by Sam Kashner
“A bullet?” I said.
Billy laughed. For the first and only time, I saw him laugh. But that same night I saw him cry. We were watching the James Cagney movie Angels With Dirty Faces. In the movie, Cagney pretends to lose his cool on the way to the electric chair, so that the Dead End Kids who look up to him will see him as a coward and reject a life of crime. Billy was a kind of sweaty, unhappy, dead-end kid. I could imagine him reading the morning paper with the headline “Rocky Dies Yellow.” But as we watched the movie, Billy couldn’t stand it when Rocky started screaming his head off on the way to the hot squat.
Suddenly, he jumped up off the couch and ran out of my apartment and into the street. The cars go very quickly up and down the Canyon Street hill, and late at night you can’t see anyone crossing the road. I knew Billy could be hit like one of those armadillos on the drive into Denver. And he was my responsibility!
I ran out after him, into the dark Boulder night.
Allen was walking Bill and Anne back to their apartments, and they saw the whole thing: Billy running like a crazed man into the street with me chasing him in hot pursuit. Anne looked at me. Her look said, You can’t take care of him, can you? I didn’t think you could. She put her arm around Billy, who was by now lying in the street, and she easily led him away. Burroughs watched impassively and never said a word about seeing his son curled up like a fetus in the middle of the road. Allen thought I looked like I was going to pass out. I was.
“What did you say to him?” Burroughs asked me. “What caused him to act so irrationally?”
“He’s very shy,” Allen said to Burroughs, defending me. “I don’t think he’s right for telling Billy what to do.”
“I should get him analyzed,” Burroughs said. “Oh, damn. I’ll do it myself.”
“We were watching James Cagney on television,” I tried to explain. “And on Cagney’s way to the electric chair, Billy just ran outside!” My answer seemed only to make things worse, to deepen the impression that I wasn’t up to the job.
“I knew little Jimmy Cagney,” Burroughs said, ignoring my explanation. “He’s queer. Buggered very selectively in Hollywood.” And then he walked away, Allen skipping to keep up, even though Burroughs walked with a cane and looked like he carried his head under his arm, Ichabod Crane–style. I slunk back upstairs to my small, one-bedroom apartment.
My living room now looked like it belonged on the Bowery: empty Bombay gin bottles (with its portrait of Queen Victoria in a cameo on the label), cigarette stubs and ashes over every surface, and a tumescent, silver-domed Jiffy-Pop still sitting on the stove. Billy had run out before we could cut it open. He loved popcorn. I cleaned up a little. My heart was still racing. You could see the mountains from the tiny balcony at the back of my apartment. Where was the Burroughs family marijuana farm? What did they do with it all? Was the “psychic surgeon” some kind of code? Was it all in some Greyhound locker in Denver? They had all gone to the Neal Cassady School of Business. Would I soon be at the wheel, hauling a trunkful of weed for the Burroughses? “Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.” Indeed.
The next day, Billy canceled his appointment with Dr. Shringwaym.
5. Notorious
I holed up in my apartment for a few days after that, embarrassed that I was so inadequate to the job of looking after Billy. Then Allen called and, in a husky voice, asked me to drop by the apartment.
I stopped by around eight P.M. and found Allen propped up in bed with a bad cold and a fever. Nonetheless, he was going over some work and he wanted my help. With his shirt off and with his beard, which Allen grew back whenever Rinpoche left town, he looked like some Western desperado holed up in a barn. I could hear the big clock on the mantelpiece downstairs ticking off the time. When we weren’t talking, each ticking of the clock sounded like a gong.
I noticed a sponge and a big bucket of water beside the bed, which Peter was using to bring Allen’s fever down. For the first time, Allen reminded me of his own poetry—his sad poems about dressing his sick father, the “don’t grow old” poems. Maybe it was the wrong time to ask. I’m sure it was. But when you’re young, you’re either too shy to ask any questions or you pick the wrong time to ask them.
