by Sam Kashner
I couldn’t hear anything. Then, faintly, I heard what sounded like a dog barking from behind a door.
“No doubt,” Bill said, “one could do much better with dolphins, which doesn’t mean that dolphins have mastered the English language. Words,” Bill continued, leaning into the microphone, which helped to carry his carnival barker’s voice to the back of the shrine room, “will emerge from recordings of dripping faucets. In fact, almost any sound that is not too uniform will produce words. Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.” Burroughs was singing, and with his straw boater and cane he suddenly seemed like a midwestern Maurice Chevalier on junk.
“The very tree branches brushing against her window seemed to mutter murder murder murder murder. Well, the branches may have muttered just that, and you could hear it back with a tape recorder.”
Someone raised a hand. Bill reluctantly acknowledged the guy with his arm hanging in the air.
“Mr. Burroughs,” the young man said, “how can everything in the world, everything we see and hear, be available to us? It can’t possibly be out there just for our use. I mean, isn’t it only crazy people who think that the television is talking to them or that fire engines have some kind of personal meaning for them?”
Burroughs refused to look up at the man. He stared at the tape recorder. Then he stared at the desk. Then he told a little story.
“Some time ago, a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him, ‘Of course they refer to you. You see them and you hear them.’”
I looked over at Billy Jr. He seemed to be shaking his head in agreement. I started to worry about accreditation. After all, I had just promised my parents that the Jack Kerouac School would get it.
Then Bill explained to us about Raudive’s experiments with tape recordings, how they were carried out in a soundproof studio, how a new tape was turned on, blank but recording. Then, when the tape was played back, Raudive listened through very sensitive state-of-the-art headphones and to his surprise very recognizable voices and words were audible on the blank tape. Burroughs said that Raudive, in his research, has now recorded more than a hundred thousand phrases. He said the sound is rhythmic like poetry, like Anne’s list poems or Buddhist monks chanting. He said many of the voices come from the dead—Hitler, Nietzsche, Goethe, Jesus Christ—“anybody who is anybody is there,” many of them having undergone a marked deterioration of their mental and artistic faculties.
“Goethe isn’t what he used to be,” Bill explained. “Hitler had a bigger and better mouth when he was alive. What better way to contact someone than to cut and rearrange his actual words? Certainly an improvement on the usual scene where Shakespeare is announced, only to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry.”
Then Bill read to us from his dream diaries, comparing Raudive’s experiments with the utterances of schizophrenics and psychotics. He then read from a notebook: “The unconscious imitated by cheesecake. A tin of tomato soup in Arizona…Green is a man to fill is a boy. I can take the hut set anywhere. A book called Advanced Outrage. An astronaut named Plat. First American shot on Mars. Life is a flickering shadow with violence before and after it.”
Burroughs’s voice was the voice of American violence, I thought. It seemed to separate knowledge from feeling, which always brought cruelty. But it was simply a man’s voice. He seemed like a man whose whole life had been a form of penance for what he called the stupid accident of his wife Joan’s death. No wonder he spent all this time trying to contact the dead or convince us, himself, that the dead could speak to us on these blank tape recordings. Maybe it made him feel less guilty.
Burroughs pulled out a piece of paper and read from a list of phrases that he had been attracted to in Raudive’s book: “Cheers here are the nondead. Here are the cunning ones. We are here because of you. We are all longing to go home. We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people. Take the grave with you…” Bill read quietly. “It snows horribly. Class dismissed.”
31. A Spy in the House of Love
One day when I stopped by Allen’s apartment to do some filing for him, Allen announced that he thought there might be a spy at Naropa. He didn’t say who it was. Was he talking about me? I had no idea. There were few enough students here as it was. Could it be Burroughs, who seemed so in love with the idea of conspiracies, secret documents, government code words, interzones, like ones he’d put into Naked Lunch? Because the Beats had lived so long on the outskirts of society, I thought maybe it was starting to get to them. What would it be like to always have your mail waiting for you at the U.S. Consul’s office or at American Express? Hadn’t Gregory called the only novel he’d ever written American Express?
