When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  45. Birdbrain

  When I told my folks about Peter’s freakout at Anne Waldman’s, my father said it could have been worse. I could have had William Burroughs as a father. He was right, although I was a little embarrassed when Seymour and Marion showed up just after New Year’s at the Ukrainian Meeting Hall on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side to see Allen perform his new poem “Birdbrain,” which he talked / sang to a rock band accompaniment. “Like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady,” Marion generously critiqued.

  The Ukrainian Hall was packed, but not with Ukrainians. Allen was signing copies of “Birdbrain,” the 45 rpm record that a small, independent label had just put out. The band The Stimulators—people called them the Stims for short—was going to perform too. Most of the members lived in Allen’s building around the corner on East Twelfth Street. It was the first time my father saw green hair. He himself was bald, had been since his twenties. Seeing a lot of hair always made my father think about how he’d woken up one day, dragged a brush through his hair, and found most of his hair on the brush. It wouldn’t happen that way for me. My receding hairline would creep up on me, like the erosion of the continental shelf. In high school, I had wanted to call my garage band Male Pattern Baldness, which horrified the other musicians. Instead, we called ourselves the Glitters, but because the “l” and the “i” were so close together on my drum kit we kept getting introduced as the Gutters. We broke up.

  Allen loved to perform. He was like most Jewish entertainers, a real ham. There were rumors that the legendary English punk rock band the Clash might show up and jam with Allen. In the early 1980s, Allen began to play and record with The Clash. Joe Strummer, the lead singer for the Clash, apparently liked visiting Allen on Twelfth Street. Anne Waldman later floated the idea to Strummer that he take over the music department of the Jack Kerouac School. He turned her down.

  My father played the harmonica. He’d picked it up as a little boy listening to Gene Autry and Tex Ritter on the radio. It was cheaper than piano lessons, and what’s the use of piano lessons if you can’t afford a piano? He played “Cielito Lindo” (“My Beautiful Heaven”), which he said was his father’s favorite song, and “Home on the Range,” FDR’s favorite song. My father’s repertoire consisted of other people’s favorite songs, mostly cowboy songs and ballads. I didn’t think he knew anything more contemporary than “Streets of Laredo.”

  My father saw the band setting up onstage and asked them if they needed a harmonica player. He was only half kidding, but Loud Fast Rules thought that was a great idea. They weren’t embarrassed. They weren’t horrified. He wasn’t their father. The lead singer told Allen that my father had offered to “back them up” on the harmonica. Allen looked very interested. They talked about harmonicas—Hohner’s versus Marine Band. My father said that Bob Dylan couldn’t play the harmonica. Allen said he could. (I loved Bob Dylan’s harmonica playing. I thought it sounded like Dylan’s soul blowing through his harmonica.) Seymour mentioned Larry Adler and Johnny Puleo, the midget harmonica player. “Now those are harmonica players,” he said.

  When Allen asked Seymour if he was going to play, my father said he didn’t want to “ruin the evening.” But everyone started to insist that he play with Allen during the premiere of “Birdbrain.” I went up to a few people and told them how embarrassed I was, but they kept telling me how cool it was that this old guy was going to play the harp for Allen.

  By the time Seymour took the stage, dressed like he was going to work in a brown suit and tie with a fedora and his plastic shoes, looking like nothing so much as a precursor to one of the Blues Brothers, the rumor had spread that my father had just come off the road with Johnny Winter. In fact, the only public performance Seymour had ever given was to play “Happy Birthday” to children in restaurants.

  Allen introduced him as my father, Seymour Kashner. He then played “My Beautiful Heaven.” That night, this jaded, hip crowd of Lower East Siders belonged to my father. For an encore, he played “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He had been listening to my records after all! He winked at Allen. Allen smiled back; he seemed to actually enjoy sharing the stage with my father. It wasn’t so long ago that Louis, Allen’s own father, had died.

  Seymour got a standing ovation, which wasn’t hard seeing that there were no chairs, but they were really digging him. I was embarrassed, but I was also secretly proud of my father.

