When I Was Cool (30 page)

49. “Consulting I Ching Smoking Pot Listening to the Fugs Sing Blake”

The spring and summer sessions wound to a close and I hung on in Boulder over the break, wondering whom they would get to replace Gregory. The fall semester passed without incident, and the spring term of my second and last year as a student was about to begin when Allen threw a party to welcome Ed Sanders to the Jack Kerouac School.

Allen had summoned Ed Sanders to Boulder to conduct an investigation into what had happened that night between W. S. Merwin and Trungpa Rinpoche. Allen didn't have much choice. Reaction to Tom Clark's story in the
Boulder Monthly
was yet threatening the Kerouac School's very existence. Some people even thought that the bad publicity was making Rinpoche's talks even weirder.

Meanwhile Allen informed me, now that I was a second-year student, that I had to start meditating or I wasn't going to graduate. I got six credits just for showing up in the shrine room and taking off my shoes. It was less humiliating than dodge ball.

Rinpoche usually gave his talks wearing a beautiful blue suit. It shone in the light like the scales of a fish. Blue might have been Trungpa's favorite color. He gave a talk called “The Blue Pancake.” It was about crazy wisdom. It was a Chicken Little story with a tantric twist. Rinpoche talked about the sky falling, about the moon and stars falling on your head. During the question-and- answer session someone asked Rinpoche why he was so enthusiastic about having the sky—the blue pancake—fall on everyone's head. Rinpoche started to laugh. “I think it's all a big joke, it's a big message, ladies and gentlemen.” I didn't get it.

I walked outside and looked up at the sky. The stars were still
there. But I wasn't sure about tomorrow, when I was supposed to join Ed Sanders's official investigation into Rinpoche and the “Merwin incident.”

Ed Sanders was a poet and a musician. He had been in a notorious rock band called the Fugs, which had gotten its start in the Lower East Side of New York City. I think they wanted to call themselves “The Fucks,” but then they wouldn't be able to advertise their appearances in any newspapers. And so, being made up of writers and a few poets, they changed their name to something that sounded like “fuck” but wasn't. Another story was that the word “fug” came from Norman Mailer, that he'd wanted to be able to say “fuck” in his novels but knew he would never get away with it, so he came up with “fug” instead. I never asked Ed Sanders. In fact, I hardly spoke to him.

In class, Sanders said, “People with shyness problems who want to get into investigations have a big problem.” Ed Sanders had written a book about the Mansons called
Family.
I read it by a sliver of bathroom light in my parents' house in Merrick, Long Island. After I read it I kept thinking that Tex Watson (one of Manson's followers) or maybe even Charlie himself would break out of prison and wind up on Long Island, and maybe, just maybe, he'd make his way to my house and kill me. It was a pretty remote possibility that Manson would escape from San Quentin, get to New York's Penn Station, find the Babylon line of the LIRR, know enough not to change trains at Jamaica, then come to Merrick and find our house and kill me. But that didn't discourage me from worrying about it. (I thought the same thing when Richard Speck was at large after he'd killed those student nurses. When I was much younger I must've thought that being a victim of a famous serial killer would make me famous, too. Gregory told me that all poets want fame, but that it's sad because poets cannot be famous anymore, for poetry is not famous anymore.)

Sanders looked like a disheveled version of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, with his downturning Victorian mustache and unruly mop of slightly poofed-up hair. He even wore
vests. I knew the poem Allen had written in June of 1966, “Consulting I Ching Smoking Pot Listening to the Fugs Sing Blake,” which made Ed Sanders even more mysterious. He had made it into Allen's poetry.

I never figured out why I found it so hard to talk to him; perhaps it was because he seemed so smart and I was shy about what I didn't know about literature. He was putting Sappho's poetry to music. I was unable to give up my Sammy Davis Jr. records. I was still going back to my apartment and listening to
Sammy at the Cocoanut Grove.
He did imitations of movie stars from the 1950s like Jimmy Stewart, Marlon Brando, and Jerry Lewis. I thought it was funny. I had to keep my interest in show business a secret from my teachers at the Kerouac School. I was afraid of what they'd think. I shouldn't have been so insecure. In
Visions of Cody,
Jack Kerouac writes a kind of aria to the Three Stooges. I should've given my teachers a little more credit. On the other hand, I never heard any one of them ever tell an old-fashioned joke. Allen had funny poems, but they were funny in an ironic way. They got big laughs, but with punch lines like, “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” It wasn't the Friars Club.

