When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  “I want you all to meet the first graduating class of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,” Allen announced. All of a sudden, the spotlight Burroughs had been standing in seemed to swallow me up, blinding me. I felt the heat of it on my face. I stepped back to look at my fellow poets, the other students, Allen’s army of apprentices. I saw nothing. No one. The room was strangely quiet. Charlie Haden’s bass played a kind of funereal chord. I was alone. I was it. Naropa had dozens of students of dance, music, meditation, calligraphy, religion, but the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics had no student body except for mine, the one that stood trembling in the glare of the spotlight.

  Anne thought of rescuing me from my embarrassment, but she only made it worse. “Who would like to dance with the Jack Kerouac School’s first student?” she asked. For a moment I felt I was in junior high, terrified of being picked last for the team. And then another thought crossed my mind: if I was the only poetics student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, how could this institution survive? Would we all go bankrupt, and would I be sent packing back to Merrick? Would Ginsberg, Burroughs, Waldman, Corso & Co. have to fold up their tents and return to the steaming streets of the Lower East Side? I had a feeling they were as desperate to remain in the austere, beautiful foothills of the Rockies as was I.

  Mercifully, Barbara Dilley, who headed the dance department at Naropa, crossed the room, snapping her fingers to Charlie’s bass beat, high-stepping over to me. She pulled me out of the spotlight and spun me around the dance floor, ending my embarrassment and my end-of-Naropa fantasy. I felt as if I might crack in two from relief and joy. All the other dancers, students, and wallflowers fell in around us. The shrine room suddenly filled up with music, with talk, with real life. Barbara flung me back into the crowd. A woman whose father was the richest man in Boulder, owner of the biggest department store in town, kicked off her shoes and kissed me on the mouth. She was wearing a dress with zebra stripes on it. I lost her when she leaned her head against Charlie’s bass so the sound could enter her head even faster. Then the Naropa secretary, a woman named Monica whose husband was not a student of Rinpoche’s and who disapproved of Buddhists, came up to tell me something.

  “Call your mother. She said to call when you get a chance.”

  Call my mother? I couldn’t believe it. I guess I should’ve gotten my phone installed already instead of just relying on Naropa’s office phone. Well, she can’t ruin my reputation, or so I thought, because I don’t have one yet. “Just give her time,” the bluebird of unhappiness whispered in my ear, the one that I seemed to carry on my shoulder. How do you stay alive when you’re dancing with Beat poets and your mother calls?

  A band of Naropa musicians, Charlie’s students really, had nudged their teacher off the stage and took over, playing loud. The shrine room floor, always polished and shiny as a mirror, squeaked with all the dancing and general jumping around. Rinpoche had long gone but Allen and Peter stayed behind. Allen wasn’t a big dancer, not at all, but he liked watching the kids move, and he always found someone to go home with.

  I headed for Monica’s office to make that call back to Long Island, to reassure my parents that they hadn’t made the wrong decision to let me go to Naropa. They didn’t quite know what to do—my parents had never really had the chance to go to college. My mother had dropped out of Stern College for Women in New York to go to work during the Second World War after her brothers were drafted, and my father had been working, supporting his brother since the two were orphaned at a pretty young age.

  My parents had never tried to stop me from writing poetry; they never really censored my reading, except maybe once, when on a trip to my grandmother’s in the Catskills I bought a Signet paperback copy of Goldfinger, and my father, after thumbing through the book, decided it “wasn’t for me.” I was twelve years old at the time. It was the movie tie-in version of the book, with the woman’s body painted gold, wrapped around the front and back covers. Later, at my grandmother’s, I saw my father reading the book at the kitchen table; he stayed up half the night finishing it.

  My parents secretly liked the fact that I wrote poetry and admired writers more than baseball players. They thought that would mean I would do well in school, but I don’t think they counted on my wanting to be a poet. Allen Ginsberg was something of a controversial figure in our house. His beard and hippie countenance, his radical politics, some of the obscenity in his poems must’ve troubled my parents, but when I called home from my first semester at Hamilton College, miserable, homesick, and unable to convince any of my teachers to let me do an independent study on Neal Cassady and his influence on the Beats (“a guy who stole for a living?” my adviser at Hamilton said; “he’s just a petty criminal”), I just knew I had to go to Naropa. And my parents, they didn’t stop me. They probably had their hearts in their mouths, but they let me go.