Allen called me up—I had to come over immediately. He explained that the government had been listening to him on the telephone for years. He felt that his mail was often tampered with. He told me about “Cointelpro,” a government, mostly FBI, operation to discredit radicals or anyone deemed dangerous to the permanent government of the United States—business interests, powerful families like the Rockefellers, the Hunts, Henry Luce, etc. Allen had a lot of names. He said that some of these people weren’t even all that bad, he said that he once met Nelson Rockefeller and had liked him personally, that he loved art and wasn’t stupid. Allen said it was the people who worked for Rockefeller, who “took care of business” for these powerful people—they were the dangerous ones.
I knew from Ginsberg’s files that he had been gathering information on the government and its program of misinformation. He said they did it to Martin Luther King and to the Black Panthers. Allen told me all this while we were sitting around the kitchen table sipping Celestial Seasonings chamomile tea. Peter sat with us, listening, nodding his head. At the same time, he was admiring the Sleepytime Tea box, with its happy family of bears—Papa Bear sitting in his rocking chair wearing a nightcap in front of the fire, Mama Bear carrying Baby Bear off to bed.
“You’ve been staring at that box for a half hour,” Allen told Peter. “What do you see in it?”
“I see the future,” Peter said, “with you sitting in front of the fire and our babies coming to kiss you and their mother goodnight. Do you think you’d like to live in a cave with me, Allen?”
Allen laughed. It was a sweet laugh—a respite from his high seriousness—which I didn’t see too often. His crooked mouth made it all the sweeter. Strange that it would come during this gentle- voiced tirade against the government, the CIA, and America’s power establishment. It was the old Allen, but tempered by his Buddhist meditation, his growing awareness of the other guy’s pain and suffering.
Then again, I also wondered if they were all crazy. I know that Allen had gone missing once in the mid-fifties, only to turn up in the deep forests of South America, living with a woman, Burroughs told me, a woman named Karena Shields. Shields had portrayed Jane in a couple of early Tarzan films, and I knew from reading the so-called yagé letters between Allen and Bill that they were practically subsisting on coca leaves and getting incredibly fucked up. I knew that Allen had been given a choice in his younger days between staying at a mental hospital or going back to college. Were the inmates running the asylum at the Jack Kerouac School? Or were my hopelessly scaredy-cat, bourgeois roots beginning to show?
Peter got up and took a giant ironing board out of the closet. He was going to press Allen’s shirt and pants for the reading later that night. For the first time since arriving at Naropa, I was going to read my poems, along with Gregory, Allen, and a few other students from the dance and Buddhist psychology departments. I was supposed to be the jewel in their diadem, the student who would come to represent the Kerouac School, the one they exposed to Ginsberg and Corso, to Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, to the New York School of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Koch. And, thanks to Anne’s friends, the younger writers who had taken up the brunt of my so-called education, I had also read Balzac’s Lo
st Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, as well as the “grumps,” as Corso called them, Céline and Ezra Pound. The writer Michael Brownstein, Anne’s former lover (the one who usurped her husband, Lewis, while he had gone around the corner for the evening newspapers), taught me those books in one of my classes at Naropa. So while Peter laid out Allen’s pants one leg at a time on the ironing board, spitting on the iron like my grandmother used to do in the basement when she came to visit us, Allen continued his spiel about Cointelpro.
Allen said that Naropa could be finished before it even started. He said that I should be on the lookout for anyone suspicious, any- one who doesn’t seem really interested in poetry. (It didn’t occur to me at the time that that included just about everyone.) He said that I should keep an eye out at the reading tonight for anyone who looked lost, or hopelessly straight. I thought about how I felt lost and hopelessly straight myself, even though my heart practically leaped like a gazelle in the Song of Songs whenever I found myself sitting in Allen’s place or struggling with Gregory over his poems.
I said I would do my best.
I was nervous that night at the reading, which was held in the living room of a beautiful home on a street filled with old trees, which had to be a hundred years old and gave wonderful shade. I walked to the reading with Gregory. I told him about what Allen had said, about Cointelpro, about how the government might have sent a spy to attend classes at the Kerouac School.
