out my name. I was going to receive the first diploma, which stated that I was graduating in the Year of the Earth Horse. Rinpoche offered me his good hand to shake. He looked crocked to me. He had a big Little Red Riding Hood basket full of diplomas. Anne gave a short talk. She said something about how we now had to go out and do the Jack Kerouac School proud by becoming great poets. She said we had a tradition to live up to.
As she said this, I suddenly felt a chill, as if a great wave of oblivion had just passed over me. I didn't particularly like Anne, I wasn't going to miss her, but when she started to cry as she gave her talk, I felt guilty. I thought Anne was wasting her time saying farewell to people she had never talked to in the first place. Then the band Oregon played some music, which involved endless drumming. Next there was a dance recital which Barbara Dilley called a dance about fire and water. I wanted to throw myself into the water and let the current carry me away. I felt the knot in my throat pushing at the knot in my necktie.
Allen stood up in his linen suit and read two poems, one by Rinpoche and one of his own. His was a poem I had always loved. He had asked me what he should read at my graduation, and now he was reading it, and so I felt he was reading it to me:
Because I lay my head on pillows, Because I weep in the tombed studioâ¦Because I get scaredâbecause I raise my voice singing to my beloved self, because I do love thee my darling, my other, my living bride, my friend, my lord of soft tender eyesâ¦seeking still seeking the thrillâdelicious bliss in the heart abdomen loins and thighs Not refusing this 38 yr. 145lb. Head arms & feet of meatâ¦Nor one single Whitmanic toenail contemn nor hair prophetic banish to remorseless hell, Because wrapped with machinery I confess my ashamed desire.
Approaching the dais to receive my diploma was like stepping into a spotlight as the last light of the day fell across the stage. When they called my name a few hands started to applaud. Feeling a sense of occasion, I bowed deeply from the waist toward Allen, who put his hand over his heart and bowed back to me. Whatever distance there had been between us (the distance of love unrequited to the nth degree) seemed suddenly to melt away.
I sat back down with my diploma unfurled like a napkin on my lap, my eyes brimming, Allen's voice cracking up in the void, the big shrine room full of its bright banners hanging from the ceiling, the floor covered with rice as if a wedding had taken place. I thought of all the lunatics I had known at the Kerouac School and how I would miss them. And Gregoryâwhere was he?
Suddenly I could hear a howl from outside, like Quasimodo in the bell tower. It sounded like someone was yelling “Penguin dust!” It reached us in the shrine room while Allen was finishing his poem. It was Gregory's voice, shouting from outside the shrine room:
“Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit!
That's it! Tell Sam Kashnerâthat's the title of our book!”
Allen, when he reached the end of his poem, wrote down the title as casually as if Gregory had been sitting across from him at tea.
Of all the lunatics, I would miss Gregory the most. I had come to the Kerouac School, had come to knock on Allen's door so that he would teach me to write and to become a poet. But Allen was a famous man who had other famous men around him, and others still who depended upon him and clung to him like a life raft, who sapped his energies and often left him too exhausted for his own work. There was a kind of terror in the way Allen insisted on being the one who held everything together. In our nuthouse, Allen was king.
But it was Gregory who had become my courage teacher, who had pulled over to the side of the road and made me watch the last few hours of sunlight going down through the mountains. He saw his own youth slipping away, but he wasn't sorry. He was grateful. “I wish I could stop being young,” Gregory said to me the last time
we were together. “To watch youth walk away would be a beautiful thing, to see it for what it's worth, its vanity, and to take a final look at it and then cross to the other side of Time.”
That's what Gregory had to say, but they wouldn't let him say it at graduation. They didn't even let him in the room. “For only the lovers of life are fit to die,” Gregory shouted through the high windows of the shrine room. And then again, “Penguin dust!” That was the last thing I heard him say. I ran out of my graduation ceremony and around the side of the building to find him, but there was no one there. You'd have a hard time talking me out of the idea that he was never really outside at all. Perhaps I just heard him, the one who made me laugh, roaming around inside my head. After the ceremony I dashed home and looked up autochthonic: “he loves the earth on which he walks.”
Later that night, Dan Goldstein threw a graduation party in his apartment. It had a couple of thousand books in it, a table full of expensive wine, and fabulous foodâa great spread, all stolen. I don't think my teachers knew what a beggars' banquet it was.
Allen and Peter and I left the party early. Allen said he had something to give meâmy last job as an apprentice. Allen handed me a piece of paper. He said it was his latest poem. He said he was up half the night writing it. He wanted me to type it up. Peter said it was best if I read it at home. I opened up the piece of paper, which was folded into thirds like a letter. I couldn't believe I was going to have to type another poem for Allen on the same day I had graduated from the Kerouac School!
