Memoirs of a beatnik

by Di Prima, Diane

  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.

  We Set Out

  About this time I decided that I wanted to have a baby. It was nothing that I decided with my head, just a vague stirring and impulse in my body, some will to flower, to come to fruition—and something in my cells whispering that the scene as I knew it had gone on long enough, that there were many other states of being to explore. I didn't do anything about it, continued to use a diaphragm when screwing, it was just that my head was in a different place. I began to see everyone as a prospective father, and I found that many people looked ridiculous in this light.

  I had been in sporadic correspondence with Allen Ginsberg and some of his friends ever since I read Howl (Lawrence Fer-linghetti had even written a tiny introduction for my "unpublish-able" first book). Now Allen and his gang were in New York and I was eager to meet them. After a few phone calls back and forth they came down to Leslie's, where I was staying, bringing with them a great quantity of cheap wine and some very good grass. We all proceeded to get thoroughly stoned, and Allen, and Jack Kerouac who was with him, rapped down a long, beautiful high-flown rap all about poetry and high endeavor. Jack's belief, which Allen shared at the time, was that one should never change or rewrite anything. He felt that the initial flash of the turned-on mind was best, in life as well as in poetry, and I could see that he probably really lived that way. He seized upon my notebooks and proceeded to uncorrect the poems, rolling the original bumpy lines off his tongue, making the stops and awkwardnesses beautiful while we all got higher and higher.

  I proposed that they spend the night. Allen had eyes for Leslie and agreed readily, enlisting his lover Peter's help in moving the couch from the front room to the back, and setting it beside the double bed. They were about the same height and made one extra-wide, only slightly bumpy, sleeping place. They dragged the whole thing into the center of the room, arranging plants around it, and burning sticks of Indian incense which they stuck into the flower pots. Benny watched, horrified.

  After kissing us all lingeringly, Peter split-to what mysterious night rituals of his own, we could only surmise. Leslie lit some candles and placed them at the bedside, turning off the overhead light. Immediately, the room seemed immense, mysterious, the

  We Set Out

  beds an island, a camp in a great forest wilderness (Leslie's rubber plants). We all undressed-Benny with some trepidation-and climbed in.

  It was a strange, nondescript kind of orgy. Allen set things going by largely and fully embracing all of us, each in turn and all at once, sliding from body to body in a great wallow of flesh. It was warm and friendly and very unsexy—like being in a bathtub with four other people. To make matters worse, I had my period, and was acutely aware of the little white string of a tampax sticking out of my cunt. I played for a while with the cocks with which I found myself surrounded, planning as soon as I could to get out of the way of the action and go to sleep.

  But Jack was straight, and finding himself in a bed with three faggots and me, he wanted some pussy and decided he was going to get it. He began to persuade me to remove the tampax by nuzzling and nudging at my breasts and neck with his handsome head. Meanwhile everyone else was urging me to join in the games. Allen embarked on a long speech on the joys of making it while menstruating: the extra lubrication, the extra excitement due to a change of hormones, animals in heat bleed slightly, etc. Finally, to the cheers of the whole gang, I pulled out the bloody talisman and flung it across the room.

  Having done his part to assure a pleasurable evening for Jack and myself, Allen fell to work on the young male bodies beside him, and was soon wrapped round, with Leslie on one side of him and Benny on the other. I heard some squeals, ?,nd felt much humping and bumping about, but in the welter of bedclothes the action was rather obscure. Jack began by gallantly going down on me to prove that he didn't mind a little blood. He had a wildly nestling, hugging sort of approach, and he was a big man; I was taken over, and lay there with legs spread and eyes closed while he snorted and leaped like Pan. When I shut my eyes I was once more aware of the warm ocean of flesh around me, could distinguish the various love-sounds and breathings of all the creatures.

