by Sam Kashner
Something apparently had happened between Merwin and Rinpoche at that retreat. Something had also happened between Dana Naone and Rinpoche. But what? Some people said that Rinpoche had wanted Merwin and his girlfriend to take off their clothes. One friend of Merwin’s said it was like Kristallnacht. He said there was a lot of yelling and broken glass. He said it had nothing to do with crazy wisdom or the teachings, just that Rinpoche was just crazy and drunk with power. I heard that a lot when I came back to Naropa for the spring semester of 1977.
It was as if a key had been turned and a door was opened, through which a lot of Allen’s enemies now felt free to walk. I came to the Kerouac School unconvinced that Allen could do any wrong. I didn’t think much about Rinpoche. He just seemed like the incomprehensible, spooky father of a girl you really liked. But I was starting to think there must be something powerful about what he was talking about, because a lot of powerful, strong-willed personalities were responding to it. They were hanging on his every whispered word, his enigmatic talks, his chronic lateness, his air of gentle menace.
“Here’s the ball game,” Gregory said to me one night in the Boulderado Hotel, waiting for Poppy to come to him after earning some money in the big double rooms off the second floor. “Allen’s like Jack. They need teachers. They don’t think they’ve got the goods. Jack needed Neal. He said, ‘Here’s my teacher.’ Jack’s first religious instruction—it came from Neal, not the nuns of Lowell,” Gregory said. “Ginzy needed a teacher, too,” Gregory explained. “He’d spent his life rebelling against authority, but secretly Allen admired his professors at Columbia. He could have had that kind of life. Instead, he found something to follow both in Rinpoche and Neal Cassady. Rinpoche is something of an intellectual, with the soul of a voyeur, and Neal? Neal was an exhibitionist with an insatiable thirst for knowledge—and words.” And for Allen and Jack both, Neal’s prison-yard torso, his muscles bulging out of rolled- up sleeves, didn’t hamper their adoration.
Allen had often mentioned Neal as a kind of teacher to him and to Kerouac. Allen said that Kerouac had once received a letter from Neal about a football game that turned into a letter about his life in Denver. It had thirty, maybe forty thousand words in it. Allen said it became a sacred document to Jack. It was almost as if that letter freed Kerouac to write his great works. It gave him the gift of Neal’s style—his relentless, fascinating jabber.
I didn’t really understand Neal Cassady. In fact, I found him a little scary, the idea of him, anyway. He reminded me of Jimmy Gordon, a high school kid who let his girlfriend play with my hair during assembly, who couldn’t wait to drop out of school. Jimmy and I were in general math class together, that is, eighth grade math but in high school. I was pretty stupid about numbers. Jimmy was so much older than the rest of us, on account of his being left back so much, that he actually had a job, with benefits, in the ninth grade. And he stole cars, like Neal. I figured that I would have been afraid of Neal Cassady. But Allen and Jack were in love with him.
The end of Neal’s life sounded pathetic. He took a lot of psychedelic drugs and drove Ken Kesey’s bus, hanging out with hippies half his age. He lifted weights. He tried to talk up his legend, while Kerouac, the artist, ran away from his. Neal had had a kind of scandalous love life. One of his wives was only fifteen years old. The Beats, my teachers, had learned to live with some very complicated romantic situations. Rinpoche’s court, for example. This idea of being a courtier in the kingdom of Shambhala was not a problem for Allen, or for Anne.
Rinpoche didn’t make any bones about the fact that he wasn’t a monk anymore. He had a wife and a couple of young kids, three sons, in fact. Rinpoche’s wife, Diana Pybus, was the first woman from America ever to attend the famous Spanish riding school of Vienna. Rinpoche was once warned by one of his teachers about exceeding the limits of familiarity with Occidentals. But that was a long time ago.
