The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Come with me

  If you want to go to Kansas City.

  I’m feeling lowdown and blue,

  My heart’s full of sorrow.

  Don’t hardly know what to do,

  Where will I be tomorrow?

  Going to Kansas City,

  Wanna go too?

  No, you can’t make it with me.

  Going to Kansas City,

  Sorry that I can’t take you.

  When you see me coming

  Raise your window high.

  When you see me leaving, baby,

  Hang your head and cry.

  I’m afraid there’s nothing in this cream, this dreamy town

  A honky tonky monkey woman can do.

  She’d only bring herself down.

  So long everybody,

  The time has come

  And I must leave you

  So if I don’t ever see your smiling face again

  Make a promise you’ll remember

  Like a Christmas day in December

  That I told you all through thick and thin

  On up until the end

  Parker’s been your friend.

  Don’t hang your head

  When you see those six pretty horses pulling me.

  Put a twenty dollar silver piece on my watch-chain

  Look at the smile on my face

  And sing a little song

  To let the world know I’m really free.

  Don’t cry for me

  ’Cause I’m going to Kansas City.

  Come with me

  If you want to go to Kansas City.

  1954

  Diane di Prima

  (b. 1934)

  A Brooklynite and granddaughter of an Italian anarchist, Diane di Prima became a Beat poet as a teenager. Her first book, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published when she was twenty-four She edited The Floating Bear, a newsletter of the new writing, with LeRoi Jones, andfounded the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre. After an interval at Timothy Leary’s psychedelic commune at Millbrook, New York, she relocated to San Francisco where she has been active ever since, working with the Diggers in the late sixties, studying Buddhism, helpingfound the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, publishing the poem-cycle Loba and the autobiography Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and working as a photographer and visual artist. This selection from di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) describes a time when there was a genuine underground and an alternative consciousness, and evokes an epiphany of generational shift—one of those turning points that often get lost in the shuffle of official history.

  from Memoirs of a Beatnik

  MEANWHILE, in the outside world everything was changing faster and more than we realized. We thought we were doing the same things we’d always done because the changes happened in slow motion, but happen they did, and when we looked out the window again we were someplace else.

  We had run through a variety of aesthetic games: little magazines for which we couldn’t raise any bread, theatre projects in gigantic lofts which never materialized, a visit by me and Susan to Ezra Pound, who wanted us single-handed to change the nature of the programming on nationwide television. Leslie choreographed and produced his first dance recital; Pete’s fantasy paintings became eight feet wide and gloomier; I put together This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, my first book of poems, and Pete and Leslie solemnly assured me that it could not be published because no one would understand a word of the street slang. Don wasn’t accepted at Actor’s Studio and made a movie instead. Most of his friends were accepted and stopped coming to see us. Miles Davis moved away from Tenth Avenue; we no longer ran into him at three in the afternoon hailing a taxi in his dark glasses, looking as if he had just gotten up.

  We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.

  The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.

  Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene as yet. The affluent post-Korean-war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.

  As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the city—who knew what we knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc., but our isolation was total and impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of the “sellout”) and to keep our cool: a hard, clean edge and definition in the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us—“media mush.” We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for love, and shut out the rest of the world.

  THEN ONE evening—it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together—the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, “I think this might interest you.” I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”

  I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening. The phrase “breaking ground” kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us—all few hundreds of us—simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.

  The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too. It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were—and now, suddenly, about to speak out. For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends—and even those friends claiming it “couldn’t be published”—waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to
meet my brothers and sisters.

  We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

  MEANWHILE THE changes started going down around us thicker and heavier than ever—so that even we couldn’t help noticing them. The first thing I noticed, and it gave me quite a jolt, was that the pad was going away, was quite used up. Nothing in particular happened, but it just began to have that air about it, that feeling when you unlocked the door and walked in, of a place that hadn’t been lived in for some time, where the air had not been stirred. Places do that, I’ve noticed. They turn round without warning, turn in on themselves, and suddenly it’s like living in a morgue, or a refrigerator; the vital impulse that made a hearth, a living center of some sort, has changed directions like an ocean current, and that particular island is no longer in its path. You can tell because even in the height of summer there’s a chill in the air, a something that gets into your bones.