 

Allen said that I should follow Ed's lead and pursue the investigation wherever it goes. He said to be careful, though, because other poets were already gunning for Rinpoche and for Allen, too. Their animosity went back to a public reading at the University of Colorado four years earlier. Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Allen were all giving a poetry reading to benefit Rinpoche's Meditation Center. Trungpa was there, presiding as master of ceremonies. He was loaded on sake. He kept interrupting the poets; at one point he kept puffing up his cheeks and then collapsing them with his fists, making a kind of farting noise. Robert Bly was getting mad. Allen, who never really liked being upstaged, asked Rinpoche if this was all some kind of religious instruction. At the end of the evening Rinpoche apologized. Not for his behavior but for the poets. “I'm
sure they didn't mean what they said.” Then Rinpoche started to yell or possibly yodel, and he started banging on a large gong. Allen looked at him and pleaded with Trungpa to tell him if this was really him, or was he acting out of some Buddhist tradition.

“If you think I'm doing this because I'm drunk, you're making a big mistake,” Rinpoche said, teetering on the edge of the stage at the school's Macky Auditorium. One of the Vadjra guards reeled Trungpa back and prevented him from falling into the orchestra pit.

“Put it in the report,” Ed told the class.

All these unflattering stories. I think Allen believed that the report we were working on in Sanders's class would ultimately absolve Rinpoche and thus Naropa from all suspicions of wrong action. But it wasn't turning out that way. I worried that Allen was going to have a heart attack when he read the report, and that Anne would flay us alive and use our skins for a shawl.

In class, Sanders told us that the principle of “Investigative Poetics” was that “poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history.” He said that we as young poets now had the chance to do this.

So we compiled a series of questions for Trungpa to respond to, but he refused to answer any of our questions when we presented them to him the next day. Through a spokesman, Rinpoche said that he would never cooperate with the class, and that this was the one class at the Kerouac School that was illegitimate. We then invited him to visit the Investigative Poetics workshop in a closed- door session. We took our job very seriously.

I wanted out of the class, but then Anne Waldman called me and said I should stay in and report back to her. Just what I wanted, to be Anne Waldman's spy!

Some of Rinpoche's closest students and advisers, members of the inner sanctum, wanted the investigation to stop. They said that the Buddhist community of Boulder should be on the lookout for what they called “the enemies of the dharma.” (Every single time I heard the word “dharma,” I thought of stuffed derma, the orangey- looking circle of fat that my grandmother loved to cook. It too had
a lot of the teachings within it—just a different tradition—and anyway, Rinpoche always said that Jews made good Buddhists.)

In the midst of the investigation, Robert Bly returned to Boulder, ostensibly to give a poetry reading, but instead he tore into Rinpoche and into the very idea of the Kerouac School. Not surprisingly, he brought up Rinpoche's fight with Merwin. He told the crowded room that the “Kerouac School is doomed.”

“Oh, God, not before accreditation,” I prayed to myself.

Someone in the audience yelled at Bly, called him a coward and a traitor to Shambhala. All these people started to seem crazy to me, caught up in some warfare that seemed more corporate than anything else. The next thing would be a proxy fight, or a hostile takeover of Naropa by the board of Yeshiva. I was getting mixed up. I think Allen was right. Bly and others saw an opportunity to stick it to Allen and Burroughs and their offspring, people that they never really liked anyway, and here was their big chance to say why.

The investigation dragged on through the spring semester. Merwin agreed to talk with us, and a few students who had actually attended the seminary retreat came forward. I met one of them at an all-night donut shop and took her testimony.

