When I Was Cool (15 page)

22. Beat Faculty Meeting

Anne came back from Denver two days later—in white face. She wore a turban and her face was frozen behind a mask of plaster. It was hard for her to speak. She told Allen on the way upstairs to meet Burroughs and Corso for a Kerouac School faculty meeting that Dylan had made up her face to look like his, and that all the women in the Rolling Thunder Revue took to wearing these commedia dell'arte masks, onstage and off.

I accompanied Allen to the faculty meeting. At first there was some debate as to whether or not I should be present when my teachers set school policy, being that I was a student and not just Allen's assistant. But Allen argued that my presence would save a lot of bother—notices wouldn't have to go out, I would be there when decisions were made, I'd be taking the minutes of the meeting. So I stayed.

At the beginning of the meeting, Peter announced that he had gone for thirty straight days without masturbating; he told the faculty that this was a record for him. Rinpoche had told him that it wasn't a good idea, although there was a perfectly reasonable Buddhist explanation for abstaining, Peter said, but he couldn't remember it.

Anne reclined on the couch in the faculty lounge and looked like Sarah Bernhardt under her turban and béchamel-colored facial mask. She wondered out loud where the other students were. “Where are my girls?” she moaned.

“They're coming,” Allen said, and everyone laughed.

I scribbled a handful of notes in my terrible penmanship.
Someone was going to have to read this, I thought, so I tried to write everything out in capital letters. When Anne asked me to read something back, I couldn't make out my own handwriting. All of a sudden, Peter asked Anne if Bob Dylan had a clean asshole.

“Does he keep his asshole clean?” Peter asked, in that deep voice and the same grave tone he used for everything, even when asking me if I wanted chocolate syrup in my milk (the same drink with which he would greet me every time I saw him for a year, because I had asked for it the first time we met. And I always felt I had to drink it; eventually I found a way of feeding it to one of Gregory's cats).

Anne pretended to be a little put out with Peter. Anne loved the Beats more than anyone. She forgave them everything. She said they were a national treasure. I always agreed with her, even as I started to have questions about some of the things they did, even after some of the younger poets, like Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup, rolled their eyes when Allen made some impossible demand or had a temper tantrum, like the time the poet Phil Whalen's plane was late coming in from San Francisco and no one would be there to meet him.

Whalen was one of Allen's gods. Like Burroughs, he was quiet and extremely well read. He could quote reams of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and he read Euclid and
Scientific American
for fun. Whalen was the great bear holding down the West Coast end of the Beat tablecloth. He, like Allen, had become entranced with Buddhism, but Whalen was an industrial-strength Buddhist; he would sit in a meditation posture for days. Once, a chiropractor had to pry Whalen out of the lotus position because he had lost all feeling in his legs and back.

I had always assumed Whalen was gay. Shortly after classes began, Allen had announced that Whalen would be at Naropa in a few days and that he had just gotten married. The only problem was that on his honeymoon, Allen said, Whalen announced to his wife that he had just become a Buddhist monk and that he was moving into a monastery.

Mrs. Whalen had already been on the phone to Allen, hysterical that her husband was about to shave his head and take on the maroon-colored robes of a Buddhist monk. “He even has a new
name,” she wailed to Allen. “I don't even know what it is! I couldn't reach him on the phone if I had to! What if there's an emergency?” It seemed to me, although I didn't say anything, that Mrs. Whalen already had an emergency on her hands.

I remember that Allen had told her to calm down, that he would discuss the situation with Trungpa. “Who knows, maybe Phil's orders will let you two live together at the zen center,” Allen explained. Allen, who was often hysterical himself, was always in the position of smoothing ruffled feathers and talking his friends down from ledges, figurative and architectural. Allen's friends were always threatening to finish themselves off—they would quote Antonin Artaud about the artist suicided by society. They were always flying off the handle about it. Not Burroughs, though. Bill thought it was bad manners to complain about society. Stoicism was a vestige of his patrician upbringing.

“You don't complain,” Burroughs said. “You don't fight city hall, you just approach it on all fours, lift your leg, and pee on it. And when in doubt, book passage on a transatlantic ocean liner.”

I thought Bill's family had probably taught him that.

Allen and Gregory always consulted Burroughs; he was their father confessor and their therapist. He had the gravitas of a small- town undertaker. They brought their problems to him. Everyone seemed to, except for Billy Jr. He kept his troubles to himself. His father was never any help anyway.

At the faculty meeting, Anne refused to answer Peter's question.

“For the record,” Anne said, “I never saw his asshole, Peter, and I wouldn't tell you if I had.” Peter seemed satisfied with Anne's answer. I wasn't.

“Is asshole one word?” I piped up.

“No, not technically,” Burroughs said, “it's hyphenated. Unless you want to break its hyphen.”

Anne tried to laugh through her mask, but her white skin paint looked painful; it was starting to flake, tiny pieces falling to the floor. When she laughed, she reminded me of Mr. Sardonicus, the guy in the horror movie whose face is frozen into a hideous, death's-head grin.

