When I Was Cool (4 page)

I looked at the people streaming toward me along the mall. How many of these backpacked strangers were going to wind up at Naropa? What raven-haired girl playing her guitar on the grass in front of the Boulder courthouse was waiting to be a muse, or at least amused by my lonesome self? I had yet to meet any of the other students.

I looked down at my watch (the one my grandfather had sold me on his deathbed, I liked to say, which of course wasn't true. My mother had given it to me as a going-away present). It was getting close to seven
P.M
. Oh no! Dinner at Ginsberg's! I had almost forgotten.

I ran up the impossible hill toward Allen and Peter's apartment on Broadway. I had forgotten the apartment number, but Bessie Smith's voice led me to them. The door was open. Would other students be waiting there as well? Shy and in awe, as I was?

I looked around the room. No one was remotely my age. Every face in the room I knew from books. If there was a way to die then, I wanted to know what it was. William Burroughs sat under the lamp that hung above the dining room table. He was dressed in a suit and looked as if he had just been interrogated by the customs bureau. I recognized him as the man who had written
Naked Lunch.
(I knew that Donald Fagen had taken the name of the dildo in that book for the name of his band, Steely Dan.) I also knew that William Burroughs had accidentally shot his wife after she had goaded him into shooting an apple off her pretty head in Mexico. Burroughs missed. Joan died. Whoever she really was vanished into myth.

I hoped I lived through dinner.

I still had my backpack with me, and in it was an album I wanted to play for Allen on an old hi-fi that he and Peter had brought from
New York. It was Gene Vincent, the blue-jeaned, hillbilly rocker who died young and was incredibly popular in England, much more so than he ever was in the States. I told Allen how Vincent, on his way to England, had only two things in his suitcase when the airport official opened it up: a teddy bear and a gun.

“That's how I'd like to travel if I could get away with it,” Burroughs drawled. “Instead, I have to bring a velvet-lined suitcase full of vials and victuals, just to keep alive.”

Other people have commented on William Burroughs's voice, how it could grind gravel, or how it sounded like the bark of a borzoi, the elegant dog on the spine of books published by Alfred A. Knopf. Allen said Burroughs's voice sounded as if it came up from under the sea, from a kingdom of mermen armed with Kalashnikov rifles.

There was something of T. S. Eliot about Burroughs, I thought. Dressed like a toff in a three-piece suit, Burroughs looked like an undertaker taking night classes. His long face was white as a candle and he smelled of talcum powder and Noxzema.

After listening to Gene Vincent for a while, Burroughs suddenly turned to me and asked me what the meaning of “disco” was. I guess he thought that since I was the youngest person in the room, I would know.

“You mean the word ‘disco'?” I asked, a little embarrassed at being spoken to. “It's from ‘discothèque.'”

Burroughs now had his back to me. He was hammering a nail into the wall in order to hang a picture. I thought to myself that this was how Jesse James got killed, turning his back on Robert Ford while he was hanging a picture on the wall. I thought about the song, about the dirty rotten coward who shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave.

I handed the Gene Vincent album cover to Allen, who liked Gene Vincent's looks—the pompadour and Vincent's skinniness. A long discussion ensued about skinny men with big cocks, the skinnier, the bigger.

“I haven't seen a cock in so long,” Burroughs growled. “I wouldn't care if it looked like a hedgehog run to ground.” He went back to hanging his picture.

I had absolutely nothing I could add to this conversation. I was conversationally busted. The night might end right here for me. I was saved by Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-a-Lula.”

“It's not the kind of music I like,” Allen remarked. “I prefer blues, like Elmore James, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, do you know that music?” Allen asked. “Dylan loves this music,” Allen added. It didn't sound like name-dropping. It just put the discussion out of reach.

“No, I don't.” It was my first lie to Allen Ginsberg. I
did
know some of that music. In fact, in junior high school, I was crazy about Son House. When I heard he was living in Rochester, New York, I called information and got his number. His wife answered the phone. “Hello, Mrs. House. Is Mr. House at home?” I asked.

“No, he's out at the Woolworth's,” she said. “He went out there to get some foolishness, should I tell him whose call came in?” I could've listened to her talk all day. I had wanted to invite Son House to be the entertainment for our school dance. I must have been out of mind (my schoolmates would have preferred disco), but my heart was in the right place. I could've told Allen that story, but I didn't. I didn't want to sound like I knew anything about anything. I wanted—needed—Allen to be the oracle. I wanted to learn everything there was to know from him, even the things I already knew.

