When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Seymour Kashner had come to the airport dressed like Allen Ginsberg. I don’t think my parents, in their planning for this kind of hilarity, counted on Allen being there, too.

  My father’s appearance stopped Allen in his tracks. He stared at my father, as if he were looking into a mirror. He even held up a hand to see if the mirror image would hold up its hand. It didn’t.

  “Allen, this is my father. Seymour, meet Allen Ginsberg. Peter, this is my dad.”

  “You never told us he looks like Allen,” Peter said.

  “He doesn’t,” I said. “Not usually.”

  Seymour unhooked his beard.

  “He still looks like Allen!” Peter said. I guess he did.

  Allen seemed weirdly flattered that my father had come all this way, dressed like him, to pick us up. It was typical of Allen to misconstrue the whole thing and turn it into an enormous compliment. My father and I looked at each other as if to say, well, maybe it will mean a good grade at the end of the Jack Kerouac School term.

  Marion was waiting for us in the car. She seemed a little taken aback by seeing Allen and Peter with me. Seymour got into the front seat and put his fake beard back on. Allen, Peter, and I sat in the backseat and we headed for the airport exit. We crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. My mother said, “You’re probably hungry,” and she offered to take Allen and Peter to Ratner’s, the ancient kosher dairy restaurant on Delancey Street in lower Manhattan. To my shock and horror, they accepted. My hip, independent, beatnik world was suddenly turning into a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  I’m a little ashamed to remember how much embarrassment my mother and father had awakened in me, these profoundly good- hearted people who were treating my teachers to a late-night meal at Ratner’s.

  Once we’d arrived and were shown to a table by one of the sourpussed, argumentative waiters, Allen told Seymour that he hadn’t been in Ratner’s in maybe twenty years. Marion ordered for everyone, while Allen explained how the last time he was in this restaurant he’d had a vision after taking peyote and copulating with a man from the U.S. Army—a male nurse who had the face of an angelic creature. Allen said he had seen a vision of Baudelaire, right there in Ratner’s, who told him to change his life, to devote himself to poetry, to music, to singing the blues in life.

  The vegetarian chopped liver came. My father told Allen to try it. Allen ate practically the whole thing.

  “Don’t they feed you at the Jack Kerouac School?” my father asked. It was like being with Allen’s father, Louis, and Allen’s brother, Gene, only worse. I didn’t want anyone at Naropa to know I came from parents. Hadn’t Bob Dylan told people he was an orphan, that he’d been raised by circus performers? Allen noticed my discomfort and told me, sotto voce, not to worry. He said he liked my parents. He even said I was lucky.

  At the end of our midnight supper, before heading for East Twelfth Street to drop off Allen and Peter, Allen told Marion that she reminded him of Mitzi Gaynor. It made my mother’s night.

  44. Anne’s Party

  It was cold in New York, but a few days after landing in Merrick I started going into the city (as we who lived on Long Island called Manhattan) every day, to walk the East Village, knowing Allen and Peter were waking up on East Twelfth Street. Now I could really see them, even though in some way they were sewn back up into their own lives.

  I called Allen from the pay phone on the corner of First Avenue and told him I was in town. If you stood in front of the building where he and Peter lived, Allen would lean out of his window and throw down the key to you. Richard Hell and his girlfriend lived in the same building. Anne Waldman lived practically around the corner; her window looked out over Eighth Street. I knew that W. H. Auden had lived farther down Eighth, across from the St. Mark’s Cinema, a tiny blue grotto of a theater that played old films. Ted Berrigan, who would be coming to Naropa in a few months, lived here too. In the 1960s, when I was still in elementary school, he and his poet friends were walking the amphetamine-soaked streets of the East Village. It seemed impossible to compete with them for Allen’s ear; they seemed to know him well enough to treat him like some annoying uncle. Anne and Michael Brownstein were always making gentle fun of Allen—his baggy pants, his hissy fits. They kept telling him that he was taking on too much work and stress. They even, behind his back, made fun of his high blood pressure.

  I would never know Allen well enough to tease him like this, I thought.

