When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Edwin Denby was always an old man, at least he seemed like that to me. All the poets at Naropa loved him; they missed him when they had to leave Manhattan and spend the year in Boulder. Anne Waldman loved him most of all. She wrote down his dinner conversation and always talked about him. He was a poet who seemed to write only sonnets. But they were very beautiful. Anne said Edwin was the greatest dance critic of the twentieth century. He knew Balanchine and he knew Orson Welles. He was shy, very shy, and very modest. Anne and Allen thought Edwin Denby was practically enlightened. He had a very trim white beard and was extremely slender; even in his seventies he looked like he could’ve been a dancer himself. He had white hair. At the Jack Kerouac School, certain people, like Edwin Denby, Frank O’Hara, and of course Kerouac himself, became people you thought you knew, or should know. They formed a kind of holy trinity. We studied them like a catechism. Bob Dylan was a part of that, too.

  Anne Waldman told Allen that he should introduce Antler at his poetry reading. It was the first one of the year. I asked Antler if he got nervous before a reading. Antler didn’t answer. A young man with dark hair and a pencil-thin mustache, very skinny, his wrists jutting out of a white shirt that was way too small for him, seemed to appear out of nowhere; in fact, he was standing behind Allen’s refrigerator. He was eating an apple.

  “Antler doesn’t speak today, he has a complete day of silence,” the skinny young man said.

  “Is it always the same day?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, taking a bite of his apple. “Antler tells me what day is going to be his day of silence.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked. He said his name was Jeff. He and Antler had come from the woods of Michigan to visit Allen and to prepare for the publication of Antler’s first book. I wanted to be doing that instead of typing Allen’s poems and working on his ancient journals, my eyes watering from trying to read someone else’s handwriting from the 1950s. In that way, I wanted to be Antler, only living in hotels, not in sleeping bags or in the Cumberland woods.

  “Michigan, that’s where the University of Michigan is,” I said, already aware of what an idiot I must’ve sounded like, but I was working up to my point. “They have the Hopwood Prize there, don’t they? Frank O’Hara won that, I think,” I said to Jeff.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jeff said. “I don’t know a lot about Frank O’Hara.” I felt relieved about that. I told myself that Frank O’Hara would’ve hated Antler, too. Because Antler was rejecting what was really important in life—buying records and lots of books that looked great piled up on your night table. And watching movies like Double Indemnity, and watching Fred Astaire dancing—“Peach Melba of the feet,” Frank O’Hara had called Astaire.

  “Antler doesn’t believe in the movies,” Jeff told me, as if he had read my mind.

  “What happens if Antler decides what his day of silence will be during his day of silence?” I asked.

  “That would never happen,” Jeff said. “It’s only once a week.”

  Antler looked at Jeff and looked at the sink where Peter was running the tap. “Antler wants a drink of water,” Jeff said. I went to get it. I handed Antler his glass of tap water—he held it up to the light like he was working for the health department. “Antler thanks you, Sam.” I made a little bow. I wanted Antler to go fuck himself, but I knew how much everyone loved Antler and his Last Words.

  William Burroughs came through the door looking like a Sunday preacher, or at least like Robert Mitchum playing a Sunday preacher in Night of the Hunter. Burroughs, god bless him, didn’t love Antler. In fact, Bill didn’t care for poetry all that much. Anne Waldman introduced Bill to Antler. The two men shook hands.

  “Antler,” Bill turned Antler’s name around in that cement-mixer voice of his. “Ant-ler. Antler.” He said it like he was trying to recall something. “I killed a moose once, got up very close to it and shot it with sodium pentothal, injected it. Killed it immediately. I got the truth out of the moose, too. Used the…”

  Bill either couldn’t think of the word or wouldn’t use it out of politeness. “What’d you use the antlers for, Bill?” I asked, saying his name for the first time.

  “Used it for a coatrack, could hold fifty coats and a lot of hats,” he said. “The wood was shiny and thick as a beam. A thing of beauty.”

  Allen offered Antler his apartment for the next few days. I couldn’t believe I’d have to work around these two all weekend. Blissfully, Jeff refused on behalf of Antler.

