When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Aphrodite said, “Gregory is the only teacher you’ll need. And anyway, your parents know all about it. They approve of the plan.”

  “What plan? My parents approve of my being driven up the side of a mountain, in the middle of the night, by a junkie and his prostitute girlfriend?” There. I’d said it. “Has everyone gone crazy?”

  They laughed.

  The phone calls, I figured out, were to blame. I didn’t want my parents calling me up every day to see how I was doing; it just made me more nervous, more homesick. So I had given them Gregory’s phone number, knowing I’d be there at least a few days each week for class. (Gregory preferred to teach in his apartment, with Max running around, rather than in a classroom.) What started happening was they’d call when I wasn’t around, and Gregory would talk to them, snowing them, even in the summertime. Junkies are always charming when they have to be. My parents even invited him, Lisa, and Max to their house on Long Island! Maybe Marion just liked being called Minerva.

  “Your parents cure homelessness,” Gregory told me. “So we’re coming home with you.” The idea terrified me. My parents, sweet as they were, didn’t know what they were getting into. I could just see Gregory showing up with Aphrodite and screwing her in my boyhood bed on Lowell Lane, in Merrick, Long Island.

  As we continued up the mountain, it was as if we had reached the end of the world. An enormous darkness swallowed up the road, until we came to a driveway and a little cabin with a flickering porchlight.

  “We’re here,” Gregory said. “We’re home.”

  42. Jailhouse Fear

  I saw it written in one of Allen’s notebooks: “You can be a virgin in fear the same way you can be a virgin in sex.” I thought about that as Gregory pushed me ahead of him into the deserted cabin. Gregory led me into the deserted cabin. It had probably belonged to a miner once upon a time. It had a bed, a table, a chair, and not much else. I got the feeling Gregory had been there before. The bathroom had a single lightbulb hanging from an exposed wire. There was a telephone and a desk with a few books on it. It had a wooden floor, and both Gregory and Aphrodite seemed to know their way around the cabin.

  “It’s dark as an asshole in here,” Gregory said. He lit a kerosene lamp that I didn’t know I was standing next to. I tried to play along for a while, to pretend I wasn’t scared. My feelings toward Gregory hadn’t changed, really, in spite of everything that was happening. I wanted to understand him, to figure out what could make a poet so brutal. But what I wanted even more was to get the hell out of that shed, because the whole thing looked pretty sinister to me. In a mess like this, with someone like Gregory, I said to myself, there’s nothing you can do but clear out.

  But Gregory was determined that I lose my virginity as a fearful, protected boy of the Long Island suburbs.

  “I never met anyone who looked greener, who looked less prepared to have something to write about than you,” Gregory said. “Where’s your subject? If you haven’t lived, if you’re living through the lives of a few legends like us, you’ve got to be alone with your fear, like I was. You have to get a pretty good look at her, and then you’ll have your subject.”

  That’s how Gregory started a war between us. I don’t know if he meant to. He was out to shock me. He really thought he could change me, that he could frighten me out of being a child, like he was frightened as a boy in prison. It’s true, I didn’t know what men were like, what people were really capable of. “People—nobody loves them, not even people,” Gregory liked to say to Allen. “Men are the thing to be afraid of,” Gregory told me that night, “always men, and nothing else.”

  “What about Long Live Man?” I asked, referring to one of Gregory’s books of poems, the one I had read on the plane, sitting next to my father, coming to Boulder.

  “This is serious,” Gregory said, lifting the shade to look out the window as if he were expecting company. “This is the real ball game,” he said, which is how he usually introduced his serious subjects. “The Beats are no example. They forsook certain habits, a certain way of being, but acquired their own habits. They’re as lost as the main flow. The only way out is the death of the way. Americans are a great people,” Gregory continued. “Are you an American?” he asked me. He didn’t wait for my answer. “I don’t need some Chinaman to tell me that.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I think he meant Rinpoche.

  “Man is the victory of life,” he continued, “not life, man.”

  I was going to have to sleep there. But where? And not with Gregory and Aphrodite, not the three of us, naked on that cold, park bench of a bed.

