by Sam Kashner
My heart almost fell out of my chest. I could’ve kissed her toe rings, her cardinal-red lips. I couldn’t believe that Anne, who seemed to all but ignore me, had come to my rescue.
But Allen cut me down from the heavens.
“No,” he said. “I think he should stay with Gregory. He’s got to start getting him to sit down to work, and I think he’s taking the money I’m giving him and buying drugs again. I don’t want the Kerouac School to start out with an overdose of a major poet.”
I didn’t know Allen well enough to beg him to let me come to the concert. I tried to make it look like it didn’t matter to me, that looking after Gregory and scraping Max’s poop off the rug was what I really wanted to be doing that night. In fact, I did want to help Gregory finish the book, but one night out of my sight wouldn’t matter, and it was Bob Dylan in Denver! Maybe Allen would go backstage, maybe…I couldn’t even begin to finish the thought. I thought of something Allen had told me, how in Big Sur, a poet had taken Dylan to see Henry Miller, who was pretty old even then. When the old novelist asked whoever had brought Dylan, “Would your poet friend like a drink?” Miller’s third-person hospitality got under Dylan’s skin. “Even my best friends didn’t put me down that badly,” Dylan later said. That’s what I wanted to tell Allen.
After all, the long connection between Dylan and Ginsberg was one of the magnets that had first pulled me to the Jack Kerouac School. I harbored the secret thought that perhaps Allen’s influence would prevail and that Dylan’s first teaching job would wind up at Naropa: “The Milarepa Chair in Advanced Poetics—Dylan, Bob, instructor.” In fact, Dylan wasn’t even about to answer Allen’s fundraising request, at least Allen didn’t think so, and now Burroughs was putting all this pressure on him to collect.
Allen did hope that Dylan would show up at Naropa. Allen wanted the movie Dylan was making during his Rolling Thunder tour to have its premiere at the Jack Kerouac School. Allen called it a “dharma movie”—it would later be released under the title Renaldo and Clara. Allen had already brought the director out to Boulder.
Allen explained to Burroughs that even after all this time, he didn’t think he knew Dylan at all. He wasn’t sure that Dylan had a self, because of all the changes he’d been through. During the Rolling Thunder Revue, Allen had asked Dylan if he was enjoying himself, if he was experiencing any pleasurable moments on the tour.
“Pleasure. Pleasure?” Dylan said. “What’s that? I never touch the stuff.”
Allen left Burroughs’s apartment and went back to his place to get ready for the concert, with me following behind. I could tell that Allen was nervous about seeing Dylan again. He said he never really felt secure in that relationship. He said that he had gone through a painful stage of being in love with Bob Dylan. “He was skinny and had a big nose like you,” Allen said to me while getting dressed for the concert.
I had always hated my looks, but Allen comparing me to Bob Dylan made everything all right, even Allen’s making me stay home and picking this of all days and all nights to nail my feet to the floor as Gregory’s keeper.
The two men liked to tease each other. Allen said that Dylan brought out a sarcastic streak in him that he didn’t know he had. Allen teased Dylan a lot about religion, about God. “I used to believe in God,” Allen once told him. “Well, I used to believe in God, too,” Dylan had said. “You write better poems if you believe in God, Ginsberg.” He didn’t want to have to ask Dylan for money.
Sometimes they went for years without talking. Allen said he was too shy to call Dylan. He wrote him letters that Dylan ignored. Then one day Dylan called him, answering Allen’s letter on the telephone. Allen had written to Dylan telling him how much he loved his song “Idiot Wind,” calling it “a national rhyme.” Allen sang a phrase to me while pulling on his socks, a blue and a black one. “Idiot Wind / blowing like a circle around my skull / from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.” Allen said that was Dylan’s favorite line in the song, too. Allen said it appealed to the Buddhist in him. The craziness on the left and the right. Allen said that Dylan was a great poet—the Walt Whitman of the American pop song—and instead of dedicating his book of songs First Blues to Rinpoche, he thought it really should have been dedicated to Bob Dylan. Allen said it was always heartbreaking and thrilling to see Dylan. He thought he and Bob Dylan should have been lovers.
