When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  “Who’s Minerva?” my mother asked.

  I waited for Gregory, a little too delighted with himself, to leave. He went downstairs where I could hear him recounting the phone call to a room full of people. (Oh, please don’t let one of them be Allen or Burroughs, I prayed silently.)

  “Who’s Minerva?” my mother asked again.

  “She’s a goddess,” I said. “Zeus’s daughter; she sprang from his head.”

  “A goddess! What a sweet thing to say, he sounds very nice,” my mother, Minerva, said. “It’s cute how they want money for you.”

  “What did you say to him?” I asked.

  My father, who was on the other line in his downstairs office, said he told Gregory it was like “The Ransom of Red Chief,” the O. Henry story where the boy is kidnapped, but he’s such a terror that the parents make demands of the kidnappers before they’ll even consider taking him back.

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, worried I might have to spend the rest of my life here.

  “Are you eating?” Marion asked.

  “Is he eating!” my father said. “Have you seen my Diner’s Club bill for May and June?”

  “Well, he has to eat,” Marion said.

  Suddenly, the two of them were having an argument over the telephone about me, without talking to me, over the two extensions in their house. Then I remembered why I had come to the Jack Kerouac School in the first place. And to think that Kerouac went home to live with his mother—after all those years on the road!

  “Thank you for keeping us posted,” my father, the king of Sidon, said. “And give Allen Ginsberg our love.”

  “We love you, you’re our favorite poet,” my mother said. How close embarrassment is to tears, I thought, and hung up the phone.

  Downstairs, Gregory, baby Max, and some of his friends were all waiting for me—all sucking their thumbs. Max was the only one not making fun of me. I vowed never to call my parents from Gregory’s again. Not ever.

  21. Shopping with Corso

  It was hard for Gregory to make friends. In prison, it had been really hard. He said poets make natural friends, “so how come we’re not friends?” he asked me one day when we had decided to go shopping for new clothes. The air had turned crisper and there was that faint, exciting feeling that the season was about to change. We both wanted to be outdoors.

  “Because of my job, because Allen wants me to chain you to this rock,” I said, patting the chair and the desk where Gregory’s poems were scattered like a bad still life among old donut bags and mugs of coffee and very rumpled Penguin paperbacks. They looked like English editions of poems: Gilgamesh, Chatterton, Rimbaud. (Anne was always comparing Gregory, when young, to Rimbaud. Allen did the same thing; he said we know what Rimbaud would have looked like if he’d kept writing poetry.)

  Gregory didn’t spend as much time with Allen and Burroughs and the other writers. He always drifted away. He liked to go off on his own. He said that it had taken him a while to become friends with Burroughs and Allen. He said that Kerouac once described him in a book as a “mooch”—“and that’s just because I once asked him for a couple of bucks.” Allen told me that if I wanted to know what Neal Cassady was like, I should get to know Gregory. He said they had a lot of things in common. They were both raised in a string of foster homes and they both became petty criminals, although Gregory wasn’t a very effective street thief, Allen said, “but he tried.” Like Neal, he had fallen in love with Stendhal and Dostoyevsky.

  Gregory’s clothes were a wonder to me. He always went to vintage clothing stores to buy his wardrobe. So on a brilliant azure day, just after classes had started, we left his apartment and headed to the VFW Thrift on Pearl Street.

  We browsed around the tired bins of used clothing, in a vast room that smelled like my parents’ basement after it had flooded. I managed to find a nice-looking Hathaway shirt and held it up for Gregory, but he just stuck out his tongue like he was throwing up. He then picked up a discarded postman’s shirt with a U.S. Postal Service patch on the sleeve and tried it on over the shirt he was wearing. Eureka.

  Next Gregory picked up a stovepipe hat that collapsed into a pancake; when you banged the rim it popped up again. Having exhausted his cash for the day, he asked me to buy the shirt and the stovepipe hat for him. Then he looked for the blue shorts that he said should’ve come with the postal worker’s outfit. He found it buried beneath a monstrous ball of socks. Gregory asked me to buy that for him, too. I told him I would, but he must have noticed some hesitation on my part, because he immediately said that the whole ball game wasn’t about money, it was about generosity.

