When I Was Cool (14 page)

19. A Junkie's Gift

Billy Burroughs didn't look so good. I'd been at the Jack Kerouac School for only a couple of weeks before he started looking like a ghost. No one stopped him from drinking. Encouraged by the Westies (who liked it when he drank because he was funny and talkative) and treated invisibly by his father, Billy seemed to be disappearing even more deeply into alcoholism. He loved alcohol the way his father loved heroin.

Allen and Anne thought it best that Billy move into a rooming house run by students of Rinpoche's, people Allen described as sane and compassionate, who could keep an eye on Billy. Of course, the Buddhists in the house had no interest in him at all; they considered him an undesirable alien. He was too antisocial for them, too unsavory. They liked dressing up like Rinpoche and cultivating at least the appearance of wealth and success, whereas Billy wore his poverty like a badge of honor.

The smell of alcohol filled the third floor of the Naropa building where Billy lived. When he felt like eating, he ate candy bars, or food with curry—tuna fish, scrambled eggs—whatever it was it had to be doused in curry powder, the kind that made your eyes tear. Poor Billy always complained about his hemorrhoids. He said it was the one thing he had inherited from his father. “My father never had a completely functioning asshole,” Billy said. “The toilet bowl was always full of blood.”

Billy had written some wickedly funny books. Anne Waldman said his novel
Kentucky Ham
had become a classic. Billy loved satire. Sometimes he liked to read Jonathan Swift to me over his breakfast
cereal (Lucky Charms was the only cereal he could eat because his teeth weren't very strong and the marshmallows were easy to chew.) I don't think Billy was even thirty years old when I met him.

Allen asked me to drop in on Billy from time to time and report back to him. He would then let Burroughs know how his son was doing. I never understood why Burroughs couldn't just walk over there himself, or call him up on the phone.

I liked Billy. I didn't like the fact that he seemed so unhappy all the time; with his aging Dennis the Menace face, he seemed to be on the verge of killing Mr. Wilson, or at least poisoning his dog. He liked taking me to a workingman's bar on the outskirts of Boulder, where women danced down a runway and took off their clothes. I had never been in such a place before. Billy almost never looked at the girls. He would order a double shot and lean his elbows on the counter. A lot of college students came to this bar, sat in booths, and idly drank their beers, staring at the sports on TV or covertly watching the girls at the edge of the runway. Billy seemed more comfortable here than with Allen's crowd or with his father's friends. I thought perhaps Billy felt the way I did about my parents' friends, about not wanting to socialize with them, thinking they were all stiffs who had terrible taste in everything—clothes, music, their politics beyond the pale. It was hard to believe anyone could think that about Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, but if you grew up around them, if your father's work was writing
Naked Lunch,
then maybe the Beats were just a bunch of old beatniks to Billy.

“You know what Lenny Bruce once said?” Billy asked me one night at his favorite bar. “There's nothing worse than an aging hipster.” Billy then asked me if I liked his father, or if I thought his father was mean. I didn't know what to say. I wondered why these two men seemed so locked away from each other. I couldn't tell if it was William, as Anne liked to call him, who didn't know how to give as a father, or if it was Billy who simply refused his love. I couldn't imagine William Burroughs telling his son he loved him. I thought of love as a country that William Burroughs knew nothing about. I hoped I was wrong.

Billy was getting drunk again, which was the only way he could handle the great livid scar of his life. Suddenly, he grabbed me by the arm.

“How can I believe you like me?” he demanded. “How can I believe you like somebody you know nothing about? You don't know anything about me! You don't know where I've been. You don't know what life is like for me. If it wasn't for us barbarians, the world would have no art, no beauty.”

Billy was working himself up into a rant. He said, “I don't care about art, and I don't like beauty.” He was perspiring and breathing pretty hard by now, and I thought he might pass out. I was worried; I couldn't drive him home. He was trembling. I felt sorry for him. I thought about my own father, how sometimes in the car, on long trips up to the Catskills to visit my grandmother, I would dare myself to say, “I love you,” just so I could figure out if he would answer me.

“No one is what he seems on the surface!” Billy shouted. “We all come from deep springs.”

I thought about how he came from a very deep spring— William Burroughs seemed unfathomable to me—and how Billy's father was a kind of ghost haunting his son's life.

“My father offered to give me a kidney, if I needed it,” Billy said bitterly. “He was excited about giving it to me. A junkie's kidney. What a gift.”

20. “Who's Minerva?”

By my fourth month at Naropa—it was now September—I realized I had to stop calling my parents. It didn't help to be this lonesome and hear their voices.

