When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

I told Aphrodite, who had come downstairs holding hands with Monica, that I had something that could help her keep her appointments, something that fell out on the shrine room floor during Rinpoche’s last talk, something she might need. “It probably fell out while you were meditating,” I said.

  Aphrodite was excited to get it back, for it had all the girls’ appointments in it, not just Aphrodite’s. Apparently, she was their manager. The madam who had greeted Billy so tenderly a few minutes earlier was just the day manager. Aphrodite worked the nights.

  Monica asked us to come see her room. She said you could hear crickets outside and that, at first, her guy couldn’t get it up because he knew those crickets could hear everything. Billy thought that was funny as hell. I never saw him so happy. Billy said he liked to come here to work, that it was the only place he could write. Things were starting to look up for Billy, I thought.

  Too bad he was starting to die.

  On the way out of the Boulderado, Billy casually mentioned that Allen and Anne had finally taken him to a real doctor, a liver specialist whose practice was in a suburb of Denver. He told me that when he had walked into the doctor’s waiting room, he’d looked around and asked, “How often do they kill people around here?” Nobody laughed.

  “He was probably a quack,” Billy said, “but at least he wasn’t a veterinarian, like the guy my father found for me.”

  This doctor told Billy that he needed a liver transplant, and he needed it soon. His liver had had it.

  “I need somebody to wipe out on their motorcycle,” Billy told me. “That’s what it’ll take to keep the party going.”

  39. Dream Lunch

  Toward the end of the fall semester, Ginzy and Burroughs were going to let me meet them for what Allen called their “dream lunch.” They started it when the two had first come to Boulder to teach at the Kerouac School. They’d meet at a restaurant off the mall so that they wouldn’t be bothered. They were an interesting pair to look at now, walking the street together, Allen with broad shoulders, growing his gray-grizzled beard back, his Greek fisherman’s shoulder bag always full of poems, one or two tomes, and his ubiquitous appointment book. And Burroughs, long and thin, dressed like a banker, a bony formality about him. He even wore a hat—straw in the summertime (a boater) and a bowler in the fall. Dressed like the last modernist stranded among the Beats.

  I walked a little ahead of them, slower, on purpose, than I would have. I learned the pace from walking down Central Park West with my grandmother. “I’m like Nerval’s lobster,” I told Allen, “on a blue leash.” Why was I so happy to make an obscure literary reference like that to these two giants who ruled my world at the Jack Kerouac School? Because it delighted Allen and Bill, who were just crazy enough to know what I was talking about. (The nineteenth-century French poet Gerard de Nerval was said to walk a lobster on a blue leash through the Tuileries, his lobster setting the pace. Nerval would later hang himself from a lamppost and, in his suicide letter, say that he was hanging from the Queen of Sheba’s garter belt.)

  I didn’t really want Allen or Bill to think of me as a lobster tethered to their leash, but I wanted to say something clever, and that was the best I could do. Conversation wasn’t equal, not even after nearly a year at the Kerouac School.

  The thing of it is, though, I had just learned about Nerval and his lobster from Michael Brownstein. Michael had been to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, where he had gone to translate the prose poems of Max Jacob. Michael was a good-looking guy with delicate eyeglasses and long black hair. He wore a strand of elephant’s hair made into a bracelet, and he lived in the mountains. He had a lot of girlfriends. He was what you’d call sardonic. He had written a book that all the other teachers, especially his old girlfriend from New York—Anne Waldman—considered a masterpiece. It was called Country Cousins. Mike Brownstein treated Allen like he was a pain- in-the-ass grandfather who was always complaining about something, but whom he never failed to kiss on the forehead when he said goodbye. I dug Mike. I wanted to be him, but he was already there.

  When I told Mike and Gregory that I was going to join Allen and Bill for a lunch in which they were going to tell each other their dreams, Gregory looked over at Mike and said, “Ahh, they make all that shit up anyway. Well, children will hear what they must hear.” And as I left Corso added behind my back, “I can see you, going to join the fairies!” He and Mike laughed. But I didn’t care what Gregory thought. He was just jealous that he wasn’t invited.

