When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Gregory seemed like a man who found himself lucky to still be alive. He usually wrote a lot of poems around the time of his birthdays. Allen said it would be like that. His birthdays would make him think more about his life, his death, the lives and deaths of those around him. It also made him want to have babies. Gregory loved children, or at least the idea of children. He thought each child was a kind of second coming.

  Gregory said that he used to dream of dying romantically, like Shelley, but now he was glad he didn’t. “Shelley missed a lot,” Gregory said.

  Then we found it: a painting Gregory had seen as a boy that he had fallen in love with, the painting he had come here to find. It was The Death of General Wolfe, by Benjamin West. Gregory had once seen a reproduction of it in school. It was a painting of a battle in which the British army defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham and effectively took control of North America. The painting depicts the victorious British commander, James Wolfe, dying in the arms of his soldiers.

  I knew that painting. My mother had brought it back from the A& P in a hardcover book, The American Heritage History of America, volume one. I remembered seeing that painting, spread out over two pages: General Wolfe, his lifeblood spilling out on the ground and the weeping soldiers who loved him. It seemed too corny to tell Gregory at the time that I, too, loved that painting. I thought he would think I was copying him, or trying to butter him up or something, so I let it go. But it made me feel close to him.

  I knew how much of a trial school had been for Gregory. How when Carmine had made him laugh at the planetarium during a class trip, the teacher punished the whole class and denied Gregory and his classmates the stars. I knew Gregory had heroes like Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton, schoolboy crushes he carried with him to this day. All this made sense to me now. That’s why it was so hard to get down to work with him—writing down and organizing his poems was too much like school. It’s why his output was so scant, especially as compared to Allen’s endless production of poems. “But a lot of it is very bad,” Gregory told me, when I asked why he can’t just sit down and think of writing poems as his job, the way Allen does it. “Because Allen writes a lot of bad poems,” Gregory said. “And when I am good—I am great. Allen writes because he’s afraid to die. I don’t write, because I want to live.”

  We drove home at night through Denver streets, passing nuns coming out of a convent and growling drunks leaning over a highway bridge. Was this the music of America on its two hundredth birthday? Max leaned out the window, his nose in the wind like a dog sniffing the air, looking at the night sky. “Stars,” he shrieked, “star-food!”

  Gregory looked happy.

  34. Father Death

  Allen was going home. He and Peter had to fly back to Paterson, New Jersey, because Allen’s father was dying. Six, maybe seven months earlier, Allen’s father had been diagnosed with liver cancer. I couldn’t stand to even hear about it. I knew Allen was a Buddhist and that Rinpoche had prepared him for his father’s death. He told Allen and Peter what to do. He said that Allen’s father had taught him how to live in the world, and now he was given the opportunity to teach Allen and Peter about leaving it.

  Paterson had been the lifelong home of William Carlos Williams, the country doctor–poet Allen had sought out as a young man, the poet Allen had asked to bless Howl and Other Poems with an introduction. But another poet had lived in Paterson, in William Carlos Williams’s shadow. It was Allen’s father, Louis Ginsberg.

  So Allen had to leave on the next day’s flight to Newark. Allen didn’t like to fly, and Peter absolutely hated it. They usually ordered lots of those little bottles to drink on the flight and were both completely snockered by the time they landed. But this time they were drinking before the flight.

  On the day of his departure, Allen told me he was going to be with his father. I told him how sad I was to hear about his illness, how I wanted everyone’s parents to live forever. He said not to worry. Death was poetry’s final subject.

  “You’re going to die one day,” he said. “Get used to it.”

  Peter added reassuringly, “Not for a long time.”

  I felt better then. The last time Allen had gone back to Paterson it was winter. Snow had covered all the monuments of Allen’s youth—Paterson City Hall, the tennis courts in Eastside Park; there was even ice in the Passaic River.