One afternoon in Gregory's apartment, at work on what would become
Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit,
the book of poems
Gregory had taken money from a publisher to write, I would sneak upstairs and use his phone to call Long Island. A bit of larceny was creeping into my soul the longer I hung around Corso. Life around Gregory was like that musical I had tried out for in seventh grade,
“Oliver!,”
with Gregory Corso as the Artful Dodger teaching us our trade. In fact, Billy's and Gregory's Westies, the pale-faced gang of Irish amphetamine kids, often brought things they'd lifted back from Denver, their pockets filled with watches, spoons, gold chains; they'd dump them on the kitchen counter and Gregory would send me upstairs to work while he sifted through them.

The only people at Naropa I seemed to know at all were waiters, as I ate out for every meal, and the core faculty of the Jack Kerouac School. The other poetry students were just beginning to drift in. I supposed that the start of the fall term would bring the lemmings out to Boulder to sit at Allen's feet. They weren't even here yet and I was already jealous of sharing the Jack Kerouac School with any other students. On the other hand, I was starved for some co-respondents, some comradeship, someone to read my poems to, someone who wouldn't laugh at me, someone I could woo with the constellations of the stars—in short, a girlfriend.

 

Gregory caught me on the phone with my mother.

I had sneaked upstairs to make a long-distance call while he was supposedly working. My father always asked the same thing whenever I called: “Is the school accredited yet?”

“Well, not since the last time we spoke,” I said, “which was Sunday. But they are preparing for a committee of people to walk through the school for a few days next month.” It was true. Naropa would somehow have to get itself together and look like a real school for at least a week. It was going to be hard. Gregory would have to be on his best behavior. Burroughs would have to take the cure again, and not start talking about a Martian invasion of the Midwest. And Allen and Peter would have to live like two maiden
aunts in a parsonage. And I was going to be their model student, appearing in class every day with a bunch of extras we picked up on the street to act as students. I hoped it wouldn't come to that. But it was going to be close.

Gregory suddenly busted into the bedroom and caught me red-handed.

“Don't be such a pussy. Stop calling your parents every day!” Gregory shouted, and then he grabbed the phone out of my hand.

“What's your mother's name?” Gregory asked me, putting the phone to his curly-headed ear.

“Marion,” I said, trembling with embarrassment.

“Minerva,” Gregory shouted into the phone. “We have your son, it'll cost you ten thousand dollars to get him back. You can get it—you, who invented the bridle, you carry the thunderbolt in your pocketbook, get…what's your father's name?”

“Seymour,” I practically whimpered into the carpet. “Seymour Kashner.”

“Great name,” Gregory said.

I perked up. I was always shy about my father's name, it was so old-fashioned and made him sound like a wimp, or an egghead, when in fact he was neither. An older father (he was thirty-five when I was born, his first child), he had even boxed for a while during the Depression. Gregory seemed to sanctify his name for me, even though he was coming in for the kill.

“…get the king of Sidon to pay a king's ransom for this kid. The kid's excited about his new life, although he refuses everything: he refused our hashish…”

“Not true!” I sprang to my feet and tried to wedge myself between Gregory and the phone. “Not true!” What was I saying? I meant that what Gregory was saying wasn't true.

“And he refuses our opium, our
kif…”

“No, no, don't listen to him,” I yelled into the phone, sounding far crazier at that moment than Gregory himself.

“He even refuses our camel juice. Refuses camel juice, just imagine! And what's wrong with this kid, he refuses to get fucked!”

Oh, no. He didn't say that, did he? I might as well be on drugs after all. And to think that I had bragged about Gregory when my mother asked about my “professors.” My poor parents. And here I was, the first in my family even to go to college. “All right, I'm sorry,” Gregory said into the phone. “He's shy. It's not your fault. Maybe he's just having a hard time,” Gregory told my mother, “staying off the junk.” Gregory was laughing now, very pleased with himself. “Those first few weeks sans junk, Minerva, they're very hard. He's holding up beautifully,” Gregory reassured her. “He'll be interested in girls after that,” he said. “Good to talk to you, too, Minerva. Did you build a little Parthenon for Shmuel when he was a boy? Penguin dust!” Gregory spritzed into the phone.

“Here,” Gregory said, letting the phone drop into my lap, “she wants to talk to you.”

I thought I had lost the power of speech. I was going to be the youngest patient at the Rusk Institute. Gregory Corso would be written on my chart as the cause of my debilitating stroke.

“Who's Minerva?” my mother asked.

I waited for Gregory, a little too delighted with himself, to leave. He went downstairs where I could hear him recounting the phone call to a room full of people. (Oh, please don't let one of them be Allen or Burroughs, I prayed silently.)

