by Sam Kashner
The city meant something to Allen, too. Denver was in his poems as a place folded deep inside America where he had had his own satori—his flash of enlightenment, his glimpses of “ordinary mind,” as he liked to put it. It was in Denver where he first saw himself as part of a lineage—a patrimony of poets—someone who should be committed to the welfare of the world by tending to his own sanity.
“In Denver,” Allen said as we moved closer toward the skyline of the city, “I saw the inevitable beauty of doom, that Fate tells big lies. It’s where I leaned against a brick building as if it were a Mayan temple and realized that we are phantoms, and that friendship fades.”
I thought Allen was luckier than most. Even if friendship fades, he still had many of his friends. Gregory might be missing his teeth, but he was still here; Burroughs needed a cane but he looked pretty good for a guy who needed heroin to live. And Peter seemed strong as a horse. Allen was smiling, happy just to be with his friends in a car—not the famous Green Automobile that was Cassady’s chariot but a town car (the Beats had status now) with a torn-up floor.
In one of Ginsberg’s poems about Neal Cassady that Allen had handed over to me to finish when I first arrived at the Jack Kerouac School, he had written about how he could talk to Neal forever; that it was somehow more than conversation, it was a discoursing of spirits.
I didn’t feel that, but I was grateful to be in their company, though I was no longer sure why. I couldn’t enjoy it the way I would have with my own friends, but it was as if I had willed myself into their story, even though there really was no place for me as originally written.
As we approached the city limits, I could tell everyone’s mind was wandering. Allen took out a piece of paper with directions on it. Peter made all the turns. Billy asked if we could stop at Duffy’s, a bar he really liked in the city. Gregory said he had hemorrhoids and wondered if that could be taken care of while we were there. “There’s blood in the toilet bowl every time I sit down,” he complained, sounding like Burroughs. “It’s like I’m menstruating. Can the surgeon do something for that, Ginzy? If it’s expensive, can Sammy pay for it with that Diner’s Club card of his?”
“Do psychic surgeons take Diner’s Club?” Peter asked, suddenly interested.
“I’ll write a check for everyone,” Allen said. “Maybe he can help my Bell’s palsy. Maybe you’ve found the fountain of life, Bill! Phat, Phat, Phat, Svha…” Allen chanted as Peter nudged the giant town car into a too small parking space in a drugstore parking lot in downtown Denver. The six of us climbed stiffly out of the car.
“I remember this drugstore—it has a soda fountain,” Burroughs said. “I bought my first vial of paregoric there. Paregoric is rather yummy. No one admits it, though.”
“It’s like the Wizard of Oz!” Gregory said suddenly. “We’re going to see the wizard! Come along, Dorothy.” Gregory grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the curb.
A shingle swung from a rusty iron bar next to the drugstore, like a sign above an old tavern. Dr. Shringwaym A. Surgeon.
“This oughta learn you to stay away from them hoors,” Bill said, as he escorted his son inside Dr. Shringwaym’s office.
“Dig it,” Gregory said, “there’s danger here. The ball game with these places is that they take your money and give you chicken livers they hide up their sleeve. It’s a magic ritual, Bill. These guys don’t operate on you—they don’t know how to open a letter!”
We entered the building.
There was a weird vibrating in the doctor’s office, and for a second I thought it was an earthquake, but then I realized there was some construction going on outside. The doctor’s assistant, a middle-aged woman, came out from behind a glass partition, explaining that they’re building a new approach to the highway and told us not to be alarmed, that they were just dynamiting the road. She said it had ruined their business, that no one walks in off the street anymore.
The assistant walked over to Billy, probably because he looked the sickest, and escorted him into the doctor’s office. Allen offered to go with him, but Billy said he’d rather go himself. If he was scared, he didn’t show it; he shrugged and said this reminded him of a massage parlor in the Philippines he’d gone to once.