  “Antler wants to camp out in the mountains, Allen,” Jeff said. Big surprise, I thought to myself.

  11. Fast Talking Woman

  The next day I had my first conference with Allen; we were supposed to go over some of my poems. I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror before going over to Allen’s because I noticed that the better looking you were, the more Allen liked your poems. For example, there was a guy named Bobby Meyers. I thought his poems stunk. Allen raved about what a genius Bobby was. At parties, Allen would introduce him as the next Ezra Pound. It always burned me up. Bobby was cute, with a lot of dark, curly hair and a cherubic face. He looked like one of the Romantic poets, even if he couldn’t write, but for Allen, that was enough. Allen put my work aside and took out Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. He turned to a longish poem called “The Skaters.”

  “Now tell me,” Allen asked, almost pleading at his desk. “What does this mean? I can’t understand it. I want to know what it means, what is happening in this poem. Why does he have to be so mysterious about everything? Is it too much Manhattan psychiatry?”

  Kerouac once told Frank O’Hara that he was ruining American poetry, Allen said, but Frank answered back, “That’s more than you ever did for it.” Allen laughed to himself. I wanted to explain “The Skaters” to Allen, but I had a hard time explaining it to myself. I only knew that I loved it.

  I dodged Allen’s bullet. I said a lot of people keep asking what Ashbery’s poems are about, and he probably wants to know the same thing. “I think it’s about skating, about falling through the ice of your own conscious mind.” I was getting good at appropriating little phrases I had picked up from my teachers’ interest in Buddhism. It seemed like a salve that covered all sorts of ailments. I also think that it may have really been what the poem was about. I wasn’t sure.

  “I hate feeling stupid, I hate not getting the idea,” Allen said. Anne later said she thought Allen really wanted to be the smartest man in America. I asked her about Allen’s poem “Ego Confession.” She said that they were sitting next to each other somewhere in San Francisco when Allen started to write it, but that he was embarrassed or for some reason didn’t want her to see him writing his poem, so he cupped his hand around the piece of paper like a schoolboy guarding answers on a test.

  I returned to Ashbery’s poem. “‘The apothecary biscuits dwindled.’ I like lines like that,” I told Allen. “I can’t even explain why. It’s just pleasing to the ear.”

  “But shouldn’t it be about something?” Allen asked, really upset that he couldn’t get a handle on Ashbery’s poem, which was like a greased pole he kept trying to climb, only to come sliding back down again. I wondered what was wrong with not knowing something. I was certainly getting used to it here.

  The phone rang. It was Anne Waldman. I could hear her voice coming from the phone pressed against Allen’s cheek. Allen had to hold the phone a little away from his head, because sometimes Anne’s voice gave Allen a headache. She loved deep-dish gossip. She said everything with a lot of power and authority. She never spoke in parentheses. Everything was given equal weight. She never seemed to sit still. I wondered how she ever meditated. I once saw a woman in the park in Boulder reading under a big straw hat, the kind you’d see in an Impressionist painting. She was being perfectly still, she was wearing a yellow summer dress, and her long legs were crossed. She wore espadrilles. I moved closer to her. I was going to get to talk to Anne Waldman in a calm way with no one else around.

 
; “Anne,” I said, “am I disturbing you?” The woman looked up from under her straw hat. It wasn’t Anne. It couldn’t have been. I should’ve known better. Anne would never have been that still for that long.

  Anne was beautiful. I think everyone was in love with her in some fashion. There were even rumors that she had just been having an affair with Bob Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue. This made her even more unapproachable. She wore polka dot scarves tied around her neck and a red protection cord that Rinpoche had put around her throat. She wore peasant blouses that she had brought back from Czechoslovakia with beads and rings on her fingers that she had picked up in exotic places or that her lovers had given to her. She had come to the Jack Kerouac School as a legendary heartbreaker—books by the younger teachers of Naropa were dedicated to her. The poet Lewis Warsh lived with Anne, and they were married briefly. Then Lewis went away and Anne fell in love with Michael Brownstein, a young novelist and poet who had been to Paris on a Fulbright. When Lewis came home, Michael was there, living in Anne’s apartment, living literally in Lewis’s place.

