When I Was Cool (9 page)

When we arrived, the women were just getting into their bunny costumes. My friends and I were all in our temple suits; we had come into the city after services. I still had my yarmulke in my pocket when the mother bunny had me sit on her lap. They fussed over us like glamorous moms, giving us ice cream and complimentary copies of the May issue. For some reason, my father spent the whole time on the pay phone. When he finally joined us at our table, he took out a pencil and sketched a caricature of one of the bunnies on a napkin. That was one of my father's few hobbies, drawing caricatures of people in restaurants. She turned her profile to him and sat with her head thrown back like a real artist's model. I kept thinking, “Today I am a man. Tomorrow—who knows?”

One of the bunnies asked me what I was planning to become after I went to college.

“A poet,” I said.

She smiled and started to recite “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. “She's my favorite poet,” the bunny said.

Even at thirteen I knew Joyce Kilmer was a man, and not a very good poet. But I didn't say anything. When she recited the word “bosom” at the beginning of the poem, her own bosom rose up to greet me, and suddenly Joyce Kilmer's “Trees” became the greatest poem in the English language ever written by a man with a woman's name, recited by a woman dressed as a rabbit, while my father sketched like Toulouse-Lautrec on a cocktail napkin and the weekend traffic rumbled toward the bridge.

 

Bonnie and Nanette were still laughing. To cover my embarrassment, I made a joke about Anne Frank—a joke I was ashamed of
making—about how Anne Frank should've gotten out of the house more. I thought about how my grandmother back on Central Park West, with her thick Yiddish accent, would have been so hurt by what I had just said. But I said it to keep my tears in check. I knew I was being too sensitive. Maybe I did have a haunted look about me. I was uncertain of myself, and maybe Rinpoche was right after all, in the one conversation I had had with him so far, sitting next to Peter Orlovsky in Allen's living room. He said the real reason I had come to the Jack Kerouac School was to be
released
from my heroes—to find out the truth about them and be free of them, to be able to live my own life.

Allen said that Rinpoche loved the title of a magazine created by Ed Sanders that came out of the Lower East Side in the 1950s and early '60s
—Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
By then, that first Beat scene had begun to break apart. Frank O'Hara's death didn't help things. Like his great poem, his “Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” Frank was a kind of sun. He brought the uptown and downtown scenes together, and with his death, as Anne explained it, things drifted, until Anne, home from college, began working at St. Mark's Church, holding readings and putting out a magazine called
The World.

Anne liked having Bonnie and Nanette following her. She liked to read her long list poems, and she wanted to be the center of attention. If someone else entered the room, she would get a look on her face as if she had just missed a train, or expected to win the Irish sweepstakes but had all the wrong numbers.

She wrote poems with everything going on around her. She said all her heroes could do it—Frank O'Hara and Ted, meaning Ted Berrigan, who was coming soon to the Jack Kerouac School, as soon as there were some students to teach. Anne said Ted was one of her greatest teachers and mentors, but she warned me that he liked to lie on the couch all day balancing an ashtray on his huge stomach, and living on Pepsi, candy bars, and amphetamines. They said he had grown up in Tulsa with Dick Gallup, whom Anne had
brought to Naropa from New York, where he was married with two young kids and driving a cab.

 

One evening Anne stopped by Allen's apartment because Allen was in despair. She entered the room the way Isadora Duncan entered a room. Or at least, the way she imagined Isadora Duncan entered a room, all scarves and drama, long fingers moving in the air when she spoke, like she was signing for the benefit of the deaf.

I was there doing some typing for Allen, but Allen was in a funk because he said he now hated the name “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.” He thought no one would ever come because of the word “disembodied.” He had his white shirt unbuttoned and he looked pretty fit, a little hair coming up from his belly. He wore khaki trousers and was barefoot, and his beard was growing back from that punishing day when Rinpoche had made him shave it all off. He looked nice. He had his head in his hands. Allen was miserable. He loved to smoke cigarettes, but Peter wouldn't allow it in the house, so he had to go sneaking around to other people's apartments to smoke. Or else, if he was working, he'd smoke in the house but exhale into the air-conditioning vents. He was behind in his prostrations, he hadn't done enough, he said—too busy. Rinpoche told him to make the time. So his guru was sore at him. And now he didn't like the name of the school he helped found.