  Allen and Bill sat across from each other in a darkened booth of Sage’s restaurant, an imitation Tiffany lamp hanging over their heads. Drinking hot cider through straws, Allen and Bill looked like chaperones at some demented sock hop. They were talking about “oneself and the other,” and Bill answered with something about “what is needed is direct action against the regime.” I wondered if they thought, these two, whether or not they had won a kind of victory against the squares. After all, they were famous, legendary even. Did they assume that victory was theirs? Were they now getting down to molding a world to their measure? I wasn’t sure that outside of Boulder or the Kerouac School anyone even cared anymore. Or did Allen and Bill think this was a war they had lost, that the squares had in fact won? And they, in retreat, had ended up here in the mountains, safe only among each other? Even the loveliest hallucinations fade away—hadn’t Allen taught me that?—leaving one that much sadder for having glimpsed paradise and lost it.

  I remember only one dream from that lunch. It was Allen’s dream. He said that in his dream, he put all of Kerouac’s books and letters into a kind of steamer trunk and dragged it to a harbor by the sea. With great effort, he pushed the trunk into the sea and the water swallowed it up. When Allen got back to his apartment, in the dream, Kerouac was waiting for him. He asked Allen, “Why did you do that? I thought you loved me. That was my life’s work.”

  “But now that you’re dead,” Allen had said, “you don’t need to make any dust. Books just gather dust.”

  “Maybe,” Bill said, “you just needed to get Jack’s work out of the way, to make room on the shelf for you.” Old Bill, a Freudian to the last.

  40. A Bathing Suit in the Hot Tub

  In spite of everything, I always went back to Gregory. I didn’t like the abuse, but I always felt that I learned something talking to him. He seemed completely himself. Everyone else was so happy to hide from you, and maybe if you lived long enough you’d discover something about who they really were, but not Gregorio Nunzio. He would get you there faster than a bus. He would always tell you what the ball game was, though you could never tell how far he’d go in his frankness.

  Gregory had a terrible habit. A disgusting habit. Maybe it stemmed from the days when he had his nose pressed up against the glass, the street urchin of Little Italy, or from his life after prison, feeling that he had to be bad because he was bad. Whenever we went for a walk down Pearl Street, Gregory would stop in front of a fancy restaurant, especially one with a window that looked out onto the sidewalk, where you could see the people enjoying their dinners and they could look out onto the street. Gregory would stop and stand there and start picking his nose—deeply, fiendishly, until he was completely sure that everyone in the restaurant could see him. He wouldn’t stop until some of them put down their forks and knives and tried shooing him away like a mangy cat. I could never bring myself to laugh at Gregory’s prank. I liked eating out too much. It made my gorge rise just to see it. I felt for the people inside the restaurant. Gregory said that he used to do it as a boy in New York City. If he couldn’t afford a nice meal, he didn’t want anyone else to have one either.

  “Everything you do,” Gregory told me on one such stroll in Pearl Street, “can be beat, every face you meet is a beat kind of face.”

  “Every face?” I asked.

  “There’s inconceivable heartache in every face,” Gregory said. “It just doesn’t come out until, like, six o’clock at night. Some people can’t tell the difference, but I ca
n.”

  Another day Gregory and I were walking out on the strand, or at least what passes for the strand in Boulder, Colorado, and Gregory stopped in front of Pelican Pete’s restaurant. He started picking his nose. Who should come rushing out but Allen.

  “Gregory, what are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Ginzy, I didn’t see you. This climate, man, it dries out my nose.”

  Allen hadn’t come out to chastise Gregory for being disgusting, but to ask what had happened to him. He’d missed the last three faculty meetings. (Gregory had successfully managed to avoid almost every faculty meeting at the Kerouac School for the two years I was there.) Allen either hadn’t noticed Gregory’s revolting stunt or he didn’t think it was worth commenting on. Or maybe he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it because Allen was so magnificently blind, so wall-eyed about the flaws of his lifelong friends. What for Ginsberg was a definition of friendship, the embracing of social dissonance, would have been for me a defining moment in a relationship— the beginning of the end. But the Beats seemed interested in my opinion only if it was exactly like their own.