I was dying to know if Anne had gone to bed with Bob Dylan. She had been gone for two whole days, but she said she was away writing a long poem about the tour and about Dylan as a kind of Provençal troubadour. Well, the troubadours were always climbing walls and vines and throwing themselves out of undeserved beds.

Anne went to the bathroom to try and take off her makeup. She said it had been on for days, but that no one wanted to insult Dylan by taking it off. She said that he kept his on for a long time.

Later, at Gregory's, I asked Calliope about Anne's visit to Denver to see Dylan.

“Oh, she's had flings with him before,” Calliope said. “He's really a skinny little guy, but he's a fucking genius, a great poet, so who cares?”

I could've kissed her. I felt a lot better. I knew some people liked my poetry; I didn't hear a lot about my appearance. I didn't know how it stacked up. If a sexy woman like Calliope thought Dylan's poem-songs were a turn-on, then there was hope for me. So far, only Allen had commented on how well I looked in my blue jeans. I remembered being flattered by it. That was a compliment, wasn't it? I thought, whoever admires you, that's who you fall in love with. But I wished it had been Calliope.

Calliope told me that Anne accepted the fact that Dylan had a lot of women. “You just don't let yourself fall in love with him. You might never see him again. Anne was able to handle this, because she was practicing the idea of nonattachment.”

When Anne came back from the bathroom after removing her white mask, she looked beautiful, but there were circles under her eyes. She looked like she'd been up for a long time. She looked sad to me.

“I had a wonderful time,” she said. “Bob sang a song he dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud, and then he looked at me.”

“What song was it?” Allen asked.

“I never heard it before,” she said. “I remember the image of the street and the dogs on it barking, and night is falling.”

“‘One Too Many Mornings,'” I told Anne, and I wrote that down in the minutes.

She frowned. I knew the song title, and I wasn't even invited to the concert. I thought then that Anne and I were on some kind of collision course. She didn't like it when one of Allen's assistants showed her up—someone not under her wing. I was like an outlaw who retreats to the sanctuary of Allen Ginsberg, and Allen stands in front of the doors of the synagogue and says, “You can't come in here, he's under my protection.” That's how it felt.

Allen beamed when I mentioned the song title.

“That's right. I love that song,” Allen said. “Good, boychick,” he said to me. “Rimbaud would've liked that song; he could've sung it sitting with one leg and strumming the guitar with a country dog chasing fireflies in Charleville at night.”

Rimbaud's lost leg, his phantom limb, had kicked Anne under the table for me, kicked her in the shins, schoolboy-style, across time.

23. Heroin Doesn't Make You Immortal

It wasn't just Allen's idea that poets could be rock stars. After all, Allen thought that Dylan was really a poet masquerading as a rock musician. A “troubadour,” he kept calling him. He and Anne said that a lot. “The troubadour just called,” or, “The troubadour is coming to Denver, we should get spruced up and go,” Anne had said. In fact, all the Beats at Naropa wanted to be rock stars. They were the ones who seemed to be inheriting the Beat gift for social dissonance and for outrageous behavior. They also seemed to be the ones who were getting all the press. Not to mention money and sex. During that summer, when the big rock tours were announced, Burroughs surprised everyone by sulking about it.

“The goddamn Rolling Stones,” Burroughs said one afternoon in the backyard of one of Rinpoche's wealthy supporters, who had thrown a garden party for the Jack Kerouac School faculty, some of the other teachers at Naropa, and its only officially enrolled poetry student. “Mick Jagger pretends to be sinister,” Buroughs explained, balancing a teacup and saucer on his bony knees, along with his cane. “I can't stand all that Aleister Crowley crap and the Stones in their wizard hats. The real evils are the Central Intelligence Agency, and childhood carcinoma. You could bring most of them”—meaning the Stones—“home to Mother.” Everyone laughed.

“Even Keith Richards?” someone asked.

“Keith Richards made one mistake about heroin,” Burroughs explained, ignoring the laughter among the Buddhists. “It doesn't make you immortal, it makes you improbable.” It was the first time I had heard Burroughs say something about heroin that didn't sound like a travel brochure to some exotic island. But even Burroughs had appreciated the fact that Donald Fagen had called his group Steely Dan after the dildo in
Naked Lunch
and that Patti Smith had posed with him in New York, wearing a T-shirt with a silk-screened likeness of Rimbaud as a young, cravated schoolboy who had just finished writing some of the most powerful poems in the history of the world (or at least that's what I thought at the time).

Only Gregory, of all the Beats, didn't care about rock music or about wanting to be a rock star. He didn't care about sharing the stage with Bob Dylan or Patti Smith or Jim Carroll, who was another poet having success as a musician, writing songs like “People Who Died,” a necrology of all the friends Carroll had lost, some to heroin. Carroll was addicted himself for a while—to the drug and to the danger of life. Corso loved opera, particularly the Italians, and especially Rossini. He loved Renata Tebaldi's voice. He said he heard her singing in heaven once.

