When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  On the other hand, Burroughs wrote and talked like a man who seemed to know everything. I could still barely bring myself to speak to him. I thought of him as the George Washington of the Beat Generation, the man who refused to be a king—King of the Beats—but who was still revered.

  Jubal came over to the car and asked for the blueprints.

  “Show the son of a bitch whatever he’s entitled to see, but keep him away from me,” Burroughs said.

  Jubal took out a gun. It had a long nozzle and he pointed it through the window, not at Bill, and not quite at me, but it was definitely in the car with us. It looked like the sort of gun a U.S. marshal would’ve carried in the Old West. I thought I might pass out. I tremblingly gave Jubal his plans. Billy, Peter, and the Westies driver seemed to be doing all the work. Peter was singing an old Negro spiritual. The car lights began to flicker and dim. The battery was running low.

  “We must return to the mother ship,” Bill said, to no one in particular.

  I could’ve sworn I heard a helicopter in the mountains. I waited for the others to return to the car. The trunk was soon weighed down with bales of pot.

  “How many are there?” asked the author of Naked Lunch.

  “It’ll be a miracle if we can get down the mountain,” I said nervously. I could just see my parents reading about it in the Daily News: “Merrick Boy in Pot Bust.”

  “We should’ve used mules,” Burroughs remarked.

  We made the long, slow trip down the mountain. The car moved like it was carrying the Lincoln Monument. I couldn’t wait to be in my bed in my safe little apartment, but the boys wanted to go to Tom’s Tavern to celebrate.

  “That’s part of the fun of working for a big company,” Billy said, and everyone laughed.

  Back in Boulder, in front of Allen’s apartment complex, Jubal straightened his suit when he got out of the car and shook my hand. “Let’s just say we understand each other a little better now,” Jubal said. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for. William seems to like you. Maybe we’ll have you over for a company dinner.”

  I walked back to my apartment. I was afraid to fall asleep. I didn’t want to dream about Jack Kerouac, or Jack London, or Neal Cassady. I still had that poem to finish for Allen, the one about giving Neal a blow job. Are all poets crazy? Am I crazy, too? I remembered a line from Allen’s commonplace book that I had copied out: “Thou gavest the tears of pity away / In exchange for the tears of sorrow.”

  8. William Burroughs Was Crying

  Some nights Allen didn’t get much sleep. He would see his mother, Naomi, who had spent years in a mental hospital for schizophrenia, in a dream. I would be working late, Allen would come down. “I saw her again,” he said. “She was taking me for an egg cream at the Gem Spa on the corner of Eighth Street and Second Avenue. She told me that she loved me and that I was smarter than Eugene [Allen’s brother]. Then we walked along the beach at Belmar, and there was a big couch at the edge of the water and she patted it, as if to say, come and sit next to me, I’m your mother. Then she said, I want to tell you a secret, Allen. Every man over forty-five should watch his weight. Then she got up and walked into the ocean. I wanted to follow her,” Allen said, “but she said I shouldn’t try. She said, try to remember me. She said it without turning around.”

  “You have remembered her. You’ve done even more than that.” Thinking about Allen’s poem “Kaddish,” I said, “You’ve made her immortal.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d said something that stupid, that sounded just like flattery, the kind of thing I could already tell Allen was so used to. I had promised myself I’d never say anything like that to him, or to any of them, even if I meant it, which in this case I did. His answer surprised me.

  “It’s the only poem of mine my father ever really liked. It made him cry. It was the only time.”

  Occasionally Allen would send me, like a go-between, to Burroughs’s apartment. Sometimes it was just to deliver a simple message like, Dinner at eight. Or, Did I leave my red tie, the one that was a present from Henry Miller, in your bathroom? More often than not, I think he was sending me to check on his friend.

  One afternoon, a sweltering one, Burroughs had the air-conditioning turned off; he was sitting alone in the middle of the room, all the shades drawn. He was wearing his uniform: a black suit and dark, heavy Florsheims. He was talking about Jack.