I didn’t know what to say. I could tell he’d be upset if Anne stayed in Denver and spent the night with Dylan. “I introduced them,” Allen said.
Gregory just didn’t share their adoration of Dylan. He couldn’t care less. “Everyone thinks Bob Dylan is writing about them,” Gregory once told me. “I don’t give a shit if I’m in a Bob Dylan song—I just want some of the royalties! I told Dylan I’d write him a poem for one song’s royalties. I’ll write him a beautiful poem in exchange for the royalties of ‘Just Like a Woman.’ That song’s about Ginzy anyway. The woman in the song is really Allen—not about his being a faggot, just about his unrequited love for Dylan. Now you don’t feel so cheated about that five hundred dollars, right?”
Allen said he wanted to take me somewhere before driving to Denver for the concert. If he sensed that I was disappointed about not being invited to meet Dylan, he didn’t show it. As we left the apartment, the threatening sky had opened up and the rain began to pour. As we headed back toward Naropa headquarters in the rain, Allen said he wanted to go to the shrine room, to sit. That meant he wanted to meditate. I could tell whenever Allen was nervous or anxious about something. He always thought meditating would help. Sometimes he meditated when he thought his ego was getting too big. He was under a lot of stress: Everyone seemed to want something from Allen, especially his students. Eventually there would be quite a few. Sometimes kids would show up for registration without any money, and Allen would ask why they had come to school without funds. “I had a dream that I should come see you,” one said. “I read ‘Howl’ and it changed my life. I thought maybe you needed someone to come take care of you.” Sometimes young gay men would show up hoping Allen would take care of them, or at least make it easier for them to come out to their parents. “Would you tell them?” they’d ask. Sometimes Allen gave them money to go back home. Sometimes he took them to bed, then told them to go back to school and get married.
I thought most of the time Allen took all that attention with a lot of humor. Rinpoche certainly helped Allen take a more humorous view of himself and of his fame. Before meeting Rinpoche, Allen wasn’t known for his sense of humor. You could never tell him a joke. He would always ask you questions about it—why the person in the joke did a certain thing and not another. Peter had a better sense of humor, but then he’d had a much sadder life.
When we arrived at the Naropa building, I didn’t want to go into the shrine room. I had avoided it ever since I arrived at the Jack Kerouac School. I think I’d absorbed some of my parents’ worry that I would become a Buddhist. They knew that Allen chanted om, and that he was Jewish, but that he was also a Buddhist.
The shrine room frightened me. It shouldn’t have. It was quite beautiful really, with hundreds of red meditation cushions, a yellow sun in the middle of each one. It was a large room made to look like a Tibetan monastery, with mandalas hanging on the walls, and dragons breathing fire on bright yellow cloth. Allen felt at home there. He said that synagogues made him feel anxious and inadequate.
I worried about what would happen if I went into the shrine room, took off my shoes, and sat on the meditation cushion. I thought of my mother and my grandmother, and I suddenly realized that today was Friday, and they’d be lighting candles for the Sabbath. My mother wasn’t even all that religious. After lighting the candles we’d sometimes all go out to the Flagship Diner in Freeport for bacon cheeseburgers. We were those kind of Jews. (That was then; she keeps kosher now.) My mother hated “the black hats,” as she called them, the ultra-Orthodox Jews who threw rocks at your car if you drove through their Borough Park neighborhoods on a Saturday.
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Allen liked asking me about my Jewish parents. He said being Jewish was one of his mother’s obsessions, so maybe that was why he turned his back on it. Naomi had suffered so much, and had made him suffer: maybe that’s why Judaism caused him so much pain. He said seeing Hebrew letters in a prayerbook recently made him weep.
“I never understood the Jews’ fear of death,” he once told me. He said that Buddhism made him think of death all the time. I told him I was a kohen, and that I wasn’t allowed near a dead body. I said that if I were a religious Jew, I wouldn’t even be allowed at a funeral, which was okay by me.
“What about your own funeral?” Allen asked.
We stepped out of our shoes and left them at the threshold. In the beautiful, empty shrine room, which smelled like old shoes, incense, and Johnson’s floor wax, Allen put me down on a meditation cushion. He straightened my back, he lit some incense, he bowed toward the elevated area where Rinpoche often sat, which had framed portraits of all the lineage holders. Allen said he wanted to initiate me into sitting, so that I wouldn’t be so afraid of it.