The poem was in Allen's by now familiar, tiny notebook handwriting. It was called “Forgotten Birthday: Sammy's Lament.” My last assignment was a poem Allen had written for me. It was about how sad he felt now that Peter was often missing from the house, now that Peter was sleeping with Juanita, and how he had forgotten Peter's birthday for the first time in twenty years until I'd reminded him, and then he realized he'd forgotten my birthday, too. The poem went on to say how he was glad we were both born and knew each other and had become friends and that, even if we
wandered away from each other, we would have a home in each other's hearts. It was pretty sentimental for an Allen Ginsberg poem. But I already knew that about Allen, his sentimental streak, his schoolgirl crushes.
It's hard to tell you what that meant to me, to have this poem from Allen, this incredible gift that gave me my passport into this world I had willed myself into, as if in a dream from which I refused to wake. I'm sure it didn't mean as much to him. I doubt he had stayed up half the night writing it. He dashed it off. I had seen him do it. It didn't matter. It was the moon and stars to me. I would carry it in my pocket and, when it grew too fragile for my pocket, keep it in my wallet. Then one day, while taking it out to read on the subway, incredibly, I left it behind. I never even bothered to memorize it because I wanted it always to seem new.
I hated my life when I lost it. I'm older now; I don't see the weight, the tragedy of it. I don't let such things stab my joy anymore. I can't afford to. Once I left the Kerouac School, I had no choice. I had to put their books away:
Howl, Kaddish, Naked Lunch.
I had to take Sal Paradise at his word, that it was time to “go out, dig the river, the people and smell the world.”
I would see just one of them again.
After ten years of trying to become a poet in America at the end of the twentieth century, I moved into an apartment on Lafayette Street in New York City. The statue of Puck looked out over the street. Carla tried living there, too, while I spent most of the time out on Long Island working for my father in the window shade business. I took Carla to the Mudd Club on weekends. She didn't need me. Every time we went there, she seemed to know more and
more people. Eventually, the gatekeeper let her in as soon as he saw her. She had a secret life while I was with my parents. Her old boyfriend, the violinist, came back into her life. I didn't like it. I asked her if she was seeing him, if I should consider it “official dating” of an old boyfriend.
“You can't tell me who to fuck,” she said. “You don't control me.” I think that's when I realized the relationship was really over.
We went out one last time, to see the Feelies on Washington's birthday. They were a rock band that, in the beginning, performed only on national holidays. The lead guitarist, with his oversized glasses and curly hair, looked just like a young Allen Ginsberg. I never saw Carla after that. I wanted my James Dean plastic life mask back. She wouldn't give it back. For a while, I was haunted by the memory of this love affair.
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I
would
get married. I
would
be good. I didn't astound the girl next doorâ¦as Gregory wrote in “Marriage.” But I met a woman named Nancy in a poetry writing class. She was the teacher. She wore pearls and a red sweater. I thought she was beautiful. She worked for an outfit called the Academy of American Poets. She arranged the readings and raised money. Nancy worked for an old, rich woman named Mrs. Bullock; when she stepped down it was taken over by a younger rich woman named Mrs. Chase, who turned out to be Chevy Chase's stepmother. She liked Nancy and was kind to me, and she threw us a big engagement party at her Park Avenue apartment. The Academy poets were everything the Beats were not: they wore suits, they won prizes, they had readingsânot in church graveyards or coffeehouses but in places with fancy zip codes, like the Guggenheim or at the library across the street from the Museum of Modern Art, even the Morgan library.
Nancy wore her hair like Louise Brooks, the silent screen actress who played Lulu, the prostitute who gets murdered, “the girl in the black helmet.” Nancy came from a Southern family. Her mother and father grew up in New Orleans; they lived on opposite
sides of the Audubon Park Zoo. At night, they could each hear the lions roaring in their cages. I liked Nancy's stories about her parents. They seemed so exotic. Nancy's father had been a test pilot in the navy; back in the 1950s, he broke the sound barrier for a living. He's a very quiet and very nice man who looks like John Wayne. He's tolerated my social dissonances for fourteen years. Nancy's mother was a homecoming queen at LSU, whereas my mother had enrolled in Stern College for Women, but had to drop out when the war came. (She had to be home, she later explained, to hide the mail. She didn't want her parents to know that her brothers had been sent overseas to fight. It was a full-time job to keep the war from my mother's parents.) That's how different our parents were.
Nancy and I got married. We had a small reception at a French restaurant on East Eighty-third Street, Le Refuge. I took refuge in marriage.
I didn't invite Allen. I didn't invite Gregory. I regretted it. More time passed.