  “We all came up out of the swamp,” Burroughs explained. “But Jack, ahhh! Jack was different. That beautiful boy. I feel more passionate about him now than I ever did. His own restlessness was a thing of beauty. I was crazy about him. Sit down. Sit down,” Burroughs said. “Needle was the boy. Needle was the boy. Didn’t he live in Needles as a boy?” Was Burroughs asking me about where Jack Kerouac lived?

  “All those women! Probably Chinese girls and heaven knows what else,” he continued. Tears were gathering in the corners of his eyes. “Jack was seducing me, when I was a boy. I didn’t even know it. Seducing me without even holding my hand. I felt him doing it. You need a writer to take you like that when you’re so shy.”

  William Burroughs was crying. The private was becoming public. He was looking away from me now, gazing thoughtfully at the brass posts at the foot of the bed. “The Call of the Wild,” he said. He was looking away from me now, gazing thoughtfully at the brass posts at the foot of the bed. “The call of the wild. No philosophy. A great writer. Should have run for president. I first read him sitting in a tree. I hope he’s in heaven now. Or at least not besieged by maiden aunts in San Francisco. Poor Jack London with his rotted teeth. I should have followed him. Tried to map out my life like that. Like a seaman on the Essex. To wear a raccoon coat and a high silk hat to keep the Trib dry when on land.”

  So William Burroughs wasn’t weeping for Jack Kerouac but for that other Jack—the one who had left home but didn’t return to his mother: Jack London. His life going off like a rocket. That was the life Burroughs had really wanted for himself. I saw the bottle of J& B nearly empty beside him.

  “That’s good to hear,” I said helplessly. “Hang in there.”

  9. Fortunato’s Son

  If you have a choice between two things and can’t decide between them, Greogory Corso once said, take both.

  I was afraid to meet him. Corso was a much scarier person to me even than William Burroughs, who was often depicted as a kind of carnival barker in one of Dante’s circles. But unlike Burroughs, Corso really had been in prison. At sixteen he was busted for robbing a Household Finance office. He was the youngest inmate at Dannemora. He was like a commedia dell’ arte performer sent to jail. He survived prison by being funny. And by reading. Corso, who had stopped going to school in the sixth grade, was the best read of all my teachers at Naropa, with the possible exception of Allen. He was proud of how much he had read in prison. He spent three years behind bars reading the dictionary—1905 edition. He loved classical literature. He loved the Greeks. He loved Shelley. But he wasn’t a snob. He read Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer detective fiction at the same time he was reading The Frogs by Aristophanes.

  Not long after my trip to the mountains, Allen told me that my new job at Naropa would be Gregory. He said that New Directions had given him money for a book, but that Gregory was doing everything but getting down to writing. He had a new girlfriend that he’d met at a party Jubal had given in Burroughs’s apartment. I knew her slightly. She had a very dramatic profile. A big nose and strong chin. She had the straightest hair I had ever seen. It was like she was peering out of a waterfall. She was very skinny and wore tight, mod-looking striped pants. She always had on red lipstick. Her name was Doris, but Gregory renamed her Calliope.

  I knew that Gregory would be hard to handle, much harder than Billy Burroughs. Allen told me almost casually that Gregory would probably try to ask me for money, that he would try to score heroin even while he was teaching. Allen said to let him know if that happened. I didn’t want to be a snitch, but Allen said I had to get Gregory to s
it down and write his poems, or at least dictate them to me.

  Gregory was always testing people to see if they cared for him. He came into Ginzy’s apartment—that’s what he called Allen, “Ginzy”—wearing a white shirt with two pockets on the front and epaulets on the shoulder. He wore reading glasses around his neck on a chain. He wore khaki pants and loafers without socks. He was dressed like a movie director, or some colonial administrator in the Bahamas. He had long curly hair that was turning gray. He wasn’t wearing his dentures when I met him, so it made him look much older than he was—his lower lip looked like it was riding up on his face.

  Once upon a time, Gregory was known for his looks. Anne Waldman used to see him as a young kid wearing a torn black sweater and the hand-me-down pants from an old zoot suit on the streets of Greenwich Village, and she would just stare at him. But Gregory reminded me of Charles Schulz’s cartoon character Pigpen, the one who always arrived in a cloud of dust. That was Gregory Corso.