  Apparently, Allen’s father was too tired to move and required someone with a strong back to lift him. That job, of course, fell to Peter, the nurse in the family. It was Peter who would pull Louis up out of the bath and dress him after they arrived at the house. Allen later told me that while Peter was helping Allen’s father get dressed at the edge of the bed, Louis looked up at Peter and with a rueful smile told him, “Don’t ever grow old.”

  Allen’s father had come to Boulder once, soon after I’d arrived, when he was still well enough to travel. Allen had taken him to the Flagstaff House, a restaurant high above the town, and as the first poetry student of the Kerouac School I was invited to go along. From the elevation of the restaurant, you could see the lights of the town coming on; you felt even closer to the stars that high up in the mountains. Rinpoche was also present that night. We all felt pleasantly tired after a big dinner and sat quietly watching the lights of Boulder through the wraparound glass window. Louis talked. Allen called it bantering.

  I liked Louis. He reminded me of my father, if my father had been a poet. He wasn’t. He was a window shade salesman. He played the harmonica, picking up cowboy tunes on the radio when he was a boy, so he could play “Streets of Laredo” and “Down in the Valley.” He liked to play the harmonica while driving up to the Catskills, which he dutifully did every other weekend when I was a boy, to visit my mother’s mother. He was a good sport about it. I know he secretly didn’t want to do it. I was always astonished by how he could drive the car, steer it with his elbows, and play the harmonica. Other motorists would stare at us on the thruway. On the way, we’d stop at the Red Apple Motel and Restaurant for cafeteria-style meals. It was open twenty-four hours a day; I loved the idea of it being open all night.

  Allen said he loved twenty-four-hour cafeterias, too. He said Louis would take him to one after visiting his mother in the mental hospital, but they wouldn’t talk very much.

  My father wasn’t a poet, but he had the soul of an artist. He was gentle, quiet, thoughtful. Maybe now I would say his thoughtfulness could have been depression, at least some of the time. Louis seemed like that, too—depressed in a quiet, thoughtful way, not in a can’t-get-out-of-bed-or-wash-my-face-to-go-to-work sort of way. My father loved to draw, to make caricatures of people in restaurants. He kept a small memo pad like the ones I used to take to school to write down homework assignments, and he kept his window shade orders in them, but most of the pages were torn out so that he could hand out the caricatures he made of people. When I was older and home from college, he was still doing it. Most of the time people were flattered by the drawings and came over to ask if he were an artist. “No,” he’d say, “I’m not an artist—I like to eat. This is my son, he’s the artist, he’s a poet.”

  I always felt embarrassed when he said that. It also made me feel like I would never succeed, that I would be a failure if I became an artist, because artists never make any money and often go hungry. I thought of that whenever Gregory talked about himself as “a penniless legend,” someone who has to go through life begging for money.

  At the Flagstaff House overlooking the lights of Boulder, Allen’s father was talking, remembering something Allen did that he thought was funny and Allen remembered as embarrassing. Louis let out a long sigh. “Is life worth living?”

  “Depends on the liver,” Allen replied.

  It was an old joke, but Rinpoche thought it was funny; he and his secretary, David Rome, both smiled. “Fathers are the same everywhere,” Rinpoche told Allen on the way out of the restaurant.

  Louis had seemed sad and philosophical that night. Now his liver—or wa
s it his pancreas?—was killing him. Allen had always had a difficult relationship with him. Was it jealousy? Sometimes I used to wonder what my father thought about my living in Boulder with the Beats, that he worked so hard and they had this reputation, unfairly earned and simply not true, of hardly working, of being deadbeats. In fact, Allen worked harder than anyone I ever knew. He worked like a one-man poetry factory, and when he wasn’t doing that he was promoting the work of his friends, and promoting the Kerouac School. But here was Louis, a serious poet of a different time, and his son had become an icon, a cultural hero, a famous, notorious legend, and, like Gregory had said, one of “the Daddies of the age.” How did that make Louis Ginsberg feel?