  So your own ideas, your own feelings, went underground. You drifted. You waited for their approval. You wanted to go through their rites, their rituals and procedures, you wanted to be one of them, but then (I had a terrible thought): Do they know who they are?

  Allen, on the other hand, was much more careful—and more socially acceptable—than Gregory. In a way, Allen was the exact opposite of his image, the one I had imagined for him when climbing the walls of Bookmasters on Third Avenue looking for Allen’s City Lights books. People always think of Allen Ginsberg as the outrageous, out-of-control, scatological, nudist-loving, free-speech advocate who smoked pot for breakfast and took LSD the way other people take Tums, whose work and life ushered in the hippie movement and prefigured punk. To be honest, Allen encouraged that image, in countless public readings, and in his musical collaborations with Dylan, the Clash, Sonic Youth, and others. Even in interviews Allen liked to push the envelope, bearding the lion in his den, such as in his famous television interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line, chanting and playing the harmonium inches away from Buckley’s darting tongue. None of that was very hard for Allen to do, because he really did have those qualities in him.

  By the time I was Allen’s apprentice, though, he had changed. If he hadn’t changed, then he had finally managed to come into the personality he had always had: the soul of an actuary, not a wild man. He loved keeping lists and files and filling notebooks as if they were ledgers, his dreams charted and monitored like stocks. He rarely if ever cursed. He could be the most polite of men. He often wore a bathing suit in the hot tub. He liked to take pictures when he traveled, like any bourgeois tourist, and he was an incessant labeler. Everything had to have a name or a lineage attached to it. For example, I was the third-generation, New York School poet, descended from Samuel Greenberg (a young Jewish immigrant poet who died of consumption and was an influence on Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”). Allen went to bed late only if he couldn’t fall asleep, and he didn’t care for bohemian espresso pits; in fact, he tried to get me to stop drinking coffee. So twixt the image and the cup, Allen was a very different person. Still, despite all his European influences, from Apollinaire to Zukofsy, Allen was an American poet. He was a JAP: a Jewish American Poet. He was a whiner who howled.

  41. Kidnapped by Poetry

  “It’s always a bad day for someone,” Gregory liked to say. Here’s what happened toward the end of the fall semester, when I was looking forward to getting away from everybody, returning to Long Island for the holidays. Christmas break was coming to the first Buddhist college in America.

  I was walking home from a party at Jane and Batan’s (the couple who taught tai chi at Naropa). Gregory was living there now, sleeping on the couch, after Lisa, Max’s mom, had thrown him out. She usually took him back after their fights, but this time she’d left, taking little Max with her and heading back to San Francisco. Jane and Batan loved Gregory.

  I liked Jane and Batan, and I loved to watch them performing tai chi; it looked so calm. It’s a discipline that tries to slow down the speedy confusion of the world. It was strange to think that Batan and Jane would welcome Gregory into their home, but they did. They accepted the chaos he brought with him.

  I noticed that even as Gregory brought the whirlwind with him, he also seemed to carry prison around with him wherever he went. He set up his prison life, so no matter how much space he was given, he seemed to choose a tiny area in which to live. He was never free of it. He had roped off a little corner of Jane and Batan’s living room, and that’s where he was living now.

  Even though Gregory suffered from panic attacks, he once said that one of the things that bothered him about me was my fear, that I was too afraid of everything. Gregory told me that when he was a kid, his heart used to beat like a scared rabbit in a cage—a rib cage. He thought I was like that, too, and he wanted to help me get over it. He said that he had overcome his fear in prison.

  Jane and Batan had big, beatnik parties during weekend nights at Naropa—noisy, beat parties that spilled out of the house onto the lawn, the backyard, even into other houses. Allen and Peter were always the first to get naked at those parties, having done so ever since a famous poetry reading in the mid-fifties when someone in the audience had asked Allen and Gregory what they wanted. Allen had responded by saying, “To be naked, to reveal the truth,” and he took off all his clothes. Then Peter took off his pants and started throwing them around his head, as if he were roping a steer. Since then, it didn’t take much to get Allen and Peter to take off their clothes.