  Gregory arrived in Boulder at the beginning of the fall semester. He came dancing into Allen’s apartment, his glasses bouncing off his chest, his New York street-kid accent cutting through the late summer air like an electric fan—his words all running together. Like a knife thrower in the circus, Gregory just hurled his words at you, coming perilously close: “Hey, ginzy, ineedmoneywillpayyoubackifnotyoucanafford it—you’re a famous poet now and besides you’re a Jew. Jews always have money, right, Ginzy?”

  Who the hell is this? I thought.

  “Don’t look so scared,” Gregory said to me. And then, to Allen: “Where’d you find him? He looks so ghetto.” Gregory spun around to talk to me. “Do you have any money? Come on, your parents must’ve sent you here with plenty of money, give me your Diner’s Club card.”

  How did he know? My parents did give me their Diner’s Club card—for emergencies. Don’t despair, I told myself. If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved.

  Allen turned to Corso and told him that I was to look after him, get him to write, that I would become Gregory’s baby-sitter.

  “I don’t need a baby-sitter!” Gregory said. “I need money. I now have a title for my book. It’s a brilliant title—why bother to write any poems? The title is the most important thing. Les Miserables— all you need to know about Victor Hugo is in that title.” The torrent continued.

  “Ask Allen how we met,” Gregory continued, jumping from one subject to another in a stream of consciousness. “Get this, I’ll tell you, it’s fucking beautiful how we met.” Then he turned to Allen, and in a slightly wheedling voice, said, “Max needs milk and food. We have to have these things, Ginzy.”

  Max was Gregory’s baby. He was in Boulder with his very young mother, Lisa. I wondered if they knew about Calliope. Gregory’s life all of a sudden seemed like a whirlpool I was getting sucked into. His voice began to sound like swirling water. It was like being in a boat with Ulysses, the Aeolean winds blowing me farther and farther away from my old life of suburban comfort and ease. Had I thrown myself out of paradise? Here was someone who had slept in the subway and on the roof of Allen’s apartment in New York, who stole lunches from kids in the playground, who wound up in juvenile court at an age when I had gone to Astronaut Camp in Towson, Maryland, who broke out of a Christian Brothers home and lived on the street until he was arrested in Florida for robbery.

  And yet, I would soon discover, we both loved the same things. When he started talking about Shelley, about Dante, about “unapprehended combinations of thought,” about having sympathy and love for all things, it was as if the wing of some angel passed over him and he wasn’t scary, mad Gregory anymore. Poetry saved Gregory Corso’s life. It pulled him back from the brink. The same way it made men mad, it gave Corso what sanity and clarity he knew. It was the only time he seemed to float easily, calmly through his own life. Otherwise, it was a maelstrom.

  I could tell that he liked to shock me. He liked to call Allen and me, and all Jews, “christkillers,” and “matzah-christas.” But I didn’t take it too seriously.

  He and Allen explained how they had met. They traded the story back and forth, handling the details like some demented version of The Newlywed Game played out in a Bowery flophouse.

  Allen first met Gregory in 1950 in a lesbian bar. The poète maudit, Allen called him. “I loved his looks, and he had poems with him,” Allen remembered. “He was a beauty. So were his poems. Many incredible lines, like Shelley by way of Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal.” (“The Stone World came to me, and said Flesh Gives you an hour’s life.”) Allen remembered great swatches of Gregory’s poetry, as if he had written the lines himself.

  Allen confided that Gregory would have to warm up to me at first, that he didn’t make friends too easily. It was prison to blame for Gregory’s not making too many friends. “He’ll like the fact that you’re a poet,” Allen said. Hearing Ginsberg almost casually refer to me as a poet, as if to say it’s no big deal, I know you’re one and that’s all there is to it, was like graduation day in a moment. I could go home tomorrow. It would be all right.