Rinpoche and Diana lived in their beautiful mansion on a hill in Boulder, “the wedding cake house.” It had a lot of rooms. I should know. I had to vacuum them all, as part of my job as Allen’s assistant at the Kerouac School. He also had a home in Nova Scotia, and property elsewhere in Colorado. The Vadjra guards took care of his every need. I started to think that it must be good to be reincarnated.
Allen believed that I was making a big mistake in not availing myself of the teachings. He thought I should try to meditate, and learn about the Four Noble Truths. Allen had even put the Four Noble Truths to music. He’d get his audiences to sing along with him: “Born in this world, you’ve got to suffer. You die when you die, die when you die.” And so on. It was catchy and upsetting at the same time.
In the weeks following what was becoming known as “the Merwin incident,” the Kerouac School was in an anxious state. Mike Brownstein and Anne Waldman tried to deal with it by first asking Tom Clark what he thought he’d accomplish by publishing a story about something outsiders could never hope to understand. But the horse was not only out of the barn, it was off and running, setting records at Churchill Downs. And the barn? The barn was on fire. Something had to be done. While no one knew exactly what had happened to Merwin and Dana on that retreat, the inter- mezzo wasn’t pretty.
Allen had other troubles. By now he and Peter had moved from the apartment complex on Broadway to an old wooden house on Mapleton. But if that move had been intended to give Peter more of a gemütlich sense of family, it didn’t work. Allen’s life companion of twenty years had met a woman. Peter Orlovsky was in love.
Juanita Lieberman arrived at the Kerouac School during one of the registration periods for the spring semester. She was painfully shy. I was meeting prospective applicants for the next summer session at Naropa. Peter’s class was still mentioned in the catalogue, even though, after his crash course in cunnilingus and strawberry jam, his class had been canceled. Nonetheless, Juanita expressed an interest in it.
She was the daughter of a Park Avenue psychiatrist. She was plainly—almost shabbily—dressed, wearing a torn green sweater, dungarees that came down only to her ankles, and old tennis shoes. Her appearance made no secret of the fact that she hated makeup and wasn’t dressing for the pleasure of men. She had a sad face. It was always a little red, as if she had just been crying. She looked like she was suffering from some invincible melancholy. I waved Peter over and introduced them.
I left the two of them alone in the hallway of Sacred Heart, the parochial school where the Naropa registrations always took place. That was the whole story. That evening, during Allen’s poetry reading welcoming the new inmates to Naropa, I saw Juanita napping on Peter’s shoulder. Like two bedraggled immigrants staring into the sea, Peter and Juanita sat there oblivious to everything. Juanita didn’t even seem interested in the other writers who had come to see Allen, even the presence of Ken Kesey, who had driven out from Oregon with his friend Ken Babbs in a big Cadillac to visit a woman named Felice Duncan, with whom Kesey was having a “same time, next year” love affair that had been going on for twenty years.
As soon as Kesey arrived at Allen’s house on Mapleton, he went into the bathroom. We all just sat there and listened to him pee; it took forever. Then someone broke the silence by saying that Kesey urinated with a sense of eternity, like a sailor.
Felice lived in Boulder and had become a Trungpa student. At first, I felt badly for her. I thought she lived for these visits from Kesey. They were both big, tall as trees, powerfully built—a good- looking couple. Kesey made Felice Duncan wait a long time for their night together, but she never griped about it. She waited for her lover with all the forbearance you see on those Mexicans waiting for a bus in Los Angeles, with the patience of saints. I wondered if Felice dreamed about Kesey, satisfied with not going to the bottom of life with him. Well, I guess life sometimes throws you off the path, and you just have to change your plans.
Gregory was right again, the disgraced Gregory. “You have to hurry—death is chasing you and it’s closer than you think. There’s a lot to do in a s
hort time.” So I didn’t blame either Felice or Juanita. They had all those noises inside them, too.