  “I want you to separate from your parents,” he said, “and the best way to do that is for me to separate you from their money.” He was really becoming Yuri Gligoric from The Subterraneans, making up the laws of the world as he went along.

  After buying Gregory his clothes, he walked out of the store with a pretty little dress he had found for Calliope, rolled up inside one of the legs of the postal clerk’s shorts. The dress was only $4.75 but I guess Gregory wanted to stay in practice. Afterward, I took him to lunch.

  We waited on line at a health food store called Workingman’s Dead. It was run by fans of the Grateful Dead, and the album Workingman’s Dead was always playing on the record player. I had brought William Burroughs here the day before. Burroughs had stood on line for about a minute, looking over the sandwiches being prepared for customers holding their plastic trays. Burroughs said he couldn’t possibly eat any of the food.

  “I hate sprouts,” he snarled. “They put them on everything they serve. Eating sprouts is like going down on a robot.” We had to depart the premises “lest our health be seriously compromised,” he insisted. “This food cannot possibly be good for anyone who has experienced a real meal. There is clearly a conflict of interest here between politics and taste. And, besides,” Burroughs groused, his gravelly voice rising over the music, “it makes you shit, and hell already exists in my asshole.” I figured that was a reference to the family hemorrhoids that Billy had mentioned. “We should scram, Salmonella Sam,” Burroughs said. I held the door open for him.

  Gregory, on the other hand, wasn’t all that bothered by the food—beans and rice, tuna salad nestled on a vast aluminum tray, cooled off by an electric fan.

  Gregory and I sat down with our trays. I looked over at his Mexican plate special, which he was hungrily tearing into, hunched over his tray as if someone might snatch it away from him.

  “How’s your food, Gregory?” I asked.

  “‘How’s your food, Gregory?’” he repeated back to me, mimicking my concern. “How’s yours?” he shouted. “Just let me eat.”

  I sat there not saying anything. I must’ve looked a little wounded. I still wasn’t used to the idea that frankness was the fashion among the Beats. It was usually the preface for saying something rude.

  I decided a frontal attack was best called for. “What do you really think of me? Down deep, I mean?” I asked Gregory. He looked up at me, rice sticking to his stubble of beard.

  “People who aren’t frank with each other have something to hide,” Gregory said. “In limited quantities I’m very fond of you,” he said. “In fact, you’re one of my nearest and dearest friends here, and I don’t make friends that easily.”

  I didn’t believe him. I knew him to be a liar who also spoke the truth. Besides, he had already hurt my feelings.

  Seeing my unhappiness, Gregory offered to tell me about “the pushcart incident.” He thought that telling me a story—something I had already read about in The Subterraneans— would make everything better.

  “Shmuel,” he began, “I was in a bar named Fugazi’s, back in New York, with Jack Kerouac. We left the bar and walked through Washington Square Park. That’s when I saw this pushcart. ‘Get in,’ I told Jack, ‘and I’ll push you to Ginsberg’s place.’”

  So Kerouac and two girls they were with got in the pushcart, a
nd Gregory pushed them through the park.

  “They were looking up at the stars from this pushcart,” Gregory reminisced, a strange light coming into his eyes. “I was pushing this thing so beautifully! Then I stopped in front of Allen’s place. But that wasn’t cool, because the landlord noticed the pushcart, and Allen’s place is supposed to be safe, no den of thieves. The landlord didn’t approve of the pushcart in front of the house, so he involves Ginzy, who had already thrown the apartment key down to Jack.” That was the only way to get into Allen’s New York apartment—whoever was in had to throw the key out the window because there wasn’t a working buzzer or intercom. “So Ginzy and Jack have a little fight about it, and then Jack throws the apartment key back at Allen. So now Allen is mad at us, mad at me.

  “‘You’ve compromised the security of my home,’ he yells at me from his third-floor window. Allen threw this hissy fit, and on top of that, he has this compassion for the poor shmuck who had his pushcart stolen!