At first Allen thought the name was a good joke because Kerouac was dead, but now he thought it made the place sound silly, and not real. (After all, it still wasn't accredited.) He wanted it to be great, part of the only Buddhist college in America. He wanted it to be a feast and a wedding—a wedding of East and West, and a feast of poets and musicians and dancers and psychologists and meditators all working, Allen said, on their suffering.

Anne tried to cheer him up, but he wasn't having any. Wearily,
he got up and took out his harmonium and sang a little song he'd made from something Rinpoche had said in his lecture the night before at the Sacred Heart auditorium: “Born in this world / You've got to suffer / everything changes / you got no soul.”

Anne later confided in me that for Allen, meditating was really hard. “Trungpa doesn't approve of pot or psychedelics,” Anne said. “He thinks they're too trippy, they create uncertainty, he believes in things being grounded, he just doesn't approve of Allen's smoking grass and taking acid. I think Allen's going through withdrawal.”

Anne told Allen that it was too late to change the name of the school because the catalogue for the summer had already gone to the printers. And then she said that Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue was coming to Denver in a few days, right after Naropa's first official gathering. She said that five tickets would be waiting for them at the box office.

I tried to figure out who was going—Allen, of course, which meant Peter was going; Anne; and who else? It was getting late. “Don't be grasping,” Rinpoche said to us the other night, “be non-ambitious, it's the only way to achieve sanity.” What I wanted to know, Mr. Rinpoche, was how do you achieve a ticket for Bob Dylan and what was left of the Rolling Thunder Revue? Or would I—born in this world—just have to suffer?

12. The Wyrde Sister

The next day, I walked along Pearl Street with Allen. He was wearing a white shirt and his khaki pants and he carried a shoulder bag, which made him look like a postman in a Greek fishing village. I noticed people recognizing him. Teenagers on skateboards and older hippie couples acknowledged Allen and I even thought they
gave
me
some sort of respect, out of respect for him. Perhaps, I thought, a few of them will think that I'm one of Allen's lovers. I was kind of surprised that the idea, at least what I thought other people were thinking, didn't bother me at all. I kind of didn't mind them thinking that. I was getting very mixed up, very fast. I enjoyed the reflected glory. The only problem was, I was too shy to talk. We walked along for a long time in silence.

A crazy woman with a Scottish accent seemed to be holding court across from a record store on the mall. I just knew this was going to be bad, that something was going to happen between Allen and this woman. I thought about the woman who shot Andy Warhol. I thought that, despite meditation and becoming famous for chanting
Om
in Lincoln Park during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention and thereby helping to avoid a riot, there was an aura of violence or at least potential violence around my Beat teachers. Gregory and Burroughs, even Billy Jr., seemed to wear the threat of violence like a cape—they unfurled it when it suited them, took it off at more respectable gatherings, made grand gestures with it, although I never thought they made very believable criminals (except for Gregory). Maybe that's why they loved Jean Genet so much (Allen had escorted Burroughs and Genet to that same Chicago convention). And I once heard Burroughs tell Billy that he wanted to be buried or cremated with something by Genet (or was it Gide?) in his coffin.

The Scots woman, who looked like one of the Wyrde sisters, approached us, wiping her mouth on the bottom of a red plaid shirt. She didn't have many teeth, her red hair was still shiny, even beautiful, and it occurred to me that she probably wasn't very old. Like a lot of people living on the street in Boulder or in the mountains, she had beautiful skin. She began shouting at us.

“You two Jews, you Bolsheviks, you Greenstein, Allen Greenstein, and your boy, your little boy, you bug me, you buggerer! You bunghole! You jewbeatle!” She was pointing at us. I felt like Peter Lorre in
M.
There was nowhere to go. The tunnels of Berlin were too far away. There just was nowhere to hide from this crazy woman. I wondered
what Allen was going to do. He had dealt with crazy people all his life, starting with his mother.

Allen spoke to her. He didn't humor her, in fact, he argued with her! “I'm not a Bolshevik,” he said calmly. “My mother was a Bolshevik. I'm not even a communist. I'm a Buddhist. I meditate. I don't give people a hard time.” Allen then explained to her what the hours of mediation practice were and where she could get meditation instruction.

We moved away from the woman, who seemed much calmer after talking to Allen. She stopped insulting us. She didn't shoot us. Allen had the good but stern manners of an ambulance driver. He seemed to know how to handle lunatics.

