by Sam Kashner
Allen said that I should follow Ed’s lead and pursue the investigation wherever it goes. He said to be careful, though, because other poets were already gunning for Rinpoche and for Allen, too. Their animosity went back to a public reading at the University of Colorado four years earlier. Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, and Allen were all giving a poetry reading to benefit Rinpoche’s Meditation Center. Trungpa was there, presiding as master of ceremonies. He was loaded on sake. He kept interrupting the poets; at one point he kept puffing up his cheeks and then collapsing them with his fists, making a kind of farting noise. Robert Bly was getting mad. Allen, who never really liked being upstaged, asked Rinpoche if this was all some kind of religious instruction. At the end of the evening Rinpoche apologized. Not for his behavior but for the poets. “I’m sure they didn’t mean what they said.” Then Rinpoche started to yell or possibly yodel, and he started banging on a large gong. Allen looked at him and pleaded with Trungpa to tell him if this was really him, or was he acting out of some Buddhist tradition.
“If you think I’m doing this because I’m drunk, you’re making a big mistake,” Rinpoche said, teetering on the edge of the stage at the school’s Macky Auditorium. One of the Vadjra guards reeled Trungpa back and prevented him from falling into the orchestra pit.
“Put it in the report,” Ed told the class.
All these unflattering stories. I think Allen believed that the report we were working on in Sanders’s class would ultimately absolve Rinpoche and thus Naropa from all suspicions of wrong action. But it wasn’t turning out that way. I worried that Allen was going to have a heart attack when he read the report, and that Anne would flay us alive and use our skins for a shawl.
In class, Sanders told us that the principle of “Investigative Poetics” was that “poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history.” He said that we as young poets now had the chance to do this.
So we compiled a series of questions for Trungpa to respond to, but he refused to answer any of our questions when we presented them to him the next day. Through a spokesman, Rinpoche said that he would never cooperate with the class, and that this was the one class at the Kerouac School that was illegitimate. We then invited him to visit the Investigative Poetics workshop in a closed- door session. We took our job very seriously.
I wanted out of the class, but then Anne Waldman called me and said I should stay in and report back to her. Just what I wanted, to be Anne Waldman’s spy!
Some of Rinpoche’s closest students and advisers, members of the inner sanctum, wanted the investigation to stop. They said that the Buddhist community of Boulder should be on the lookout for what they called “the enemies of the dharma.” (Every single time I heard the word “dharma,” I thought of stuffed derma, the orangey- looking circle of fat that my grandmother loved to cook. It too had a lot of the teachings within it—just a different tradition—and anyway, Rinpoche always said that Jews made good Buddhists.)
In the midst of the investigation, Robert Bly returned to Boulder, ostensibly to give a poetry reading, but instead he tore into Rinpoche and into the very idea of the Kerouac School. Not surprisingly, he brought up Rinpoche’s fight with Merwin. He told the crowded room that the “Kerouac School is doomed.”
“Oh, God, not before accreditation,” I prayed to myself.
Someone in the audience yelled at Bly, called him a coward and a traitor to Shambhala. All these people started to seem crazy to me, caught up in some warfare that seemed more corporate than anything else. The next thing would be a proxy fight, or a hostile takeover of Naropa by the board of Yeshiva. I was getting mixed up. I think Allen was right. Bly and others saw an opportunity to stick it to Allen and Burroughs and their offspring, people that they never really liked anyway, and here was their big chance to say why.
The investigation dragged on through the spring semester. Merwin agreed to talk with us, and a few students who had actually attended the seminary retreat came forward. I met one of them at an all-night donut shop and took her testimony.
According to her account, it was like that Fatty Arbuckle party in the 1920s—Merwin was not an innocent, at least not at the beginning. He was a gentle guy, but he had tried to get into the spirit of the retreat. He was on the front lines of a terrific snowball fight earlier in the day with the Vadjra guards, and he had hatched a plan to create a little mischief by surprising Rinpoche with laughing gas, but they couldn’t get their hands on it—all the dentist offices were closed.