I thought the best time to ask questions of the Beats was while I was still a somewhat fresh recruit. I remember my father telling me not to be shy about asking questions. “They’re supposed to be your teachers,” he said.
I had mostly illusions about the Beats when I first arrived at the Kerouac School, but they were beginning to fall away, especially when I considered the miserable condition that Billy was in. Now, I wondered, what gave them the confidence, if not the right, to stand up there and talk to us? They were still at it, after all these years, trying to explain the world: first to each other, then to the world, and now to us. And so I did it. I asked Allen how he got famous.
Allen put down his papers and looked at me. Always the teacher, he launched into a tale he must have told countless times, but one that he still loved telling.
It was an irony, I learned, that Allen Ginsberg became America’s most notorious poet while he was out of the country, in the mid-1950s, visiting Burroughs in Tangier, traveling with Peter on very little money. That’s when he got the word that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the manager of the City Lights Bookstore, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested for selling Howl and Other Poems to a pair of undercover cops in plainclothes.
Allen told me that he had been ecstatic about the publication of Howl and he made a list of people to send copies to.
“Do you still have the list?” I asked.
“It was all in my head,” he answered listlessly, blowing his nose. “The law is a dangerous thing,” he continued. “I was using the U.S. mail to ‘promote obscenity,’” he said, raising his finger in the air. Allen had sent copies to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden; Ezra Pound even got one at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, special delivery. So did Charlie Chaplin and his then-wife Oona, in Switzerland. Even Marlon Brando.
“The ACLU saw an opportunity to make a strong case for the first amendment,” Allen explained. “They thought they could strike a blow for free speech.”
All of a sudden, it turned out, Ferlinghetti had retained a team of topnotch lawyers. The obscenity trial began in the summer of 1957. Allen said he didn’t think he had a chance; after all, the trial judge was well known as a Sunday school Bible teacher. I wondered if Allen feared that they would never let him back into America. He stayed away from the trial. “Peter and I traveled around Europe,” he said, “sleeping on park benches.”
Peter came upstairs and plunged both hands in the bucket, squeezing out the sponge. He took the sponge and mopped Allen’s brow while Allen continued with his story. Peter was completely absorbed with his work of giving Allen a sponge bath, as if I weren’t even in the room. I noticed that Peter’s usual pink complexion, seen most often on the mountain men who came down into the city after bathing in mountain streams, took on a bilious hue in Allen’s sickroom.
“We went by train with our knapsacks, making our way through Europe. We weren’t about to give that up to come home for an obscenity trial, not with all the culture of Europe laid out in front of us.” Peter wrung out his sponge and started over.
“We were meeting people like Mary McCarthy and Peggy Guggenheim. I read ‘Howl’ to Caresse Crosby in Alan Ansen’s living room in Venice,” he said, referring to the widow of Harry Crosby, the famous expatriate and founder of Black Sun Press who had committed suicide in a hotel on Central Park South.
“We visited Dostoyevksy’s house. We visited Shelley’s grave—”
“Remember when you kissed Shelley’s grave and took a clover from it?” Peter interrupted. “And when we went to the Vatican, Allen got mad because there were fig leaves on all the statues!” Peter shouted in that loud voice of his, as if everyone in the room were hard of hearing.
Allen explained how a coterie of literary experts were called to testify in support of “Howl.”
He had the rare privilege of having his poem called great and important as part of the court record (most of the poets I knew would have died for that, and would probably die from the lack of it). It started to sound to me like the arrest and trial were the best thing that could have happened to Allen and the Beats. It made them famous.
“What was the verdict?” I asked Allen.
Both men turned toward me. “Not guilty!” they shouted, as Peter squeezed the sponge over my head.
It occurred to me that if the Howl obscenity trial had occurred today instead of in 1957, Allen wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Around the same time as the Howl trial, On the Road was published. But Jack Kerouac would never recover from that joyful event. Unlike Allen, fame didn’t sit well on Kerouac; ultimately, he’d have almost no time to get used to it.
