When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Carla put a Brian Eno record on the stereo, and then played me a song she said was called “Love Is the Drug,” by Roxy Music.

  That night we were supposed to go to a party in a house up in the hills that Jubal had rented, or more likely had gotten someone to lend him for the evening. It was a very modern-looking house that someone said had been used in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper; it looked like a giant egg with a window, perched on a ledge in the mountains, as if a prehistoric bird had left it there to hatch.

  Just as we were getting ready to go out, Carla barred the door and wouldn’t let me out. “Why won’t you fuck me?” she said. “You’re turning my ovaries blue.”

  My brain was swimming in my head, bobbing there like a child’s toy in a bathtub. It’s hard to say what I wanted to do then. It was usually Carla who made the decisions. I made a step toward her.

  We stayed in her apartment until five in the morning. We made love, and then she stopped and crawled as far away from me in her bed as she could get. Then we made love again, and then she’d wander off again. This went on for hours, until she got hungry and at five in the morning we went out for steak and eggs.

  I saw her bathroom that morning for the first time. On one wall was a nude drawing of Carla, drawn in sharp lines. She said she hated that drawing but the artist was a famous German (I hadn’t heard of him), so she couldn’t part with it.

  Carla put on a kind of kimono before we went out for breakfast. She said she had something to tell me, but it could wait until she knew me better. Meanwhile, she wanted to give me a key to her apartment.

  The weeks flew by, and I found myself watching the first snows of winter outside Carla’s bedroom window. We spent a lot of time making love, or sometimes I would just watch her sleep; by midwinter, whenever I answered her phone, no one was surprised to hear my voice. No wonder I started not to care so much about the Kerouac School, about Allen’s poems, about the Beats. I was safely away from them, and I could now ask myself why I had worried so much about them. Why did I care what they thought about me every minute? They began to fade from my memory, even though I still saw them every day and had their books to read, their classes to attend, and their work to do. And for the first time, though it’s hard to explain what I felt, I could tell that Allen was beginning to feel deserted. He never asked me about Carla, and when I brought the two of them together, he pretty much ignored her. It was as if anything she’d have to say couldn’t possibly interest him, which I found incredible, considering how fascinating she seemed to me and how much I loved being with her. Of course, a lot of that was sex.

  I had never had that much sex before. Carla was the answer to a prayer I barely knew I had formulated at those moments when Billy seemed unable to stand up, or Burroughs cried about Jack London, or Allen offered his toweled body to me and I had to make some excuse why I couldn’t sleep with him. It was the answer to the prayer “Get me out of here,” a prayer that surprised me when I made it, because I had wanted so badly to be there.

  Burroughs once told me that the very moment someone is shot, the pain is slower in coming than the realization of what had just happened. But now the pain had come: these are just men, I realized, they have faults. They have bad days. They paid a price for storming the ramparts; they paid a price for fame; it’s just that not all of their scars showed.

  One day Carla asked me if I would stay at her place while she was out of town. I asked if she was making a business trip to the Philippines to buy some furniture or batik dresses. She said no, that it was her partner who was on a buying spree in Asia. I found out that Carla worked for Linda Louie and her husband, Mickey. She said that Anne’s manager didn’t have any close friends, that she never made any close friendships with other women, that in fact she disliked most women but trusted Carla. At last she told me what she had promised to tell me after the first time we’d made love. She said that Linda and Mickey Louie needed someone who could bring money to Florida and drive back with a car filled with marijuana. That was the trip she’d planned.

  I asked Carla if Anne Waldman knew about Linda and Mickey Louie’s activities. She said she thought so. That’s how Linda Louie was able to pay for Anne’s demo tapes and all the work that went into trying to make Anne a rock star. (Carla said she thought Linda Louie was wasting her money. That’s what I liked about Carla: she could be extremely realistic in her observations.)