  When I was in high school, the East Village was like something out of the Arabian Nights romances. The Fillmore East was still in existence, and there was the St. Mark’s Bookshop, with its picture of Allen in a huge oval frame hanging off a nail downstairs. I once saw Auden shuffling into the Gem Spa in his satiny bedroom slippers on a rainy Saturday night, where he had gone for an egg cream and the Sunday New York Times. It was a place where I knew that Allen and his friends were lurking, that confidences were taking place—but where, exactly, were these gloomy zones of melancholy? I was still groping my way around Avenue A, a little uncertain in some of the same places where Allen moved so effortlessly. I once lied to my parents about coming here to the East Village on the Long Island Rail Road, telling them I was studying for a test with a friend. That night, I brought home a drum major’s uniform complete with epaulets that I’d bought at a vintage clothing store on Eighth Street. My parents had already called my friend’s house and found out I wasn’t there. The drum major’s uniform and I were met with “the treatment”—my father’s not talking to me for twenty-four hours—and the confiscation of what he finally called my “doorman’s uniform.” I had seen the Beatles inside the foldout of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band seated in those uniforms, and I wanted one.

  Somehow everything was different now that I knew the Beats, or thought I did. My visions of Allen and Burroughs had become real, even to me. My visions didn’t fail me, as I walked down Second Avenue with Allen and Peter, and Larry Fagin (one of the younger teachers at Naropa) and his girlfriend Susan Noel (the whitest woman I ever saw, from Kentucky, who looked like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby).

  We were headed toward Anne’s apartment on New Year’s Eve, midway through my first year at the Jack Kerouac School. I had the feeling in this bitter cold that the rest of the world had gone away.

  Here they were, all together in one room, or, more accurately, spread out over the several rooms of Anne’s railroad apartment. Most of the guests—Ginsberg, Burroughs, Larry Fagin, Reed Bye— were in the club car (the living room), holding drinks and smoking cigarettes in groups of twos and threes, like the cocktail hour in a Frank O’Hara poem. There was Edwin Denby (bearded, delicate, whippet-thin, with the fragile whiteness of a ghost, smiling). His lively eyes looked around the room. I was hoping Larry Fagin would introduce us, as they were friends. He never did. Instead, Allen brought him over. He left us standing together in front of Anne’s window, which looked out over Eighth Street. I saw the snow starting to fall.

  “It’s snowing,” I said.

  “Just wait till summer. Have a little patience,” Edwin Denby said. After that, it was only our two voices on the verge of saying what voices always seem about to say, but never do. So here they were, the last free men, I thought. The ones who stormed the hills of bourgeois complacency. The ones who were going to restore humanity to itself, freeing it from encrusted, outdated inhibitions and fears. The ones who would spear all the two-legged sharks who walked the earth.

  But that was before Peter freaked out.

  A few minutes before midnight, Anne recited her long poem “Fast Talking Woman,” a command performance that put an exhausted Allen to sleep. “I’m the celebrity woman / I’m the luminary woman / I’m the student woman / I’m the braggart woman…/ where will I go?…/ who will save me?…”

  Anne wrote a poem for Allen, which she read that night. Anne loved Allen, but I think she was a little jealous of his fame; a lot of Allen’s friends were. In her poem, she told Allen to go to Rinpoche’s meditation
center and park his ego. Allen came to life when he heard his name spoken. “Go disappear,” Anne advised him, “and meditate, just be Allen the janitor, go clean the stove.” She told him to “stop telling everyone what to do, then act meek.”

  Away from Boulder, it seemed that the younger poets were getting back at Allen for running the show. It reminded me of those Dean Martin “roasts” on television, which I loved, with Don Rickles poking good-natured fun at Frank Sinatra. Only there was no laugh track in Anne’s apartment. Perhaps the younger poets thought Allen was just a madman who thought he was Allen Ginsberg.

