by Sam Kashner
Had Gregory given me the key to his relationship with Allen by leaving Gilgamesh behind for me to read, while his wife and child, their heads thrown back and their mouths open in sleep, looked like they were in the netherworld reclining on the couch of death?
And then I read it: the last line in Gilgamesh about the one who enters the underworld without leaving anyone to mourn for him (a scribe who wanted his pen to dispense justice in the world): “No dog would eat the food he has to eat.” Gilgamesh expressed Gregory’s fear that Allen, the world-famous bard, and not Gregory—reprobate and drifter—would wind up emptied out by fame, alone and abandoned by all the young men who would leave him and begin families of their own. Gregory was obsessed with being alone at the end—being “motherless” and even “catless”—but at the time he saw that as Allen’s fate, not his own.
I went downstairs, tiptoeing so as not to waken the sleepers. I sat on the couch and waited for Gregory, “the Mad Honeymooner,” as he called himself in his great poem “Marriage,” to come home to his wife. He certainly was raising Max, his latest baby, the way he imagined himself raising a kid in “Marriage”—making a rattle out of broken Bach records, tacking pictures of The Flagellation by della Francesca along its crib, and sewing the Greek alphabet onto its bib. Gregory wanted to build for Max’s playpen a roofless Parthenon; instead, they all dwelled in an apartment in Boulder with constant traffic of strangers, Gregory’s hot, New York City accent filling the rooms.
But Gregory didn’t come back that night. I walked home in the early-morning light, “all the universe married but me.”
16. Kerouac’s Grave
Anne Waldman hadn’t come home after the Dylan concert. Allen must’ve felt squeezed, jealous from both sides. Dylan didn’t ask him to stay, and everyone assumed something was going on between Anne and Bob Dylan. (Anne had a boyfriend, Reed Bye, but I don’t think he knew. He was a local guy, a roofer, with an almost angelic, feminine face. Anne liked beautiful men—men who looked lovelier than their girlfriends. Reed Bye was sweet-tempered and he had a gentle manner, even though he stomped on people’s roofs and most days ate his lunch above the treeline. He was writing poetry in his spare time, and Anne was giving him books to read.)
When I saw Allen the next day, he didn’t look like he’d had a good time at the concert. He asked what we thought of Renaldo and Clara, and I had to tell him that we didn’t see it. Sotto voce, I told him that Gregory didn’t seem too interested. Trying to sound as if I didn’t really care, I asked him about the Dylan concert.
He said that the concert was held during a driving rain, and that Dylan sang “Idiot Wind” as a tribute to Allen. He sang “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” while it was falling.
As a kind of consolation prize, Allen brought a few of us together that evening to watch scenes from Renaldo and Clara— Billy Burroughs, Barbara Dilley, some of the Vadjra guards. But watching the movie only made me sad. I saw Allen beaming during the scenes he and Dylan were in, but I thought they were making fun of him. He took Dylan so seriously, he loved his music, he thought of it as great poetry. In the movie all the musicians called each other “poet,” as if that were the highest compliment you could make to someone. I, myself, was beginning to wonder. I did, however, like the fact that Dylan had brought his mother on the tour. Some people said that whenever Bob sang “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” Mrs. Zimmerman would stand up and say, “That’s me!” I thought that was incredibly cute. Allen liked it, too. “The mysterious Bob Dylan had a chicken-soup, Yiddishe mama,” Allen told me, “just like us.”
Allen said the most touching and moving experience for him on the whole tour wasn’t in the movie. It was a visit with Dylan to Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. I know Allen was a Buddhist, and most Buddhists are cremated, but Allen dug graves. I don’t mean with a shovel; he liked visiting them. He went to Poe’s grave in Baltimore. He went to Apollinaire’s grave in Père Lachaise in Paris. At Jack’s grave he and Dylan stood and read a section from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, which was the first thing by Kerouac that Bob Dylan had ever read, when he was still a young man in Minnesota.
According to Allen, the poems in Mexico City Blues are really Buddhist poems, in that they’re about the ego as an invisible man that wreaks havoc. You try to catch the ego as it leaves footprints in the snow, but it’s too fast and too tricky. You just have to sit still and be patient, and wear it out. That’s what Allen said I should do.