Allen once said that “everything in life is timing,” and that was certainly true of the publication of On the Road. Had the novel been published six years earlier, when it was first written, it might have gone unnoticed, but the obscenity trial for Howl had put a spotlight on the Beats. Still, no one could have predicted the kind of success On the Road had in the fall of 1957—certainly not Jack. “It just exploded—it was the big one. No one knew where it would lead, or that it would lead to Jack just wanting to be left alone,” Allen explained. “The story—and it’s true—is a legend now, about how he got off the bus at the Greyhound station in New York, walked along Broadway till he got to Sixty-sixth Street, and bought a copy of the New York Times. There he saw a review of On the Road. I’m sure it had to have blown his mind. I’m sure he thought, ‘What will become of me?’ At the same time, it must have been so exciting. The reviewer compared it to The Sun Also Rises, the way Hemingway’s novel gave voice to the Lost Generation. Jack said he felt paralyzed reading the review. The phone didn’t stop ringing for years.”
Allen explained how the novel was on the best-seller list for eleven weeks; how Warner Bros. bought the film rights for $110,000, how Marlon Brando wanted to play Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady); how Jack was overwhelmed with offers to write for Playboy and Esquire, to read at the Village Vanguard, to appear on The Steve Allen Show. Kerouac’s dark, handsome face became the face of the Beat generation; men everywhere wanted to fight him or to be him, and women wanted to fuck him. It was too much, and Kerouac responded by going on a five-week bender. It didn’t help that all his buddies were away, leaving him to face fame alone: Peter and Allen in Europe, Burroughs in Tangier, Neal Cassady somewhere in California.
Burroughs later wrote about his old friend that “Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis…[but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life. We will all die and the stars will go out one after another…”
Then it was Bill’s turn. Talk about the criminal boredom of men. Burroughs tried working as a private detective, a bartender, a bug exterminator, and, when all that failed, a criminal. Naked Lunch had begun as a series of sketches acted out by Jack and Allen. They used daggers brought back from Morocco and assumed different identities. After City Lights declined to publish Naked Lunch, Allen launched a campaign to get it published in the little magazines and periodicals where he had some pull. A few of the sketches thus made it into print, one in the final issue of the Black Mountain Review in 1957; the following year, The Chicago Review published nine pages (a columnist writing in the Chicago Daily News described the nine pages as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated”). University of Chicago officials then refused to publish any more of the novel, which caused the staff of the Review to resign and start up their own publication, called Big Table. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso appeared at a benefit reading to raise money for the new publication so that it could publish the suppressed pages of Naked Lunch. The first issue came out in March of 1959, with ten episodes from the novel, and it was immediately seized by the post office of Chicago as obscene material.
However, a year later, a Chicago judge absolved the novel of its obscenity charge, saying that it was “not akin to lustful thoughts.” The judge, incidentally, was Julius J. Hoffman, who ten years later would preside over the trial of the Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, et al.), charged with inciting to riot at the Democratic Party Convention of 1968 in Chicago. At that trial, Allen Ginsberg infuriated Judge Hoffman with his testimony and by chanting on behalf of his friends.
The publisher of the Paris-based Olympia Press (who had published Henry Miller) had originally turned down Naked Lunch, but he changed his mind as a result of the publicity and offered Burroughs a contract for $800, and gave Burroughs ten days to hand in a publishable manuscript. He did.
Burroughs later said that the pressure of having to pull the manuscript together in ten days was just what he needed, but when the galleys came back to him in no particular order, Burroughs decided to stick with that. It was as if he had thrown the manuscript up into the air, gathered the pages together, and agreed to have it published that way.
When it finally came out from Olympia Press, in 1959, it didn’t get one review. Burroughs had to make up his own review, with an invented critic: “‘The book grabs you by the throat,’ says L. Marland, distinguished critic, ‘it leaps in bed with you and performs unmentionable acts…this book is a must for anyone who would understand the sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age.’”