The events in question had occurred at the end of October, when leaves were turning and falling from the trees. All of a sudden it was Halloween, even in the Rocky Mountains. The last month of seminary is supposed to be the hardest. Cabin fever combined with crazy wisdom. The Vadjra guards were throwing a Halloween party: come as your neurosis. This would be the big blow-out before the transmission of some very heavy psychic petting, when the coal of the psyche, under enormous pressure and over time, is transformed into diamond.
Merwin and his companion, Dana, had arrived early at the party, according to my informant. They left early, too. Trungpa came late, and most people thought he was drunk. He was dressed casually in blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. It was hot inside the ski lodge. It was noisy. It was turning into a typical Naropa party. Rinpoche decided to take off his clothes. He ordered a few of his most trusted guards to lift him up on their shoulders, like a bride at a Jewish wedding, only he was completely naked as they led him through the various rooms of the ski lodge. Everyone looked up. Rinpoche looked down. He noticed that Merwin and Dana were not there. He asked where they were. Someone said they had gone back to their rooms.
“Bring them down,” Trungpa said.
“They don’t want to come,” one of the guards told Rinpoche.
“Bring them anyway! Break down the door if you have to.”
But Merwin and Dana refused to open their door. One of the guards decided to smash the plate glass and enter the room. Merwin broke a beer bottle and held it out, threatening to cut anyone who came close to him or Dana. He thinks he might have even cut one or two guards simply by brandishing the broken bottle before throwing it against the wall and allowing himself to be dragged downstairs to the party, where Rinpoche was waiting.
Downstairs, Trungpa urged all his students to expose their neuroses. Then he singled out Merwin and Dana, accusing them of indulging in neurotic violence and aggression. Merwin defended himself. He said that it was Trungpa who was being irresponsible and a traitor to the teachings. Merwin said that Rinpoche was cutting his own throat with the way he was going about teaching crazy wisdom.
Trungpa threw a glass of sake in Merwin’s face, then he turned to Dana Naone. “We’re both Oriental,” he told her. “The Communists ripped off my country. Only another Oriental can understand that.”
Dana then called Trungpa a Nazi.
That’s when Trungpa suggested that Merwin and Dana take their clothes off. After all, he, Rinpoche, was already naked. They turned him down.
When Ed Sanders, during the course of the investigation, spoke with Dana and introduced her evidence into the report, she told him how the Vadjra guards had dragged her off and threw her onto the floor. She could see Merwin struggling too a few feet away. She told Ed, “I fought back and called out to friends, men and women, whose faces I saw in the crowd, to call the police.” But no one did.
Only one man, Bill King, broke through the crowd, and while Dana was lying on the ground in front of Trungpa, King spoke up. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Stop it.” Then Trungpa got out of his chair and surprised Bill King with a punch from his good arm, which was quite strong, and knocked Bill King down, saying that no one else should interfere with what was going on. Another Vadjra guard Dana identified as Richard Assally was trying to pull her clothes off. She said that Trungpa leaned over and hit Assally in the head, urging him to “do it faster.” The rest of her clothes were torn off.
Merwin and Dana Naone stood in front of Rinpoche
“like Adam and Eve,” as one eyewitness described it, and then Merwin spoke up. He challenged everyone else at the seminary to take off their clothes. Everyone did. Belt buckles fell to the floor, shoes were flipped in the air, people slithered out of their clothes like snakes in molting season. Then Rinpoche gave his final order of the evening: “Let’s dance.”
Someone put on a record, Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.” Seeing their chance, Merwin and Dana grabbed their clothes and slipped away.
The next morning Rinpoche had a letter placed in everyone’s mailbox. “You must offer your neuroses as a feast to celebrate your entrance into the Vadjra teachings. Those of you who wish to leave will not be given a refund [it had cost $550 to go to seminary], but your Karmic debt will continue as the vividness of your memory cannot be forgotten.”
I read the letter at the donut shop; it already had a few coffee rings around the edges. The woman who gave it to me liked to come here late at night to think about what had happened. She said that since seminary, it was hard for her to sleep. I added the letter to our “Merwin Incident Report” and took it to the copy shop at the top of the hill near the university, where I had it Xeroxed. I gave it to Allen. We had a copy made for the Naropa library, but someone removed it about a week later.
