When I Was Cool (3 page)
Authors: Sam Kashner
Peter was still puttering around the kitchen, putting the groceries away. He had a big belly. The rest of him was quite lean. Allen began to explain the work to me, what he required of his apprentices, when Peter threw his long mane of gray hair back like a wet horse and gathered it together into an elastic holder. Until then, I had only seen girls do that in school or on the bus. I always thought it was beautiful. I didn't know what to think about Peter's doing it. Allen stopped to look also. I looked at him admiring Peter. I think he was still in love with him then. They didn't speak much
when I was there. I'm sure Peter was staying out of our way, simply being polite, because “Allen was working.” But they also reminded me of my parents, their silences, the way they sometimes became annoyed with each other.
When I thought about it, it seemed fitting that I was spending the summer of the bicentennialâour nation's two hundredth birthdayâwith the man who had told America to “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” in his poem “America.” Allen Ginsberg was the father of my country. Throughout my youth, I always saw a different kind of Mount RushmoreâGinsberg's bearded head was there, and Jack Kerouac's, whose handsome profile already looked carved out of rock. Gregory Corso, the shaggy-haired poet-thief, the François Villon of the Lower East Side, looked out on the clouds where Teddy Roosevelt was for everybody else, and William Burroughs's death's-head rictus formed the narrow slope at the end of my Mount Rushmore. I loved poetry and especially Rimbaud, or at least the idea of Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French poet who had written all his masterpieces by the age of seventeen and renounced poetry to run guns out of Africa, who had to have one of his legs amputated, who spent the rest of his short life being cared for by his sister, playing the guitar and making up songs under a Belgian, Magritte-blue sky.
So when Allen, between sips of steaming tea, asked me what I knew about Arthur Rimbaud, I had an answer.
“The derangement of the senses?” I said, aware only that the phrase appeared in Rimbaud's poetry. If only I could've said it in French, I thought. That would have been
très cool.
“Rimbaud is in the pantheon,” Allen said. “There are others. Mayakovsky.” (
Knew it,
I thought, and said a silent prayer of thanks.) “Breton and Tristan Tzara.”
“Sammi Rosenstock,” I said.
“Who's Sammi Rosenstock?” asked Allen Ginsberg.
“That's Tristan Tzara's real name.” I thought this would impress him. I prayed it would impress him, this great man with the slightly crooked mouth who had just come back from traveling
in New England with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue (that's what I really wanted to ask him about, but I was too shy).
“Sammi Rosenstock” fell on Allen's bad ear. No reaction. Worse than no reaction. He looked bored. I felt my nerve slipping away. The tea felt like battery acid at the back of my throat. There was now a serious possibility, even without the heat, of passing out. Where, oh, where were the other students? The other “poetics” students?
Just two months earlier, Allen's postcard had reached me at my grandmother's house in South Fallsburg, New York, in the Catskills, up the road from Brown's Hotel (that billboards for fifty miles along the thruway advertised as “My Favorite Hotel” with a gigantic picture of Jerry Lewis on them). It had read: “Dear Mr. Kashner, You have been accepted as one of the Naropa summer apprentices. Here is my telephone number. Please call to arrange for an appointment. I look forward to meeting you. I hope you can type. Sincerely yours, A. Ginsberg.” On the other side was printed a small poem of Allen's about sitting under a tree and reading a book when a bug of some kind lands on the page and Allen blows the “tiny mite into the void.”
My happiness at getting Allen's postcard, his phone number and his signature, was more than I could bear. It never occurred to me what being an apprentice might mean, why it mattered whether or not I could type. I could, but not very well. The treasure was the postcard. Hadn't Allen sent Kerouac a postcard every day for a year in the early stage of their friendship? This was my diploma, even before attending a single class. I read it over and over again at the kitchen table in the old boardinghouse my grandmother ran in the mountains. Suddenly, I remembered that I had failed typing in high school.
Allen had written one other thing in his postcard. His father was very ill. He would be late in coming to Naropa. He and Peter had gone to take care of him. “We're reading to him from âTintern Abbey,'” he wrote. I looked it up. Allen was telling his father that
all souls return to God. It didn't sound like him. I didn't want to think about death that summer. After all, I was about to leave home and enroll in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I had never heard of someone going to care for a dying parent. Whenever someone got sick in our family, they went into the hospital and we never saw them again. Already, Allen Ginsberg's “Golden Book of Life,” as he called it, was opening up to me, whether I liked it or not.