  We finally got loose of the bedclothes: Jack, with a great cry, heaved himself upwards and dumped them all on the floor, then fell heavily on top of me and entered me immediately. My momentary surprise turned to pleasure, and I squirmed down on his cock, getting it all inside of me, feeling good and full. It nudged the neck

  We Set Out

  of my womb, and I felt a thrill of a different kind, a pleasure that, starting in my groin, spread outward to the edge of my skin, stirring every hair follicle on my body separately. We bucked and shifted, looking for the best position, fucked for a long time on our sides. Then Jack withdrew and flipped over on his back. I played with his half-soft cock with the traces of my blood on it, bringing it back to fullness. He indicated by gestures that he wanted me to sit on top of him. I did, guiding his cock inside me, and it touched the same place at the neck of my womb again, but this time more heavily, so that the pleasure was sharper and edged with a slight pain.

  It was a long, slow, easy fuck. I knelt with my feet tucked under me and moved up and down on Jack's cock, while his hands on my waist supported and guided my movement. I glanced at the group beside me. Leslie was lying on Allen, kissing him, and they were grinding their stomachs together. I could imagine, though I could not see, their two hard cocks between them, denting the soft skin of their bellies. Benny lay a little to one side of the two of them. He was kissing Leslie's back and neck, and he had his own cock in his hand. Pleasure began to increase in my gut. I bent down and kissed Jack on the mouth, moving faster and faster against him. His two hands on my shoulders held me warm and tight, as we both came in the friendliness of that huge, candlelit room.

  Jack stirred after a few minutes of light rest. He leaned over the side of the bed, feeling around to find his soft leather pouch, and rolled a joint of good Mexican grass. Drew on it deeply and handed it to me. I smoked a little, and looked around to see where the others were at. Allen was lying full out on the bed, and Leslie was fucking him in the ass. I tried to hand the joint to Benny, who refused it with a shake of his head and fell, sobbing, into my arms. I handed the grass back to Jack, and tried to comfort Benny, but he would only lie there, sobbing softly. I stroked his shoulders and back and wished he would stop. It was very boring. Jack caught my eye and grinned at my chagrin. I turned my head towards him and he put the grass back in my mouth, holding it for me while I drew on it. Finally Benny stopped and said, "I have to go to the bathroom." He tromped about with reproachful noises, finding a bathrobe, and was lost in the unfathomed halls and staircases.

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  We Set Out

  Allen and Leslie finished doing their thing, and Leslie was hungry, as he always was after fucking, and went to the kitchen and came hack with bread and herring and a bag of early peaches, and he and Jack and I sat munching and smoking, while Allen scribbled in a notebook, occasionally looking up abstractedly for the grass. Jack pulled me between his legs and began to rub his limp cock against my backside and eventually got it hard again, and he exclaimed, "Look, Allen!" and leaped out of bed pull
ing me onto him as he stood in a deep plie and we tried to do it in Tibetan yab-yum position. It felt good, was really fine and lots of fun, but Jack was drunk and high and balance not too good, and we fell over, narrowly missing a plant and went on fucking on the floor, my legs around his waist, while he protested that we should slow down and let him get into lotus position so we could try that one. But I simply locked my ankles around his waist, spread the cheeks of his ass with my hands, kept him busy, and we flipped over first one way and then the other on the floor.

  Allen by this time was reciting Whitman and rubbing Leslie's cock with his feet, and when Leslie got hard again he went down on him, and Benny came back from the bathroom and went down on Allen. And then Jack went back into his pouch and came up with a black ping-pong ball of hashish, and we smoked a little and ate the rest, and I fell asleep and dreamed that the aether was flesh and human bodies merely cresting waves upon it. I watched them form and unform all night long.

  In the morning I had my period full force, and stayed in bed sitting on a towel while Leslie and Benny pranced out and scored tamp ax and coffee and eggs from the horrified corner grocer.

