by Sam Kashner
Peter could tell I was distraught. He sat me down and patiently explained to me how Patrick and Ruthie and Allen had been going to bed with each other for years. I asked Peter if Allen’s affairs ever made him jealous. Peter said he wasn’t jealous and that he liked to have sex with Ruthie and Patrick, too, but that lately he just wanted to have sex with girls. He said again that he would like to have a family.
“I like ugly girls,” Peter said. “I prefer to make love to ugly girls, because they treat you nice and they don’t leave you. The sex is better because they are so grateful.”
I wondered if Peter worried about what people would think, especially girls, about his philosophy. Peter said that homely girls made the best mothers. He asked if I was still upset at seeing Allen with Patrick and his girlfriend, and then he laughed. (Peter’s laugh sounded like he was clearing his throat; it was more like the imitation of a laugh.) I pretended to Peter that I wasn’t scared, or confused, or bothered at all by what I had seen.
I had come to Naropa ready to learn about Blake, to listen to Allen talk about the four Zoas—Blake’s four principles of human nature: reason, feeling, imagination, and, of course, the body. But I wasn’t prepared for the final Zoa—to see Allen in bed with his guitarist and his guitarist’s girlfriend. But why not? I hated my own prudery. I hid it from the Beats. I vowed to conquer my shyness if it killed me.
Later, much later, after I had been at the Jack Kerouac School for more than a year, I was introduced to Allen’s psychiatrist, a handsome, middle-aged Italian woman. The two of us walked to the old cowboy hotel, the grand-looking Boulderado, and we sat on the veranda looking out at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She ordered a gin and tonic and I sipped a scotch and soda. I had never had scotch, but I ordered it because it was the only drink I knew because my uncles were scotch drinkers, so my mother always had J& B in the house for their visits.
I told her about what I had seen that night in Allen’s bedroom, and about Peter’s desire to be with a woman and to have children. In her thick Italian accent, she said that she thought the books would always get it wrong. She believed that Allen Ginsberg was essentially a straight man, but that he was in love with the idea of being Walt Whitman, in love with the idea of being the holder of a lineage. Without children, she explained, this is how Allen passed down the tradition of Whitman. She thought that Allen wasn’t sexually incompatible with women and that he did have sexual involvements and crushes on women. Anne Waldman was his latest infatuation.
“For Allen,” she said, “homosexuality is an incendiary device, a Molotov cocktail to throw into the windows of polite society. The real homosexual of the group,” she added, “was Jack Kerouac.”
Jack Kerouac? The he-man football hero from the hardscrabble shoe town of Lowell? Kerouac, with his ruggedly handsome, leading-man good looks, was the truly gay one among the Beats? Allen’s psychiatrist said that Kerouac suffered from the fear that coming out as a gay man would crush his mother; he also thought that it was simply unmanly to be queer. No wonder Kerouac drank and looked so miserable in that photograph Allen had taken of him during Kerouac’s last visit to Allen and Peter’s apartment, five years before the end of his life.
Once when Allen was developing some of his photographs, I stood by his side in the small darkroom in the basement of the apartment complex. I watched as two of the many photographs that Allen had taken of Jack began to appear in their chemical baths. Side by side, in two separate trays, two images began to appear of Jack, just seven years apart. They looked like two different people, and in some sense they were. The earlier photograph, taken against Burroughs’s garden wall in Tangier in 1957, just after On the Road was published, showed a cautious, handsome man wearing a newsboy’s cap, a plaid lumberjack shirt open at the neck, with the glimpse of a T-shirt underneath. It must have been chilly in the garden of Burroughs’s villa. Kerouac looks alert, smart, somewhat suspicious, but independent and ready for whatever the world will throw at him.
Right next to that image, under the red light of the darkroom, the second picture came into focus. This one was taken in Allen’s East Fifth Street apartment on the Lower East Side in 1964. Kerouac sits in a chair next to his packed bags, holding his head in his right hand. He’s wearing big, heavy dress shoes and a bulky checked sports coat that looks as if his mother had picked it out for him. But it’s his face that haunts me—the face of a broken, heavy man waiting at a bus station who has made too many wrong decisions. He’s scowling, lost in some sad, deep memory. Allen wrote, “The thing about this picture is how much Kerouac had begun to look like his late father, a kind of W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror.”