Before we began, though, we talked about the Dylan concert. He must have sensed how badly I wanted to go.
“You know, Sam, you’d be doing me a great favor by looking after Gregory,” he said. He added that he was hoping the rain would lift, and that he would be released of his longing for Bob Dylan’s approval. I thought of that old song by Rodgers and Hart, with the line, “unrequited love’s a bore.” I hoped Dylan loved Allen and appreciated him. Allen was like an Indian alone in the shrine room praying for rain, except he was praying for the rain to stop. He thought meditating would help remind him that he should just enjoy the concert and not worry so much.
“If you stay and watch Gregory,” he told me, “I have a surprise for you. I’ve arranged for us to watch the movie Dylan and I made together.” He said that Sam Shepard wrote the screenplay for Renaldo and Clara (in 1976, I didn’t know who Sam Shepard was), but that he, Allen, had created many of his scenes with Dylan. We were going to watch it at Gregory’s house after the concert, projecting it onto one of Corso’s blank walls.
“Gregory doesn’t feel the same way about Dylan as the rest of us,” he explained. “Gregory distrusts people with a lot of money, especially artists with money.” I supposed that was because Gregory never knew where he was going to sleep from one night to the next. For a long time, when he lived in Europe, Gregory’s address was just the American Express office. Once he was arrested for sleeping in the Parthenon.
After I tried sitting for a while, and Allen prayed for the rain to stop and to be delivered from Dylan-longing, he dropped me off at Gregory’s apartment, as if I really were the baby-sitter.
Allen said goodbye and kissed me on the lips. Gregory ran up and kissed Allen on the lips, too. Baby Max, his soggy diaper dripping, clung to my leg and sat on my shoe. He liked to hold on and have me jump up and down like a pogo stick. Max’s mother was a dark, very young woman. She didn’t say very much. Calliope was nowhere to be seen.
Apparently, Gregory felt like he had to keep earning my $500, so he decided to tell me what Kerouac’s wife had said when he showed up at Jack’s funeral. “This’ll be it,” Gregory said, “this will square us.”
15. Gilgamesh in Boulder
“The first thing Stella said to me when I came to the funeral,” Gregory, smoking furiously, began, “she said, ‘Gregory, why didn’t you come sooner? Jack wanted to see you. Why didn’t you come when he was alive?’
“I told her, ‘How do I know when people are gonna die?’ I have no idea. I wrote out a poem and stuck it in Jack’s jacket, but there was already a piece of paper in there. I didn’t read it. I wanted to know who else thought of that, putting a poem in there. Maybe it wasn’t a poem—maybe it was a cleaning bill.”
Before Gregory could finish his story, Allen interrupted, telling Gregory about his plans to show a rough cut of Renaldo and Clara at Gregory’s apartment after the concert, but Gregory wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to see Renaldo and Clara, he wanted to meet Calliope and get high. He turned to me and said he was thinking of a great way to get money, and that he would discuss it with me tomorrow. Allen left, in a hurry to make it to Denver in time for the concert. I was left alone with Gregory, Max, and Lisa, his sullen wife.
He handed me two poems he said were meant for his book. He said one of them was a love poem to Shelley, which he wrote after having a dream in which he and Shelley were married. He said he never has thoughts like that in real life, but he has them in his sleep. I wondered why that wasn’t a part of real life.
Gregory then informed me that my first job was to read the epic of Gilgamesh; he said he couldn’t work with anyone who didn’t know it. Furthermore, we would discuss it. I was supposed to read it to Max and his mother. With that, Gregory headed for the door, no doubt on his way to find Calliope and score some dope with some of my money.
Lisa didn’t try to stop her husband from leaving. She just took Max in her arms and went upstairs. Max started crying. Gregory sang something from La Traviata to Max from the bottom of the stairs, and then he was gone.
“Gregory left this book for you,” Lisa told me from the top of the stairs. “You have to read to us till we fall asleep.” I climbed the stairs, a little apprehensively, picked up the book, and sat on the edge of her bed. Max was being breast-fed by his young mother. I tried not to look.