Peter was practically living with Juanita by the end of the first week of classes. Was Allen going to have to support Peter and Juanita, and maybe a baby? First he had to worry about losing the Kerouac School, and now Peter. What about their pact, the one they had made to look after each other, even in paradise? I guess Peter must have decided that paradise will have to wait, while he searched for it on earth. Of course, Peter never had any intention of leaving Allen—it would have to be the three of them, or the four of them. I know that Allen didn’t like to go to bed alone, and Peter was beginning to spend less and less time at home and more and more time sleeping with Juanita and going out with her friends. When you saw them all together, Peter looked like Hercules attended by the maidens.
I would have done almost anything to please Allen. I had arrived at the Jack Kerouac School wanting to learn how I could become Allen Ginsberg; but I ended up wanting to take care of him. We hardly spoke about not going to bed together. Early on, when I’d had my chance, I always left. I always walked home in the evening, wondering what Allen was thinking after I’d left him alone. I had seen the poems he was writing now, the things he was confiding in his journals, his fears about Peter leaving him, about getting older, about not being attractive. Relying on his fame to take boys to bed. I didn’t want him to take my refusals as some form of rejection. It was like a wound we had to keep dressing every time I said no.
One night after Allen asked me to stay, he started to cry. He seemed lost in his private darkness. The big, two-bedroom house was empty except for the two of us.
Allen was already in bed when he called out to me to come in and sit on the bed and talk. He reached out and hooked his fingers through one of the empty belt loops on my pants and pulled me closer to him. He kissed me on the mouth. I gently pushed him back on the bed and tried to say something sweet, something to comfort him. At the time, it felt like the end of the world, as if we were the only two people left, with no one else to confide in. All of his fame seemed to disappear for me inside his own unhappiness.
A time comes when you are just alone. No wonder it had been hard for Allen to do what Rinpoche asked—shave off that beard, stop wearing black, buy white shirts and a tie, go on retreat, and just be the Allen who takes out the garbage. At moments like this, I’m sure he sought comfort in retracing his steps as a great man in the world, returning to those moments when he was more certain of who he was and what the world expected of him. Peter’s taking up with Juanita, and my rejection of Allen, must have left him feeling like someone fated to go back over his life, again and again, in the lonesome dark.
I kissed Allen’s hand and let it go.
47. A Woman with No Heart
I failed. My first year at the Kerouac School was coming to an end, and I flunked the first assignment Allen had given me at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics: I couldn’t keep Gregory away from his drug dealer. I had tried. I tried everything. I tried talking him out of going into Denver and spending all his money. I told him, “What if something happens to you? Think of your kids if you have an overdose.” It didn’t really occur to me that as far as Gregory was concerned, getting high was the only place in the world where he felt comfortable, now that he was forgotten, or not as famous as his famous friends Ginzy and Burroughs. It was also a way for Gregory to have a kind of permanent vacation from the slavery of having to make a living. Gregory’s boss-hating attitude was the most extreme I had ever seen. It didn’t help that Allen was making the Kerouac faculty plow their money back into Naropa, especially now that the scandal involving Rinpoche and W. S. Merwin might hurt future enrollment. It would be a happy miracle if Gregory could only finish his book; there was more money in it for him if he could.
Gregory had been a beautiful young man. Anne Waldman had told me that when she used to see him walking along MacDougal Street, his black curly hair and impish smile would take her breath away. Allen was always saying what a gorgeous kid Gregory was. But the years of wandering and drug taking had taken something out of him. Butterflies in youth, maggots at the end.
It wasn’t envy, really, that Gregory felt toward Allen, but whatever it was it seemed like a pendulum that swung between aggression and depression. I didn’t like hearing Gregory swearing at Allen behind his back, or calling him names. If Gregory could have been a ghost, free to haunt Allen and Bill, he would have shown his resentment in boundless mischief. As it was, he acted out in front of Allen, accusing him of abusing his authority at the Kerouac School and not promoting his friends’ work so much as using it as a way to control them, a way of supervising how famous they could get.
I couldn’t stand up to him anymore. He said if I let him go down into the hole of his addiction one more time, he promised me he would finish the book, and even write a letter of apology (“you could write it, I’ll sign it,” he said) to the entire Kerouac School faculty, apologizing for trashing the apartment they had given him. It seemed too good to be true.