  I suddenly saw Gregory Corso across the room, mingling with the crowd. None of us knew he was even in New York. He just appeared, like a genie out of some discarded kerosene lamp. I wondered if he’d still be teaching at the Kerouac School when the new semester began.

  Gregory sidled up to Seymour and told him that he played the harp like a Negro, then he asked him for ten bucks. Seymour gave it to him. That night my father met all the people who had been wining and dining on his credit card the past year. He spied William Burroughs, settled in the only chair at a table near us, but Seymour thought he was the actor Dean Jagger. I didn’t correct him. Someone asked Burroughs what he thought about my father’s harmonica playing. Bill said a terse “no comment,” then added that Allen always had a soft spot for vaudeville. I thought that was a cruel remark. I didn’t understand why Burroughs had this mean streak in him. After two years at Naropa, I would still feel that Burroughs didn’t have any feelings, any tenderness. No wonder Billy was drinking himself to death back in Boulder. What had Burroughs done with his heart? I didn’t defend Seymour. I was too afraid of Bill, and anyway, I probably wasn’t supposed to hear his remark. But I could hear the whole room that night. I could hear the whole world.

  I didn’t so much feel proud of my father that night as I felt relieved. Relieved that he somehow had managed to keep up with the non-melody of “Birdbrain” and that the crowd didn’t pelt him with unlit Gauloises, forcing him to leave the stage. Why was I embarrassed by this good man? Allen was often far more embarrassing. Later that night I would drive back home to Long Island with my parents, riding on my father’s coattails along the L.I.E.

  The Clash never showed up at the Ukrainian Meeting Hall, but on my way out to the car I swear I saw Joe Strummer in black combat boots, wearing a blue jean jacket, smoking a cigarette, skulking in the doorway of the social club.

  “Nice job,” he said, bowing slightly to my father. “That was beautiful, man.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I waited for Seymour to say something. For an exquisite moment I stood between Joe Strummer, punk rocker, and Seymour Kashner, window shade salesman.

  “Do you know who that was?” I asked.

  “A bum?” my father said. “The Bowery is home to a lot of men like that. You have to have your wits about you around here. Did he ask you for money?”

  Our car was parked in front of the Kiev, a restaurant off East Seventh Street. With its Polish churches and restaurants, its onion domes and its onion rolls, the Lower East Side appealed to my father, the son of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw. “How about some blintzes?” he asked. “You get hungry performing.”

  As we headed for the Kiev, a few people seemed to recognize him on the street. There’s a thin line between pride and humiliation, like two countries sharing a common border. That night, I seemed to move between the two like a double agent whose loyalty was only to himself.

  As Gregory once said after Allen had called him on some particularly egregious behavior, it isn’t a pretty picture, but there it is, hanging on the wall for everyone to see.

  The next morning my father asked me, “What are you writing at the Jack Kerouac School?” We were all sitting down together at the kitchen table; that’s where all the momentous and trivial moments of our life together were traversed. I started to read some of the poems I had written during the past year at Naropa. My mother thought all my poems were beautiful. My father said, “Well, I don’t understand them, but they sound very nice, very pretty.”

  That’s exactly what Allen had said to me about John Ashbery’s poetry, so I took it as a kind of compliment.
I remembered what Charlie Haden had said about the problem of having hip parents— there was nothing to rebel against. I read a few more of my poems, and the phone rang upstairs. My mother went to answer it. She didn’t want to interrupt the poetry reading.

  “It’s Allen Ginsberg on the phone. Allen Gins-berg,” she said, turning it into an English-sounding name. She wasn’t making fun; it was her way of saying someone distinguished was on the phone for her son.

  It felt good to take the call. Allen said he would be going back to Boulder earlier than planned. He said something had taken place that could ruin everything, something involving Rinpoche that could destroy the Jack Kerouac School. We had to go back. He asked me to come along. He said that it was important to show people that Naropa wasn’t some kind of cult, and that he might have to put me on exhibit at the Kerouac School in order to save it.

  Allen said he had been walking around with a secret about Naropa that he couldn’t tell anyone. Now, he said, because of a story ferreted out by his friend the poet Tom Clark, everyone would know. But it was a rotten time to have to go back.