  The rats were part of it. They had moved in, en masse, from the demolished building next door, and they scampered and played about the kitchen at night, making quite a racket. They came in through a hole under the kitchen sink, and we covered it again and again with pieces of tin, till finally there was nothing left to nail the tin to but more tin, and I gave up. But it did often give me a deep shudder as of awe to awaken in the morning and find that a whole loaf of bread in its plastic bag had been carried halfway across the room, or to find, half an inch long, the neat little claw prints of one of my furry roommates in the congealed fat of yesterday’s roast.

  O’Reilley had already split with our scene more or less completely. Occasionally she did stop down for a night or two, like gingerly putting one toe into some rather scummy water, and then withdrew to the safety and order of her new East Side flat. Don, having completed his movie, decided to take himself seriously and set out for Hollywood. And Pete fell ill, as I have since learned that he does every three or four years: fell seriously, heavily ill with pneumonia and had to be shipped home to Kew Garden Hills in a taxi at his father’s expense while his fever raged. The disease itself abated rather quickly, but the weakness remained, and Pete stayed in the comparative luxury of his family’s house, eating minute steaks and resting.

  It may have been our large rat population that drove Leslie out into the world, but I think it was simply growing pains: he suddenly felt old enough to have a pad of his own, and he set out to get one. He found a loft on Prince Street in a part of the Village that had just opened up. The loft was the top floor of three. They were open to each other at staircase and hall, and they all shared one john. Previous tenants had installed a bathtub and hot water heater on the second floor and Leslie’s present downstairs neighbor had just added a small washbasin which also served for everyone’s dishes. Leslie had a two-burner hotplate on top of a small, rickety office frig, and a table with three wobbly chairs. All the water came from downstairs and was carted up in gallon wine jugs. It was dumped out the window when one didn’t feel like making the trip down to the second-floor john. No one worried about sprinkler systems, exits, or other such regulations; living in lofts was illegal, and everyone who could afford it did it.

  The light and space in Leslie’s place was lovely: huge front room like a big barn, green plants everywhere. White curtains that were probably just sheets let in the play of light. Almost equally large back room faced north on paved courtyard and endless possibilities of rooftops. And kitchen off to one side. It was the most luxurious (and most expensive) apartment that any of us had attempted yet. It cost eighty dollars a month and we all admired Leslie for braving such a rent.

  With the pad, Leslie took on a roommate, a long, lanky, funny-looking boy named Benny Hudson. Benny’s ears stuck out, and he had a herringbone coat. He smelled of soap and earnestness and other Midwestern virtues, but he had a job and could pay half of the rent—all of it in emergencies—so here he was. He and Leslie were lovers, of sorts. That is, they were making it, and Benny was in love.

  As for me, I still clung, out of sentiment and attachment, to the uptown pad. It was my home base, though I slept there seldom now. I had stopped paying rent several months before, but hung on, muttering “Health Department” at the landlord, whenever he muttered “Eviction” at me. We were at an impasse.

  Since I wasn’t paying any more rent, the landlord wasn’t making any more repairs, which meant that when the local gang broke the windows they stayed broken, and finally nearly all of them were. The place was breezy, but it was getting warm again, and so it didn’t matter. Then the lights and gas went off; I took to eating out, eating and bathing in other people’s houses, and reading by candlelight, which was scary because of the rats. I didn’t relish the thought of meeting a rat as big as a cat by candlelight in my kitchen. I began to look for someplace else to live.

  Memoirs of a Beatnik, 1969; second edition, 1988

  Jack Kerouac

  (1922–1969)

  Movie-star handsome and con-man charming, Jack Kerouac was a romantic and contradictory literary pop star. He made a movement, or at least named it; he set out its ground rules and then broke them. Kerouac changed the novel forever, speed-typing madly on rolls of paper. He practiced poetry, fusing haikus with bop and blues. After On the Road came out in 1957 and made him overnight into the emblem of a generation, there was no turning back. The underground had gone mainstream, and Kerouac lost his footing in the swirl of adulation, media attention, and self-indulgence. He would be dead at forty-seven, a burned-out hulk—but what a fire he left behind him. Here’s one of several attempts he made to explain the Beat Generation and his role as its prime mover.

  The Origins of the Beat Generation

  THIS ARTICLE necessarily’ll have to be about myself. I’m going all out.