Later that night, after a fascinating but strained evening trying to eat dinner in the company of legends, I tried to finish Allen's poem about Neal. I read some of the other poems Allen had written about blow jobs, tracking phrases that appeared and making use of them. I was stealing from Ginsberg to write a poem he would later claim as his own. (Was “Howl” written this way? Was “Kaddish” written by somebody else for his (or her) mother?) I didn't know whether to stay or to pack up and go home to Long Island. Instead, I just cried.

3. Psychic Surgeon

I stayed. A few days later, the core faculty of the Kerouac School held its first faculty meeting, which was also another dinner in Ginsberg's apartment. William Burroughs took the minutes.

Everyone in Allen's living room was a great talker. (Anne Waldman, the tall, glamorous poet and a core faculty member at Naropa, had been billing herself as “Fast Talking Woman” after her long poem, which she recited in a breathy rush to adoring crowds.) But I noticed that they all stopped talking and listened to Burroughs whenever he spoke. How could anyone ignore that voice, that ruined patrician's face, that T. S. Eliot on smack?

There was something enchanted about Burroughs, in a midsummer night's dream kind of way. It looked as if someone had put a spell on him and he had been changed into a woman, then a man, and then back again, as if they couldn't quite make up their mind.

I saw he was missing a finger. Well, not an entire finger. Just the top of it. I felt like Robert Donat in that Hitchcock movie my father loved,
The 39 Steps,
when Donat thinks he's found sanctuary in the Scottish highlands with the High Sheriff and his family, but then he sees that the High Sheriff is missing a finger, which identifies him as the ringleader of a dangerous group of spies. I wasn't in the Scottish highlands, I was in the Rocky Mountains, but seeing Burroughs's left hand silhouetted in the window made me wonder about how safe I was.

Burroughs, I would soon discover, seemed to save his affection for a select few. He had a simple philosophy of friendship: not to spread his good cheer “all over hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.” When I heard that, I crossed Bill's name off
my Chanukah party guest list, the one I was mentally preparing to have when December came around.

I would later learn from Anne Waldman the story of Bill's missing finger. It seems that Burroughs, in his youth, had been in love with a young man named Jack Anderson, who did odd jobs in an office and, on the side, hustled both men and women. Anderson knew of Burroughs's infatuation and tortured him with his other affairs. They lived next to each other in a shabby apartment building, and Bill could hear his boyfriend having sex with other people. He was miserable and angry about these infidelities, or at least the feelings they created, so one day he bought a pair of poultry shears. He later said they reminded him of his Thanksgiving dinners.

“He looked in his dresser mirror, all the while composing his face into the supercilious mask of an eighteenth-century dandy,” Burroughs later wrote about the incident, and then he severed the tip from the little finger of his left hand. He watched the blood rushing out of the wound, eventually bandaged the finger, and put the offending digit into his vest pocket, as if he were putting away a handkerchief or returning a fountain pen to his pocket. “I've done it,” Bill said to himself. After that, Burroughs noticed, “a lifetime of defensive hostility had fallen away.”

That was when Burroughs gave up his dream of becoming a psychoanalyst. Smart move, I thought. It was hard to imagine this silent man, tall and pale, as having been Allen's and Jack's teacher and therapist. (Kerouac had taken one look at Burroughs's mad, bony skull and described him as a Kansas minister.)

 

I wonder if that missing finger was the reason Allen sent me over to do some typing for Bill the following week. I knew that Kerouac had been Bill's favorite typist. It was Kerouac who typed up the manuscript for what would become
Naked Lunch.
Kerouac was like a one-man secretarial pool, an almost mystical typist, Allen thought, really fast and accurate. I, on the other hand, had failed the Regents
exam in typing. Not only did I make Abraham Lincoln look like Sigmund Freud, I typed out John F. Kennedy's silhouette but ran out of time and left a big hole in the back of his head. The teacher thought I had done it on purpose. I didn't. I just messed up.

When I arrived at Burroughs's apartment one week after the first faculty meeting, I wanted to impress him with my efficiency, so I marched right over to his electric typewriter and tried to turn it on. I couldn't find the power button.