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the Naropa Institute were established in 1975 by Allen Ginsberg and a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. They met arguing over a taxicab. Trungpa was heading downtown, so was Ginsberg. They got in the cab together. It changed both their lives. Allen said that Trungpa (as they called him) had saved his life. “I was like Dylan before the motorcycle accident,” Allen told me, referring to the time in 1966 when Bob Dylan had injured himself riding his Triumph motorcycle in upstate New York, and how his recovery forced him to slow down, to reconsider things in his life. Even Dylan's voice seemed to change after the accident, as revealed on his 1969 album
Nashville Skyline,
into the voice of a laconic cowboy.
To get to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics you had to get to the mall on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, and then climb the stairs next to the New York Delicatessen, a deli, by the way, started by two hippies from Brooklyn who missed their grandmother's babka and matzoh ball soup. I knew I'd come to the right place when I saw three Buddhist monks in saffron robes sit-
ting at a table outside the New York Deli, scrutinizing their matzoh balls. I went upstairs.
Naropa, named by Rinpoche after an ancient Buddhist teacher, existed in a long series of rooms that Rinpoche's young followers had taken over, polishing the floors and painting the walls bright yellow and red (the colors of Buddhist shrine rooms). Rinpoche's framed calligraphy hung on the brightly colored walls. There were mandalas and tanka paintings hung throughout the sparsely furnished rooms. I got the feeling that the meager furnishings had come from the University of Colorado in Boulderâstuff that had been put out on the street. Except for Rinpoche's office. His room was exquisitely furnished with plush leather chairs and a beautiful couch. I also noticed that Rinpoche's door was different from all the others: it was a thick, beautiful wooden door that looked as if it had been carved in the Middle Ages and had come from a monastery. Maybe it did. Someone told me that the doorknob was a religious object that had once been held by a
tulku,
or religious teacher. Whenever that door was closed, it meant that Rinpoche was in the building. To me, Rinpoche was as elusive as Elvis.
By the time I arrived at Naropa, Allen Ginsberg had been famous for a long time. Two obscenity trials had made Allen and his friend William Burroughs famous: those of
Howl
and
Naked Lunch.
I knew those books the way an earlier generation knew
Catcher in the Rye,
with its all-maroon cover with the yellow letters. But I never saw
Catcher in the Rye
in my sleep the way I saw the City Lights copies of
Howl
and
Kaddish and Other Poems,
with their black borders and the words “The Pocket Poets Series” at the top, as if it were just another broadside you could take with you to work on the thirty-eighth floor of an unfinished office building and read it while sitting on a girder eating your lunch, then stuff into your back pocket and wait for the foreman to send you home. The books were small, no bigger than your hand, and Allen told me he loved them that way, because it made him think of the railroad handbook that Jack and Neal used to read
âThe Brakeman's Handbookâ
when
they were getting ready to go to work for the railroad. Allen had taken a picture of Jack Kerouac with handbook in his jacket pocket, smoking on the fire escape outside Allen's apartment on the Lower East Side. I noticed there was a copy of the photograph torn from a magazine Scotch-taped to Allen's desk in his apartment. I remember thinking, How weird is that? He was the one who took the picture, but he gets his copy out of a magazine.
Allen couldn't find his poems. The day before, Peter had apparently moved them to give a massage to Barbara Dilley, one of the heads of the dance department at Naropa. She had danced with Merce Cunningham and everyone talked about “The Union Jack” as one of the famous dances she had participated in. She had short hair and looked like pictures of Joan of Arc. She didn't move like a dancer, she moved like a boxer, a very good middleweight. Peter had moved Allen's poems when Barbara came in. Allen was mad.
“I have apprentices coming all day,” he barked to Peter, still bustling around the kitchen. “I have to know where things are!”
I saw the poems, a stack of paper on a bar stool near the kitchen. I went over to get them. I brought Allen's poems back to him. I felt like I had found the holy fucking grail. My first job as an apprentice was completeâand a success! I was going to call my parents and tell them. Maybe the
Daily Camera,
Boulder's only newspaper, would interview me on finding the poet's poems.