  I had returned home to Long Island with a secret of my own. Carla was pregnant. I didn’t tell anyone, either. It came as a big surprise, especially to Carla. She said a doctor had once told her that she couldn’t have children. She had once lived with a musician—a drummer for the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa’s group—who wanted children, and he’d left her when the doctor told Carla it just wouldn’t happen. Now it did.

  She told me she was pregnant as we walked home after a Barbara Dilley dance performance at Naropa, in which Barbara had given birth to a giant medicine ball onstage to music by Gordon Lightfoot. I sensed something had changed in our relationship; she seemed happy and angry at the same time. When I asked what she was going to do, she said she wasn’t about to raise two babies, meaning me and the real baby. I also felt two things at the same time: I felt insulted and relieved. Insulted that she didn’t think I was grown up enough to have a baby with her; and relieved because I wasn’t really able to grasp the idea of having a baby with Carla. I thought of my folks. They had sent me to Naropa to become a poet, not a father.

  But I was trying to be a grown-up, maybe I was trying too hard, trying to act as if this had all happened to me before. In truth, I was trying to hide the fact that I was scared to death.

  I offered, in a whisper, to get married. Carla just laughed, and then she cried. I asked if she needed money. A big mistake. “Look,” she said, “it’s not your problem.”

  Carla was pretending to be tough, the way I was pretending to be unfazed.

  I tried to see her after that, but she avoided me. She said some cruel things. She said I’d get over it. She said the sex wasn’t all that great anyway. And here I was, thinking it had been the greatest sex of my life. She said I was just too attached to her, and she quoted something Rinpoche had said about neurotic attachments and how my love for her was just an extension of my ego. I wept over the phone, but she was unmoved. She said in ten years I wouldn’t even remember her name. She was wrong.

  On the phone, I asked Allen what had happened, why we had to run back to the Jack Kerouac School. What could be so awful? If it wasn’t because of Gregory or Burroughs or Billy, what was left?

  Allen said it involved a poet named W. S. Merwin. The name made me think of Merlin, King Arthur’s teacher. Allen said not everyone understood “crazy wisdom,” and that what happened to Merwin and the woman he was with could ruin everything. This was the incident that Rinpoche’s detractors were waiting for, to bring down the first Buddhist college in America. That Tom Clark, a fellow poet and a friend of theirs, had done this, Allen said, hurt even more.

  Clark was one of those second-generation poets, a former poetry editor of The Paris Review who had recently moved to Boulder where he was editing the Boulder Monthly. His wife, a delicate-boned beauty who had wanted to move to the mountains with her young children, made Tom go to work, so he began editing the magazine, looking for a big scandal to make his mark. He found it in Rinpoche’s kingdom of Shambhala.

  Tom Clark prefigured the grunge look, wearing a wool cap over his receding hairline. He was tall and exceedingly lanky, like the baseball pitchers he admired, the kooks of the mound like Stan Lee, whom they called “the Spaceman,” and Mark Fidrych, the eccentric pitcher for the Detroit Tigers known as “Big Bird” who during games had intense little conversations with his pitching mound. Tom Clark loved these guys.

  Allen believed that Clark was going to succeed in doing what Cointelpro had, up to now, been unable to do: disembowel the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

  So I flew back to Boulder with Allen and Peter. Carla shunned me. Because I’ve never been able to seriously think about killing myself, I spent a lot of time at the movies. I preferred the lies of the movies to my own.

  One day I saw Burroughs on the street. I asked about Billy. He said Billy spent most of the time in his apartment. It reminded him of a thieves’ den in Marrakech. He said Billy didn’t know what to do next about his fading health. Old Bill said Billy Jr. was reading up on Doc Holliday, the tubercular gunman at the OK Corral. Old Bill thought that was a bad sign, but in fact it was something that these two men—father and son—had in common, a romance with the Old West. I wondered if they ever knew that about each other.

  I saw a lot of movies that winter. I went with Gregory and Calliope, who seemed to have completely forgotten that they had kidnapped me a few months earlier. Gregory was still living with the Faigos, taking tai chi. He was trying to stay away from drugs, but I couldn’t keep the same kind of eye on him that I had before. He still hadn’t finished his book, and his money was running out; he looked like one soul Allen could not save.