Nancy got a job at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, teaching creative writing. That's what poets did at the end of the twentieth century. Poetry was turning out to be a mug's game after all. Whoever said thatâI think it was T. S. Eliot, the most successful poet of the centuryâwas right. You wait around for your SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to come back, your poems rejected from
The New Yorker
in your own handwriting. You see the fiction writers getting all the attention.
You get used to a certain kind of poverty. When Jack Kerouac wrote, “Because I am poor everything belongs to me,” it was the 1950s, maybe earlier. Allen would often write that line on the blackboard at the Jack Kerouac School. But this wasn't the '50s anymore, it was the end of the 1980s and nothing belonged to you if you were poor, or even if you were middle class. They never told you that at the Kerouac School. I used to want to be like Allen and Gregory; now I wanted to be like Jayne Anne Phillips and Paul Auster. Jayne Anne used to be a poet; she even studied with Richard Hugo when he was a visiting writer at the University of
Colorado in Boulder. “Poets don't have any glory,” she told me, “it's the novelists who make all the money and have all the fun.” I went to a Paul Auster poetry reading when I first got out of the Kerouac School. It was held at the St. Mark's Poetry Project where Anne Waldman reigned supreme, even during her increasingly infrequent trips back to New York, only Auster didn't read any poetry that night; he read from a work-in-progress, something he called “a metaphysical detective story.” It made him famous. Now he makes movies. I was beginning to get the picture. I stopped writing poetry. I'd write novels instead. I studied the field. I'd start at the top. I'd call my first book,
The Latest Novel of Joyce Carol Oates.
It would be a little like science fiction. Joyce Carol Oates would be in it. She'd get caught in some kind of nuclear compressor with Stephen Hawking. He wrote best-sellers about black holes and things going on behind our backs in outer space. Their molecules would get all mixed up, like in that movie
The Fly.
When they emerge from the compressor, Joyce Carol Oates would write hundreds of books about serial killers hiding out in black holes that all sound as if they'd been written by a mechanical voice. Stephen Hawking would be able to take up boxing. My novel would be a best-seller. It would make me famous. I'd be cool again.
As a poet you become bitter, so you hold on to a lousy job at a college, where your colleagues don't think creative writing is a worthy thing, even though they're teaching Beckett and Shelley and Faulkner and Keats; their whole existence depends on creative writers! Your students feel sorry for you. They think teaching is another form of social work. You help them get through their phase of writing poetry. Then you realize their “phase” is how you have spent your life. This makes you even angrier. It's a bad idea all around.
You sting yourself like a scorpion and poison your life with the thing you once loved. You know you'll never again have the joy you once found in it.
I wanted some of that old magic. I wanted to feel drenched in the importance of poetry again. I wanted to look into the past with
my own brown eyes and see Allen Ginsberg standing in front of me, with a sheaf of poems for me to type. I had to see him again, or everything would be lost.
So I invited Allen to come to Williamsburg to give a reading. I was teaching a class or two, so as not to go crazy in Virginia, where I felt like I was in the witness protection program, talking to my neighbors about crabgrass and the weather.
I was teaching a course on the Beats. I was taking students away from the other teachers, even the ones with tenure. I had to keep the enrollment down to thirty or forty students, as so many wanted in. They hung on my every word about Allen and Gregory and Bill. They talked about Rimbaud like he was Rambo. They brought in CDs of Tom Waits reading Kerouac. I made them read “Sunflower Sutra” and “Howl” and “Kaddish,”
On the Road, Vanity of Duluoz,
and
Visions of Cody.
They talked about Neal and Jack and Allen like they were living with them in their dorms. I saw myself in these kids, these young hipsters.
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Allen was older now. There was a lot of gray in his beard. We picked him up at the airport in Norfolk in the fall of 1991 and brought him to our house, a Dutch Colonial on a tree-lined street just off campus. As soon as he arrived he wanted to lie down. He always had the happy capacity for taking naps in the middle of the day, wherever he was. His secretary had faxed from New York a list of all the things Allen needed for his travels, what kind of salt-free meals he had to have because of his blood pressure, the brand of chamomile tea he liked to have onstage. The fax made a big deal of the microphone, and how to arrange the prayer scarf on the table where he kept his books and finger cymbals. It also listed the medicines he was taking, in case he lost them or ran out. He had liver trouble now, and his stomach sometimes gave him a hard time. He'd never quite lost the slight palsy in his face.
We tried to have everything ready.