“I have a lot of work,” Allen told me. “I'm putting together my collected poems, I need help. I have to finish poems I haven't written yet! Take this one, for example, it's a long poem about Neal.” (He must mean Neal Cassady, I thought, but what if I'm wrong and he means Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon?) I didn't know Allen well enough to know.
After an hour or so in Allen's presence, I didn't have a sense of who I was dealing with, except that it was really
him,
that he had really lived this life that I
did
know something about, and that by putting himself in a kind of lineage with Walt Whitman, I felt Walt Whitman's breath passing over me. Though it was really Allen's and he was eat-
ing a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat bread that Peter had prepared for him, one that I had refused out of sheer nervousness.
The poem Allen handed to me was interesting, but scary, about two men lying on a cot. It sounded like they were in a flophouse, or maybe just a cheap hotel, in Denver, where I think Neal's father, a drunk, had lived and worked as a barber, though it sounded like he was a bum or at best a hobo, which is how Allen described him. Anyway, the two men are getting ready for bed, and if I'm reading Allen's handwriting correctly, Allen gives Neal a blow job. As Allen watched me reading the poem, his eyes seemed to say, Are you getting to the good part? The poem stops with Neal throwing his head back in the throes of ecstasy.
“I haven't been able to finish it,” Allen said. “That's where you come in, that's your first assignment, finish the poem for me. I want to know what happens,” Allen said.
He wasn't laughing. I had to finish Allen Ginsberg's poem about giving Neal Cassady a blow job. I wasn't sure that I had ever had one myself, even from my girlfriend, Rosalie, and we were together all through high school. I would have remembered it. Where do I go for advice, for help, for inspiration? I didn't know anyone else at Naropa. Maybe the Naropa librarian could help me? I was still thinking about the epigraph in
Kaddish
: “Taste my mouth in your ear.” Maybe it was a test, I thought, a test to see if I was interested in Allen. In Allen giving me a blow job. All of a sudden I didn't feel very good. Maybe I should've gone to Nassau Community College after all. Why had Allen given me this assignment? I wasn't gay. At least I didn't think I was. Maybe Allen knew something about me that I didn't know myself. After all, at the beginning of my life at the Kerouac School, I thought Allen Ginsberg could see through walls. Then certainly he could see through me.
I remembered Allen's beautiful poem about Cassady's cremation. He described Neal's ashes, “anneal'd, and all that muscle and strength and beauty reduced to ash.” I could pretend to know what that would feel like, but giving Neal a blow job? My first task as Allen's first apprentice might turn out to be my last. I might be
banished from the kingdom of Shambhala. It's a good thing I didn't unpack.
“You're a sweet boy,” he said. “So unborn.”
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You could say that Neal Cassady was Jack Kerouac's muse. He's the main figure, the central character in
On the Road.
Cassady seemed like Kerouac's “true brother,” the lost brother. What is it he called him? A “western kinsman of the sun,” or something like that. Cassady was a great talker and driver and cocksman. “Holy Cassady,” is how Allen described him.
Cassady was the only one of the Beats to actually be born “on the road.” He was the ninth child, born in a charity hospital in Salt Lake City, when the Cassadys were driving to California from Des Moines in a Ford House Truck. Once they arrived after their brief stop in Salt Lake City, Neal's father opened up a barbershop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. He was a volcanic drunk and the marriage broke up, so Neal Jr. and his father moved to Denver. They lived in a one-dollar-a-week cubicle, sharing it with a double amputee named Shorty, in a five-story flophouse called the Metropolitan.
My father once drove me through the Bowery in New Yorkâthe windows rolled upâin our Chevrolet, and the men would come out of thin air and lean over to wipe the windshield, making it dirtier and asking for change. My father never gave it to them; instead, he just turned on the windshield wipers.