  Gregory said that, for him, going to the movies was like going to church. He liked the flood of light radiating from the screen. We saw a lot of old films on Pearl Street. Gregory liked Frank Capra’s movies, and films like Macao with Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum. He thought Russell had “unforgettable tits and shoulders. Her shoulders are even bigger and sexier than her tits,” Gregory said. He loved the fact that actors don’t grow old. Well, not on the screen they don’t. Also, he liked to say that the poor see the same things the rich see when they go to the movies.

  “The rich can’t save Tara from burning,” he said. “They can’t rescue the Count of Monte Cristo.”

  One night I saw Carla in the movie theater. She looked right at me, but then walked away. Gregory put his arm around me. It gave me courage, even before the lights came all the way on in the theater. I’d taken on some of the courage—or whatever it was—that helped Gregory get from one day to the next. It’s a funny thing, but Carla’s contempt for me, her anger, didn’t hurt as much. I thought of Gregory watching Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman. That’s what was playing the night I saw Carla.

  “Just let yourself get pulled in,” Gregory said when we slunk into our seats. “In the movies, the world is love. It’s like being in your mother’s womb, and you can see your father—his shadow— as he comes into the room, and you know your mother is glad to see him.”

  It was a pretty weird thing to say to me at the time, but somehow it worked. I felt almost like myself again.

  W. S. Merwin was a well-known poet, for what that’s worth in America, which means he still must feel pretty lonely—an ant crawling up an American anthill. It can be pretty discouraging. Allen was fond of quoting Shelley about how poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I was discovering, however, that poets could be a pretty resentful bunch, possessors of bad attitudes. “Heap Big Jackasses,” Billy Jr. had said about the poets who came and went through the Jack Kerouac School. The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty, just like anybody else. And even when you think they should be sticking together, they stick out like a bunch of sore thumbs in the eye of the great American night. Geniuses and artists banding together—that was the idea behind the Keroua
c School, though Allen was now starting to get a lot of criticism from the poets more acceptable to the academy, Merwin being one of them. Some said Allen was just using Naropa to find jobs for his friends. “What’s wrong with that?” Allen cried out when he heard that the National Endowment for the Arts had refused his application for money for the Kerouac School. “Do they want to punish me because my friends happen to be some of the greatest writers and poets of the twentieth century?” Allen seemed really perplexed. I couldn’t tell if he was asking me or telling me.

  I tried to cheer him up with a Sam Goldwyn story that I had read about in Oscar Levant’s autobiography, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, a book that Jack Kerouac had loved, all about Levant’s famous breakdowns and his legendary nicotine habit and coffee drinking (up to fifty cups a day, like Voltaire). He was an addict of everything. “I’m going to hold my hand over my heart,” Kerouac used to say, “like Oscar Levant faking a heart attack.” The story was that lawyers hired by Sam Goldwyn told him that he couldn’t keep hiring his relatives for high positions at MGM because he would be accused of nepotism. “You mean they have a word for that?” Goldwyn had asked, incredulously.

  Allen was in no mood for jokes. I’m not sure he even got it, any more than Sam Goldwyn had. All I knew was that this business with Rinpoche and W. S. Merwin had something to do with sex.

  46. Allen’s Secret

  People wondered about Trungpa’s love life. Allen said you had to do what the teacher told you. That was part of crazy wisdom. He said that you had to trust the teaching.

  Merwin had a beautiful girlfriend. The previous summer they had gone on a retreat with Rinpoche and other Buddhist practitioners. Merwin had requested permission to attend Rinpoche’s seminary, a kind of sleep-away camp for his most advanced students. Besides Allen and Peter, Merwin was the only other poet to have attended one of Rinpoche’s seminaries. Merwin had been to Naropa before, as Allen’s guest, but he was totally unfamiliar with Buddhist teachers, and his Hawaiian girlfriend, a woman named Dana Naone, knew even less. Trungpa evaluated applications to his seminaries like a college admissions officer. He apparently took great pleasure in turning people down. But Merwin’s application was approved, and for a $550 tuition fee he was invited to join the seminary, which would gather at a remote ski lodge in the Colorado Rockies.