  I knew Gregory’s poetry—his great “Marriage” poem, which was in all the anthologies, his elegy for Kerouac, which begins with the Indians in the forests of New England, and which broke my heart reading it on a Greyhound bus coming into the Port Authority from my college in upstate New York. I remember I had the flu, and so was coming home to be sick in my own bed and spit into my Spider-Man trash can and read Playboy under an enormous blanket. This was right before leaving Hamilton College and enrolling in the Jack Kerouac School. I read Gregory’s poem called “Bomb.” I read it during an air-raid drill in high school, my desk melting in my imagination like Dalí watches, while Gregory’s words exploded all around me.

  I wasn’t prepared for the story of how Allen and Gregory met. At first, I thought they were only trying to shock me, to scare me, it was all a test to see how much I could take, to see me red with Keats-like embarrassment. But then it dawned on me that perhaps this was just the Beats confessional, as always: trying to stake out some intimate new ground by killing all small talk. You have to talk about your life, they seemed to be saying. What else is there to talk about?

  In a lesbian bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Gregory and Allen traded life stories. Gregory told Allen about a secret thing he did at night that had become a kind of religious ritual. He lived in an apartment on West Twelfth Street, and from his window Gregory could see another apartment. It seemed to belong to a young woman. Gregory would watch her taking a bath, then she would step out of the bath and into the bedroom where her boyfriend would be waiting for her. Gregory liked to watch them making love. Nearly every time he watched them he would begin to rub himself. He would masturbate to their lovemaking. One day, Gregory told himself, he was going to go over there and introduce himself to the girl. He wanted to quickly tell her the story of his watching her.

  Allen said that during the conversation he began to realize that Corso lived directly across from Allen’s girlfriend’s apartment at the time, and that the couple Gregory was watching and jerking off to was Allen and his girlfriend. The following day, Ginsberg made Gregory’s erotic wish-dream come true by inviting him over and introducing him to the girl.

  Allen turned back to me and began explaining my new duties vis-à-vis Gregory. First off, he warned me about the bed.

  “Gregory will ask you to keep it dry for him,” he said. I didn’t understand at first, but Allen explained that Gregory was a chronic bed wetter.

  “I wet the bed,” Gregory chimed in, completely unself-conscious and unapologetic. “I’ve done it forever,” he explained. “My parents beat me for it. They made fun of me.”

  Allen explained that Gregory’s parents had sent him to a foster home just a few months after he was born. It was Gregory’s bad luck that the agency didn’t believe in children developing a close attachment to their foster parents. By the age of ten, Gregory had been to three sets of so-cal
led parents. “I was twelve years old,” Gregory said, “and I stole a neighbor boy’s radio. I got sent to prison for it. Four months in Youth House. I couldn’t read yet. I was beat up. I was too pretty, too silly.”

  Allen, with a strange half-smile on his face, said that Gregory was so desperate to get out of Youth House that he put his hand through a window, just so he could go to Bellevue. Allen said that he didn’t know Gregory then, of course, but that at one time Allen, Gregory, and his mother were all in Bellevue, at the same time that Peter was an ambulance driver there.

  “So, I wet the bed,” Gregory said, sucking his thumb. “I wet the bed because it reminds me of Michelina, my mother, and Fortunato, my father, may they rest in Heaven.”

  During all this Allen managed to peel off a hundred-dollar bill. It sat on the glass table in the middle of the apartment. Gregory palmed it before rolling out the door, his cloud of words and chaos and heart leaving with him.

  Something told me that Max’s milk money was going to feed Gregory’s habit. If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved, I thought to myself.

  10. Antler Wants a Drink of Water

  Antler was standing in the doorway of Allen’s apartment. Antler was another poet. He had long blond hair and a long beard. He wore sandals and his dungarees were flecked with paint. He looked like a Nordic version of Allen. Allen loved his poetry. Antler wrote a long poem, which he read at Naropa one evening, called “Last Words.” It was about famous people and their last words. Everyone loved listening to Antler read his poems. Thanks to Allen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books was going to publish Antler’s first book of poems; it was going to be called Last Words.

  I hated Antler. I was jealous of all the attention he got from Allen. I hated his poems about nature, about fishing and living outside; he even wrote a poem about shitting in the woods. I liked writing poems about taking the subway, the Long Island Rail Road even. I liked going to record stores and bookstores. I even wanted to start going to the ballet because of Edwin Denby.