Dr. Shringwaym suddenly appeared. He was a giant. He had a dark face and wore wire-frame glasses and a green lab coat, with a black T-shirt underneath. As he strode into the waiting room, he looked like he had a sense of who the posse of friends waiting for Billy were, as if they were some kind of visiting royalty in disguise.
The doctor told Burroughs that he’d have his son back in about a half hour. Gregory asked to use the phone, then called Calliope, and they made some kind of arrangement. We sat in the waiting room, Allen reading a U.S. News & World Report and Burroughs resting on his cane, watching the goldfish in a bowl on the window sill. I just kept shuffling magazines, too nervous to make small talk with anyone. No one could tell what was going on in those other rooms. A few assistants shuffled in and out, wearing slippers and hair nets. I leaned over and told Allen that no good could come of this. He agreed and gently told the receptionist that he’d like to see Billy Jr. All of a sudden we can hear Billy screaming.
The doctor came back and told Allen that Billy was not cooperating, and that without help he will not live.
It didn’t occur to anyone to call the hospital.
Billy came out looking like death. His lips were white and he was shaking and bleeding from his nose. Dr. Shringwaym said he didn’t have the chance to remove the growths, which are the cause of Billy’s problem. Billy, still shaking, announced that he wanted to leave—he wanted to go to Duffy’s and get “transported.”
“I feel incredible evil in this place,” Burroughs said as he rose from his chair.
“I would have Lionel Trilling operate on me before I’d let that Arab touch me,” Gregory said.
We left, and Billy limped toward the car.
Wasn’t it in Denver where Allen had had his vision, his cosmic flash in the pan, about how we’re all phantoms talking to phantoms, a skull on a pillow? Is that why we were driving toward an Irish bar in the Denver darkness, some of the dust from the dynamited road in Gregory’s hair and on Allen’s beard?
I was glad to see those specks of dust. If we didn’t exist, we wouldn’t look like dusty, terra-cotta statues driving around in the dusk.
27. Gregory’s Time Piece
The trip back was not easy. First, we got lost, and parts of Denver at night—even in that banner-filled year of America’s two hundredth birthday—could be scary. Billy was aching and miserable. He wanted to get dropped off at Duffy’s in downtown Denver. It was famous, Burroughs recalled, for a big multiple slaying years earlier. It wasn’t a reassuring advertisement, not at night anyway. We couldn’t find the place, and then Gregory noticed my watch.
My parents had given it to me before I left home to come to the Kerouac School. It looked like a more expensive watch than it really was. Marion, my mother, had selected it—she’d said it was a watch for a writer. The two hands were fashioned to look like writing implements—one a quill, another an old fountain pen. It was a little corny, but I loved the fact that it had come from them and that despite the fact that all my friends were in colleges like Stony Brook or Binghamton, my parents still blessed my going to the Kerouac School. I might as well have been going off to join the foreign legion. And what little they knew of Burroughs and Ginsberg was probably not going to help them feel they’d done the right thing by letting me go. I guess they’d just agreed to suspend their disbelief.
One of the first things Gregory had asked me about was my parents. “They let you come here?” he said. “To study with unwashedbeatniksexcrazedcommiedopefiends? ” He laughed. “In fact,” he told me, “we’re just old men. Soon to poof into air. Look, I hardly have any teeth.” He gave me a smile, mostly gums, with a few teeth left over that looked like the old, crooked tombstones he leaned his girlfriend against in his “Marriage” poem.
I also discovered, as the town car hummed and humped the six of us through the flat, back streets of Denver, that Gregory thought a lot about time, about what it had given him and what it had taken away.
“Sixteen years ago we were put down for being filthy beatniks,” he shouted into my left ear, the two of us scrunched up in the backseat. “Now look at us. Allen’s a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences—he’s even been pinned like a girl in school! Peter’s looking for a girlfriend so he and Allen can have a baby, Hermes willing. And Bill. Look at Bill! He got off heroin before me and he doesn’t even smoke Camels! And I, Nunzio Gregorio Corso, I should be as famous as Bill and Allen and not neglected by fame.”