In the early sixties, Barney Rosset, the pugilistic publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, was fighting fourteen censorship trials over Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Once those trials were settled, Rosset was able to republish Naked Lunch, in 1962. Writers like Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller championed the novel, and it was soon accorded a place in the literary pantheon as a kind of grotesque masterpiece. The book— a phantasmagoria of cannibalism, homosexual violence, graphic hangings, and ejaculations—was banned one more time, in Boston, and it reached the Massachusetts Superior Court, where a majority of the justices ruled that Naked Lunch was not obscene. It was the last literary work to be suppressed by the U.S. government or any government office.
As Allen would later tell us in class, describing the effect of Naked Lunch on the world of the 1960s, “the word had been liberated.” For Allen, it was more important than D-Day.
As for me, I never could read Naked Lunch. I didn’t like reading about ejaculations. It wasn’t that I was a prude, but I preferred Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education; that was the dirty secret I carried around with me at the Kerouac School. I preferred Flaubert to flagellation. And you know what? So did Bill Burroughs.
I would soon discover that the book Burroughs slept with under his pillow at night was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Burroughs had a streak of gentility, of elegance even, belied by his scorched-earth prose. It was as if Burroughs’s novels simply turned the body inside out, so that the cancer was made visible. But he read Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington for pleasure.
6. Ginsberg Saves His Beard
Within a few weeks Allen had regrown his beard. He kept it more closely cropped, but he was beginning to look like a member of the Russian mafia.
Rinpoche was coming over. He lived in a beautiful Georgian-style mansion that his followers called the Wedding Cake House.
A gray Mercedes pulled up outside Allen and Peter’s apartment. The Vadjra guards were the first to leave the car. They were the young security officers who protected Rinpoche wherever he went. Dressed in identical-looking black suits and carrying walkie-talkies, the Vadjra guards were students of Rinpoche’s who were given some training in martial arts and meditation to aid in their awareness of all potential situations.
They opened the door for Rinpoche and he moved slowly out of the backseat of the car. They accompanied him into the apartment. Peter had cleaned house like a demon. He even cleaned the sidewalk in front of the house with a toothbrush. All
en had taken a bath and a shower, and he was wearing his best suit and the pin he was given upon his induction into the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. It was like inspection at military school. Allen made sure my shoes were polished and that I had worn my seersucker suit. Peter was wearing sandals, but with socks. He was making tea.
Rinpoche was coming for one of his poetry lessons, which Allen gave him from time to time. They wrote three-line poems together: Ground. Path. Fruition. One idea embodied in each line. Allen’s latest City Lights book was dedicated “to Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche Poet”: “Guru Death your words are true / Teacher Death I do thank you / for inspiring me to sing this Blues.”
Rinpoche was a practitioner of what he called “crazy wisdom.” Allen loved that phrase. It seemed to mean that Rinpoche could do whatever he wanted, and his students would study it and try to learn a lesson from it.
“I still think you’re too attached to your beard,” Trungpa told Allen as soon as he arrived. “I think you should go upstairs and cut it off again.”
Allen looked unhappy. “But I don’t want to cut it off.” He stamped his feet like a little boy. “I just grew it baaaaaack.” He even said “whaaaaa,” imitating a baby crying. But he went upstairs anyway to shave it off.
I was left on the couch in my seersucker suit. Peter was sitting with Rinpoche, and the Vadjra guards were situated throughout the house, as if the president were upstairs taking a leak. Peter tried making small talk with the leader of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
“I haven’t been with a woman in thirty years,” Peter said. “That’s a long time not to taste pussy, don’t you think, Rinpoche?”
“Too long,” Rinpoche said.
I couldn’t tell if Peter was a genius or a complete idiot. When I saw the movie Being There with Peter Sellers, I thought that Jerzy Kosinski must have known Peter Orlovsky. Peter’s honesty was painful to watch, like someone trying to walk after a stroke.