I remember Peter telling me that he and Allen had given Jack a “blow job, as a going-away present” the last time they saw him, but Jack had just sat there without enjoyment, scowling and bored as the two men huddled together between his legs. It was simply too late for pleasure, too late for anything to make Kerouac happy.
Jack Kerouac never made it to the Jack Kerouac School. I was starting to think he would’ve hated it, but he might have at least liked the mountains of Boulder. Allen said once that Kerouac had wanted a quiet old age, a kind of hermitage in the woods where he could write his books. Because Kerouac was so important to Allen, he was the invisible dean of Naropa.
On the Road had brought me here, even though I didn’t drive or even have a license. But I wanted to be Jack’s passenger. I thought the trip was still on. For Kerouac, Neal Cassady’s death in 1968 in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, never really happened. Everyone said that Jack kept expecting Neal to come back—or at least to call him. It was dawning on me that, in the same way, that’s how Jack existed for Allen. He wasn’t really dead. How could he be? Perhaps that’s why the name of the school made so much sense to Allen, even though he always seemed to be a little embarrassed about it.
I didn’t know then that Kerouac had moved in with his mother and had died in Florida, a place he loathed. I didn’t know he hated hippies and was proud of our troops in Vietnam. To honor Kerouac, I thought, I should probably have joined the army! I learned later that Jack was put out when someone had suggested that On the Road had helped give birth to the hippies. Boulder was certainly full of them now, their ponchos filling the parks on weekends, like one enormous, scratchy Mexican blanket that just made me sneeze.
And it was Kerouac’s books that had turned Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Gary Snyder—and so many others—into myth. Kerouac had intended On the Road to be one long, shambling book of his life, with the same characters running through all of the books. It was the “maiden aunties” again—the editors and legal departments—who had made him change all the names from book to book. But it didn’t matter; I knew them all. By coming to Boulder and entering the Jack Kerouac School, I wouldn’t be taught just by Allen Ginsberg, but by Leon Levinsky of The Town and the City, Irwin Garden from Vanity of Duluoz, Alva Goldbook of The Dharma Bums, Carlo Marx from On the Road, and Adam Moorad from The Subterraneans. And it wasn’t just William Burroughs crying over Jack London that I had witnessed, it was Old Bull Lee from On the Road, and Bull Hubbard from Desolation Angels. It wasn’t merely Gregory Corso reciting Gilgamesh, but Yuri Gligoric in The Subterraneans, and Raphael Urso, one of the Desolation Angels. They were all here with me now, at the Jack Kerouac School— not disembodied, nor merely ashes, like Neal. The film of death no longer obscuring my eyes, I could see their genius flashing wildly before me and even hear sweet singing above what Allen liked to call “the ingrate world.”
19. A Junkie’s Gift
Billy Burroughs didn’t look so good. I’d been at the Jack Kerouac School for only a couple of weeks before he started looking like a ghost. No one stopped him from drinking. Encouraged by the Westies (who liked it when he drank because he was funny and talkative) and treated invisibly by his father, Billy seemed to be disappearing even more deeply into alcoholism. He loved alcohol the way his father loved heroin.
Allen and Anne though
t it best that Billy move into a rooming house run by students of Rinpoche’s, people Allen described as sane and compassionate, who could keep an eye on Billy. Of course, the Buddhists in the house had no interest in him at all; they considered him an undesirable alien. He was too antisocial for them, too unsavory. They liked dressing up like Rinpoche and cultivating at least the appearance of wealth and success, whereas Billy wore his poverty like a badge of honor.