On the way back to Naropa, Allen explained how he tried to deal with anti-Semitic remarks. He said that he even got Ezra Pound to “take it back,” to admit that it was a dumb, suburban prejudice. Allen knew that I liked Bob Dylan, so he told me that he had played
Bringing It All Back Home
for Ezra Pound, played the record for him at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Allen said he'd had to deal with it in Jack Kerouac, too. Even at the end, during their long-distance talks over the telephone late at night, Jack would provoke Allen with a lot of what Allen called “dumb-ass jive about Jews.”

“He was trying to get me into a fight, to draw me in to a fistfight with him over the phone,” Allen said. “It was just a test, to see how strong my ego was, after years of meditating.”

“What did you say to him,” I asked. “Did you take the bait?”

“I told him ‘your mother's cunt is full of shit and you like to eat it.'” Allen started giggling. “I completely bought into it, I fell for Jack's trap. He sprung it, and I fell for it, I put my big foot in the rope.”

Allen said that I should ask Gregory about Jack, that I should read Gregory's long poem about Kerouac, that it was the only thing about Jack worth reading. It was called “Elegiac Feelings American.” He said Gregory didn't like to talk about Kerouac's funeral but that I might be able to get him to talk about it a little.

Gregory was haunted by Kerouac's funeral, Allen said. And Gregory was having trouble finishing his new book because his love life was so complicated, and because he was still buying drugs. Allen told me that I would be on the express elevator to heaven if I could bring Gregory back down to earth and get him to finish his book.

I didn't really want to spend my time at Naropa following Gregory around, like he was Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend—
watching him hock his typewriter and doing God knows what to me because I was keeping him from his drugs. But I loved his poems, and he was completely uninhibited in a way that I wanted to be; he seemed to have no superego, no censor. Poetry and life. They were both real to Gregory.

 

The Naropa dance was hours away. The dance would feature a band led by Charlie Haden, who
was
the music department at Naropa, at least for a while. Haden was a jazz legend, though I didn't know enough about jazz to appreciate it at the time. He had played with Ornette Coleman and Art Pepper. He had used heroin and had been to Synanon. He was a small, compactly built guy with a sweet and boyish face; he wore glasses. He played the standup bass. I got to know him a little bit. He once offered to play the bass while I read some of my poems. We were going to do it at a local nightclub in Boulder, called the Blue Note. But the night of the performance, the Go-Gos, or some early incarnation, came to town, and the local impressario told us that they had offered to play there at the last minute, so our services were no longer needed. After that, Charlie Haden always winked at me. “What would Beethoven do?” Charlie said, after we were fired.

“Write a symphony?” I asked.

“No, go for a long drive.”

But neither one of us had a car, so Charlie hired a cab to take us to Stapleton Airport. We sat on the roof of the cab and watched the planes take off and land. I realized that any one of those planes
could take me back to Kennedy Airport, which was only thirty minutes from my house. The airport was making me homesick.

On the way back, Charlie hummed an entire aria from
Madama Butterfly.
Charlie said that he lived to be sober now. I had told him about my other job, the one Allen wanted me to take, to get Gregory to finish his book. I told him how I thought that Gregory was buying heroin with the money Allen was giving him. Charlie said that Gregory reminded him of himself—how many winters and summers he had spent getting high, how in all that time he finally came to realize that he had never really cared about anyone, any one person, whether or not they lived or died. He said that even getting in bed with his wife didn't make him feel the way heroin did. He said that he had to kick in order to see that playing music was the only real excitement he'd ever had.

“What can be bad about something that makes you feel that good?” I asked Charlie, who was cleaning his delicate tortoiseshell eyeglasses with a locomotive engineer's red handkerchief.

“How do you stay alive,” Charlie said, “long enough to know any of those other things, the other things that can bring you joy? What price would you put on that? It's not really an equal relationship. Heroin takes all your money, all your time, and it leaves you broke. I don't approve of Bill Burroughs, and all that horseshit about how you can practically smell it going into your veins. I hope he doesn't teach you that. He should stick to books.”

Charlie then told me that, in his opinion, Burroughs was not a real junkie: “He's a dilettante junkie. He wouldn't forget to take his antibiotics. On the other hand,” he confided, “Gregory's the real thing. Be careful, he might do something crazy. He's going to make you read
Gilgamesh.
He believes everything he's ever read is true, especially if it's great. He's a real poet, he feels he can only speak the truth, whatever it is. But be careful of him.”

Charlie was starting to scare me. Gregory already scared me. If only I could share these fears, these uncertainties with some of the other poetry students at the Jack Kerouac School, but where were they?

And was I going to be included in the Rolling Thunder Revue night of extravaganza, which was right around the corner?