  I left the dance to find the telephone. My parents were a bit like Allen’s, I thought, as I made my way to the office to call my mother. A quiet, sensitive father, the soul of an artist under his suit jacket and tie; a lively, outspoken mother, a kind of bully of almighty kindness: They drove me crazy but I loved them for their indulgences, now becoming too many to mention.

  Outside the shrine room, in the foyer, I ran into Gregory and Calliope, who were sharing a cigarette. Gregory was holding a cat and he waved me over, a conspiratorial look on his face. He had a plan.

  “You’re not used to money yet, kid, so you don’t know the first thing about life. Sit down.” I kept standing.

  “Five hundred big ones,” he continued, warming to his theme. “That’s what you’re worth to me. I’ll write you a poem for five hundred big ones.”

  I wanted to like Corso. I loved his poems. I loved the fact that he took pity on strays and gathered them up in his arms, that, as allergic as I was, his apartment was full of cats. Gregory wrote about missing his cats: “My water-colored hands are catless now / I am catless near death almost.” He seemed calmer with a cat cradled in his arms. But I saw how he sometimes lashed out, and he wouldn’t give up this rant about the five hundred dollars. He certainly didn’t try caressing it out of me.

  “Look, I’ll sell Calliope to you,” he said. “She likes screwing poets. I’ve made a careful study of this. How much would you pay for her?” Gregory asked me. “Now you might think she’d go to bed with you anytime, but she won’t,” Gregory explained. “I made a little study of you, too. I know that Ginzy’s set it up so that you can watch me. I’m a great poet, I don’t need some kid looking out for me. All you care about is my writing, am I right? Of course I’m right.”

  I had to say something. If only because I didn’t want Calliope to think I was a wimp, being bullied by Gregory. She did look great, she was sexy, and I didn’t want to feel humiliated.

  “Why does any of this worry you?” I asked Gregory.

  “Worries you,” he repeated.

  “Worries me?”

  “I don’t give a shit about you. I don’t ask you a lot of questions,” Gregory said, moving his jaw up and down like he was gumming a piece of turkey at a mission dinner. “I need five hundred dollars; now what would you require of me for five hundred big ones?” At the word “require,” he made a flamboyant gesture and spun every syllable out, like he was a French nobleman with a handkerchief in his sleeve. Very theatrical.

  So I blurted out, “Tell me about Frank O’Hara. Tell me about Kerouac’s funeral, Allen said you might tell me. I’ll give you five hundred dollars for that!” I couldn’t believe what I’d just said. My curiosity was the only thing I could trade with Gregory. I wasn’t about to let him sell Calliope to me, as much as I secretly and idiotically hoped she would like the idea.

  “You do think things out, don’t you?” Gregory asked. “Sit down. You might as well hear this from me. Jack’s funeral was a traffic accident.”

  I could hear Charlie Haden’s deep bass thrumming from the shrine room, and I felt a pang of guilt fo
r not calling my mother back, but I really wanted to hear this.

  “There were too many people,” he continued, stroking the cat. “I’d been to a funeral parlor before. I once saw a child’s funeral. The tiniest coffin I ever saw. Mrs. Lombardi’s son—he was one month old. It was in Rizzo’s funeral parlor. I saw it in its coffin. I wrote a poem about it, about its small purplish wrinkled head.”

  Corso stopped, took a deep drag off the cigarette Calliope was holding, and scrutinized me. Then he asked for the five hundred dollars.

  I didn’t have it. How was I going to get five hundred dollars? This man spent three years in prison! But Calliope saved me. (Women I didn’t know seemed to rescue me just in the nick of time.)

  “Gregory, that’s not enough. You’re cheating him,” Calliope said, putting out her cigarette in the tiny glass bowl filled with rice and a stick of incense on a small shrine table in the lobby. She must’ve thought it was a sand-filled ashtray like the ones in front of hotel elevators.