The smell of alcohol filled the third floor of the Naropa building where Billy lived. When he felt like eating, he ate candy bars, or food with curry—tuna fish, scrambled eggs—whatever it was it had to be doused in curry powder, the kind that made your eyes tear. Poor Billy always complained about his hemorrhoids. He said it was the one thing he had inherited from his father. “My father never had a completely functioning asshole,” Billy said. “The toilet bowl was always full of blood.”
Billy had written some wickedly funny books. Anne Waldman said his novel Kentucky Ham had become a classic. Billy loved satire. Sometimes he liked to read Jonathan Swift to me over his breakfast cereal (Lucky Charms was the only cereal he could eat because his teeth weren’t very strong and the marshmallows were easy to chew.) I don’t think Billy was even thirty years old when I met him.
Allen asked me to drop in on Billy from time to time and report back to him. He would then let Burroughs know how his son was doing. I never understood why Burroughs couldn’t just walk over there himself, or call him up on the phone.
I liked Billy. I didn’t like the fact that he seemed so unhappy all the time; with his aging Dennis the Menace face, he seemed to be on the verge of killing Mr. Wilson, or at least poisoning his dog. He liked taking me to a workingman’s bar on the outskirts of Boulder, where women danced down a runway and took off their clothes. I had never been in such a place before. Billy almost never looked at the girls. He would order a double shot and lean his elbows on the counter. A lot of college students came to this bar, sat in booths, and idly drank their beers, staring at the sports on TV or covertly watching the girls at the edge of the runway. Billy seemed more comfortable here than with Allen’s crowd or with his father’s friends. I thought perhaps Billy felt the way I did about my parents’ friends, about not wanting to socialize with them, thinking they were all stiffs who had terrible taste in everything—clothes, music, their politics beyond the pale. It was hard to believe anyone could think that about Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, but if you grew up around them, if your father’s work was writing Naked Lunch, then maybe the Beats were just a bunch of old beatniks to Billy.
“You know what Lenny Bruce once said?” Billy asked me one night at his favorite bar. “There’s nothing worse than an aging hipster.” Billy then asked me if I liked his father, or if I thought his father was mean. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered why these two men seemed so locked away from each other. I couldn’t tell if it was William, as Anne liked to call him, who didn’t know how to give as a father, or if it was Billy who simply refused his love. I couldn’t imagine William Burroughs telling his son he loved him. I thought of love as a country that William Burroughs knew nothing about. I hoped I was wrong.
Billy was getting drunk again, which was the only way he could handle the great livid scar of his life. Suddenly, he grabbed me by the arm.
“How can I believe you like me?” he demanded. “How can I believe you like somebody you know nothing about? You don’t know anything about me! You don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know what life is like for me. If it wasn’t for us barbarians, the world would have no art, no beauty.”
Billy was working himself up into a rant. He said, “I don’t care about art, and I don’t like beauty.” He was perspiring and breathing pretty hard by now, and I thought he might pass out. I was worried; I couldn’t drive him home. He was trembling. I felt sorry for him. I thought about my own father, how sometimes in the car, on long trips up to the Catskills to visit my grandmother, I would dare myself to say, “I love you,” just so I could figure out if he would answer me.
“No one is what he seems on the surface!” Billy shouted. “We all come from deep springs.”
I thought about how he came from a very deep spring— William Burroughs seemed unfathomable to me—and how Billy’s father was a kind of ghost haunting his son’s life.
“My father offered to give me a kidney, if I needed it,” Billy said bitterly. “He was excited about giving it to me. A junkie’s kidney. What a gift.”
20. “Who’s Minerva?”
By my fourth month at Naropa—it was now September—I realized I had to stop calling my parents. It didn’t help to be this lonesome and hear their voices.
One afternoon in Gregory’s apartment, at work on what would become Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit, the book of poems Gregory had taken money from a publisher to write, I would sneak upstairs and use his phone to call Long Island. A bit of larceny was creeping into my soul the longer I hung around Corso. Life around Gregory was like that musical I had tried out for in seventh grade, “Oliver!,” with Gregory Corso as the Artful Dodger teaching us our trade. In fact, Billy’s and Gregory’s Westies, the pale-faced gang of Irish amphetamine kids, often brought things they’d lifted back from Denver, their pockets filled with watches, spoons, gold chains; they’d dump them on the kitchen counter and Gregory would send me upstairs to work while he sifted through them.