  Aphrodite walked out to the car and brought back a set of works. “What thinkest thou the poppy?” Gregory said to me. I knew what Gregory thought of drugs, especially drugs like heroin, peyote, and hash. He felt that most drugs were the poet’s prerogative. I knew it from his poems; now I saw it before me. Gregory had often said that what was good enough for Chatterton, Coleridge, and Shelley was good enough for him. “Like the poets of the Lake District,” Gregory explained as Poppy held a soup spoon over the kerosene flame. “It’s part of the poet’s lineage, the poet’s inheritance, such drugs.” Only Coleridge didn’t have to go through a Puerto Rican connection, or flout the law to get it. Gregory resented that. “It should be a part of every poet’s medicine cabinet,” he said.

  He paced the cabin floor and, telling me to get comfortable, explained how the law turns farmers of the poppy into gangsters and prevents the poet from exploring the pain of life. “For me, there is no Xanadu,” Gregory wailed.

  I was present, sometime earlier, when Gregory had dictated a poem about his muse, who asked him, “Do you love drugs more than you love me?”

  “With tearful eyes,” Gregory cried back to his muse, “I swear to you, there is in me yet time / To run back through life and expiate all that’s been sadly done…sadly neglected.”

  Gregory, I wanted to tell him, there is no time like that. No one is given that much time. It wasn’t a muse, it was Gregory’s own intelligence looking back at him that seemed to be saying, “Oh, Gregorio, Gregorio, you’ve failed me.”

  Gregory went to the bathroom, leaving the door open. Aphrodite used the noise of his peeing to give me the news that I’d be shooting up with Gregory. I would see through the big lie of life with him. We would both partake, and the apothecarian earth would bloom in our veins, or something like that. I would shoot up, then make love to Aphrodite. People have only themselves, and they don’t do that too well, was one of Gregory’s themes. He believed no one person would give you everything—you had to steal what you needed.

  Yet, I thought, many had been kind to Gregory because of his gift, because his poetry revealed his soul, which seemed both good and fragile.

  I started crying when it looked like I would have to shoot up with Gregory. I thought I would die up there in the mountains. I suddenly envied people who don’t have much imagination. When you don’t have an imagination, dying probably isn’t much to worry about. But if you do have an imagination, then dying is something awful, something to be afraid of. I wasn’t really enough of a Buddhist to feel any other way. I entered the shrine room only for classes, or for school dances, never to meditate.

  How much longer would this craziness go on? It felt like we’d been up there for hours. When would these lunatics fall asleep, drop off with exhaustion? How long would it last—weeks, months? Would they keep me here for years, until we all died of hunger and exposure?

  Pity comes in funny ways. My tears made Gregory stop in his tracks, so to speak. He saw my tears and told me to go outside, to listen to the birds singing at night. There were still some left, up in the mountains. I think he was probably just as glad not to have to share the junk. I suddenly remembered what Charlie Haden had said: that Gregory was the real addict; he was the one to be afraid of.

  “In the morning,” Gregory said, “we’ll call your parents. We’ll make our claim.”

  I wait
ed outside the cabin, listening for the birds whose songs I couldn’t hear. The only sound in my head was my own fear. They were naked and rolling in the bed when I came back inside the house.

  Aphrodite told me to approach the bed. She pulled at my tie. (I still had it on.) I felt excited and sick to my stomach. The noise was still in my head—that noiseless noise of fear. Aphrodite rose to her knees in bed and gave me a long kiss. Gregory was drowsy, his head on the pillow, making small, whimpering noises like a puppy having a bad dream. They were both high.

  I walked away from the bed, determined to wait them out. I was waiting for them to fall asleep. When they did, I would be the one to call my parents, to have them come and take me out of there. This was a time for daring. Maybe Gregory had helped me conquer my fear after all. Anyway, I had nothing to lose.

  “What is it?” Gregory asked. “What are you doing?” Gregory had gotten up when Aphrodite had kissed me. He slurred his words; he was very stoned. He was trembling. I couldn’t tell if he was mad or about to have a seizure. I couldn’t figure out if he wanted to talk to me, if he wanted to tell us something, or if I was going to see Gregory Corso cry.

