When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Sam Kashner

  When I Was Cool

  My Life at the Jack Kerouac School

  A Memoir

  For N.

  "The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “THE POET”

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Naked Brunch

  1.

  A Postcard from Allen

  2.

  Allen Can’t Find His Poems

  3.

  Psychic Surgeon

  4.

  Billy the Kid

  5.

  Notorious

  6.

  Ginsberg Saves His Beard

  7.

  A Shady Character

  8.

  William Burroughs Was Crying

  9.

  Fortunato’s Son

  10.

  Antler Wants a Drink of Water

  11.

  Fast Talking Woman

  12.

  The Wyrde Sister

  13.

  Last Gasp &/Or Gasm Sock Hop

  14.

  Rolling Thunder

  15.

  Gilgamesh in Boulder

  16.

  Kerouac’s Grave

  17.

  Last Words

  18.

  The Lineages

  19.

  A Junkie’s Gift

  20.

  “Who’s Minerva?”

  21.

  Shopping with Corso

  22.

  Beat Faculty Meeting

  23.

  Heroin Doesn’t Make You Immortal

  24.

  Diane di Prima Loved Food

  25.

  Billy and Tangier

  26.

  Burroughs and the Box

  27.

  Gregory’s Time Piece

  28.

  Saint Petersburg

  29.

  Menstrual Pudding

  30.

  Human Beings Need Meat

  31.

  A Spy in the House of Love

  32.

  The Six Realms

  33.

  “The Death of General Wolfe”

  34.

  Father Death

  35.

  Going to Bed with Carla

  36.

  Death Is a Friend

  37.

  “First Thought, Best Thought”?

  38.

  Billy at the Boulderado

  39.

  Dream Lunch

  40.

  A Bathing Suit in the Hot Tub

  41.

  Kidnapped by Poetry

  42.

  Jailhouse Fear

  43.

  Back to New York

  44.

  Anne’s Party

  45.

  Birdbrain

  46.

  Allen’s Secret

  47.

  A Woman with No Heart

  48.

  King of the Cats

  49.

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

  50.

  Plutonium Blues

  51.

  Carla Redux

  52.

  Graduation and Beyond

  Coda

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Sam Kashner

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Caveat Emptor

  Please don’t read this book if you’re looking (as I was in the early 1970s) for a history of the Beat Generation. When I got hooked on Howl and On the Road, when I was ga-ga for The Dharma Bums and Gregory Corso’s poem “Bomb” (which folded out of the book as if dropped from an F-15; and it looked like a bomb, too, the way the words were arranged on the page), there weren’t many books on the Beats. Now there’s a tower of Babel. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Corso—they’ve become the Rat Pack of literature. Anne Waldman is their Angie Dickinson.

  In truth, there are many wonderful books on the Beats. Ann Charters, an old friend of Ginsberg’s who wrote one of the first and still one of the best biographies of Kerouac, is supreme. There’s Gordon Ball, Allen’s Boswell, who knew Ginsberg as well as anyone and helped put together Allen Verbatim and all the published journals and correspondence; and you should read Barry Miles, Ginsberg’s biographer, and Steven Watson, who wrote a wonderful book called The Birth of the Beat Generation. Ed Sanders wrote Tales of Beatnik Glory; he, too, knew them all, as did John Tytell, who was there almost before anyone. Also, Diane di Prima and Hettie Jones, for their remarkable memoirs of the Beat life, as well as Michael Schumacher’s epic life, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. And then there’s Gerald Nicosia, and Kerouac’s other fine biographers and chroniclers, such as Tom Clark, John McNally, and of course Barry Gifford. Not to mention Joyce Johnson, whose mighty Minor Characters is a great book about her life with and without Jack Kerouac. These are the historians of the era, and these wonderful books and a few others I’ve used as an aide de memoire, and am deeply grateful to the authors.

  I wasn’t there at the beginning or even the middle. I was there for the ending. Or, maybe, the beginning of the end. I wasn’t a beatnik; I wasn’t even a hippie. But I wanted to write poetry and have cool friends and thumb my nose at the establishment; at the same time I wanted to make my parents proud of me. How was I going to do all that?

  These are letters from camp. Beat camp. My counselors happened to be former Beats: Allen Ginsberg taught me swimming and Swinburne; William Burroughs took us deep into the forest and then told us which one of us was probably an alien; Gregory Corso taught us how to sing—only the camp song was an aria from Pagliacci and his philosophy was strictly jail yard: “Never rat on a friend.”

  When I left the south shore of Long Island for my Beat experience at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1976, I didn’t know who I was. I just knew what I didn’t want to be. After arriving, I was initially afraid of the Beats; I even tried to stay away from them. But they were my teachers, so I couldn’t avoid them for long. I had nothing to offer them. I wanted them to make me an artist. I wanted the noble calling of literature. There was nothing I could do but enter the hive.