“Maybe it’s Allen,” Gregory said. “He seems to be getting a lot of official recognition, and he always seems to have money. He even knows the police chief of Chiapas,” Gregory reminded me. It was Burroughs who told me that, to a stupid person, Allen looks like a communist.
When we arrived the living room was filled. There must’ve been about two hundred people throughout the house, which was owned by one of Rinpoche’s most devoted followers, a young woman whom Gregory pointed out to me as the heiress to a discount department store fortune. She welcomed everyone and then she introduced Allen, who was going to be the master of ceremonies. Anne was there, of course, with her contingent of exotic- looking women and pretty men. I noticed Anne’s manager, Linda Louie, her husband Mickey, and their baby Hadrian, named after the emperor or the wall—whichever came first. A young woman with dark hair in an old-fashioned hat pinned with a veil was seated between Linda and Mickey. She was eccentrically dressed. She wore a kilt. She had a round pleasant face and reminded me of Brenda Vaccaro, an actress no one hears about these days. She was Jon Voight’s girlfriend for a while, or at least that’s what I’d heard.
Allen was a real jambon when it came to an audience. It’s why he seemed to love teaching so much. It was hard for him to leave the stage. Originally he was only going to read a small poem, something he had dashed off in the minutes after supper before he and Peter got dressed for the reading. Allen called them his “porch haikus” because he wrote them on the porch as the sun was going down. He read one porch haiku about a guy who cuts up his girlfriend with an ax. I thought haikus were supposed to be about the moon awakening and stuff like that. I guess I was wrong. Encouraged by wild applause, Allen read for another half hour. He read “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby”—the crowd cheered when Allen read “Fuck me in the ass! Suck me! Come in my ears! Promise you’ll murder me in the gutter with orgasms!”
After that, I was no longer sure they would like me, or sit still for my love poems, written like French surrealism, with titles like “Portrait of Orpheus as a Young Horticulturist” or “The Water Lily Is Doomed.”
Allen wouldn’t get off the stage. They had to carry his chair away from the front of the room with him in it, like he was the groom at his own Jewish wedding. Gregory finally had to say something.
“Ginzy, that’s great but give the kid a chance. Miss Christ, we’re all gonna be two thousand years old by the time you run out of breath!” It’s true that Allen’s meditation practice had given him even more of a barrel chest, even more lung power.
Gregory read next. He recited a poem that I had heard before. He never said it the same way twice. The poem was about how Gregory had met this guy in a bar who had asked Gregory what poetry was. It wasn’t an existential or a philosophical question. He was just a guy, Gregory said, who had come into some tavern who didn’t know what poetry meant.
“I told him,” Gregory said in his poem, which he called “I Met This Guy Who Died.” “Happy tipsy one night,” Gregory takes the man home so that they both might admire his baby asleep in his crib. When all of a sudden, “A great sorrow overcame him ‘O Gregory,’ he moaned / ‘you brought up something to die.’” That’s all he read. It was obvious it was one of Gregory’s favorite poems. Later that night, Gregory whispered to me that it wasn’t just any guy. It was Kerouac, drunk with mortality, who had peered into the baby’s crib.
Like the tiny coffin Gregory had written about seeing when he was a young kid on the Lower East Side, being taken away by all those big Cadillacs, Gregory wrote tiny poems about great big subjects like death and time. He had memorized the poem. I was supposed to hold the crib sheet, in case he got it wrong. He didn’t.
Then he introduced me, as a poet, as his friend, as someone bathed in that from which he, Gregory, and Allen also bathed: the healing waters of poesy. He said something like that.
I almost fainted with joy. I didn’t think my poems were very good. I apologized for them in advance. I read a few. I heard applause. I dared to look up. I read another. I read the one poem of mine Allen seemed to like, even though I had to explain to him who Donny and Marie were. It was a poem about imagining myself a construction worker, taking The Donny and Marie Show lunchbox with me to work and sitting out on a girder of an unfinished New York City skyscraper. It was meant to be funny. People laughed. They positively howled with laughter. It doesn’t seem that funny now, the poem. It got old fast. But it was new then and people loved it.