  “Ten black Cadillacs hauled Mrs. Lombardi’s month-old son away,” Gregory continued, ignoring Calliope, “to the cemetery. They had a high mass for it.”

  I thought it curious that Gregory would tell me that story. He didn’t know what an impression his poem “Italian Extravaganza” had made on me. It was just a couple of lines, but I never forgot it. It was obvious now that neither did Gregory. Abandoned, orphaned by mixed-up kid parents, the little coffin was sort of Gregory’s childhood—his was over too soon, too.

  “I’ll tell you about the other thing, after you give me the moh-ney,” as he called it, drawing the syllables out. “My life isn’t free, it isn’t open to the public, you know.”

  I had my father’s Diner’s Club card; my mother made him give it to me for emergencies. This was definitely an emergency.

  “Okay, come with me,” I told Gregory and his girlfriend.

  The three of us went down the long skinny staircase, leaving Naropa to go outside onto the crowded weekend mall at night. I took them to one of the drive-through banks where I cashed the checks my parents sent me to keep life and limb together while I received my sentimental education from the Beats. Gregory and Calliope played on the grass like a couple of young lovers, though Gregory was old enough to be Calliope’s father, maybe even her grandfather.

  “Don’t give him your money until he tells you,” Calliope said.

  “Okay, okay,” said Gregory. “This is the perfect place.” And right there on the grassy patch next to the drive-in bank Corso acted out Jack’s funeral, even his thoughts while viewing the casket and talking to Jack’s wife.

  Gregory Corso could’ve been a great actor. Al Pacino would make a great Corso. Corso would’ve made a great Al Pacino. It’s no accident that Gregory came into the picture as a writer at the Poets Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s where he met Frank O’Hara and the other poets. He was a kind of protégé of Bunny Lang, the eccentric doyenne of the Poets Theatre, the sun around which all the poets and artists seemed to revolve. O’Hara had written about the three of them—Bunny and Gregory and Frank, in costume, bowing to one another and to the audience. He said they looked like jinxes. Gregory, though older now, still looked like the jinx O’Hara had remembered him to be.

  He loved Thomas Chatterton, read him in prison. I, too, was obsessed with Chatterton, the seventeen-year-old poet genius who pretended to have found the long-lost, Old English manuscripts of a poet named Thomas Rowley, but in fact had written them all himself on old church parchment. Unable to support himself in London, he bought poison with the last few coins he had and died in a garret. I was in love with Chatterton’s story. Gregory had brought Chatterton into even more romantic glory by reading him in a prison cell.

  Gregory was only twenty-six when Bunny Lang discovered him living on the streets of New York, completely destitute. She asked the members of the Poets Theatre to take up a collection to pay Gregory to take care of the theater. He wanted to sweep up after everyone had left, to look for wallets and loose change. Gregory always seemed to be able to get people to take care of him. Bunny Lang arranged for him to live in a room kept by a young novelist at Harvard. Gregory made him construct a tent made out of dyed sheets and hang the sheets on metal poles for Gregory to live under at Eliot House. He continued to wear mostly black, though recently Calliope tried to get him to wear brighter clothing.

  I was afraid to show him my poems, and dreaded the idea of giving a poetry reading at which Gregory might be present. I knew he talked back to the screen, as it were, shouting down other poets, confronting them about being phonies. “You’re not a poet!” he had once yelled at Archibald MacLeish when he ran into him at Eliot House.

  In Gregory’s apartment, I saw a copy of an old play I’m sure he had written for the Poets Theatre called In This Hung-up Age. Beauty is a character in the play; she’s a pill-popping saxophone player. Poetman is her opposite. I didn’t want to turn into poetman, “a little magazine type with social complaints.” I knew that Frank O’Hara loved Gregory’s poetry, and that made Gregory even more of a legend to me.

  O’Hara had the kind of sophisticated life I wanted to have in New York. At least I thought he did. His friends were all in love with him. Men and women. He didn’t even seem ambitious for his poems, which were great anyway and seemed so tossed off, though of course they weren’t. When he died after being hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island, an accident that sounds almost as lightheartedly strange as his own poems, he was barely forty years old. He died in 1966.