“Who's Minerva?” my mother asked again.

“She's a goddess,” I said. “Zeus's daughter; she sprang from his head.”

“A goddess! What a sweet thing to say, he sounds very nice,” my mother, Minerva, said. “It's cute how they want money for you.”

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

My father, who was on the other line in his downstairs office, said he told Gregory it was like “The Ransom of Red Chief,” the O. Henry story where the boy is kidnapped, but he's such a terror that the parents make demands of the kidnappers before they'll even consider taking him back.

“Oh,” I said. I didn't know whether to be relieved or not, worried I might have to spend the rest of my life here.

“Are you eating?” Marion asked.

“Is he eating!” my father said. “Have you seen my Diner's Club bill for May and June?”

“Well, he has to eat,” Marion said.

Suddenly, the two of them were having an argument over the telephone about me, without talking to me, over the two extensions in their house. Then I remembered why I had come to the Jack Kerouac School in the first place. And to think that Kerouac went home to live with his mother—after all those years on the road!

“Thank you for keeping us posted,” my father, the king of Sidon, said. “And give Allen Ginsberg our love.”

“We love you, you're our favorite poet,” my mother said. How close embarrassment is to tears, I thought, and hung up the phone.

Downstairs, Gregory, baby Max, and some of his friends were all waiting for me—all sucking their thumbs. Max was the only one not making fun of me. I vowed never to call my parents from Gregory's again. Not ever.

21. Shopping with Corso

It was hard for Gregory to make friends. In prison, it had been really hard. He said poets make natural friends, “so how come we're not friends?” he asked me one day when we had decided to go shopping for new clothes. The air had turned crisper and there was that faint, exciting feeling that the season was about to change. We both wanted to be outdoors.

“Because of my job, because Allen wants me to chain you to this rock,” I said, patting the chair and the desk where Gregory's
poems were scattered like a bad still life among old donut bags and mugs of coffee and very rumpled Penguin paperbacks. They looked like English editions of poems:
Gilgamesh,
Chatterton, Rimbaud. (Anne was always comparing Gregory, when young, to Rimbaud. Allen did the same thing; he said we know what Rimbaud would have looked like if he'd kept writing poetry.)

Gregory didn't spend as much time with Allen and Burroughs and the other writers. He always drifted away. He liked to go off on his own. He said that it had taken him a while to become friends with Burroughs and Allen. He said that Kerouac once described him in a book as a “mooch”—“and that's just because I once asked him for a couple of bucks.” Allen told me that if I wanted to know what Neal Cassady was like, I should get to know Gregory. He said they had a lot of things in common. They were both raised in a string of foster homes and they both became petty criminals, although Gregory wasn't a very effective street thief, Allen said, “but he tried.” Like Neal, he had fallen in love with Stendhal and Dostoyevsky.

Gregory's clothes were a wonder to me. He always went to vintage clothing stores to buy his wardrobe. So on a brilliant azure day, just after classes had started, we left his apartment and headed to the VFW Thrift on Pearl Street.

We browsed around the tired bins of used clothing, in a vast room that smelled like my parents' basement after it had flooded. I managed to find a nice-looking Hathaway shirt and held it up for Gregory, but he just stuck out his tongue like he was throwing up. He then picked up a discarded postman's shirt with a U.S. Postal Service patch on the sleeve and tried it on over the shirt he was wearing. Eureka.

Next Gregory picked up a stovepipe hat that collapsed into a pancake; when you banged the rim it popped up again. Having exhausted his cash for the day, he asked me to buy the shirt and the stovepipe hat for him. Then he looked for the blue shorts that he said should've come with the postal worker's outfit. He found it
buried beneath a monstrous ball of socks. Gregory asked me to buy that for him, too. I told him I would, but he must have noticed some hesitation on my part, because he immediately said that the whole ball game wasn't about money, it was about generosity.

“I want you to separate from your parents,” he said, “and the best way to do that is for me to separate you from their money.” He was really becoming Yuri Gligoric from
The Subterraneans,
making up the laws of the world as he went along.

After buying Gregory his clothes, he walked out of the store with a pretty little dress he had found for Calliope, rolled up inside one of the legs of the postal clerk's shorts. The dress was only $4.75 but I guess Gregory wanted to stay in practice. Afterward, I took him to lunch.

We waited on line at a health food store called Workingman's Dead. It was run by fans of the Grateful Dead, and the album
Workingman's Dead
was always playing on the record player. I had brought William Burroughs here the day before. Burroughs had stood on line for about a minute, looking over the sandwiches being prepared for customers holding their plastic trays. Burroughs said he couldn't possibly eat any of the food.