Peter saw me after the reading. He said I was a star. People milled around me afterward, those too shy to go up to Allen or Gregory. I was grateful. They asked questions I couldn’t answer in a thousand years about poems I hadn’t taken very long to write. I was happy. I was sweating. Then a dark-haired woman came up and put a napkin in a glass of water and wiped my forehead. She didn’t introduce herself right away. She was grinning and said, “You were wonderful.” She lifted her veil. Anne and Linda Louie came over to me. Anne said, very tightly, “That was good.” Linda Louie was more generous, and she introduced her veiled friend. Her name was Carla Fannetti.
I’d only had one serious girlfriend so far, so I didn’t know a lot about men and women coming together. But this attractive woman who had just mopped my brow looked like she was in love, and she was gazing in my direction. I looked around; there was no one standing behind me.
32. The Six Realms
A few of us—Allen, Anne, Burroughs, Gregory, and I—walked over to Tom’s Tavern after the reading. Carla came along with Linda Louie; Linda’s husband had taken the baby home.
I never met the Tom of Tom’s Tavern. I don’t know if he even existed. The tavern was a place where college kids from the University of Colorado came to get drunk, and men who lived in bombed-out cars or in shacks up in the mountains came down whenever they scraped a few bucks together to make a night out of it with a hamburger and some beers.
We all squeezed into a booth. I sat across from Carla. I could really see her for the first time. She had style and sense. She owned her own import-export business. She often had to make business trips to Thailand. Apparently, Rinpoche encouraged his students to start their own businesses. He would often step slowly out of the back of his black BMW, helped by the Vadjra guards, and walk into a community business and make some kind of blessing over it. Then he would look over the merchandise. Sometimes he would buy something as a kind of benediction for the success of the establishment. His aides would come by later and pay for it.
I asked Carla what Rinpoche bought at her store. She thought it wa
s a hand-painted tie or something that he bought as a gift, maybe some “Flash Gordon soap,” which is what Gregory called the oval, scented soaps on display in strangers’ bathrooms.
In the smoky and darkened tavern, Carla turned to me and asked how long I’d been at Naropa. She explained that she had come to Boulder because she was a student of Rinpoche’s and she wanted to be around other practitioners. She said that she started to “sit” in Scotland, which is where Rinpoche had spent time at a meditation center in the highlands.
I found out that Carla had a past. She had lived with a famous violinist, who was the son of an even more famous violinist, and had traveled the world with him.
I asked if she and the violinist were still together. She said no. She said that studying Buddhism had changed the way she saw relationships. She said that Rinpoche practiced something called “crazy wisdom.”
I had already heard about crazy wisdom from Allen, but I let her explain it to me. She said it meant giving in to your desire so you didn’t have desire anymore. I started thinking that Carla wanted to give in to her desire. And that she wanted to give in to her desire to be with me—tonight. Crazy wisdom didn’t seem so crazy, but it did seem dangerous—dangerous in unenlightened hands, which included mine, and probably Carla’s. The more I heard about crazy wisdom, the more I felt like someone was shaking my hands with a hand buzzer and wouldn’t let go. But I was intrigued.
As the poets and their hangers-on huddled together at Tom’s, I remembered something Phil Ochs once said. Ochs was a folksinger Allen admired who became a suicide. He once said, “To the losers go the hang-ups, to the victors go the hangers-on.” I basked in the feeling of being included among the poets; it felt good to be chosen for something. It didn’t happen too often. In high school, I never made the honor roll, but my sister made it every year. I did get to be president of my junior high school class, but that was for all the wrong reasons. I think it was because I once had a pizza delivered to the middle of my seventh-grade algebra class, or was it because I had ridden my bicycle down the hall, or because I wore an American flag tie that got me called to the principal’s office until my parents came? Or was it because I once fell inside a baby grand piano at a school assembly when I was trying to imitate Jerry Lee Lewis? (The assistant principal had to pull me out by my legs, cautioning me by saying that I had to be protected from myself.) So I felt that being elected class president was like when the people of Paris made Quasimodo the mayor. I even ducked out of the prom, my one ceremonial duty as president, so that I could watch Bob Dylan come out of seclusion to sing on The Johnny Cash Show.