  Allen loved Louis’s second wife. She was probably what Allen’s mother would have been like if she hadn’t become schizophrenic at age forty—“croaking up her soul,” as Allen called it, varicose- veined, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling the police, locking herself in the bathroom with razor and iodine, her chosen weapons of self-murder, “coughing in tears at the sink.” In contrast, Allen’s stepmother was a kind of Jewish angel who gave Allen and Louis much love. They were lucky, I thought, to have her.

  When I first met Louis, I thought he might be hard to love. Behind his thick eyeglasses, he seemed lost. I know that he never quite understood Allen; some of Allen’s fame bothered him. He might have been embarrassed by it. One night Allen told me that he had lunged at Louis when he was a much younger man and they’d had a fight. He thought he would kill him; it was like a psychotic break, but they never talked about it afterward.

  Louis was eighty years old when Allen and Peter flew back to be with him. Allen said he thought his father looked frail the last time he’d seen him, “his cheek bonier than I’d remembered.” Allen wrote me a few postcards from Paterson; they were very sweet and sad. He seemed changed by the experience of caring for his father. He said it was an ordeal just to get Louis ready for bed, but that Peter was strong and determined to make him comfortable. Once they got him into bed or into his easy chair, “from which it was harder and harder to get up,” Allen wrote in his postcard, Allen would read to his father from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”: “…trailing clouds of glory do we come / from God, who is our home…”

  “That’s beautiful,” Louis told Allen, “but it’s not true.”

  Rinpoche loved that story when Allen told it to him. I told my parents about it, reading them Allen’s card over the phone.

  “Sad,” my mother said, “not to be able to feel that way on your deathbed.”

  Louis died, and Allen came back in some ways a different man. I saw it in the poems he was writing, poems about love and loss, not just about caring for his father in those last weeks but poems about lovers, about growing old as a lover, about not being able to get it up, worrying about going to bed alone. And I think that Peter’s search for a girlfriend and his desire to have a family was beginning to worry Allen. He felt it was a fantasy of Peter’s that they would all live like the Sleepytime Tea bears, cozy in a little cave in the Rocky Mountains. So Allen returned from burying his father frightened of being alone.

  When I next saw Allen, I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me. I thought that if ever there was a moment to kiss him and hold him, this was it. But I didn’t want to have sex with Allen. I wanted to please him, but had always turned down his advances. I hadn’t yet made it into the hot tub with Allen and Peter, like the young dancers and meditation students who thought nothing of taking off their clothes and diving in, kissing Peter and soul kissing Allen. I felt like the shy one at the orgy.

  I helped put Allen to bed that night. He was drunk from all those tiny bottles of alcohol he and Peter must’ve had on the plane. I took his clothes off the way Peter must’ve done for Louis to get him ready for bed. Then I went downstairs. Allen’s poem of a few weeks later, given to me to type, read, “Now I lie alone, and a youth / Stalks my house, he won’t in truth / Come to bed with me, instead / Loves the thoughts inside my head.” Was that about me?

  Allen thought it was so American, so crazy, so gridlocked that his father would be buried in a family plot near Newark Airport under a Winston Cigarettes sign off Exit 14 of the New Jersey Turnpike, in B’Nai Israel Cemetery, which used to be a paint factory. Nearby were some farms, with the wires of the Penn Central Power Station buzzing overhead.

  “What’s to be done about death?” Allen wrote in his notebook. “Nothing. Nothing? Stop going to school No. 6, Paterson, N.J., in 1937? Freeze time tonight, with a headache, at quarter to 2 A.M.? / Not go to father’s funeral tomorrow morn? / Not go back to Naropa teach Buddhist poetics all summer? / Not be buried in the cemetery near Newark Airport some day?”

  Flying home, somewhere over Lake Michigan Allen had thought about Rinpoche’s advice to realize that death is one of the aspects of impermanence, and that the life his father had given him was not a bad thing for the world. He said that Louis had been a teacher his whole life; death would make him more of a teacher.