By the time Sanders left Boulder, he looked like an old man. He’d been through hell. He was living with Tom Clark and his family, who were trying not to answer the phone because threats were coming in. Tom wanted to publish the findings of the Investigative Poetry class in the Boulder Monthly, but Allen and Anne really didn’t want all of that to come out. The younger poets were angry with Tom that he would even think of doing that. But Tom had no allegiance to Rinpoche or to the Kerouac School. Tom liked Gregory’s way of doing things—keeping his distance within the circle. Sleeping with one eye open, even among his friends. I also got the feeling that there was no one Tom wouldn’t betray for a good story.
I saw Sanders the day Tom Clark took him to the airport. “Goodbye,” was the first thing I ever said to him. We shook hands. Ed was carrying a lot of the paperwork from our investigation in a big shopping bag. We were all a little frightened. Ed had told the class when we first started our investigation that when we opened the file on Rinpoche and Naropa, our first concern should be to define what he called “the area of darkness,” and to bring to that darkness “the hard light of Sophocles,” or something like that. But it was hard for us; these were our teachers, this was our school, and accreditation, we hoped, was just around the corner.
Just think of me, if you will, as I was then: an overheated imagination, a dangerously susceptible heart, a good-natured kid, maybe even a tender soul with a mind full of poesy, constantly in the presence of some of the flintiest (Burroughs père), moodiest (Allen), and chilliest (see Waldman, Anne) temperaments around. Ed’s report and the anxiety it was causing Allen put me in a state of despair that seemed only to induce a kind of narcolepsy. I slept like I was still growing. My somber fits had me (when I was awake) playing lots of Bob Dylan records. Playing “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” more than once a day was a sure sign of my misery. Even when I stepped into a restaurant, the one thing I always loved to do whatever my mood, I felt lost and alone.
I suppose that the reason I was eating myself alive was Ed’s report and the unhappiness it was causing the Kerouac School. As my two years at the Kerouac School were drawing to a close, I had stopped calling people up. The investigation had made me slide backwards into shyness and found me returning to my old haunts like an innocent, pretending that I knew no one. I was tormented by the desire for company but unable to pick up the phone. If the Kerouac School had taught me anything, it was to think of my teachers as trusty confidantes, to turn up the radio at a party and climb into the Faigos’ hot tub with Allen and Peter and a few girls, even if they laughed when the steam made my eyeglasses fog over. I was able to throw my library card over the garden wall and be a primitive youth, at least in the backyard of a suburban house. Maybe I was worried about what was going to happen to me after I graduated. Would graduating from the Jack Kerouac School make me a poet? Would I start to publish? Would I stay on in Boulder or go back to Merrick? I didn’t have a clue.
Yet I knew how upset Allen was, and I was afraid that somehow I had displeased him. Around Allen and Bill, even after all this time, I still felt like a schoolboy. Their every word sounded like it was coming from under a dome of gold, even if it was just Allen exasperated with Peter for putting his dirty underwear back in the drawer.
After a few weeks into my slough of despond, I finally screwed up my courage and called Allen. He told me he had just been to New York to accept an award for his poetry; he was now getting serious attention from more academic poetry circles. I think he liked it. He had a habit of surrounding himself with poets who were never that good. Gregory noticed this right away, how Allen often championed the work of vastly inferior poets, some of them just because they were working-class guys who reminded him of Jack Kerouac. They were solidly built and had hair. “That’s not enough,” Gregory said, “to let them into Parnassus.” (I loved how he said “Parnassus” in that thick New York accent.)
Toward the end of the spring semester, Allen invited me to a party. He said we should talk about Ed’s investigation and what else Tom Clark planned to do to ruin the Kerouac School. I went with Allen. It was in a student apartment full of lots of kids trying to act grown up. Almost immediately they began asking questions. “Was it true about Rinpoche and what happened?”