  At first, Gregory wanted to have some fun with me. Then he changed his instrument, and began playing a different tune. He wanted to teach me something, to give me a night in the jailhouse, a night under the open roof of the Parthenon, where Gregory had once slept. But Gregory misjudged me. For all his talk about self- reliance, he, too, was trading on the heroic romances of the Beats. Gregory thought he could make up new stories on the spot to entertain me, to keep me there. He thought we could share exploits—exploits that verged on the delirious.

  I was about to leave, to make that decisive step and bolt from the cabin and take my chances with the cold and the darkness, when who should arrive at that very moment but Mike Brownstein and a girlfriend. It was a double bill, and I was the audience.

  It turned out that it was Mike’s cabin after all. I ran past him, out the door, into the middle of the dark road. I must have hit something on the way out, because I noticed my arm was bleeding. I didn’t even wait for him to ask what was going on, or offer me a ride down the mountain; I just followed the road as best I could until I saw the lights of the city and I could hear the generator of Boulder Hospital humming in the night air. I don’t know how long I ran, or if anyone tried to come after me. All I knew was that I was happy, as if I had suddenly seen the mad, flickering lights of a carnival. I was home.

  The next day I found out that Gregory and Aphrodite had gone to Mike’s cabin because Gregory had destroyed his apartment after Lisa had left him.

  I went with Allen to survey the damage. Gregory was crazy to ruin the one place of his own in Boulder. It looked like he’d started with the furniture, breaking it up and throwing it into the fireplace— chairs, tables, even his writing desk. Apparently, he’d given away everything that wasn’t nailed down—plates, cups, saucers, lamps. Anything that wasn’t missing was destroyed. Even Max’s children’s books were shredded.

  Allen shook his head when he saw the wrecked apartment. We stood for more than a half hour in the midst of Gregory’s mess. It was suddenly like standing inside a cluttered tomb. Life hides everything from people, even what they know to be true about their oldest friends. For the first time, Allen seemed unable to help Gregory. Allen told me he and Peter would have to leave for New York soon. He asked if I would like to come with them and spend New Year’s Eve at Anne Waldman’s apartment in New York. I asked if Gregory would be there.

  Allen said he hoped not, so I said yes.

  As far as Allen was concerned, what Gregory had done was unjustifiable. He couldn’t save Gregory from himself. Gregory had intelligence, he was incredibly intuitive about people, he even had a weird code of honor. But he had no sense of how to live in the world. That’s probably when Allen realized they’d have to get rid of him. The Kerouac School couldn’t afford Gregory Corso anymore. So Allen and Anne, and some of the younger poets who were better at tolerating Gregory’s social dissonances, gathered in executive session in Rinpoche’s office to consider Gregory’s fate.

  As you get older, you can look back on the selfishness of the people you’ve known in life. You can see it for what it is. It becomes harder to make excuses for it. With Gregory, I certainly tried, but his pain and his cruelty were exhausting all of us. They seemed even stronger than time itself.

  Thanks to Allen, though, I’d be going home.

  43. Back to New York

  The air above Boulder was as unstable as the atmosphere at the Jack Kerouac School. The wings of the plane were flapping as if they were made out of canvas. Allen and Peter were holding hands. I hadn’t seen that before, in the whole time I had been at Naropa. I didn’t know when I first arrived at the Kerouac School that there was so much unresolved tristesse going on among the Beats, to say nothing of the second-generation poets and other characters that Allen and Bill had brought with them to Naropa from the Lower East Side. I didn’t know I was in the middle of turbulent affairs and unrequited love: Burroughs for Allen, Allen for Peter (now that Peter had discovered women, or at least the idea of women), Peter for girls, girls for Anne, Anne for Gregory, Gregory for the Muse, Allen for Neal Cassady, as Cassady—now dead—had become an object of veneration in a lot of the poems Allen was handing over to me to work on. And, of course, all of them for Kerouac, whose disembodied spirit held them and our school together.