  “‘No, Allen,’ I had to explain to him. ‘No, you don’t understand. You don’t know the street. Have no worry for this poor bum. The many bums with their pushcarts, they dispose of them at the end of long bum days. The mafia really gobbles up the pushcarts for scrap.’

  “We had a beautiful time in that pushcart,” Gregory continued, lost in the memory of it, “and the pushcart had the best time that a pushcart ever had! These two friends, Jack and Allen, are fighting, and I’m thinking, ‘Uh-oh, I fucked up again. I’m always doing something stupid and causing old friends’ arguments.’ I’m a pain in the ass, but in a nice way. It’s in Kerouac’s book, but all changed around.”

  After lunch I followed Gregory down the narrow stairwell and out into the blinding sunshine on Pearl Street. “I’ll drive you home in a bicycle basket,” he said, still trying to make up for having hurt my feelings.

  Gregory ran across the street to where a lot of student bikes were parked. He picked one out, a girl’s bicycle. “Get on,” he said.

  I held his new old clothes in a bag clutched to my chest while I climbed up on the handlebars; Gregory rode up the killer hill on this stolen girl’s bike. I didn’t think we were going to make it up the hill; I didn’t think Gregory had the strength. The bike sputtered. We fell off the bike and spilled onto the grass.

  “She’ll look for it and find it here,” Gregory said. “Maybe she’ll come to us asking about it, and she will be beautiful and wonderful and become the mother of your bicycle children.” And then he was off, leaving me to prop up the bike against a city hall statue of Lewis, without Clark, looking out over the horizon.

  22. Beat Faculty Meeting

  Anne came back from Denver two days later—in white face. She wore a turban and her face was frozen behind a mask of plaster. It was hard for her to speak. She told Allen on the way upstairs to meet Burroughs and Corso for a Kerouac School faculty meeting that Dylan had made up her face to look like his, and that all the women in the Rolling Thunder Revue took to wearing these commedia dell’arte masks, onstage and off.

  I accompanied Allen to the faculty meeting. At first there was some debate as to whether or not I should be present when my teachers set school policy, being that I was a student and not just Allen’s assistant. But Allen argued that my presence would save a lot of bother—notices wouldn’t have to go out, I would be there when decisions were made, I’d be taking the minutes of the meeting. So I stayed.

  At the beginning of the meeting, Peter announced that he had gone for thirty straight days without masturbating; he told the faculty that this was a record for him. Rinpoche had told him that it wasn’t a good idea, although there was a perfectly reasonable Buddhist explanation for abstaining, Peter said, but he couldn’t remember it.

  Anne reclined on the couch in the faculty lounge and looked like Sarah Bernhardt under her turban and béchamel-colored facial mask. She wondered out loud where the other students were. “Where are my girls?” she moaned.

  “They’re coming,” Allen said, and everyone laughed.

  I scribbled a handful of notes in my terrible penmanship. Someone was going to have to read this, I thought, so I tried to write everything out in capital letters. When Anne asked me to read something back, I couldn’t make out my own handwriting. All of a sudden, Peter asked Anne if Bob Dylan had a clean asshole.

  “Does he keep his asshole clean?” Peter asked, in that deep voice and the same grave tone he used for everything, even when asking me if I wanted chocolate syrup in my milk (the same drink with which he would greet me every time I saw him for a year, because I had asked for it the first time we met. And I always felt I had to drink it; eventually I found a way of feeding it to one of Gregory’s cats).

  Anne pretended to be a little put out with Peter. Anne loved the Beats more than anyone. She forgave them everything. She said they were a national treasure. I always agreed with her, even as I started to have questions about some of the things they did, even after some of the younger poets, like Michael Brownstein and Dick Gallup, rolled their eyes when Allen made some impossible demand or had a temper tantrum, like the time the poet Phil Whalen’s plane was late coming in from San Francisco and no one would be there to meet him.

  Whalen was one of Allen’s gods. Like Burroughs, he was quiet and extremely well read. He could quote reams of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and he read Euclid and Scientific American for fun. Whalen was the great bear holding down the West Coast end of the Beat tablecloth. He, like Allen, had become entranced with Buddhism, but Whalen was an industrial-strength Buddhist; he would sit in a meditation posture for days. Once, a chiropractor had to pry Whalen out of the lotus position because he had lost all feeling in his legs and back.