“Use your brains, dammit,” Burroughs snarled at me. While he watched my distress, he began telling me how to catch a rabbit for food, in case I ever needed to do that. “Start by building a contraption with a shotgun,” he explained, “but be careful it doesn't go off in your face.” His point was: Think clearly when you're going to kill something, and not act like I did now—the paragon of butter-fingered incompetence.

I would soon learn that Burroughs liked words no one really used in conversation. His small talk sent you to the dictionary. Words like “jeremiad.” Burroughs no longer cultivated the role of the dandy, but he still seemed to be playing a part. The part of the man with a virulent strain of something he'll never get rid of. He seemed perfectly happy with his old age. Whereas Allen seemed to want to be young, Burroughs seemed to find a way to defeat death by never stopping to believe in his own death; it was in this way that he seemed to come alive. He had found the perfect role to play in this theater of the Beats—as not death's, but life's avenger.

Burroughs talked while I typed; he liked to tell stories about his youth, as if I were too young to hear anything else. Or maybe my own youth made him think about the past. He liked talking about being eight years old. At that age Burroughs had a little hiding place under the back steps of his parents' house, a secret place where he kept a box, and in the box was a spoon, a candle, and some type of instrument for investigating the forging of hard metals for weapons. It was also around the time he said that he shot off his first gun and wrote his first story. It was called “Autobiography of a Wolf,” a
ten-page story about an animal who lost his mate and was killed by a grizzly bear. Burroughs said his parents had listened politely to the story. “Surely you mean
biography
of a wolf,” his father had told him. “No,” Burroughs insisted. “I mean the autobiography of a wolf.” They sent him to Harvard. Now he was, he said, “the Payne-Whitney Professor of Bellevue Studies at the Jack Kerouac School.”

It dawned on me, leaving Burroughs's apartment and walking home in the cool night air that held the hint of autumn, that Burroughs had just named two psychiatric hospitals for his college chair.

 

During my first summer at Naropa, Ginsberg had a lot of dinner parties at his apartment. Any visiting writer, any important decision that had to be made, any problem that arose was presented at one of his long, shambling, informal dinners. I went to most of them, sure of a chance to listen to Allen or Burroughs hold forth on whatever was obsessing them that week. For much of that summer, Burroughs was preoccupied with space travel and with unexplained voices that suddenly appeared on tape recordings. He was also enthralled with the literary collages that he and his collaborator, Brion Gysin, had created, called “cut-ups.” Burroughs's conversation was in fact a kind of verbal cut-up, consisting of references to Shakespeare, the Bible, Rimbaud, Kohut, Freud, and Jack London. He referred to hustlers in Tangier and to the dying words of Dutch Schultz, to Goethe and the parables of Jesus Christ in the same tone of voice—and it was how he would order his dinners. Milk shakes with scotch. Egg creams and tequila. I loved to hear him talk.

His cut-ups, he said, were a way to alter the meaning of words and ideas. Burroughs claimed he had been doing them for so long that sometimes his cut-ups actually anticipated future events.

“I cut up an article written by John Paul Getty,” Burroughs explained at one of Allen's dinners, “and the sentence that came up was, ‘It is a bad thing to sue your own father.'” Burroughs
claimed that a year later one of Getty's sons did sue him. Then Allen asked Burroughs to tell the story of the air-conditioner.

I looked blankly at my hosts. They all knew what was coming.

“In 1964 I made a cut-up and got what seemed at the time to be a totally inexplicable phrase: ‘And there is a horrid air-conditioner.' Ten years later I moved into a loft with a broken air-conditioner, which was removed to put in a new unit. And there were three hundred pounds of broken air-conditioner on my floor—a behemoth—a horrid disposal nightmare, heavy and solid. It had all emerged from a cut-up I did ten years before.”

I found out later that Allen, Anne, and Peter had heard Burroughs's fairy tale about his air-conditioner at least a hundred times before. But they enjoyed hearing it, like children who ask to hear their favorite bedtime story and catch you every time you leave something out. It was a deeply weird pleasure to listen to that snarling, midwestern voice. The word “disposal” coming out of Burroughs's mouth was a great pleasure. It was like listening to John Wayne say the word “pilgrim.” We all loved listening to Bill.

It reminded me of a scene I had read, maybe it was in
On the Road,
when they stop at “Old Bull Lee's” place. Old Bull Lee was Burroughs, at least that's what we all thought. And Jack and his friends liked to visit Old Bull Lee and his wife, and just listen to Old Bull, sitting out on the porch with a shotgun laid across his lap, talk about what he'd just read in
The Handbook of Psychic Discoveries.