  Allen said he had written “a blues” while flying back from seeing his father. He said he thought the blues was the only way to talk about death and grief, so he wrote his “Father Death Blues” sitting in the airplane, like a prince of Shambhala above the clouds.

  Back in his apartment, Allen took out his harmonium, a musical instrument like a little church organ, and placed it on his lap. The harmonium case had stickers from all the places it had been with him. Wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, Allen played the harmonium by pressing the hand pedal toward him and pumping it with air. He started to sing. “Hey Father Death, I’m flying home / Hey poor man, you’re all alone / Hey old daddy, I know where I’m going. Father Death, Don’t cry any more / Mama’s there, underneath the floor / Brother Death, please mind the store…Pain is gone, tears take the rest.”

  35. Going to Bed with Carla

  It was my first winter at the Kerouac School. Kerouac himself, for a guy who had grown up in New England, who was buried in his hometown of Lowell, who—in Allen’s words—would always have leaves falling on his grave, had hated cold weather. Huddled at a bus stop, waiting for someone to come and sell him drugs, Gregory told me that that was why Jack loved Mexico: it was romantic because it was warm.

  I, on the other hand, loved the winter. I wasn’t discontented at all. My teachers, the younger ones like Mike Brownstein, who lived up in the mountains, hated coming down to teach in the winter months. For two reasons: I think Brownstein hated teaching, period, and also he nearly drove off a cliff due to the snow and ice. It was like the Alps up there, even though everyone kept telling me it was just the foothills of the Rockies.

  For a long time I was afraid to go to bed with Carla. She seemed like such a woman of the world. She had lived with a man, she had been to Macao, which was as close as you could get to China in those days. She knew French and even some Gaelic; she knew things like how Gaelic and one of the Chinese dialects—I forget which one—had words in common. She had danced at the Mudd Club in lower Manhattan; she knew the bouncers. She said the best way to learn a foreign language was in bed.

  We seemed to go out every evening during that winter. It became a ritual, my coming by her store as she closed up, meeting her other girlfriends at the Hotel Boulderado for drinks. Sometimes we split off so she could attend her Buddhist studies class or sit for an hour in the shrine room. That’s when I would prowl the mall.

  Allen seemed increasingly short with me, irritated. I thought maybe it was because I was spending so much time with Carla and maybe he was becoming a little jealous. He found fault with my work; my typing didn’t please him anymore. Allen apologized once after yelling at me, saying every day was lost time if I couldn’t handle his correspondence. He got a lot of junk mail. I told Allen that we were learning all about “found poems” in Larry Fagin’s class, poems that were the literary equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, everyday objects hung up o
n a wall and labeled as art, like a black shovel, or a bicycle seat, or, most famously, a urinal. I told Allen he should take all the junk mail and turn it into a found poem.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. He was still fuming about something else.

  Six months later, after he had come back from a trip to New York, he came home all excited about a new poem he had written in longhand that he wanted to read to me, called “Junk Mail.” He either never remembered it had been my suggestion or he just didn’t feel like sharing the credit. I didn’t tell him that, in his absence, I had written a new poem called “Junk Mail: Canyon Street Apartment” (which was my address). I stuck my poem in a drawer and instead typed out Allen’s, which he published in the City Lights book he was working on. Great poets get to do that.

  Not long after we began seeing each other, Carla invited me up to her carriage house apartment. I had never been inside. It was part of a private house but had its own entrance. Her apartment looked like that of a sophisticated undergraduate or a bohemian who had decorated the place by scouring yard sales and vintage clothing stores. It was full of contradictions: English tea cozies and dish towels with pictures of the Queen Mother on them, and leopard-skin bedsheets and pillowcases. Part of it looked like a twenties-era parlor—the rooms of a flapper—with silk scarves thrown over the lamps and pictures of matinee idols framed on the walls, although in Carla’s case it would be a picture of Bryan Ferry and one of Johny Rotten with green teeth—pictures she would later bring back from trips she made to the UK.