It was. If Allen found out, I would be one dead poetry student. They would never trust me again. Nonetheless, I decided to go with Gregory—at least I could sit in the car so he wouldn’t be given a parking ticket, proof that I had let him return to the junkies’ trading post, a place as exotic in my imagination as any jungle in the Amazon, crawling with strange animals and natives with blow darts. Besides, I was curious to see what it was really like. I wouldn’t have to avoid talking about it with Gregory, I would know. If a swindle took place, or if he lost some serious money to these people, he would be able to talk to me about it. Maybe he’d have more respect for me. I wouldn’t seem like such a virgin to him. That was, after all, the big difference between us. Gregory’s past had everything in it, whereas my biggest setback occurred when my high school guidance counselor had left a packet of vocational school brochures for me just at the time when I was starting to think about applying to colleges.
We set out at night, Gregory looking for a church. The semester was almost over and summer was just around the corner—you could smell its hot breath hovering in the air. “A church,” he said, “with a tin roof.” Allen or Neal, maybe it was, had taken him there one night. We found it. As we pulled up to the curb, the car scraped the sidewalk as if we had hit a sandbar.
I thought I would just stay in the car and wait for Gregory to get his drugs, but he told me to go instead. He said he had a bad feeling about what would happen if he went in, so he sent me. I couldn’t believe his gall. I looked over at Gregory. I must’ve looked like I wanted to kill him; I certainly felt like it.
I got out of the car. Gregory said that the guy I was looking for would probably see me first and come out of church or around the corner. Gregory said that he was expecting me.
That’s when I realized this had all been planned in advance. Gregory said that the guy I was looking for was very nervous about these kinds of transactions, and that I should try not to blink or look nervous. Suddenly, my eyelid started twitching like mad. It had never done that before.
I approached my destination. No one appeared. I walked into the church. Sanctuary! No one was going to kill me there, I thought.
The church was very hot. I could hardly breathe in the little alcove. There were a lot of candles burning in little glasses. I was alone. The altar of the church looked like a horizon very far away.
Suddenly, someone put his arm on my shoulder from behind. There was a small space between the candles and the door. I turned around. It wasn’t a priest or someone who had come to say his prayers at the end of the day. It was a sandy-haired guy with blue eyes who smelled like he had been working under the hood of a car. He smiled and his gold tooth caught the light from the burning candles. I recognized him. He was one of Billy Jr.’s friends, one of the Westies.
This was Gregory’s drug dealer? I never had much respect for Billy’s friends. Billy was so smart; he loved to read; he wanted to be Mark Twai
n. The Westies seemed like idiots—the more they drank, the more drink they poured into Billy, and the more idiotic they seemed.
The Westie was staring at me. He didn’t seem too interested in his money or in giving me the glassine envelope with Gregory’s ticket to paradise in it. “How much is that worth?” he asked, pointing to the chain around my neck. “What is it anyway?” He put out his hand, and I leaned back. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not going to hurt you. Fuuuuck.” He must’ve added that for reassurance.
I never liked wearing jewelry. My father never even wore a watch or his wedding band. I’m not sure he even had one. But my parents had given me a mezuzah, which I sometimes wore on a chain around my neck.
“What’s in it? What’s it for?” the Westie asked.
“There’s a tiny scroll in it,” I said. “It has Hebrew writing inside. I wear it for good luck. It’s like a Jewish rabbit’s foot.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Some are. This one isn’t.”
I wondered if he also noticed the veins in my neck throbbing with fear.
“I want it,” he said. He was going to try to tear it off my neck. I could feel the chain getting hot as he began to pull, as if he could pass the chain right through my neck. I tried not to look at him. I looked at his tropical shirt instead: hula girls standing on the backs of dolphins. I wanted to run out of the church, but he held the chain of the mezuzah in his hand.