I never had to wake up on a naked mattress among men having the d.t.'s. Cassady seemed to thrive in the flophouse. “For a time I held a unique position. Among the hundreds of isolated creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown Denver, there was not one so young as myselfâ¦I alone as the sharer of their way of life, presented the sole replica of their own childhood.” Neal thought of his childhood as a castle. Eventually Neal moved in with his mother and a twelve-year-old half brother, a sadist named Jimmy. Jimmy had drowned cats in toilets, and he liked to trap Neal in the family Murphy bed, keeping him wedged between the mattress and the wall. Neal felt
like he couldn't yell out because that would only make Jimmy angrier, and he would torture him more. Neal's mother was no help. Neal turned his terror of being buried alive in the Murphy bed into a kind of visionary experience where he saw time being speeded up, vibrating like a Vornado fan, blurring and fluttering, fluttering and blurring. Years later he would recall the image of the fan as it emerged from his subconscious while he was tripping on LSD.
Cassady's sexual initiation was no less traumatic. At the age of nine he accompanied his father to the home of a drinking buddy, whose oldest son led his brother and Neal in sexual intercourse with as many sisters as they could hold down. After that experience, all boundaries of sexual decorum evaporated. Neal “sneak-shared” women with his father, and he slept with grandmothers and prepubescent girls in abandoned buildings, barns, and public toilets. Cars, theft, and sex dominated Cassady's adolescence, all linked in what he called “Adventures in Auto-eroticism.” Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, he stole some five hundred cars. Neal was well read for a car thief, a kind of Grand Theft Auto-didact. He was arrested ten times and convicted six. This impressed me as I never really learned to drive.
Neal was sent to reform school, but as soon as he got out he would catch a glimpse of a car showroom and pick up where he left off, with the “soul-thrilling pleasures” of joyriding through the streets of Denver in a hot car.
It was Kerouac who said that, for Neal Cassady, “sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life.” The one area in which Neal Cassady and I shared similar interestsâat least when I was a teenagerâwas in masturbation. There I was as great as Neal. Maybe greater. He masturbated and also had sexual intercourse. I hoped to give up one for the other. Cassady was a good-looking guy, described as thin-hipped and hard bellied, a champion chin-up artist who could throw a football seventy yards. I couldn't get my hand around a football, and found it too hard when it hit my chest. It made a noise. Kerouac compared Neal's face to a young Gene Autryâgreen eyes, a strong jawline, and a jutting chin. Orlovsky
said of Neal's profile, if he wasn't a man “his face would have made a beautiful shoe horn.” I think I know what he means. He always bought secondhand clothes, his one suit from a secondhand clothing shop in Chinatown. Kerouac noticed how even Neal's “dirty work clothes clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn't buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy.”
Neal liked to seduce men and women. It was part of his con man's persona. It was like a sexual swindle. He was flattering, he was manic. He was a car salesman of sex. He sounded like a 33
1
?3 rpm record played at 45. Allen talked about Neal's penis the way my Israeli cousins used to talk about the Empire State Building. Eight inches long and thick. Before I arrived at the Kerouac School I wondered how Allen could know such a thing. I got myself (with the help of my parents) excused from gymâasthmatoid bronchitis was what it said on the noteâbut not wanting to shower with other fifteen-year-old boys was the real reason.
I wondered how was I going to get along with my hero, Allen Ginsberg, who had, long ago, put “his queer shoulder to the wheel.”
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I took several of Allen's poems home. They were written out in longhand, in Allen's tiny scrawl. I studied his handwriting. It looked like the ink from a squid that someone had used to write his name in. He had written poems in a notebook on unlined paper. These new poems seemed to be about death, about his failing powers as a lover. More often than not the love poems ended with Allen's head on the hairless chest of a young boy.
I had come to Naropa to meet girls. I didn't know what to make of poems like “Love Returned” (“Come twice at last / he offers his ass”).
I panicked. I left Allen's notebooks on the floor beside my bed, my asthma inhaler on top of the notebooks. I walked out into my first Boulder evening, the mountains pressing up against my eyes. I walked down Pearl Street, which was Boulder's main Rialto. There, in a metal box with the daily paper inside, I saw the banner head-
line: “John Wayne Is Dead.” I thought of Keats's wonderful line “great spirits on earth are now presiding,” and pondered the departing ghost of John Wayne. What would Allen Ginsberg think about the Duke's death, a guy who represented everything about America that Allen seemed to stand in stark contrast to?