When Nancy and I first met him at the airport, in what passes
for autumn in that part of Virginia, I wanted to cry. I kissed him on the lips. He said I had gotten even skinnier. While I was getting skinny, Allen was getting old. He came to life, however, whenever he was around students. They started hanging out at our house at all hours over the weekend that he stayed with us. Allen, who had seemed so tired, so wrung out, still had never abandoned that wonderful ability to appear interested in everything. Maybe it was meditation, all those years of Buddhism. Maybe he really did come to see the world as holy.
Then, just as easily, he could turn it off and seem very far away, or fly into a fit or a rage. Here was a man who had been to some of the most interesting and exotic places in the world: China, eastern Europe, Cuba, the Ganges, Paris and London in the 1950s and 1960s. But he almost never went there as a tourist. So I wasn't about to show him Colonial Williamsburg. I didn't think he'd be interested. But he wanted to see it, so I took him to watch the colonial-era reenactors, the village smithy, the barber who bled you, the wigmaker. Allen said that next we'd be paying to see Robert Frank's Americaâphotographs of Americans drinking Coca-Cola and shoving quarters into jukeboxes. (He was right; a few years later, Disney tried to develop a theme park in northern Virginia, which would contain as an exhibit an actual family farm. To me, that sounded like the beginning of the end of America as we knew it.)
Allen put his arm around me and we walked into the house. He didn't seem too interested in my marriage. Suddenly we were above sea level again, back in Boulder, where the women in Allen's life seemed as distant and as interchangeable as clouds.
I wondered about Peter and Allen. I had heard things, but I never said anything to Allen. I had heard that Peter was drinking heavily, despite the fact that he was still taking antidepressants. I heard that he was back in Bellevue, not as an orderly but as a patient. He would fly into psychotic rages after drinking. I heard that he'd run down the street naked, wielding a knife. I even heard that poor Allen had to sign the papers committing him. But mostly
I was worried about the reading the next night; would there be enough people? The reading was to be held in an old movie theater that had been around since the 1930s. It held about five hundred people, and it had had one night of glory sixty years earlier: the premiere of a Judy Garland film. That theater was the only place in Colonial Williamsburg where I felt an authentic sense of history.
Many of Nancy's friends were poets she knew from the Academy; they were very presentable. She didn't know the Beat poets very well. Just before the reading, Allen panicked. He said he'd forgotten his harmonium and he couldn't perform without itâhe needed it for the reading that night. Nancy said she would run back to the house and look for it. She took a long time. She came back empty-handed.
“I looked,” she said. “I'm sorry. I couldn't find it.”
“It's a big wooden box with stickers on it from around the world,” Allen explained, sounding desperate.
Nancy turned red with embarrassment. She had been looking for a copy of Wallace Stevens's first book, called
Harmonium.
Their two worlds had collided.
We went back to get it.
It was an unforgettable night. A line of people stretched for almost a mile outside the theater. I didn't know there were so many hipsters in Williamsburg. Two hundred people had to be turned away; some had come from as far away as Washington, D.C. The ones who got in sat in awe.
I stepped onstage to introduce Allen. My psychiatrist and my internist sat in the front row with their wives. The table had been set behind me, according to Allen's instructions, with a stick of incense just starting to burn from the stage. I had prepared an introduction but I was too nervous to read it. I acknowledged the fact that Allen was in Williamsburg, Virginia, by introducing him as “the father of my country.” The audience gave him a standing ovation when he appeared in front of the curtain. He played a few songs on his rhythm sticks, some of the ones he had written in Boulder, under the watchful eye of Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
He launched into “Don't Smoke, Don't Smoke, it's a thirty billion dollar capitalist joke⦔ Everyone laughed and applauded, but when he got to the part about where he urged people to smoke pot insteadâor at least suck cockâI saw one of the oldest members of the English faculty get up to leave. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.
I was ecstatic. I was glad Allen hadn't lost his gift, his ability to offend. I wanted him to become again the frantic, demonic poet of his youth. We were together now, and Allen was rolling back the years for both of us, attempting to prove that neither one of us had really changed. I knew that it wasn't true, but it was such a wonderful lie.
Then he read the poem about giving Neal Cassady a blow job, the one he'd asked me to finish for him a million years ago. A few more people walked out. But most of them stayed, and cheered, and loved it. They were standing up now, and hollering their support back to Allen.
Later that night, they wouldn't let him leave the College Delly, where I had taken him for a midnight snack. He was the King of May again. A girl took a flower she was wearing from behind her ear and put it behind Allen's ear. They were rushing around, spreading the word that Allen Ginsberg was here, sitting at a table outside! A hundred glasses of beer seemed to be sloshing around our table, encircling Allen like golden candles. He defied the strict dietary laws sent down from New York. He had a hamburger, a pitcher of beer, and bummed a cigarette. He looked happy.