“I hate sprouts,” he snarled. “They put them on everything they serve. Eating sprouts is like going down on a robot.” We had to depart the premises “lest our health be seriously compromised,” he insisted. “This food cannot possibly be good for anyone who has experienced a real meal. There is clearly a conflict of interest here between politics and taste. And, besides,” Burroughs groused, his gravelly voice rising over the music, “it makes you shit, and hell already exists in my asshole.” I figured that was a reference to the family hemorrhoids that Billy had mentioned. “We should scram, Salmonella Sam,” Burroughs said. I held the door open for him.

Gregory, on the other hand, wasn't all that bothered by the food—beans and rice, tuna salad nestled on a vast aluminum tray, cooled off by an electric fan.

Gregory and I sat down with our trays. I looked over at his
Mexican plate special, which he was hungrily tearing into, hunched over his tray as if someone might snatch it away from him.

“How's your food, Gregory?” I asked.

“‘How's your food, Gregory?'” he repeated back to me, mimicking my concern. “How's yours?” he shouted. “Just let me eat.”

I sat there not saying anything. I must've looked a little wounded. I still wasn't used to the idea that frankness was the fashion among the Beats. It was usually the preface for saying something rude.

I decided a frontal attack was best called for. “What do you really think of me? Down deep, I mean?” I asked Gregory. He looked up at me, rice sticking to his stubble of beard.

“People who aren't frank with each other have something to hide,” Gregory said. “In limited quantities I'm very fond of you,” he said. “In fact, you're one of my nearest and dearest friends here, and I don't make friends that easily.”

I didn't believe him. I knew him to be a liar who also spoke the truth. Besides, he had already hurt my feelings.

Seeing my unhappiness, Gregory offered to tell me about “the pushcart incident.” He thought that telling me a story—something I had already read about in
The Subterraneans—
would make everything better.

“Shmuel,” he began, “I was in a bar named Fugazi's, back in New York, with Jack Kerouac. We left the bar and walked through Washington Square Park. That's when I saw this pushcart. ‘Get in,' I told Jack, ‘and I'll push you to Ginsberg's place.'”

So Kerouac and two girls they were with got in the pushcart, and Gregory pushed them through the park.

“They were looking up at the stars from this pushcart,” Gregory reminisced, a strange light coming into his eyes. “I was pushing this thing so beautifully! Then I stopped in front of Allen's place. But that wasn't cool, because the landlord noticed the pushcart, and Allen's place is supposed to be safe, no den of thieves. The landlord didn't approve of the pushcart in front of the house, so he involves Ginzy, who had already thrown the apartment key
down to Jack.” That was the only way to get into Allen's New York apartment—whoever was in had to throw the key out the window because there wasn't a working buzzer or intercom. “So Ginzy and Jack have a little fight about it, and then Jack throws the apartment key back at Allen. So now Allen is mad at us, mad at
me.

“‘You've compromised the security of my home,' he yells at me from his third-floor window. Allen threw this hissy fit, and on top of that, he has this compassion for the poor shmuck who had his pushcart stolen!

“‘No, Allen,' I had to explain to him. ‘No, you don't understand. You don't know the street. Have no worry for this poor bum. The many bums with their pushcarts, they dispose of them at the end of long bum days. The mafia really gobbles up the pushcarts for scrap.'

“We had a beautiful time in that pushcart,” Gregory continued, lost in the memory of it, “and the pushcart had the best time that a pushcart ever had! These two friends, Jack and Allen, are fighting, and I'm thinking, ‘Uh-oh, I fucked up again. I'm always doing something stupid and causing old friends' arguments.' I'm a pain in the ass, but in a nice way. It's in Kerouac's book, but all changed around.”

After lunch I followed Gregory down the narrow stairwell and out into the blinding sunshine on Pearl Street. “I'll drive you home in a bicycle basket,” he said, still trying to make up for having hurt my feelings.

Gregory ran across the street to where a lot of student bikes were parked. He picked one out, a girl's bicycle. “Get on,” he said.

I held his new old clothes in a bag clutched to my chest while I climbed up on the handlebars; Gregory rode up the killer hill on this stolen girl's bike. I didn't think we were going to make it up the hill; I didn't think Gregory had the strength. The bike sputtered. We fell off the bike and spilled onto the grass.

“She'll look for it and find it here,” Gregory said. “Maybe she'll come to us asking about it, and she will be beautiful and wonderful and become the mother of your bicycle children.” And then he was
off, leaving me to prop up the bike against a city hall statue of Lewis, without Clark, looking out over the horizon.