  I asked Carla about her upcoming trip; I wanted to know if her work was dangerous. She said that Calliope’s work was more dangerous. I didn’t know what she meant by that, so I let the remark pass. You couldn’t make Carla tell you something she wasn’t prepared to tell you. But I wasn’t just afraid for her. What about me? What if some druglord came looking for Carla and found me in her bed? These were the charitable thoughts I had.

  She usually left early in the morning, sometimes with Mickey Louie. They went together to Florida and Carla came back by herself. She got paid about a thousand dollars for each run. We’d celebrate whenever she came home by going out. She started to bring me back presents, souvenirs of her travels. After a few months, I was keeping my money in an alligator wallet, wearing a hand- painted tie with a flamingo on it. Her trips were turning me into a sleazy dresser without my realizing it.

  Alone in Carla’s apartment, I played her Graham Parker album Squeezing Out Sparks, softly in the dark. Her watch, her rings, a few of her bracelets lay on the night table.

  When I finally asked her why she was willing to make these trips, she explained that before she became a student of Rinpoche, she didn’t know who she was. She was drifting through identities like a spy. Then, when she took her refuge vows, Rinpoche had given her a Buddhist name. (I don’t remember what it was, except that in translation it had the word “mirror” in it, as if her name had become a mirror to help her see herself as she really was.) Now that she knew who she was, she wanted to make as much money as she could in a short period of time. That’s why she was working for Linda Louie.

  For a long time, I had been able to keep the two things separate: my real life and my Beat life at the Kerouac School. But I realized now, now that I was involved with Carla the Bohemian Drug Smuggler, the two worlds had blurred. My life had become as complicated, as messy, as everyone else’s at Naropa. If I had read about this back home in my bedroom on Long Island, I would have thought it was cool, but living it filled me with anxiety.

  After each trip, Carla and I resumed our romantic life. She told me that she came from an Italian family in Brooklyn, though her mother and father had separated long ago. Her mother was so angry at her father, who was a trader on Wall Street, that one day when she came home from school, her mother had taken hundreds of family photographs and cut her father’s face out of every one of them. Now her father’s face was missing from every picture. She said that it was a very Sicilian thing to do. She had a brother who was an actor in New York, and every summer he played “Charlie’s Aunt” in summer stock. His name was Dean. Carla said that Dean and his mother had a fight one day and hadn’t spoken to each other in eight years.

  Her other brother was named Frank. Once when I was staying alone in Carla’s apartment, Frankie called in tears, saying someone had been in his house and robbed him. I tried to reach Carla but she didn’t always tell me where she was staying. And sometimes she traveled under an assumed name, “Mrs. Jenkins.”

  Hearing about all of this hideous family history of Carla’s seemed to go hand in hand with the new life I was living. It was as if the sweetness of my own family had to be killed off by this early frost so that I might feel differently and not so useless. It seemed at the time the only way to grow up.

  36. Death Is a Friend

  Since becoming involved with Carla I was starting to cut even William Burroughs’s class. One day, Burroughs summoned me to his place. That really scared me. In high school the worst that could happen was when they called your parents; in college you’d simply flunk the course, or maybe you’d get a warning. But cutti
ng Burroughs’s class—that could be serious. After all, if you’re the only student, even William Burroughs is liable to notice you’re not showing up.

  Burroughs was always a scary figure to me. I didn’t see what Allen was talking about when he spoke of how “angelic,” how “grandfatherly” Old Bill had become. I wondered what Burroughs had been like before his transformation. Burroughs still told jokes in which the punch lines were things like, “and then they found a lump,” or “French Canadian bean soup.” To me, he was anonymous and spectral. And like many comics (which I think is what essentially he was), he was a Buster Keaton sad sack, with a view of the world that at first didn’t seem to make sense at a school that wanted to be the first Buddhist college in the Western world. But Billy Jr. said his father’s writing was very Buddhist in that he was someone totally without illusions, who accepted the first noble truth that life is suffering. In that way, Billy said, Old Bill was “very much with the program.”