Gregory made Peter stop the car in front of an old movie theater advertising a double feature of two Tarzan films: Johnny Weissmuller and Lex Barker, back-to-back, swinging from black and white into jungle color. Gregory suddenly sprang out of the car and dashed over to the box office, slapping down his money in front of a bored-looking woman behind the glass. We watched him disappear into the theater.
For the next two hours, the rest of us aimlessly drove around the streets of Denver, finally heading back to the movie theater. There was Gregory, standing out front, casually chatting up two girls, like John Dillinger emerging from the Biograph with his girl Frenchy and the lady in red, as if our entire trip to Denver was merely a parentheses for that moment.
It started to occur to me after we picked up Gregory, after having driven around in the dark waiting for Tarzan to leave Manhattan, that Gregory was always bolting. He just couldn’t sit still. Upstairs in his apartment with Lisa and Max sitting out on the terrace, Gregory would often bolt from his desk, and he and his poems would simply disappear for hours.
Gregory climbed back into the town car and we sped off again. I decided to confront him directly about his habit of suddenly disappearing on everyone.
“Gregory, where do you go when you go out, when you don’t let me help you finish the book?” (I wanted Allen to know that I was still trying to get him to sit down and finish his poems.)
“I go to the movies. I can’t stand crowds, or to be cooped up.”
These days, there would be a name for what I think ailed Gregory, his bolting like that. I think he was suffering from panic disorder.
“I think about death,” Gregory continued in the backseat of the darkened car. “I’m not a Buddhist like Allen. Right, Allen?”
“You can take medication,” Peter said from behind the wheel, his heavy gray ponytail, pretty as a girl’s, lit up by the passing cars.
“If I feel like I’m gonna die, I have to excuse myself. I say, ‘I gotta go!’ And like you, Sammy, they always wanna know where. They sense something’s wrong, they never know what to do. It’s happening now. You’re asking me, ‘Are you okay? Can we get you something? Want to lie down?’ Ginzy, tell him! Who wants to die amongst people?”
“That’s the only way to die, Gregory,” Peter says.
“Even when they can’t do shit?” Gregory asks. “That’s when I go to the movies, when I feel I’m going to die. So far it’s worked. I used to wake up screaming from a dream of dying, and go out on the street to an all-night movie theater in Times Square, with a great overcoat over my pajamas, but even then we cannot escape getting older. The movies I saw when I was ten are old movies now, and all their stars are stars no more.”
As we drove through the starless night, headed back to Boulder, Gregory went back to admiring my watch. “What do you want for it?” he finally asked.
I really didn’t want to sell it to him, but it was hard to deny those guys anything. I struggled to keep the watch on my wrist, but I soon realized that Gregory was obsessed with wristwatches. He loved to wear them. He frequently put them into his poems.
In fact, Gregory was obsessed with time. I started to think that it was because of the time he had spent in prison—in Clinton and Dannemora—counting off the months, days, and hours until he was free to walk down MacDougal Street again, stopping at all the outdoor espresso cafés and pouring out a little sugar into the palm of his hand. No wonder Gregory was missing most of his teeth.
“Ginzy, give me fifty dollars for Sammy Davis’s watch.”
“Gregory,” Allen said, “he needs his watch. Don’t let him take it from you, Sam.” Allen, who could stand up to Gregory, came to my rescue. He had no illusions about Gregory. He knew he was at heart still a street kid, still a hustler.
But I unfastened the watchband and gave Gregory my watch.
He looked at it like a kid at Christmas, kissed me, and put it on his wrist. His breath smelled like popcorn and alcohol. I looked away, embarrassed to see so much pleasure, so much pure joy in a man, a grizzled poetman old enough to be my father.
By that watch Gregory would miss every appointment we ever had.
Climbing back toward Boulder, away from Denver’s haze, the night stars suddenly appeared. Gregory looked up at the sky, studying the constellations. “As long as I live,” he said, “movie stars keep on dying.”