  “Don’t eat that terrible food, empty that soda down the drain,” Anne continued. Her poem was a kind of rant, a bill of particulars laying out what bugged the younger poets about Allen. I’d heard it before at the Kerouac School, whenever the younger teachers got together and began tearing into the boss. “If the phone rings,” Anne continued, “don’t answer it. Say ‘no.’ I dare you.”

  Wow. Even Allen’s big heart was starting to get on their nerves.

  “Don’t be so hungry for young boy meat,” Anne recited. “Don’t worry about / what everyone else is thinking about you. / No one’s smarter or more enlightened or more famous. / For heaven’s sake, Allen, pull up those baggy pants!”

  I looked over at Allen. Guess what? He wasn’t laughing. I knew he was hurt. As much as he had designed the Kerouac School as a kind of protective retreat from his own fame and the craziness of his own life, he was giving the last bit of his health to the place. And here were these younger poets who didn’t seem grateful for the chance Allen was giving them even to be artists at all. It just seemed to me to be bad manners. I was so grateful to be there, and they seemed to take it all for granted.

  Allen had a lot to contend with lately. Recently, a young poet had showed up at a reading at the Kerouac School and told Allen that he was going to commit suicide and name Allen as his literary executor. His estate consisted of two tremendous shopping bags filled with his poetry. Allen already felt in some way responsible for his own mother’s shock therapy and death. Allen had started jumping up and down and yelling, shaking his fists in the air, throwing a tantrum, whining and screaming at this kid. The kid looked terrified of Allen. I thought Allen was going to have a stroke. Everyone told him to watch his temper, to deal with his anger, to watch his blood pressure.

  Allen didn’t have a great sense of humor about himself, but he was learning. The tricks of his ego and his regard for his own reputation were starting to make him laugh, just a little. Rinpoche had already put that bee in Allen’s bonnet, and he was the only person Allen seemed to listen to about any of this. Rinpoche was giving Allen a real inner life, a life not just made up of Allen’s own thoughts and ideas, but one of egolessness. “It’s the only thing,” Allen once told me, “that can melt the glacier inside of me, the one that’s been building up for fifty years.”

  Incredibly, I don’t think Allen really minded the barrage of criticism because, after all, it was about him. Allen hadn’t lost his ego at all—it was still intact. In fact, I noticed that Anne and Allen were now talking about meditation, and had planned a retreat together. There was a lot of talk about losing your ego, about taking refuge in the dharma. Didn’t anyone around here realize that this was the sixth day of Chanukah? In fact, the threat of egolessness was the reason I had stayed out of the shrine room. I liked my ego. I always made up an excuse for not joining Peter and Allen when they went off to meditate. I was afraid of emptying myself out, afraid I’d have no serious reason for living. I once asked Allen, “Aren’t you afraid of disintegrating, of having nothing left to write about?” There was Allen’s old friend Philip Whalen (the poet who’d told his wife on their honeymoon that he had just taken vows to become a Buddhist monk), who was writing nothing but poems about how he couldn’t write since he started meditating. Most of Rinpoche’s students, those who seemed to spend all their time sitting, were in danger of sinking into an irresistible boredom, the human equivalent of torpor. Who was it who said human beings are such timid creatures that only our amusements can stop us from dying for real? That’s why Gregory always flew off to the movies.

  I’d known something was wrong with Peter as early as the car ride with my parents and our late-night dinner at Ratner’s. Peter was a man who shouldn’t be drinking. He had seemed manic to me, even in the car, petting my mother’s hair. (She told me later he was using a little too much force, pressing down on the back of her head, as if he were trying to flatten the flip in her hairdo.) He was like a kid in the backseat who had had too much chocolate. He was slapping Allen on the wrist and pulling pages out of Allen’s notebook and making them flap around out the window, threatening to let them go.

  Peter started drinking at Anne’s party right from the beginning and wouldn’t stop. He seemed to become even more agitated, more profane. At Naropa before we’d left, Allen asked Peter to sit in for him and teach a few of his classes while Allen went out of town to give a poetry reading. I remember one of those classes: Peter had looked around the room and called on one of the newer students, an intense, serious-looking woman who had come to class prepared (well, she had brought a notebook and some pens). Peter asked her, “Do you like to have your pussy eaten?” followed by, “Who here likes to eat pussy?”