Allen patiently explained to them that the so-called Merwin incident had indeed happened, but that things like individual rights didn’t really exist in a situation like that. He surprised me a little by saying that Merwin got what he’d deserved by going there in the first place.
I could tell Allen was getting angry. He said that Trungpa was a revolutionary, in that he was in some sense challenging the foundations of American democracy, and that, anyway, democracy was a failed experiment—the atom bomb proved that. “What Trungpa was up to was a new experiment in monarchy,” he said.
I saw Tom Clark at the party. He was listening to Allen, who didn’t notice him right away. Tom approached Allen, and it looked like they still might be friends. Tom asked Allen if he would be willing to do an interview about the Merwin problem, about religion and poetry. Allen didn’t want to do it. Clark had interviewed Allen once before for The Paris Review, an historic interview in fact. Allen wasn’t shy, but he didn’t want to be interviewed for the Boulder Monthly; he wanted his interview in a more respectable forum, like Playboy.
That spring semester I had taken a class Allen was teaching on the prophetic books of Blake: The Book of Urizen, Jerusalem. A few days after the party, we left class on a night that felt like Yom Kippur. We walked out into the cool mountain air. Tom Clark was waiting. He told Allen that the interview had to be now. People wanted to hear from Allen Ginsberg on the Kerouac School’s first big scandal. Allen agreed, and we walked back to Allen’s house on Mapleton.
Peter was there with his schizophrenic brother Julius, who was visiting that week. Julius roamed through the house like a skinny ghost in a checkered shirt, stopping to stare at something on the wallpaper. I felt like there were two tragedies going on in Allen’s house at the same time: one was the pain of the Rinpoche / Merwin incident, the other was Peter.
The Orlovskys never seemed ready for this world; they were like incarnations of its suffering. There were four children raised in poverty by a deaf mother. Julius and Lafcadio had both spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals. Allen was the one person they seemed to trust. I always thought that Peter would have wound up just like his brothers but for Allen’s love and devotion. Allen was able to look after Peter, to “handle” him on Peter’s days and weeks of locking himself in the bathroom and crying. Allen had had all that experience with his mother’s schizophrenia.
Now that Peter had taken up with Juanita Lieberman, Peter’s emotional absences, the
weird vacancies that would cross his face, making him unapproachable, almost catatonic like his brothers, became a real crisis for Allen. “Now I’ll have two babies to support,” he complained, referring to Peter and Juanita’s plans to move in with Allen and start a family.
It sounded familiar. That’s the same language Carla had used with me after she decided to send me out of her life.
Peter had just made dinner for his brother when we all came into the house. He was doing the dishes and preparing to put out the garbage. Peter cleaned out the house like he was cleaning out the Augean stables, but I understood how he had gotten himself dismissed from the army for “mental disturbance” (when he was asked to clean out his barracks, he had tossed out everything he considered ugly—including guns and helmets—and then hung curtains and painted sunflowers on the soldiers’ lockers). Peter sang to himself, but in a very loud voice, while Allen spoke softly into Tom’s tape recorder in the living room, driving Tom crazy by making him turn it off and on every few minutes, while Allen considered what he wanted to say, “for posterity.”
I liked helping Peter with the dishes; I liked to do the chores that would keep me from having to offer an opinion, anything not to get sucked into the Merwin whirlpool, where I could feel myself getting old just thinking about it.
Sometimes, despite his quiet, reasonable tone of voice, his sane manner, Allen could say some very outrageous things. That was a source of his power—his quiet mania, his well-mannered, apocalyptic thinking.
“I accuse myself all the time of seducing the entire poetry scene, and Merwin, into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship, which they’ll never get out of again, and which will ruin American culture forever,” he said into Tom’s tape recorder. “Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters…All the horrific hallucinations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are going to come true right now. Right here in Boulder…But with Trungpa…you’re talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher. Trungpa said that he was trying to explain to Dana that she should respect her roots by taking part in a classical experience. What he finally told me was, ‘This is an opportunity to turn poison into nectar.’ I don’t know what happened,” Allen admitted. “So I went to see Trungpa. It didn’t bother me too much, but apparently it bugged a lot of other people.”