Allen and Dylan sat down on Kerouac’s grave, and Dylan played Allen’s harmonium, then he played a slow blues tune on the guitar. Allen said he made up a song on the spot about Kerouac as a kind of Horatio figure, his skull peering over the horizon looking back at Allen and this musician in a white hat, the two men sitting on Kerouac’s chest, bothering his heavenly rest. The graveyard was littered with fallen leaves, and Dylan picked up a leaf that had fallen directly onto Kerouac’s grave and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Which one of the Mexico City Blues did Dylan read?” I asked Allen.
He didn’t remember. All he remembered was that he had picked out a poem for Dylan to read, but that Dylan had turned the page back and forth and decided to read the one on the opposite side of the page. Then Allen remembered the one he’d picked out. He went to his bookshelf and opened Mexico City Blues to the poem he had chosen for Dylan and read the lines, “The wheel of the quivering meat conception / Turns in the void.…I wish I was free / of that slaving meat wheel / and safe in heaven, dead.”
There was another poem Allen had especially wanted to hear Dylan read to Kerouac’s soul in heaven, a kind of list poem that names all the sufferings of existence. It ends with Jack kissing his kitten on its stomach, which he likens to “the softness of our reward.”
I was sitting with Allen on the floor of his apartment. The movie had ended and all the other students and Vadjra guards had left. The carpet was gray as the ground in Lowell in winter. It was like being at Kerouac’s grave. It was like being on the Rolling Thunder Revue. For me, sad about being left out of the concert, it was enough.
17. Last Words
The country was cleaning up after its giant birthday party, presided over by Jimmy Carter. There were still crushed cans of Billy Beer in the streets. Allen was gearing up for the first reading of the Jack Kerouac School, and he wanted everything to come off perfectly.
Antler was going to read from his book Last Words; he and Jeff were still carrying “their baby,” as they called the book, still in manuscript form. It wasn’t going to be published for at least a year. It was as if Antler and Jeff had conceived this book during some demented literary honeymoon. I couldn’t believe they talked about it like that. Did William Faulkner talk about As I Lay Dying as if it were a fetus? I doubt it. But Antler did. At least on the days when he talked.
Allen introduced him. The reading took place in the shrine room. The Naropa High Command were all there, turned out because of Allen’s pull with the Buddhist establishment at Naropa. Rinpoche kept everyone waiting for two hours. When he finally showed, he was with Osel Tendzin, his Vadjra regent, the man who would take over the teachings if Rinpoche died or decided to return to Tibet. (Not very likely, I thought.) The Vadjra regent’s real name was Thomas Rich, and he once sold cars in New Jersey before coming to Naropa. A lot of the Buddhist students said he was a great meditator and Rinpoche’s greatest student. He and his wife had just had twin boys, but there was a lot of talk and speculation that Osel Tendzin was gay.
The Jack Kerouac School turned out in force: the teachers— Bill, Anne, Allen, of course—and the second-generation Beats— Michael Brownstein, Larry Fagin, Larry’s wife, Susan Noel (whose name Peter Orlovsky could remember only as Susie Christmas). Peter was there with one of his “ugly girlfriends,” a young woman who was really quite sweet looking, an exceedingly tall and skinny redhead named Denyse King. Also present were about two hundred Naropa students from the various meditative disciplines, from flower arranging to archery
to Buddhist psychology.
The reading finally began. But before Antler could get through even half of Last Words, Gregory decided to live up to his reputation as Wild Man. With Max on his lap, he leaped into that void Allen was always talking about.
“What are you not saying that you’re kind of hinting at?” Gregory yelled at Antler after he’d finished one of his poems. “I mean that was beautiful, but so what? Do you think you have some monopoly on the way people check out of this world? What do you know, you’re just some fag who likes to piss in the river, so you like nature! Well, take a shit in the woods and call it poesy!” Antler turned white as Gregory’s rant became a rave. “Tell me something about life, tell me something about Molotov cocktails! Why don’t you two get married, climb into the most bull-dykey outfits you own, maybe even a suit with pants, drop a cigarette on the floor and say, ‘Oh, shit.”