According to her account, it was like that Fatty Arbuckle party in the 1920s—Merwin was not an innocent, at least not at the beginning. He was a gentle guy, but he had tried to get into the spirit of the retreat. He was on the front lines of a terrific snowball fight earlier in the day with the Vadjra guards, and he had hatched a plan to create a little mischief by surprising Rinpoche with laughing gas, but they couldn't get their hands on it—all the dentist offices were closed.

The events in question had occurred at the end of October, when leaves were turning and falling from the trees. All of a sudden it was Halloween, even in the Rocky Mountains. The last month of seminary is supposed to be the hardest. Cabin fever combined with crazy wisdom. The Vadjra guards were throwing a Halloween party: come as your neurosis. This would be the big blow-out before the transmission of some very heavy psychic
petting, when the coal of the psyche, under enormous pressure and over time, is transformed into diamond.

Merwin and his companion, Dana, had arrived early at the party, according to my informant. They left early, too. Trungpa came late, and most people thought he was drunk. He was dressed casually in blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. It was hot inside the ski lodge. It was noisy. It was turning into a typical Naropa party. Rinpoche decided to take off his clothes. He ordered a few of his most trusted guards to lift him up on their shoulders, like a bride at a Jewish wedding, only he was completely naked as they led him through the various rooms of the ski lodge. Everyone looked up. Rinpoche looked down. He noticed that Merwin and Dana were not there. He asked where they were. Someone said they had gone back to their rooms.

“Bring them down,” Trungpa said.

“They don't want to come,” one of the guards told Rinpoche.

“Bring them anyway! Break down the door if you have to.”

But Merwin and Dana refused to open their door. One of the guards decided to smash the plate glass and enter the room. Merwin broke a beer bottle and held it out, threatening to cut anyone who came close to him or Dana. He thinks he might have even cut one or two guards simply by brandishing the broken bottle before throwing it against the wall and allowing himself to be dragged downstairs to the party, where Rinpoche was waiting.

Downstairs, Trungpa urged all his students to expose their neuroses. Then he singled out Merwin and Dana, accusing them of indulging in neurotic violence and aggression. Merwin defended himself. He said that it was Trungpa who was being irresponsible and a traitor to the teachings. Merwin said that Rinpoche was cutting his own throat with the way he was going about teaching crazy wisdom.

Trungpa threw a glass of sake in Merwin's face, then he turned to Dana Naone. “We're both Oriental,” he told her. “The Communists ripped off my country. Only another Oriental can understand that.”

Dana then called Trungpa a Nazi.

That's when Trungpa suggested that Merwin and Dana take
their clothes off. After all, he, Rinpoche, was already naked. They turned him down.

When Ed Sanders, during the course of the investigation, spoke with Dana and introduced her evidence into the report, she told him how the Vadjra guards had dragged her off and threw her onto the floor. She could see Merwin struggling too a few feet away. She told Ed, “I fought back and called out to friends, men and women, whose faces I saw in the crowd, to call the police.” But no one did.

Only one man, Bill King, broke through the crowd, and while Dana was lying on the ground in front of Trungpa, King spoke up. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Stop it.” Then Trungpa got out of his chair and surprised Bill King with a punch from his good arm, which was quite strong, and knocked Bill King down, saying that no one else should interfere with what was going on. Another Vadjra guard Dana identified as Richard Assally was trying to pull her clothes off. She said that Trungpa leaned over and hit Assally in the head, urging him to “do it faster.” The rest of her clothes were torn off.

Merwin and Dana Naone stood in front of Rinpoche “like Adam and Eve,” as one eyewitness described it, and then Merwin spoke up. He challenged everyone else at the seminary to take off their clothes. Everyone did. Belt buckles fell to the floor, shoes were flipped in the air, people slithered out of their clothes like snakes in molting season. Then Rinpoche gave his final order of the evening: “Let's dance.”

Someone put on a record, Roxy Music's “Love Is the Drug.” Seeing their chance, Merwin and Dana grabbed their clothes and slipped away.

The next morning Rinpoche had a letter placed in everyone's mailbox. “You must offer your neuroses as a feast to celebrate your entrance into the Vadjra teachings. Those of you who wish to leave will not be given a refund [it had cost $550 to go to seminary], but your Karmic debt will continue as the vividness of your memory cannot be forgotten.”