The only people at Naropa I seemed to know at all were waiters, as I ate out for every meal, and the core faculty of the Jack Kerouac School. The other poetry students were just beginning to drift in. I supposed that the start of the fall term would bring the lemmings out to Boulder to sit at Allen’s feet. They weren’t even here yet and I was already jealous of sharing the Jack Kerouac School with any other students. On the other hand, I was starved for some co-respondents, some comradeship, someone to read my poems to, someone who wouldn’t laugh at me, someone I could woo with the constellations of the stars—in short, a girlfriend.
Gregory caught me on the phone with my mother.
I had sneaked upstairs to make a long-distance call while he was supposedly working. My father always asked the same thing whenever I called: “Is the school accredited yet?”
“Well, not since the last time we spoke,” I said, “which was Sunday. But they are preparing for a committee of people to walk through the school for a few days next month.” It was true. Naropa would somehow have to get itself together and look like a real school for at least a week. It was going to be hard. Gregory would have to be on his best behavior. Burroughs would have to take the cure again, and not start talking about a Martian invasion of the Midwest. And Allen and Peter would have to live like two maiden aunts in a parsonage. And I was going to be their model student, appearing in class every day with a bunch of extras we picked up on the street to act as students. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But it was going to be close.
Gregory suddenly busted into the bedroom and caught me red-handed.
“Don’t be such a pussy. Stop calling your parents every day!” Gregory shouted, and then he grabbed the phone out of my hand.
“What’s your mother’s name?” Gregory asked me, putting the phone to his curly-headed ear.
“Marion,” I said, trembling with embarrassment.
“Minerva,” Gregory shouted into the phone. “We have your son, it’ll cost you ten thousand dollars to get him back. You can get it—you, who invented the bridle, you carry the thunderbolt in your pocketbook, get…what’s your father’s name?”
“Seymour,” I practically whimpered into the carpet. “Seymour Kashner.”
“Great name,” Gregory said.
I perked up. I was always shy about my father’s name, it was so old-fashioned and made him sound like a wimp, or an egghead, when in fact he was neither. An older father (he was thirty-five when I was born, his first child), he had even boxed for a while during the Depression. Gregory seemed to sanctify his name for me, even though he was coming in for the ki
ll.
“…get the king of Sidon to pay a king’s ransom for this kid. The kid’s excited about his new life, although he refuses everything: he refused our hashish…”
“Not true!” I sprang to my feet and tried to wedge myself between Gregory and the phone. “Not true!” What was I saying? I meant that what Gregory was saying wasn’t true.
“And he refuses our opium, our kif…”
“No, no, don’t listen to him,” I yelled into the phone, sounding far crazier at that moment than Gregory himself.
“He even refuses our camel juice. Refuses camel juice, just imagine! And what’s wrong with this kid, he refuses to get fucked!”
Oh, no. He didn’t say that, did he? I might as well be on drugs after all. And to think that I had bragged about Gregory when my mother asked about my “professors.” My poor parents. And here I was, the first in my family even to go to college. “All right, I’m sorry,” Gregory said into the phone. “He’s shy. It’s not your fault. Maybe he’s just having a hard time,” Gregory told my mother, “staying off the junk.” Gregory was laughing now, very pleased with himself. “Those first few weeks sans junk, Minerva, they’re very hard. He’s holding up beautifully,” Gregory reassured her. “He’ll be interested in girls after that,” he said. “Good to talk to you, too, Minerva. Did you build a little Parthenon for Shmuel when he was a boy? Penguin dust!” Gregory spritzed into the phone.
“Here,” Gregory said, letting the phone drop into my lap, “she wants to talk to you.”
I thought I had lost the power of speech. I was going to be the youngest patient at the Rusk Institute. Gregory Corso would be written on my chart as the cause of my debilitating stroke.