  I stepped into Burroughs’s apartment, sparsely furnished with a few metal filing cabinets, his orgone box, and two dueling pistols hanging on the wall. (They worked.) A photograph of Wilhelm Reich and his family was Scotch-taped to one of the kitchen cabinet doors. The apartment looked even more depressing than when he had first rented it. As in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it looked like the room where you could completely obliterate an identity. Burroughs was teaching two courses that semester; I forget which one I was cutting, but I think it was his cartography course, his “map of imaginary places.” In it, we created maps of Kafka’s castle and the place where Beast kept Beauty. We looked at old pirate treasure maps and maps of Wild West towns. He had a lot of those. He and Jubal were going through a Western phase. They wrote about gunfights in the center of nearly deserted towns filled with dust. After a lifetime of getting high, Burroughs had become obsessed with High Noon. He said Gary Cooper could have played him in the movies. While everyone thought that was Burroughs being facetious, it really wasn’t such a terrible idea. Toward the end of his life Cooper’s face had aged and thinned out, his voice taking on a monosyllabic croak—it could have worked.

  I sat on the couch and then Bill came out of the bathroom, buckling his pants. He was starting to wear his pants up around his sternum like a lot of old guys, even though he was as thin as Lincoln. I started to make up some excuse why I hadn’t been going to Imaginary Maps class. He stopped me before I could even start to lie.

  “So who do you think he is, provided he isn’t a she?” Bill asked. Visiting Burroughs made me feel like I had found Kurtz in Heart of Darkness; it was like negotiating with a ghost. I wasn’t sure what he was driving at.

  “I have had good relations with some narcotics agents,” Burroughs continued, “but they are recognizable because they are small-minded and give themselves away by asking inane questions. Have you seen anyone like that lurking around?”

  I said no.

  “I don’t think we should be alarmed,” Burroughs said. “We’ll invite all the suspicious-looking characters to tea, see who makes indecent proposals, and we’ll know. If we knew any policemen here, we could compromise one of them and turn it to our advantage. A rogue cop will spill on everyone in town.”

  Then it dawned on me. Burroughs was talking about the spy that Allen thought had infiltrated Naropa.

  The idea began to take hold of me. I told Burroughs that because I go out to eat a lot, I see things. I saw one guy who’d been to every one of Rinpoche’s talks. “I saw him at Allen’s reading,” I said. “He likes to meet a bunch of guys who look like Rotarians. They get together at Pelican Pete’s and sometimes I see him talking to guys in cars in front of the post office.” I was very proud to offer this information.

  Burroughs looked interested, and said that my next assignment was to befriend this fellow and to see if I could bring him over to Burroughs’s apartment.

  “I will function as security,” he said. “I will see what caliber of man this is. If he’s a threat, we expose his weakness, although I can’t see what the government would want with a bunch of international homos sitting around hatching cancers of the prostate. But there you have it. It’s the price of fame, laddie. W. B. Yeats said it best: ‘God keep me from ever being a wise old man praised of all.’ You may leave now.”

  Great, I thought. Now I had to spy on the few friends I had. He hadn’t said a thing about those missed classes. Did he even know? Would he be sympathetic if he knew why I had cut his classes, to be with Carla? Had William Burroughs ever been in love?

  Carla continued to make her out-of-town trips, and I spent days and weekends in her empty apartment. I developed a taste for having a glass of wine by myself while sitting alone in her place, playing her records. I felt grown-up. It felt like I was living in Gregory’s poem “Marriage,” when he contemplates that “pleasant prison dream” of living in a penthouse with a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette from a long cigarette holder. I felt sophisticated.

  On one such evening I went out to replenish Carla’s supply of wine. In the liquor store I saw a newspaper headline that the songwriter Johnny Mercer had just died. Most of my friends had no idea who he was, but I loved his music, especially a kind of corny song called “Accentuate the Positive.” He was one of the founders of Capitol Records. He was a swinger. As much as I loved the Beats, I also loved Sammy Davis Jr., the Sands Hotel, 1960s-era show business. I grew up watching my parents sitting with their friends in the living room listening to comedy records, watching Barbra Streisand specials. Mercer had written some great tunes. He wasn’t Bob Dylan or Crosby, Stills and Nash, but I secretly loved his music.