  I had no idea how tormented Allen was by his crushes. He had come back from the Rolling Thunder Revue in love with a skinny, curly-headed violin player named David Mansfield, though I got the feeling that David was straight and a lover of Allen’s poetry, which didn’t translate to the poet.

  Allen had now, it seemed to me, transferred his love of Neal Cassady to the young Neals who were coming up to Naropa’s reception desk, “looking for Allen Ginsberg,” hoping Allen would help them in their battle for survival, only to reject him if things didn’t go well, or if Allen—God forbid—criticized their poems, or became impatient with their standing around waiting for some of his fame to rub off on them. They would instead humiliate him and storm off. Allen’s bed was either the most crowded or the most lonesome bed in Boulder—I couldn’t decide which.

  Allen Ginsberg was the most airplaned of poets. He had crossed America more times by plane than Neal Cassady had driven across the Golden Gate Bridge. Although Allen and Peter hated to fly, Allen liked United Airlines. He said it gave him the idea for his “poems of these states,” which he called The Fall of America. He was very proud of his National Book Award for that book, the only national literary award he would ever win. Flying United made him feel like an American poet.

  “Why not fly American then, Allen?” asked Peter, the most practical man in Allen’s chaotic life.

  Before we left, Allen admitted to Rinpoche that his ego, which he had tried so hard to rub out with meditation, always came roaring back on an airplane. “I’m too famous to die,” Allen shrieked as the plane rocked in turbulence.

  I had offered to sit between Allen and Peter on the flight to New York because, compared to the two of them, I was usually a patient and calm flier. If necessary, I could hold both their hands.

  The stewardess seemed to know them. She brought them small bottles of alcohol.

  I had my first gin and tonic on that flight. Allen ordered it for me. I also had my fourth and fifth gin and tonic on that flight. Somewhere over Michigan, it suddenly dawned on me that Peter and Allen were both smashed. And I had started to slur my words as early as the Grand Canyon.

  Then it hit me: something more terrifying even than being drunk for the first time in a rollicking airplane. My father had agreed to pick me up at the airport! He would see two of my teachers completely wasted and their main student—me—on his first bender. Is this what Allen meant, whenever he dragged me from one place to another, when he said that he was going to treat me like Edgar Allan Poe on Election Day, when Poe got taken, Allen explaine
d, from one pub house to another, liquored up by the pols so he could vote repeatedly for the same candidate? (I thought all the bars were closed on Election Day, but Allen never let the facts interfere with a good story, even the story of his life. It’s why he was a poet, I guessed, and not in market research, something he actually did in the 1950s until he was let go for rifling through other analysts’ desks.)

  My father, Seymour Kashner, was going to drive in to JFK from Long Island and find us drunk as sailors on shore leave, walking around and around the bag carousel like Buddhist pilgrims around the stupa.

  The plane landed. There is a sigh you sigh when you think you are out of danger, a sigh that commemorates the fact that you are still alive. Peter was the first to make it. Allen was next. Then, a funny thing happened. Allen Ginsberg—the poet who had chanted “Om Mani Padma Hum” in Lincoln Park, Chicago, during the calamitous Democratic convention of 1968, who, in Gregory’s phrase, “dropped Hindu for guru” and became an industrial-strength Buddhist practitioner—put his hand on his bald head and uttered the Sh’ma, the Jewish prayer testifying to God’s oneness. Every kid in Hebrew school knows that prayer. I guess Allen never forgot it.

  Then Peter put his hand over his thick ponytail and said the same thing. Russian Peter saying the Sh’ma? In another life, he would have been a Cossack rounding up Jews for the czar’s army. Prayer works, I thought as I stood up and waited for the air to come back into my lungs, teaching myself how to breathe again.

  As we left the plane, Allen and Peter wobbled like a couple of ninepins, leaning against me for support. It wasn’t a good idea. My own hallucinations were getting in the way. I saw standing at the end of a long corridor—at the very back of a group of people who had come to meet our plane—an older man with eyeglasses wearing a false, long beard hooked over his ears. What can only be described as love beads were worn around his neck, over a dark business suit. He also pretended to be reading a small book of poetry, which he held up for us to see, called Howl. The man also happened to look a lot like my father.