“Shut up, Gregory, let him read!” Allen tried shouting Corso down. Even Rinpoche stopped fanning himself with his fan so he could listen. This was gonna be good. “You don’t have to have everyone hate you. Do you want to make the worst possible impression?” Allen yelled at Corso.
At that moment, I hate to admit it, I fell in love with Gregory. I thought he was wonderful. I thought he might kill me at almost any moment and not lose any sleep over it, but I loved him anyway. And then Gregory turned on Rinpoche, who was sitting serenely at one end of the room, slowly fanning himself and smiling his half-smile.
“You had a serious thought,” Gregory said to Rinpoche, “but you blew it. Write down all your thoughts for five years and then see if you have any left!” Gregory told the holder of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. “Then go for a hike on the weekends, and maybe you wouldn’t come up with a major philosophy but you’ll need new shoes, and while you’re being fitted for them, you know, while your foot’s in that metal foot with the black heel on it, you just might hit on some philosophical beliefs that could form the basis of a cult, then he [pointing to Antler] could join you and, dig it, you could save us all this bad poetry!”
Gregory was on fire. Even Max was smiling. He knew his father was swinging like Tarzan from tree to tree, and he started to shriek with happiness and run in and out of the rows of students and teachers sitting on the floor. Max flung off his little pants, and Gregory let him run wild and naked in the shrine room.
“Actaeon, hey Actaeon!” Gregory yelled at Antler. “You look upon the divine with a mortal’s eyes!” Gregory kept comparing Antler to Actaeon in the Roman myth—the hunter, a mortal who accidentally stumbles upon Diana bathing in a stream. To punish him for his trespass she flings a handful of water in his face, causing antlers to sprout from his head. Actaeon is not only turned into a stag but the hunter’s own dogs chase him down and kill him. He, apparently, was not worthy of gazing on a Divine.
For Gregory, myths were real; he invoked them and called upon them like an ancient Roman poet. Antler looked furioso; even his beard looked like it was about to catch fire. He looked as if he couldn’t go on. In fact, he couldn’t. He handed his manuscript over to Jeff, who finished the reading.
At the end of the program, Allen announced that there was going to be a party at Jane and Batan Faigo’s house. They were a couple who taught tai chi at Naropa. Jane was short and chubby with a beatific blond face; her husband was from the Philippines, skinny with long hair and a sad face that flashed a gold tooth when he laughed, which was almost anytime he heard Gregory open his mouth. Jane and Batan were Gregory’s guardians at Naropa. I was only his keeper, Allen’s spy in the house of love.
I passed Gregory on the way out of the shrine room. I don’t know if he saw me trying not to smile when he went after Antler, but I think maybe he knew how pleased I was, how weirdly proud of him, even though he was impossibly rude. As I filed out of the room, Gregory winked at me. The Wild Man had let me in on the joke, just a little.
18. The Lineages
Allen was always creating lineages where none really existed. He had an elaborate system of codifying groups of writers, creating circles within circles, like Dante, with the original Beats at the top in a kind of Paradiso. Whenever he was working on his lineages, he reminded me of an obsessed Mormon climbing the branches of his family tree, or a mathematician working out Fermat’s theorem on a cocktail napkin. The covers of phone books and stray pieces of paper beside Allen’s bed were filled with crossed-out names and names reinstated from exile. The New York School, which was really—let’s face it—Frank O’Hara and his friends Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery; the San Francisco Renaissance, which included Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, and Michael McClure; the Black Mountain poets Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Then there were the “mid-American poets”— Allen’s “Wichita vortex poets”—comprising Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett, all of whom had known each other as teenagers in Tulsa.
Allen kept another category he called simply “Women”: Diane di Prima (who had been married at one time to Leroi Jones), Alice Notley (Ted Berrigan’s wife), and Bobbie Louise Hawkins (who had been married to Robert Creeley, the one-eyed poet who would come to the Jack Kerouac School and try to teach me how to drive). It occurred to me that even the women Allen bothered to mention in his lineage were the wives and girlfriends of the men poets he knew.