  And two weeks later, sitting at home in the pad, in a patch of sunlight on the black painted floor, while a small fire blazed for companionship and not for warmth, sitting there in a cloud of plaster dust I had raised by trying to carve a hard chunk of plaster of Paris into the semblance of a hand, white dust in the clean air, the house swept and windy from the broken windows, I heard a key turn in the lock. And turned in white sweatshirt and blue jeans, white plaster dust in my hair, to find Ivan standing in the doorway. Ivan whom I had not seen in many months, who had disappeared into the depths of the South, into some dull southern college where

  We Set Out

  he was teaching. He stood in the doorway, grinning his old grin in spite of necktie and straight overcoat, and stepped-in shiny shoes—across the swept and splintering floorboards, removing professorial gloves.

  I put down the half-carved hand and went to greet him: kiss long and fine, though only a small improvement on our kisses of long ago. And we drank brandy together out of coffee cups and ate bread and cheese while he told me about his life, the incredible circuit of "work," of words and money, that had closed around him.

  And I, looking him over, seeing how he still moved so fine, sensing the long hard muscles under the straight clothes, the fine bones of the face, high cheekbones that held through the years, good quick mind fumbling now with the foolishness of semantics and logical positivism, bogged down in the karmic round but still shooting sudden sparks, sending magic across the room till we both found ourselves laughing, rolling on the floor with laughter, knees pulled up and brandy spilling-I, noting these good points which were the kernel, and which all the karmic bullshit hadn't changed, flashed for a minute on the possibility that this might be the father I was seeking.

  It was the last really fine day in the pad. Ivan as usual shed his pomposity with his wardrobe, and we fucked all afternoon in the patch of sunlight on the double bed. The quintessence of all the pad had been, the friendly magic and high adventure we had lived in it, all floated around us that afternoon in the dusty air. That life had never seemed more graceful and easy, more filled with kindly love and essential freedom, than it did that day, and I knew I was saying good-bye to it. When Ivan split I lay awake for a long time, staring at the fire-escape and the sparse starlight through the window.

  And when the full moon shone on the fire-escape again, I didn't get my period as I should have. And as the moon waned, my breasts grew and became sore, and I knew I was pregnant. And I began to put my books in boxes, and pack up the odds and ends of my life, for a whole new adventure was starting, and I had no idea where it would land me.

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  Afterword Writing Memoirs-

  In March 1968,1 did my last theatre piece in New York City. It was called Monuments, and was a series of monologues: people played themselves—my take on the insides of their heads. There were eight monologues and any three could be performed in any given order to make a kind of "story," or at least a sequence, and we did them at the Cafe Cino. In the one I wrote for myself I asked if I would ever "sit in a bay window in San Francisco, looking at the rain and writing another novel."

  By summer solstice I found myself on a plane with a screaming infant, part of a crew of fourteen "grown-ups" with all their accompanying children, pets, rifles, typewriters, and musical instruments, who were migrating from New York. I had neglected to tell my husband where I was going, as he was in India on our credit cards, and had neglected to leave me any credit, leaving me instead a bevy of beautiful boys he had loved and left (I took two of them along). The crew went west in a variety of ways: planes, and a VW bus (newly purchased with the tag-end of my credit) being the two most notable. I will always remember being met at the airport by the most downtrodden pickup truck I had ever seen, driven by Lenore Kandel, whilst a Digger moppet, age about two, stood beside her in the cab, naked from the waist down and chewing on a hot dog (horrific to my macrobiotic mind). Miscellaneous mutts-mostly canine-shared the back of the truck with us, as we drove into town. My infant refused to stop screaming.

  A few months and many horrendous adventures later (vide if you will my, like they say, "work in progress" The California Book) I found myself ensconced in aforesaid bay window, looking at the heaviest rainy season in ten years, and writing-well, writing for our rent and dinner. Most of the fourteen grown-ups had stayed around, and none of them was working. The one gay woman friend who had the most impressive track record in this regard: ten years in offices in New York, had taken to her bed, to rest and recuperate. And all the other less hardy folk followed suit. Or they were organizing be-ins, delivering free food, selling or manufacturing illegal chemicals, publishing anarchist manifestoes, design-Diane di Prima

  Afterword

  ing political broadsides, creating lightshows for rock concerts, feeding stray guitarists, or making beaded earrings or candle glasses out of colored pebbles.