  This night, Carla was away on another run for Linda Louie. I thought she was becoming addicted, not to the drugs she was running for the Louies but to the money and to the idea of herself as an outlaw.

  I left the party and walked home. It was cold; there was no moon in Boulder that night, no cars on the road. I couldn’t see in front of me. It was one of those dark nights when you felt you could stretch your arm out in front of you and wonder if you would ever get it back. So it was a relief when a car raced past me and its headlights flooded the street. For a moment anyway, I wasn’t alone in the dark.

  Then the car came back a second time. It passed again. The high-beams sent a silvery light onto the trees before I even heard the motor. I walked along. Now my heart was beating like a warm rabbit in its cage.

  As the car slowed down beside me, I heard laughter. It sounded like the kind of laughter that had been going on for a long time. I could feel the heat radiating from the car’s engine. I couldn’t see inside. A window was rolled down. Thank God, it was Aphrodite at the wheel, and Gregory was sitting next to her.

  “Get in,” Gregory said.

  “I’m almost home,” I told them. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

  “You’re always having things explained to you,” Gregory said. He sounded like he was starting to get irritated with me. “I have some new poems you have to see. I want to know what you think. They’re fucking great poems.”

  “I’m sure they are,” I said.

  Gregory knew what would get me into the car. I climbed into the backseat. Aphrodite did a three-point turn and headed down the oneway street the wrong way. It was dark, but I knew we weren’t going in the direction of my apartment house. In fact, they had no intention of taking me straight home. We were going up into the mountains.

  “What do you think of that?” Gregory said, almost sneering.

  “We’re going to have him on our hands for the next few days,” Aphrodite complained.

  “That’s the idea,” Gregory said.

  “For days?” I said, echoing Aphrodite. Now I was scared.

  I was kidnapped by poetry. I would never have gotten into the car if Gregory hadn’t offered me the chance to see his new poems, the ones I was desperate to put into the new book, just so we could get it done, so he could get paid and have some money to
see him through the rest of the year, and I could justify Allen’s confidence in me as an assistant, a helper of the Beats.

  Where were they taking me? Just a moment before, I was feeling a little like Jack Kerouac in that line that Gregory hated, when Kerouac says how, because he was poor, everything in the world belonged to him. But walking home that night, I did have everything I wanted. And I had it all to myself. I owned the moon, and Boulder, the mountains, and my thoughts, melancholy though they were. I was thinking about how other poetry students had begun to trickle in, and by next spring a horde of students would join the few of us at the Jack Kerouac School, which made me sad. But I knew it would be good for accreditation, which Allen and Anne so desperately craved, and which I promised my parents would happen any day now, though it didn’t look good.

  But now I was the owner of an enormous fear, riding up the side of a mountain, farther and farther away from my apartment.

  They say you can never really picture your own demise—that’s a good thing. I hated Gregory at that moment, lying to me like that. I could tell he was high on heroin again. Whenever he got high, he became a kind of chickenshit god, a tyrant, a Mussolini of poetry, jut- ting out his almost toothless jaw, in love with his ideas about everything. I knew that he was desperate for money. Lisa and his other wives were pressuring him for cash, and the Kerouac School wasn’t much help. They couldn’t always pay their teachers. It wasn’t a problem for someone like Allen, who could make a thousand bucks giving a poetry reading, but Gregory didn’t get that kind of money for readings. And anyway, whenever he did get money, it seemed to go into a hole in his arm. He was furious with the school for not paying him.

  “Forget about this fucking school,” Gregory said as we drove higher up into the mountains. “I’ll teach you what you need to know. I’ll be like those angels who brought me books in prison. I’ll be your school—you pay me! No, we’ll get your parents to pay. We’ll keep you up in the mountains until they all pay. I’ll teach the fear out of you. Did you know you can learn a lot about human nature from looking at cats? Cats who are threatened by fire end up jumping in the river.”