Gilgamesh, I found out later, was a kind of bible for Gregory—he loved quoting from it. It was the first book he was going to teach at the Naropa Institute. He already told me that he wasn’t interested in my poetry—not yet, anyway. I thumbed, or as Allen liked to say, thrummed through the book, which I thought was kind of skinny for an epic. Gregory later said it was a shame we couldn’t read it in Sumerian. Or rather, that he couldn’t.
I started reading aloud: “Of him who knew the most…who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled…” Max stopped breast-feeding and sat up in bed, leaning against his mother, with his wild bird’s-nest hair, and Lisa with her sad eyes like those of a gypsy fortune-teller in a storefront window in Atlantic City.
Gilgamesh was a hero of the twenty-seventh century before Christ. He was a god of the underworld. No wonder Gregory loved him, having first read him in his prison cell. Statues of Gilgamesh appear in ancient burial rites—he’s a kind of god of the dead.
I glanced over at Max and his mother; both of them were fast asleep on the great rumpled bed. There was no withstanding the power of Gilgamesh, I thought, “neither the father’s son, nor the wife.” I slunk down and read in a corner of the bedroom. I started to understand why Gregory loved the story of Gilgamesh so much. It was close to his heart because it was so close to his art: it was the story of Gregory’s life as Allen Ginsberg’s friend.
Gilgamesh is a work of about a thousand lines. Gregory seemed to know each one by heart, I would later discover. In the story, there is a Wild Man who is created by the gods because he’s the only one who can match Gilgamesh. They become best friends and travel together. Both Gilgamesh and the Wild Man go on a journey searching for fame, but Gilgamesh wants true immortality. He wants unending fame, unending life. The Wild Man is not interested in that kind of quest.
It suddenly dawned on me: Everyone keeps thinking that Allen is the Wild Man, but he’s not —he’s Gilgamesh. Hadn’t Rinpoche told Allen that he was too in love with his fame and his notoriety? Isn’t that why he had made him go upstairs and chop off his beard, which Allen had saved in a cigar box? Gregory was always teasing Allen about wanting to be a rock star, about using his enormous energies in the wrong way, to serve the wrong master, as Gregory liked to put it. “Ginzy could be a great poet,” Gregory would confide in me, “but he’s a terrible judge of his own poems.” Once Gregory asked Allen to show him what he considered to be his greatest poems. Allen gave him poems like “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby,” “Blame the Thought, Cling to the Bummer.” Gone were “Supermarket in California” and “S
unflower Sutra,” and in their place was a dreadful poem for Anne Waldman called “Pussy Blues.”
I knew that poem; Allen had asked me to help him finish it. Allen was attracted to Anne. He used to like to tease her about sleeping with him. He said he sometimes wondered what it would be like to be married to Anne and even to have a baby. I didn’t think it was very mature to write a poem to Anne called “Pussy Blues.” He said the last thing you want to think about when you get old is maturity. He said only young people think about that. I felt embarrassed; I told Allen the poem shouldn’t come from me. He said it wouldn’t.
The poem had evolved out of a session of making up spontaneous blues songs while sitting in the empty bandshell of a park in downtown Boulder. It was the Fourth of July, when the whole nation was celebrating its two hundredth birthday, and we were watching the fireworks going off in the mountains. Allen sang: “You said you got to go home and feed your pussycat / When I ask you to stay here tonight. Where’s your pussy at? / Hey it’s Fourth of July / Say it’s your U.S. birthday / Yeah stay out all night National Holiday / Tiger on your fence / Don’t let him get away.” And that became “Pussy Blues.”
Gregory knew that it was Gilgamesh who ventures into the forest to cut down the great cedar and thus win all the glory. “My fame,” Gilgamesh announces, “will be secure to all my sons.” Gregory, I would come to realize, knew that his vagabond life was not conducive to being famous, as famous as Allen. “I’ve read stories about Allen in the International Herald Tribune,” Gregory would later tell me. “I read about Ginzy all the time and think, no dog would eat the kind of food he has to eat. Penguin dust!” he shouted, reciting his own line from “Marriage,” meaning inscrutable, the marriage of opposites, the fantastic and the divine, the silly and the stunned. But sometimes he used it as an expletive.