  Anne billed herself at poetry readings as Fast Talking Woman. She made long list poems and recited them in a rapid, breathy style, taking over the stage in her long boots. During her readings, people got swept up in the excitement and applauded her like a rock star. Anne wanted to be a rock star, a rock star of poetry. She was a real-life bohemian. She may have had lovers but she was married to poetry.

  She loved Allen. She was the only woman Allen seemed to see. He recognized her in a way he didn’t recognize any other woman, except those from his past. (Later, I would wonder if Allen, deep down, was still angry at his mother for going crazy.) He gave Anne his undivided attention. She, in turn, tolerated his temper tantrums, his bursts of ego, his euphoric ideas about the Jack Kerouac School, and his melancholy despair about Peter drifting away from him.

  Like Koko the Clown, who arose from Max Fleischer’s bottle of ink in those Betty Boop cartoons, Anne Waldman had emerged from the Lower East Side the daughter of a poetry-loving mother and a father Anne described as “a hack writer.” I always hated that phrase, especially when she said it. I thought it was so unfair to her father. She seemed embarrassed by him. He wrote for a magazine called Why? I once tried to find it in the library but it was too obscure. He wrote articles about how to give up smoking and the dangers of drugs.

  Anne had grown up the opposite of a feral child. They didn’t eat with their hands, they ate quoting Epicurus. Her mother was a translator. Anne went to Bennington, where she fell in love with poetry and, more important, with poets, while still a young woman. She seemed to know everyone. She was the doyenne of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the Bowery. All the poets were in love with her. The picture on the back of one of her early books of poetry shows a very young and beautiful woman, part Pre-Raphaelite, part French film star. She looked like a cross between Bardot and Monica Vitti. She had that scraped-away face that looked as if she might have been a beauty in utero, and so nature stopped doing anything else with her. She scared me. I never saw anyone that confident before. She seemed to soak up not just all the air in the room but all the attention from the men, even though Allen, Peter, and Bill were all queer.

  I met Anne’s mother once. She was like Esperanza Wilde, Oscar’s mother. Anne’s mother had lived in Greece. She even married a Greek poet. She helped to revive the ancient Greek festival in Delphi. She was crazy about poetry. Anne said that poetry was the food of her mother’s life. She said that some of that must have rubbed off on her. She got chills the first time she heard “The Idea of Order at Key West.” And she fell in love with “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” Ezra Pound’s poem written in the style of a poem by Rihaku. “At fifteen I stopped scowling.” Anne was fifteen when she first heard it. She grew up on MacDougal Street in the Village; she practically lived at the Eighth Street Bookstore— the same store that I had rushed to as a teenager as soon as I climbed out of Penn Station and got into a cab heading down Seventh Avenue. She devoured Donald Allen’s famous poetry anthology, which was now required reading at the Kerouac School. She used to see Bob Dylan walking around the Village, or sitting in front of Café Reggio sipping espresso, and Gregory Corso, who “was so gorgeous,” she said, “like Rimbaud.”

  I met her for the first time at a dinner, held in Allen’s apartment, for all the poetry apprentices. She smiled and held out a long limp hand for me to shake. “So this is our apprentice,” she said. “Naropa’s first certificate student.”

  “Not exactly,” Peter said, and unable to lie if his life depended on it. “He’s our only student.” No wonder I had been alone at the first apprentice dinner. No wonder there was no party for us to get together and talk through our homesickness. I was alone. I was the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Here on the lower east side of the Rockies, alone with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso (wherever he was hiding), and Anne Waldman, the core faculty of the Jack Kerouac School. Allen was driving this whole thing. I was their experiment, their first matriculating student. Would I end up their “Ode to Failure”?

  It was clear to me now that they had all come together to this quiet town to get away from their fame, to slip out of their legends for a while, but at the same time they had to trade on it in order to bankroll their getaway. Yet here they were, and here, like it or not, was I. I had beaten a path to the door of the Beats; like Allen with his meditation teacher, I was learning that gurus can be hell on earth.