I noticed that Burroughs didn't say anything for shock value. His life had absorbed too many body blows for that. His
life
had shock value. Like Kerouac's Old Bull Lee, Burroughs was always an old man to them, and a kind of teacher. Even Allen felt that way. Although I never saw Allen Ginsberg afraid, the wrong look from Burroughs and Allen was like a little boy sent to stand in the corner and contemplate the peeling plaster. Burroughs was their oracle.

I, however, wondered what kept him out of the mad house. He seemed to hear voices. There seemed to be no line between
Burroughs's daily life and his dreams. He seemed to walk through his dream life the way we walk through our daily lives. How does he do it? I wondered. How does he avoid getting killed crossing the street?

Bill, as they called him, had brought dessert. Apple pie. “They say it makes you sterile,” Burroughs said, after Peter had asked whether or not the pie should be heated up. Burroughs's son, Billy Jr., was to bring the ice cream. “It goes on top of the pie,” Burroughs explained, as if it were Dr. Heidegger's experiment.

Peter went into the kitchen to heat up the apple pie. The phone rang and Peter answered it. He called Burroughs to the phone. Burroughs listened for a moment, then put the phone down. “Heat the bathroom, company is coming,” was all he said.

Later, I would figure out this code. I would learn what he wanted from the refrigerator, or when it was time for me to lay out the hypodermic needle, like some underage Dr. Watson preparing the needle for Sherlock Holmes after a particularly tough case. “Heat the bathroom, company is coming” was, apparently, an old Latvian custom. When expecting guests in Latvia, someone makes the trek into the bathroom and lights the stove. Burroughs was expecting his son to drop by.

Billy Burroughs Jr. arrived, bringing coffee ice cream in a soiled backpack that looked as if it had been through a war, which, in fact, it had. He had bought it from an army-navy store in Denver; he said it had been to Korea on the back of an American soldier. It even had a bullet hole in it—of which Billy Burroughs was very proud. “Straight from the back of his heart to mine,” Billy said.

 

There was nothing darling about this Billy. At least at first, at least to me. I had never been around a lot of alcohol. My parents still called it “schnapps.” Billy Burroughs was finishing out his twenties, and he looked just like Elisha Cook Jr., the character actor who played the gunsel Wilmer in
The Maltese Falcon.
Like Wilmer, Billy wore an overcoat frayed at the sleeves. It was made
of camel hair, and it smelled of the unfiltered Camels he smoked. He looked like a dying youth who had come to say goodbye.

Billy came over to his father and they shook hands. Billy looked at his father as if he were looking at Hemingway in a dream, with a bullet hole in his head talking about the Far Tortugas. He asked for a glass with ice in it. His mouth was dry. He kept his overcoat on, though it was hot in the apartment. The two didn't seem to have a lot to say to each other.

Billy Jr. was a good writer, I knew that much. He wrote a book called
Kentucky Ham.
It made me laugh. If the book was any indication, Billy lived to get stoned. His father, along with Anne Waldman, had thought it would be a good thing for Billy to come to Boulder. They hoped that he would fall under the influence of Rinpoche, maybe even start meditating. Give up cigarettes and drinking. Try some food.

Allen made a place for him at the glass table, around which the usual suspects sat on wrought-iron chairs with wicker seats—Anne, Peter, Bill, Allen. Peter had made dinner for the whole crew, a vast, vegetarian lasagna sprinkled with oregano that looked like pot (halfway through the dinner, Peter announced that it really
was
pot). Billy sat hunched over in his overcoat, staring at his plate as though, if he looked at it long enough, his dinner would simply get up and leave. He had a few days' worth of blond beard; his hair was dirty and fell into his eyes.

Billy started talking about Rinpoche, whom he called “the professor,” or “the professor of nonexistence.” During a lecture, he'd asked Rinpoche whether or not “the far-away” really existed. “Is the future packed away in salt, somewhere? Is the body evidence of the spirit, Professor?” he asked, to the delight of his friends, a hard-core group of young, mostly Irish street kids, some with gold teeth, who were part of Billy's all-white gang. Allen and Burroughs referred to them as “the Westies.” They revered Billy. One of them came by that night and whispered something in Billy's ear, and then left. I think they spent a lot of their time scoring drugs and
listening to music in the Naropa rooming house on Arapahoe Street.