But as little as Gregory cared for rock 'n' roll fame, that's how much Anne wanted it. She had seen Jim Carroll, with his long-legged skinniness and strawberry-blond hair, become something of a rock
star. Jim was already a notorious presence on the Lower East Side, thanks to
The Basketball Diaries,
his story of being an inner-city basketball star and junkie. I picked up the book in what passed for the Naropa library, a small room that had mostly books Allen had donated or had sent from New York. I couldn't believe the sex in it. Jim was just a teenager but he claimed to have slept with women from every strata of New York society, from waitresses in Queens to Park Avenue matrons and even a few of his teachers. He also loved the movies like I did, and he wrote a whole book of poems about cutting school in favor of slouching down in the dark at the St. Mark's Theater, watching Montgomery Clift go to the electric chair in
A Place in the Sun.
Carroll, like Patti Smith and even Sam Shepard, had cut his teeth performing in the parish hall of the St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. So Anne watched this success and she wanted it. She wanted it bad.

Anne had an agent, well, a “manager,” a woman named Linda who had married a man named Mickey Louie. She liked calling herself Linda Louie. It gave her, a Jewish woman from Teaneck, New Jersey, a kind of gangster chic. Linda Louie had curly black hair that was thinning. She seemed old to me at the time, though she was probably about thirty. She had a baby named Hadrian. “After the emperor,” she explained. She liked me. She liked my poetry. She had very large breasts. I thought about them a lot.

Linda Louie said she had plans for Anne. She was going to make her a big star—a poetry star. Anne would give concertlike recitals, like they have in the Soviet Union. She'll fill soccer stadiums. She thought Anne should take some voice lessons and learn how to sing her poems. She and Allen could tour.

Because Linda Louie had a kid, she wasn't technically a part of Anne's entourage of sirens, like Calliope, Kitty, and Nanette. And because she often spoke to Anne in private meetings about Anne's future, the other women were excluded from these strategy meetings, and I think they resented her because she had Anne's undivided attention whenever she wanted it.

Allen hardly acknowledged Linda Louie at all. I had seen him
treat most women somewhat invisibly, unless they were older, like his stepmother, his father Louis Ginsberg's wife, whom he genuinely loved and admired. Those women came closer to reminding Allen of his mother—they had “corsets and eyes.” The younger women were ghosts to him.

Linda Louie's husband, Mickey, had long hair he kept in a ponytail, but he had a receding hairline that he often examined in restaurants, scrutinizing his reflection in a knife or a soup spoon. He was a short guy and very skinny. Linda told me Mickey might not look like much, but “ohhh, when it comes to lovin' me, he's got a huge sock.” It occurred to me later that she had said cock. It was the first thing she had said to me, after I had been introduced to her husband. I could never quite regard him in the same way after that. But Mickey Louie's big “sock” didn't keep him from being the subject of other rumors. The most unkind was that the little boy Mickey was raising with Linda Louie wasn't really his.

Apparently, Linda Louie was able to devote herself to Anne's career because she had unlimited funds. The reason for it, people said, was her relationship with something of value: a connection to a lucrative pot and cocaine deal with Cubans living in Miami and quite a few who had stayed behind on the island. A small plane would deliver the pot to the Louies, and they would pay for it with money they carried in money belts, ferrying the pot by cross-country road trips or driving all night from Florida to New York and then over into Colorado. I wondered what my mother and father would've thought of this conversation I was having. I thought of Anne Waldman, who was relying on this couple to bring her fame.

Anne told Linda Louie that Allen had invited Diane di Prima to come from San Francisco to visit Naropa and give a poetry reading and perhaps stay to teach a class in the summer program when all the students would finally show up at the Jack Kerouac School. But Naropa didn't know how to pay her, and Anne asked if Linda Louie would help. She bailed out Naropa more than once that first year— a legacy of the Cuban revolution. I felt like Meyer Lansky just standing around with them trying to figure out how the Cuban
connection could help bring di Prima and her impeccable beatnik credentials to Naropa for a couple of weeks.

Diane di Prima was one of the women poets Allen could
see.
She had a reputation as a very sexual Beat chick; she used words like
cock
and
cunt
and
fuck
in her work. She had Italian ancestors. She was born in New York and had dropped out of college— Swarthmore, I think—to become a writer, to try to become an artist. A few years before coming to Naropa she had written her beatnik memoirs. She had five kids, and one of her daughters with Leroi Jones was going to come to Naropa later in the year as a student. I took the news personally, as if she had told me I was soon going to have a friend.

Diane had written a poem that became very controversial, “Brass Furnace Going Out,” about having an abortion as a young girl. She hated the fact that people opposed to abortion had appropriated the poem and were reading it at huge rallies.

There were a lot of sexy pictures of Diane around, and I had fantasies about meeting her. In one picture she was wearing a scarf and a dark sweater with a black skirt and white socks; you could see the calves of her legs. In another photograph, she was staring down into a book, looking thoughtful and horny. I couldn't wait to meet her.