  Ten years later, Gregory, O’Hara’s friend, was standing on the grass waiting for me to give him some money. It sounds silly now, but at the time it was as if I had a physical connection with Frank O’Hara through his friend Gregory, and that’s why I wanted to give Gregory the money. It was like buying a kind of membership that was going to get me into a world, not just a club. It was a world I thought I could live in forever. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though I didn’t fight sleep, I wanted them to come and get me. I wanted to speak their language, to sound like them, to dress like them, to be as open to the world and to experience the world as they did. I wanted their hipness and confidence to cover me like a blanket—I would awake calm, and hopelessly hip and new. But as someone once said, whistling in the dark hardly ever becomes music, and Gregory wanted his money right now!

  “The funeral,” I said, five one-hundred-dollar bills fanning out in my hand.

  Gregory took the money and stuffed it in his pants pocket. Then he sat down on the grass and began to tell his tale.

  “I saw Jack in the funeral parlor, everyone was there,” he said. “I wanted to take him up out of the coffin and throw him against the wall or something. It was a Buddhist or a Zen idea I had. I thought Jack would like it if I just took him and flung him across the room, like when John Barrymore died and all his buddies, Errol Flynn and W. C. Fields, they took him out of the funeral home and brought him back to Errol Flynn’s house and they played poker and drank with him in a chair. A real Irish wake. I mean, it’s just a body.”

  Gregory stopped and put his reading glasses on as if he could see his thoughts better.

  “I would’ve been arrested, probably sent back to prison—or worse, the funny farm.” Gregory peered at me over his reading glasses. “I know you’re scared of me, but I’m not dangerous,” Gregory continued, putting his hand on my cheek.

  “I thought at the time you should end this medieval agony, the hypocrisy of the funeral! People in mourning for something that no longer exists. That was it. That’s the last shot,” Gregory said. “The last shot: I had to do something for my friend, my dear friend, but it only occurred to me when he was dead in his box.”

  Suddenly the brick, drive-through bank looked like a crypt. A sliver of moonlight hung in Gregory’s hair. He stopped talking, got up, and he and Calliope disappeared into the night.

  14. Rolling Thunder

  “Make sure you get the money,” William Burroughs snarled to Allen. “
When a man asks for money you can’t back down, you’ll lose your self-respect.” Ginsberg had come into Bill’s apartment the day after the Naropa dance to tell him that he and Anne were setting out for Denver to attend the Bob Dylan concert that night. A huge storm was expected and the clouds were already passing over us. The sky looked like an iron vault.

  I was setting up the mah-jongg table, wondering if anyone had found an extra ticket for me. I was too shy to ask. Bill and his son were going to be playing mah-jongg. I couldn’t imagine the two Burroughses playing a game my mother and her girlfriends were playing on Long Island.

  “Ask him about the money,” Burroughs said again. Allen had written a letter to Bob Dylan asking him for $200,000 for Naropa.

  “He’s never going to give it to us, Bill. He doesn’t even read letters like that,” Allen said.

  “Then get someone to read it to him,” Burroughs snapped.

  Allen was put on notice: ask for the money or have Burroughs walk away in disgust. I never wanted to see that happen. Burroughs seemed to live in a constant state of contempt, although I’m sure it was just the way that he talked and the fact that he looked like someone who had never completely gotten over trying to kick his heroin habit. He had the driest-looking skin I’d ever seen. Even his sweat looked dry. It also looked like I wasn’t going to get to go hear Dylan under a thunderous Denver sky. The number of people and the number of tickets—the math just didn’t look like it was going to come out in my favor.

  Gregory could care less. He dropped by Burroughs’s apartment holding his baby, Max, who had Corso’s wild, dark, curling hair. Max ran around without clothes most of the time. He liked to run upstairs and poop in all the empty rooms. He seemed like one of those children brought back to civilization after years of being raised by wolves in the forests of India. Anne waltzed in, dressed like an Arabian princess for her rendezvous with Dylan. There was something definitely going on there, I thought. How great to be there. At least Antler wasn’t invited either. Anne was actually wearing a sari—it was going to become completely see-through in the rain. I was even sorrier that I wasn’t going. But Anne astonished me by asking if I wanted to come along.