Then there were other categories, like third world (Miguel Algarin and Miguel Piñero of the Nuyorican café), gay and political poets, the meditation practitioners, and the music poets. One thing nearly every category had in common was that Allen had put himself in each one. He had written out his own name in every category, with the exception of the women’s section. Allen’s name was never crossed out, even in the category of ecological poets. Allen, who threw a temper tantrum when the landlord of the apartment complex had asked us to recycle soda cans. “I can’t separate plastic from aluminum,” Allen had shrieked one afternoon. “I can’t tell the difference, and besides, I have important work to do!”
Ginsberg was always fighting with his ego. After all, hadn’t Allen written once in a poem that he wanted to be the most brilliant man in America? I think he did want that. He also wanted to be rid of his ego. But he craved attention. That’s also why he had come to Naropa, not just to rest his weary, world-wandering bones but to have students and lovers, in order to feed the lineage. “Meat for the synagogue,” he would say. “The best teaching is done in bed,” Allen was always reminding me.
He wanted to make love to his students, seduce them, and be seduced by them, to whisper Shakespeare and Milton to young men who had already fallen for Allen through his poetry. For Allen, the great teacher was Socrates. Allen used Eros to teach Whitman. What better way to receive knowledge than laying your head on the teacher’s belly, like playing a tape to learn a language in your sleep?
At first, Allen’s sexual candor scared me. I wasn’t a prude. I certainly didn’t want to be one. After all, I didn’t want to have to disappoint him. I wanted Allen to love me without taking me to bed. I was starting to think that was impossible.
“Would you like to join in the fun?” Allen asked one night before jumping into the hot tub with Peter, both of them already naked.
“I’m here to protect Burroughs,” I said.
“What from?” Peter asked. “He hasn’t needed anyone’s protection so far.”
“He sure does now,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I was thinking about myself, or maybe because Burroughs always looked so sad to me. People always thought of him as the toughest hombre in literature, the man who saw everything and who sees everything in the future, all of it terrible. I never thought so. I thought Burroughs, Allen, even Corso (liar, poet, thief, and lifelong junkie) all shared a kind of crude tenderness, an almost habitual gentleness. It just wasn’t universal. It was limited to their relations with the people they knew, the people they felt “normal” with. Burroughs, with his sad bony face, looked like someone who you would’ve thought was solely responsible for the atomic bomb.
Allen Ginsberg had a heart as a big as a refrigerator.
Then there was Patrick Chandler, a musician who often accompanied Allen on his reading tours. He was a young, longhaired, skinny kid who had followed Allen to Naropa and who had a beautiful girlfriend with a name like a Dylan song—Ruthie. She looked like a gypsy. I hadn’t been able to put two words together to talk to her. She never wore shoes, like Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa. She and Patrick seemed very much in love. Yet Allen seemed to love Patrick.
One night I walked in on Allen without an appointment. I had screwed up my courage, and I was just going to do what the other poets did without thinking: drop in on Allen for a chat and a cup of tea. The apartment was quiet. I wandered over to the corner of the living room where Allen and Peter kept their meditation shrine. A trail of incense still burned from the shrine, with its red cloth, a zafu (the square, red-and-yellow cushion for sitting practice), and picture of Rinpoche in a tiny gold frame. A woman’s cry came from upstairs.
I thought someone was in trouble.
There seemed always to be people I didn’t know in Allen and Peter’s apartment, people they didn’t know, either. I ran upstairs. Ruthie, Patrick, and Allen, naked as the truth, were rolling around on Allen’s bed, with Allen being kissed and fondled by them both. I stood there, like Gregory Corso staring out of his Twelfth Street apartment so many years ago, on the Lower East Side. I was transfixed by the sight of Allen in bed with a woman, and Patrick in bed with Allen. I thought Patrick was straight, and I thought Allen was queer, but Eros had turned everything on its head.
The two of them were biting Allen’s nipples like he was a gift from the Chinese—a giant panda in the National Zoo. What would I say to them the next time I saw them at the Naropa school? Did they know I had seen them all together? Maybe I was just being a hopeless square. My thinking was foggy, my mind not quite right, as I crept out of the threshold of Allen’s bedroom. Peter was waiting to catch me at the foot of the stairs.