Later, I would go back and look at Gasoline, Gregory’s first City Lights book, the poems that had made Jack Kerouac compare his friend to Frank Sinatra—Caruso even—singing his Italian songs over the rooftops of Greenwich Village and Little Italy. Gregory, afraid of death?
And what about Bill, who seemed so frail? Allen had told me once that Burroughs had changed a great deal over the years, that he’d become grandfatherly, almost angelic. I didn’t see it. He didn’t even seem too interested in what was really wrong with his son. The Beats were lucky, I thought. They were still alive.
As if he could read my mind, Allen started talking about the longevity of his friends, men like Burroughs, Gregory, Peter, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, who were all still going strong since the 1940s and ’50s, when he’d met most of them. It was the academic poets like John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz, Allen observed, who “wrecked themselves drinking.”
“We were saved by marijuana,” he continued, as Peter suddenly popped open the glove compartment where a baggy filled with pot and rolling papers magically appeared. “Randall Jarrell ran out into traffic and Sylvia Plath—they both committed suicide. The Old American Monster—alcohol—ruined the poets who thought of us as unsophisticated and ignorant.”
“Beatniks!” Gregory shouted.
“We should have our own exercise tape,” Burroughs mused. “It would make a fortune.” (Had Burroughs anticipated the fitness- videotape craze of the eighties?)
“Alive, Kerouac was older than me,” Corso chimed in, obsessing on time. “Now I’m a year older than Jack…and fifteen years older than Christ. I’m fifteen years older than God…and getting older.”
“In the Catholic sense,” Allen pointed out.
Gregory had always been the youngest of their group. The youngest everywhere! Even in prison, they said he was the youngest inmate at Dannemora and the youngest to leave. Like François Villon—the French poet-thief of the fifteenth century who was a kind of god to Gregory—he was the youngest “in the company of peers. Poets and convicts. The youngest for years.”
Now Gregory was cooking; starting to rhyme in his conversation meant he was starting to write his poems in his head. Like recalling a vision, he recounted his poem-ideas and then would write them down, or, these days, call me up and recite the poems before even putting them down in his free-for-all handwriting, full of doodles and digressions, trying to maintain beauty in the ruin of his penmanship.
Now I was the youngest. At least tonight, in this black automobile climbing the st
eep hill back into town, past the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Didn’t these straight college kids at the university know who was living down the street from them? Didn’t they care? Maybe they didn’t want to know. Maybe it was better that they didn’t know. After all, it was idolatry that killed Kerouac. He ran from their love, as Gregory ran from Allen, Peter, and Burroughs. Gregory was always running away from them. He was the one who had spent most of his time living abroad, moonbathing in the Parthenon and sitting with his magic wand in a small apartment in Paris, living on grapes and casting spells that only he knew about. “The young must always run away,” Gregory said when we left him at the bottom of the hill. I knew he wasn’t going home but to Calliope. Was this also due to Gregory’s fear of getting old?
“What’s he running away from now?” I asked Allen after we dropped off Gregory.
“His shadow, seeing his shadow on the path.” I knew just enough Buddhist jargon to know when to smile, though I didn’t always get the joke.
“We should find a parking space,” Peter told Allen.
“Like the Buddha said, ‘Park the empty vehicle.’” He and Peter laughed. Burroughs was fast asleep with his eyes open. He awakened by closing his eyes.
“I just had the most extraordinary dream,” Burroughs said. “Leonardo da Vinci and Lonny the Pimp accompany a woman dressed as a nurse. They appear at J. Edgar Hoover’s office. ‘We have come to give Mr. Hoover a high colonic, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox studios.’ Then they plant a time bomb up his ass, and leave.”
While Bill had slept, Billy asked to be dropped off at a dark bar near the university. Peter pulled over. We all watched as Billy was swallowed up by the crowd at the door. I wondered why none of us stopped him.