  Some people may think this book is an act of heresy. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s an answer to Gregory’s last phone call to me: “Tell me the truth,” he barked, without even saying hello. Maybe all you need for heresy is an opportunity. Someone once said that the past is a kind of prison. You don’t always get the chance to open a window in jail. This is my chance.

  Prologue: Naked Brunch

  I wanted to be in the picture. I just can’t remember where I first saw it: the photograph in front of City Lights Bookstore of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Neal Cassady. They had their arms around each other. They looked happy. They looked like friends. They looked like they understood each other. And Allen Ginsberg—he looked like me.

  In the photograph Allen was thin, he had short dark hair, and he wore glasses. Everyone in the picture—even Neal Cassady, the tough guy in the white T-shirt—seemed to like Allen. The photograph projected a feeling of bonhomie. But I can’t remember where I first saw it. It might’ve been at Philip Weiner’s house. He was two years older than I. He was fifteen. The Weiners lived next door, around the corner on Shore Drive in Merrick, a prosperous little town on the south shore of Long Island, about an hour from New York City on the Long Island Rail Road. Our split-level houses were so close that I could see the Weiners’ bathroom shelf from the window of my father’s downstairs offi
ce.

  Philip’s parents were swingers. They went into New York City a lot. Irving Weiner had an office in the garment district. He made children’s pajamas. (That was before we knew pajamas could catch on fire.) He took his clients to the Copacabana. The Weiners had framed photos of themselves sitting with other couples at the Copa, looking very glamorous. My mother was always commenting on Shirley Weiner’s glorious figure. Every summer she would lie out in the sun on a lawn chair in her backyard in a bikini, smoking a cigarette and sipping a drink. She wore high heels around the house. This was in the late sixties, when the suburbs were supposed to be a safe refuge from the big city.

  As soon as I hit puberty, I longed for the big city.

  Philip’s bedroom was in a converted attic. He had a chemistry set. He said he was working on some kind of formula that would make him invisible. (I always looked to see how I could escape from Philip’s attic if I had to. I didn’t want him to make me drink the invisibility potion he was cooking up.) He was also the first guy I knew who listened to Bob Dylan records. He showed me one. It was Bringing It All Back Home. Philip pointed out all the interesting things thrown around the room in the picture on the album cover, such as a copy of Sing Out! magazine and a Dave Van Ronk album. I didn’t know what they were. We looked at the song titles and the numbers next to them. I wanted to sound like I knew something, so I told Philip that the numbers next to the songs were the time of day each song was recorded. He said that was impossible. He said we should time the songs and then I’d see how they were only the length of time of each song.

  Philip then asked me if I knew about Allen Ginsberg or if I’d ever heard of William Burroughs. He said that Burroughs, best known for his mind-boggled, heroin-laced novel Naked Lunch, had gone into the jungle to look for a rare hallucinogenic drug called yagé. Philip said we should go and search for this drug near Camman’s Pond in Merrick. We did, but we didn’t find it. We found only a few crushed beer cans and a used condom.

  Back then, Bob Dylan’s voice scared me a little, but the picture of Allen Ginsberg meant something to me. Philip had cut out of the Village Voice another picture of Allen wearing a scarf and glasses, a long, unkempt beard, and an Uncle Sam hat. I didn’t know why, but I just wanted to take that picture home with me. When Philip started talking about the Beat Generation, I suddenly felt the enthusiasm of the liberated. Something new had crossed my path.

  I soon realized I had much to learn. Philip took out one of Allen’s City Lights books and read one of the poems to me. I think it was about running into Walt Whitman at the supermarket. At the time (seventh grade), I didn’t know who Walt Whitman was. I thought it might’ve had something to do with food—maybe the Whitman Sampler box of candies. It didn’t matter. A new world with its own planets, its own creation, its own myths had just come swimming into my brain. Philip’s stories about Burroughs and Ginsberg and their friend Jack Kerouac were like tombstones kicked over in the dark. It was joyfulness in the face of junior high school desk death.

  I suddenly felt part of some sublime truth that most of the other creeps in my school would never understand, like our principal, Mr. Grebenauer, who once kept me waiting in his office for an hour before he tore the American flag tie I was wearing off my neck. (My mother wondered where the neck burn had come from. “Gym,” I told her. Gym was a great excuse for everything. Melancholics lined up everywhere in school to blame gym.)

  After hearing Philip’s descriptions of the Beats, I wanted to go back to my own, safe house. Philip knew too many things, and it confused me. I didn’t have far to go to get home, for we lived next door, so I walked around the block a few times, thinking things over. I decided to look up the word “Beat” in the Random House Dictionary. I dashed into our house on Lowell Lane and ran downstairs to where we kept the big dictionary and I looked up the word.