  I had always assumed Whalen was gay. Shortly after classes began, Allen had announced that Whalen would be at Naropa in a few days and that he had just gotten married. The only problem was that on his honeymoon, Allen said, Whalen announced to his wife that he had just become a Buddhist monk and that he was moving into a monastery.

  Mrs. Whalen had already been on the phone to Allen, hysterical that her husband was about to shave his head and take on the maroon-colored robes of a Buddhist monk. “He even has a new name,” she wailed to Allen. “I don’t even know what it is! I couldn’t reach him on the phone if I had to! What if there’s an emergency?” It seemed to me, although I didn’t say anything, that Mrs. Whalen already had an emergency on her hands.

  I remember that Allen had told her to calm down, that he would discuss the situation with Trungpa. “Who knows, maybe Phil’s orders will let you two live together at the zen center,” Allen explained. Allen, who was often hysterical himself, was always in the position of smoothing ruffled feathers and talking his friends down from ledges, figurative and architectural. Allen’s friends were always threatening to finish themselves off—they would quote Antonin Artaud about the artist suicided by society. They were always flying off the handle about it. Not Burroughs, though. Bill thought it was bad manners to complain about society. Stoicism was a vestige of his patrician upbringing.

  “You don’t complain,” Burroughs said. “You don’t fight city hall, you just approach it on all fours, lift your leg, and pee on it. And when in doubt, book passage on a transatlantic ocean liner.”

  I thought Bill’s family had probably taught him that.

  Allen and Gregory always consulted Burroughs; he was their father confessor and their therapist. He had the gravitas of a small- town undertaker. They brought their problems to him. Everyone seemed to, except for Billy Jr. He kept his troubles to himself. His father was never any help anyway.

  At the faculty meeting, Anne refused to answer Peter’s question.

  “For the record,” Anne said, “I never saw his asshole, Peter, and I wouldn’t tell you if I had.” Peter seemed satisfied with Anne’s answer. I wasn’t.

  “Is asshole one word?” I piped up.

  “No, not technically,” Burroughs said, “it’s hyphenated. Unless you want to break its hyphen.
”

  Anne tried to laugh through her mask, but her white skin paint looked painful; it was starting to flake, tiny pieces falling to the floor. When she laughed, she reminded me of Mr. Sardonicus, the guy in the horror movie whose face is frozen into a hideous, death’s-head grin.

  I was dying to know if Anne had gone to bed with Bob Dylan. She had been gone for two whole days, but she said she was away writing a long poem about the tour and about Dylan as a kind of Provençal troubadour. Well, the troubadours were always climbing walls and vines and throwing themselves out of undeserved beds.

  Anne went to the bathroom to try and take off her makeup. She said it had been on for days, but that no one wanted to insult Dylan by taking it off. She said that he kept his on for a long time.

  Later, at Gregory’s, I asked Calliope about Anne’s visit to Denver to see Dylan.

  “Oh, she’s had flings with him before,” Calliope said. “He’s really a skinny little guy, but he’s a fucking genius, a great poet, so who cares?”

  I could’ve kissed her. I felt a lot better. I knew some people liked my poetry; I didn’t hear a lot about my appearance. I didn’t know how it stacked up. If a sexy woman like Calliope thought Dylan’s poem-songs were a turn-on, then there was hope for me. So far, only Allen had commented on how well I looked in my blue jeans. I remembered being flattered by it. That was a compliment, wasn’t it? I thought, whoever admires you, that’s who you fall in love with. But I wished it had been Calliope.

  Calliope told me that Anne accepted the fact that Dylan had a lot of women. “You just don’t let yourself fall in love with him. You might never see him again. Anne was able to handle this, because she was practicing the idea of nonattachment.”

  When Anne came back from the bathroom after removing her white mask, she looked beautiful, but there were circles under her eyes. She looked like she’d been up for a long time. She looked sad to me.