  I looked up from the newspaper and saw Gregory sauntering into the liquor store. I bought the paper. Gregory took it from me and saw that Mercer had died.

  “He was great!” Gregory said, surprising me. “He was a poet, too. We should remember him. I heard all those songs—Greek cabdrivers know them. They have a great power. Lovers of life know how wonderful those songs are! Johnny Mercer’s lyre quieted by death.”

  I followed Gregory outside. He told me to come with him. We walked for a long time, Gregory lost in thought. He was half humming, half talking to himself. He was a little frightening, drinking my wine out of the bottle by now. The only building in sight was a hotel, far out on Arapahoe Street, like a Ramada Inn. We went inside, but I was afraid we were going to get thrown out. The electric doors opened for Gregory, but they got stuck for me. He went back and stomped on the rubber mat and opened the door.

  It was evening and the lounge was in full swing. An older woman was playing the piano. “Johnny Mercer is dead!” Gregory declared to the dozen or so salesmen and tourist couples sitting at the bar. “What dies, dies in beauty; what dies in beauty dies in me!”

  He sat down and started writing. A new poem for the book?

  “Hold this,” he said as he handed the piece of paper back to me, and I saw that it was not a poem, not a Gregory Corso poem at any rate. It was a crib sheet of song lyrics, the words—most of them, anyway (some he got wrong or had made up)—to Johnny Mercer’s “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Gregory whispered something to the rather masculine-looking woman at the piano, who was dressed in a suit and tie. She began to play Mercer’s song. Gregory stood in front of the piano, his hand over his heart, and I understood I was to prompt him, like in his readings, if he should get something wrong. He prided himself on memorizing his poems and he hated to get it wrong.

  “Happy together? Unhappy together / and won’t it be fine / Days may be cloudy or sunny”—Gregory blew the hair out of his eyes, and went on in a sweet but breaking voice—“we’re in or we’re out of the money, but I’m with you always—” (“Did I get it right?” he asked interrupting himself, and spoiling the moment, which we are all carried away by)—“I’m with you rain or shine!” He looked up at the word “shine” and I saw that his eyes had filled with tears.

  I glanced around the room. Everyone in the place was crying or trying not to. I was getting a headache
because I didn’t want to feel sentimental about it. Gregory would only make fun of me later. He then asked the lady pianist if she knew “Blues in the Night,” because I’d told him that that was my favorite. She did and he sang it, sweetly but a little off key.

  “How’d I do?” Gregory asked me when the song was over.

  “You were great!”

  “Fuck off, no I wasn’t! Why do you have to suck up to me all the time? I’d like to see you do that. You’d pee your pants.”

  I should’ve known. I should’ve told him he couldn’t sing for shit, then I’d have his respect. Another beautiful night ruined.

  On the way home Gregory apologized. He told me that he was writing a play for Halloween, about different people who meet death on the subway platform at Astor Place. He asked me if I’d like to be in it.

  “You can play Death,” Gregory said.

  “Why me, Gregory? Why do you want me to play the role of death, what did I do?”

  “Because Death is a friend,” Gregory explained. “You need Death to be a friend. Death’s got to be a friend.” I suppose that was his way of apologizing, of letting me know that I was still his friend.

  I got the part.

  37. “First Thought, Best Thought”?

  I had Calliope’s address book.

  I found it in the shrine room, the only place big enough to accommodate the crowds when Rinpoche gave one of his public talks. By now I was familiar with the routine—the long wait, the arrival of the Vadjra guards to secure the space, sweeping it for “undesirables,” which I always thought was pretty funny, considering that among Rinpoche’s students sat Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Charlie Haden, and, during the last couple of weeks, Allen’s old friend Carl Solomon, a guy with thick eyeglasses to whom “Howl” was dedicated. (In the third section of the poem, a long catalogue begins each new line with “Carl Solomon I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am…I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother…I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries…”)