  I didn’t know at the time that it was pretty much Kerouac’s definition I would find there: “Members of the generation that came of age after World War II, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions.” I don’t know how long that definition was in use—it was an old dictionary. My parents kept it in the basement along with Fanny Hill, The Hundred Thousand Dollar Misunderstanding, and Candy, three forbidden books.

  Another early picture I saw of Allen Ginsberg was on the cover of an old copy of the Evergreen Review. He was bearded and wearing his Uncle Sam hat, his arms akimbo. And he was jumping into flames. It turned out to be two pictures put together: his image juxtaposed over a movie still from a film Allen and Peter had been in together called Chappaqua. Then, when I turned sixteen, Don’t Look Back opened. It was playing in only one theater in Lynbrook, a few towns away from Merrick, and I went to see it with my father. It was a black-and-white documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. The movie starts with Dylan, wearing a vest, holding up cards with the words to his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” written on them. After each lyric he casually throws the card away. It looked like it was filmed on Clinton Street, or some street in lower Manhattan. But what struck me was the man way in the background, with a long dark beard, wearing a shawl or a tallis over his shoulders. He looked like he was davening—like the old men in my grandparents’ temple in the Catskill Mountains—praying while rocking back and forth. At the end of the song, when Dylan has thrown away all the cards, he walks away, and the man in the background walks away after him. It is Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan’s favorite poet.

  In 1969, the world was filling up with forbidden things. Suddenly the houses on Shore Drive, across from the bay, stood out more sharply as something to leap over in order to find real life, but night was coming, and I couldn’t even see the walls that seemed so hard to get over. The night would take hold of the world I knew; soon I wouldn’t recognize it anymore.

  I never got to be really close friends with Philip. He went off to college a few years before me. I liked to think he perfected his invisibility formula and just disappeared. I, too, wanted to disappear. By the time I hit sixteen I felt like a displaced person in the suburbs.

  To my parents, though, the suburbs were the Garden of Eden. They had come from Brooklyn and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and Merrick was like a little bit of heaven. Our front lawn was a pasture. You could shop every day at Waldbaum’s and never get hungry again.

  My father remembered growing up in the Bronx, and he told us about a woman who had come to his mother to read a letter she’d just received from her brother in Poland. The woman was illiterate, but my paternal grandmother, Gertrude, knew Polish, as well as Russian and English, so this woman had come to ask her to read the letter out loud. As she read the letter, she came to a part where the writer talked about how “we killed a Jew today,” and how much happier the village was now that he was dead. That was read in my father’s house, when he was a boy. He must have wondered if life in America was really going to be any different from wartime Poland.

  How much like Eden, though, or some trembling cup of good fortune, was the house on the corner of Lowell Lane in Merrick! Still, you can get used to anything, luxury as well as hardship.

  Because my parents kept their Depression-era hard times a secret from me, I never knew why our house and town seemed like paradise to them. They came to Long Island, our parents, to welcome happiness and prosperity, whereas Jack Kerouac and his friends saw freedom in poverty—the kind of poverty my parents had escaped from.

  The essence of “Beat,” Allen Ginsberg used to tell people, can be found in On the Road, in the phrase “everything belongs to me because I am poor.” And all this time my poor parents were killing themselves to make it to the suburbs, to get me and my sister away from want.

  The Beat Generation should’ve been my uncle Joe’s heroes. He was still young when he returned from the Second World War. He was a painter. He read Civilization and Its Discontents. He knew from Camus. He lived at 410 Central Park West. He stood on line
at Carnegie Hall for an entire day for a ticket to see Horowitz come back from his nervous breakdown. He should’ve been interested in the Beats, but he wasn’t. He was too much of a loner. The Beats were first and foremost a group of friends. That’s what I liked about them. That’s why, later on, I wanted to go to the Jack Kerouac School. I thought it would be like the re-creation of the Columbia University friendships that Allen and Kerouac and their friend Lucien Carr had when they were eighteen years old, drawn together by a love of literature and smoking joints in their dorm room.

  It was Lucien who introduced Allen to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in college. Even long-dead poets were a part of this family. This was a movement that seemed to be created by kids in college, although they didn’t seem like kids. By the time I entered high school two years later, I had become infatuated with the Beats. They had transformed their own lives into myth and legend, made up of the details of their days, their fragments of conversation, the habits of their friends. Burroughs narrated his earliest years as a heroin addict in Junky, taking his brief job as an exterminator and giving it a comic voice. Kerouac set everything down in his “spontaneous bop prosody”: the story of his life written in marathon sessions fueled by weed and endless Benzedrine. He had turned his life and the lives of his friends into a kind of epic.