  In addition, a great bevy of new-found California friends had also moved in, some invited and some not. (We had rented a fourteen room house with finished basement, in-law apartment, and huge back yard for $300 a month.) I still remember with distinct un-fondness the two couples with seven kids between them whom the Diggers installed above my protests on the floor of the dining-room. Said couples had just returned from Hawaii where they had gone to "get clean"—get off smack. Diggers who brought them from the airport in my van also brought them a present—more smack. And so they dreamed the time away on my sheepskin scatter rugs. All except one of the men, who was prone to wander the streets in search of hold-up victims, or burn up anything burnable on our altars (wooden statues were his favorite) or clean his guns just behind my back in my study, insisting that if I were really a Buddhist it wouldn't bother me, I'd be able to write no matter what he did.

  And write I did, and was glad when the S.F. police finally came for him, though I put up the traditional fight: "Do you have a warrant?" etc. Write I did, else how would we all have the seaweed and brown rice and miso soup I deemed necessary for our survival? It was a schizophrenic life. I was sitting zazen every morning at Zen Center on Bush Street, and consequently went to sleep by ten, whilst downstairs people danced in boots on the dining room table, or held war conferences: where to put the children when the shooting starts. I would get up at four, wake the two Michigan zennies on the back porch, and we all three would push the VW van down Oak Street in the pre-dawn light till it started, and drive to Zen Center. On our return, I would make enough oatmeal or rice cream for the army we were, scarf some, and go to my big front room to write before the action started.

  I had met Maurice Girodias in New York, and had written the sex scenes for a couple of dull and innocuous novels he had purchased as skeleton plots to which the prurient interest had to be added, like oregano to tomato sauce. Before I left town he had asked me to write one myself, and when it
became obvious that money was scarce, to put it mildly (everything you could possibly

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  Afterword

  want in that San Francisco of 1968—four hundred pounds of free fish, $85 kilos of grass, great cheap wine, free food, beach and sky—everything except cash. Wherever the "prosperity" was, it wasn't where we were)—when, as I was saying, it became obvious that money was scarce, and would likely to continue to be so, I got to work, and quickly whipped out enough pages for an advance. It was the first and only time I'd ever written a "potboiler," and it was clearly the course to take.

  Money wasn't supposed to be scarce, you understand. Before I left New York, the powers-that-be in Washington had awarded me a $10,000 grant—a considerable sum in those days. It was supposed to arrive in a lump on July 1, a mere ten days after I got to San Francisco. But due to the vagaries of bureaucracy, it didn't even begin to show up till the following January, and then came in in small and relatively useless dribbles. Clearly the twenty-odd large and assorted small humans who graced the halls, balconies and bannisters of my pad had to eat.

  And so, I would go from my morning meditation and macrobiotic eats to the typewriter, and sit indeed in the bay window I had requested of the gods, turning out pages of reminiscences, whilst Black and White Panthers, Hells Angels, parrots, rock bands, assorted Chinese and American Indian dealers and babes without diapers wandered in and out of the room (no one paid attention if you closed the door, and you were asking for trouble if you locked it). As time went on I got more and more into the book, especially the remembering and recreating of that earlier time, those early fifties in The City. I would play Bird, or Clifford Brown, or Miles' "Walking" over and over as I wrote, and tiny perfect memories of long-forgotten rooms, and scenes, and folks would take me over-which is of course one of the joys of writing prose, and one I was tasting there for the first time. I'm really glad I wrote the book, and wrote it when I did, before the world of the West completely took me: reading it now, there's much that I don't remember, that I read like someone else's story.