  As I got to know her better, I noticed that Anne was surrounded by talk. She was always on the telephone; she kept the radio on; the telephone in her apartment was hot from constantly holding it to her ear. She said my education at Naropa was going to be like Yeats’s poem “The Cap and Bells.”

  “Do you know it?” she asked. I didn’t. I felt like Mamie Van Doren when in some terrible movie she’s asked if she knows anything about astrophysics, and she answers, “I know some very handsome men like it.” I told Anne that a lot of interesting people I know and respect really love that poem. Anne said that, in the poem, the jester sends his soul dressed in blue to the young queen, but she shuts her window against him. Then he sends his heart wearing something red but she dismisses it with a wave of her hand, or maybe her fan. He finally dies, but he leaves his cap and bells, his jester’s uniform, and that’s what possesses her.

  Anne said that she was going to encourage me to be who I am. She said that what should possess people was to be as authentic as possible. Anne was going to give me an assignment. She said I had to read a poem that was as great as “The Waste Land,” and even more provocative. It was “The Skaters” by John Ashbery. She said it changed her life. I wanted to tell her that Allen didn’t understand it. He had asked me what it meant!

  “Ashbery’s constantly playing with illusion and reality,” Anne said. “There’s such subtlety and duplicity in the poem.” She said the poem was like a great meal, great food for one’s head. She described it as a four-part symphony. She told me I had to bring back a paper on “The Skaters.” And I was going to ask Allen for help!

  Anne had an entourage, well, at least a couple of women who followed her everywhere—her “sirens,” Bonnie and Nanette. They were like ladies-in-waiting to Queen Anne. Anne’s poetry, especially the poems about Sappho, made me wonder if they were all sleeping together (at least it was exciting to think about). They both wrote poetry and I’d see them all together in a restaurant having dinner. Whenever they waved to me or motioned for me to come inside and talk to them, I felt as if I had entered a harem. I blushed and felt terribly shy around these poetwomen.

  “Don’t be so scared,” Nanette said to me one night at Pelican Pete’s, a vast fish restaurant with an enormous lobster tank that fascinated Burroughs and his son. They would peer into the lobster tank, mesmerized by the bands that held the lobster claws together, “so they don’t start slashing at each other,” Burroughs said one night, in his Midwestern drawl. Billy liked to d
rop a little plastic paratrooper into the tank when no one was looking; he liked it when all the lobsters went crazy climbing over the little submerged man; he called it his science-fiction movie. After seeing that, I always ordered the filet of sole. Ginsberg also refused the lobster, but on religious grounds. “A Buddhist can’t eat lobster,” he said, just as the waiter brought two huge, live lobsters to our table. “As a Buddhist, you can’t condemn a living creature to its death.”

  The three women, as usual, were dining together, and they called me over. “You look so haunted!” Bonnie said. “You could win a Franz Kafka look-alike contest.” They all laughed.

  Oh, great, I thought. I remind them of Kafka or, worse yet, one of his stories. It could have been worse, I suppose. Bonnie could have compared me to Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s hero who went to bed a man and woke up a cockroach. I hated seeing Anne laughing, not really laughing but grinning at what was a thoughtless and stupid remark. I wondered why Anne, who had her life changed and her heart touched by poetry, would want to be around anyone who could say something like that. Being toyed with by Anne and her maidens put me back in junior high school again, being teased by the sexiest girls in school in Merrick, on the south shore of Long Island, where we lived up the street from Amy Fisher. I think I even baby-sat for her once.

  At school, my friends were the geeks, the misfits, the guys who didn’t date. That’s probably why, for my bar mitzvah, I wanted to take my friends to the Playboy Club. Those clubs still existed in the late sixties. We must have passed the one on East Fifty-seventh Street in our car a hundred times, leaving the city for the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, heading home to Long Island. I would catch very fleeting glimpses of it through the backseat window of our car—the darkened windows, the gold key that meant “members only.”