  One shy girl I had danced with once at a Kerouac School party held her hand up at half-mast, looked around meekly, and then quickly withdrew her hand.

  “Does it taste like strawberry jam?” Peter demanded. “It should taste like strawberry jam.”

  Then Peter turned to me. “Your assignment, Mr. Sam,” he said, “is to eat the pussy of some girl in the class and tell us if tastes like strawberry jam.”

  I pretended to write down the assignment in my memo pad.

  Peter never taught again, at least not that class. After Peter had confided to Allen that he’d had suicidal thoughts, Allen had taken Peter to a doctor who put him on antidepressants. Peter was now going around saying that he was really straight, and had been duped by Allen into being queer.

  At Anne’s party on Eighth Street, Peter kept saying that he didn’t want to be gay anymore. “It’s because you had such a strong personality,” Peter told Allen. I didn’t really believe it. I thought it was just the alcohol talking, the pills, even Peter’s illness. But in front of all these people, on New Year’s Eve, Peter kept going on about how Allen had tricked him.

  Peter was eyeing a carving knife Anne had laid out for cutting the New Year’s cake she had bought in Little Italy. I touched Peter tenderly on the shoulder and moved between him and the table. I liberated the knife and brought it back into Anne’s kitchen. Allen threatened Peter with sending him to Bellevue. I feared that Peter wouldn’t be making just a weekend visit to the nuthouse. One more act of madness and Peter would probably never, ever get out. I was afraid for him. If gentle Peter, who let tiny birds perch on his finger, was doomed, then everyone was doomed. Even Allen. Even Rinpoche. Even me.

  Peter was now starting to take off his clothes. I could tell he was getting ready to throw himself into the arms of a monster—a madness that, in time, would perhaps subside, but you never knew when. You could threaten Peter, like Allen did, with the drip-drip of a drug that would quiet him in the hospital—and maybe that was the only way—or you could try to understand Peter’s dilemma. Sweet and care-taking, his outward gentleness seemed to mask a hatred of the people closest to him.

  When you saw Peter’s zombie brothers, who would both come out to Boulder for a visit during the spring term, you saw what the problem was. The problem was Peter’s fate. This was Peter trying to escape his own private sorrow. Burroughs said that in the end Peter, like Ezra Pound, would probably choose silence.

  Peter was upsetting all of Anne’s plans for New Year’s Eve. Midnight had come and gone. Peter was being calmed down on the couch, or, rather, held down. Suddenly, he sat upright and jumped off the couch. I thought I recognized Philip Glass trying to hold him back, like a poli
ceman. Like a Russian bear at the picnic, Peter was chasing away all of Anne’s friends.

  Larry and his girlfriend asked if I wanted to leave, and we went to Raoul’s for a late dinner. Larry ordered caviar and an expensive wine. He got me to pay with my father’s Diner’s Club card, which I still had. I had too much caviar. Walking toward Penn Station alone, I threw up in the snow. It was black.

  I knew my parents would eventually see the bill for dinner— $300 for the three of us. I didn’t want to face them. I didn’t want a temperance lecture from my father. I felt bad. I just wanted to take my body off to somewhere else. I had been locked up with the crazy Beats long enough, but I was always nice to crazy people. That was my problem. I thought you had to live on the edge of craziness to be a poet, and I wanted to be a poet more than anything. At the Jack Kerouac School and around Rinpoche himself, I felt as if I were in an almost constant state of danger and excitement, as if the Beats themselves had lured me into this unknown city, a city where everything is wreckage but you stay as long as you can. You keep looking with fascination, not for a way out but for a way in—even deeper. It had happened to Allen, Gregory, and even old Bill. It was happening to me.

  “They fell in front of a cracked mirror, Sam,” Billy Jr. said when I called him from my parents’ house the next morning to wish him a happy new year. He sounded stoned—very stoned—as I told him what had happened at Anne’s. “And they fell in love with that cracked image. They’ll just stare at it until they die.”