  That nutty picture of me on the cover of On the Road results from the fact that I had just gotten down from a high mountain where I’d been for two months completely alone and usually I was in the habit of combing my hair of course because you have to get rides on the highway and all that and you usually want girls to look at you as though you were a man and not a wild beast but my poet friend Gregory Corso opened his shirt and took out a silver crucifix that was hanging from a chain and said “Wear this and wear it outside your shirt and don’t comb your hair!” so I spent several days around San Francisco going around with him and others like that, to parties, arties, parts, jam sessions, bars, poetry readings, churches, walking talking poetry in the streets, walking talking God in the streets (and at one point a strange gang of hoodlums got mad and said “What right does he got to wear that?” and my own gang of musicians and poets told them to cool it) and finally on the third day Mademoiselle magazine wanted to take pictures of us all so I posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix, and all, with Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Phil Whalen, and the only publication which later did not erase the crucifix from my breast (from that plaid sleeveless cotton shirt-front) was The New York Times, therefore The New York Times is as beat as I am, and I’m glad I’ve got a friend. I mean it sincerely, God bless The New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something distasteful. As a matter of fact, who’s really beat around here, I mean if you wanta talk of Beat as “beat down” the people who erased the crucifix are really the “beat down” ones and not The New York Times, myself, and Gregory Corso the poet. I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it. I am sure no priest would
’ve condemned me for wearing the crucifix outside my shirt everywhere and no matter where I went, even to have my picture taken by Mademoiselle. So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?

  Recently Ben Hecht said to me on TV “Why are you afraid to speak out your mind, what’s wrong with this country, what is everybody afraid of?” Was he talking to me? And all he wanted me to do was speak out my mind against people, he sneeringly brought up Dulles, Eisenhower, the Pope, all kinds of people like that habitually he would sneer at with Drew Pearson, against the world he wanted, this is his idea of freedom, he calls it freedom. Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty. In fact who knows but that it isn’t the solitude of the oneness of the essence of everything, the solitude of the actual oneness of the unbornness of the unborn essence of everything, nay the true pure foreverhood, that big blank potential that can ray forth anything it wants from its pure store, that blazing bliss, Mattivajrakaruna the Transcendental Diamond Compassion! No, I want to speak for things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was a German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D. T. Suzuki I speak out . . . why should I attack what I love out of life. This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out. When they come and stone you at least you won’t have a glass house, just your glassy flesh.

  That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said “You know, this is really a beat generation” and he leapt up and said “That’s it, that’s right!” It goes back to the 1880s when my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac used to go out on the porch in big thunderstorms and swing his kerosene lamp at the lightning and yell “Go ahead, go, if you’re more powerful than I am strike me and put the light out!” while the mother and the children cowered in the kitchen. And the light never went out. Maybe since I’m supposed to be the spokesman of the Beat Generation (I am the originator of the term, and around it the term and the generation have taken shape) it should be pointed out that all this “Beat” guts therefore goes back to my ancestors who were Bretons who were the most independent group of nobles in all old Europe and kept fighting Latin France to the last wall (although a big blond bosun on a merchant ship snorted when I told him my ancestors were Bretons in Cornwall, Brittany, “Why, we Wikings used to swoop down and steal your nets!”) Breton, Wiking, Irishman, Indian, madboy, it doesn’t make any difference, there is no doubt about the Beat Generation, at least the core of it, being a swinging group of new American men intent on joy . . . Irresponsibility? Who wouldn’t help a dying man on an empty road? No and the Beat Generation goes back to the wild parties my father used to have at home in the 1920s and 1930s in New England that were so fantastically loud nobody could sleep for blocks around and when the cops came they always had a drink. It goes back to the wild and raving childhood of playing the Shadow under windswept trees of New England’s gleeful autumn, and the howl of the Moon Man on the sandbank until we caught him in a tree (he was an “older” guy of 15), the maniacal laugh of certain neighborhood madboys, the furious humor of whole gangs playing basketball till long after dark in the park, it goes back to those crazy days before World War II when teenagers drank beer on Friday nights at Lake ballrooms and worked off their hangovers playing baseball on Saturday afternoon followed by a dive in the brook—and our fathers wore straw hats like W. C. Fields. It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers (the tenderness of Angel Harpo at harp, too).