by Sam Kashner
She surprised me. She seemed to encourage these thoughts. When she touched my arm, I was like a sponge in water, absorbing her tenderest feelings.
“I don’t want to mislead you,” Carla said. “I want to spend the night with you, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be together tomorrow and the day after that.”
I knew I couldn’t do that, which was a novelty for me. In all my time at the Kerouac School, when it came to having a sensation I never thought about it twice. I even had sex with my teacher Larry Fagin’s girlfriend, Susan Noel, the one Peter Orlovsky called Susie Christmas. I could never quite figure out why I did it. Perhaps I was secretly angry about all those dinners Larry was charging on my parents’ credit card. Or was it contempt for my own shyness around girls? Someone once called youth a glorious beach at the edge of blue water, where women seem to be always available to us, their beauty freeing us from the falseness of our dreams.
I was so serious about poetry, so serious about the world, that I was missing the point. Allen was missing the point, too. Shouldn’t pleasure and happiness come first? Why, then, send Carla away? Why do we refuse to be cured of the disease of loneliness?
I didn’t know what to do. I felt like dashing my brains against the brick facade of the library. Often, when you are strong enough to think about such things, you wish you could reclaim the words once said to you, just as you wish you could reclaim the people themselves and ask them, “What were you trying to tell me?” I was never smart enough, not then, anyway, to know what was going on. I certainly couldn’t keep Gregory away from drugs. Or bring Billy and his father together. Or find out why Anne never really dug me, or make Allen less insecure, despite his incredible fame. Perhaps we all lose our true companions. Allen lost Jack; Gregory lost his youth in prison; Bill lost Joan, the one person who, even in her craziness, probably loved him; and Jack lost them all behind the door of his mother’s house. Had I just spent two years in the valley of the lost men?
In the end, I didn’t send Carla out into the night. My love for Carla was taking a long time to die. It was Gregory—banished, disgraced Gregory—who told me, “Go after huh” in his New York street kid accent. “Go after huh, don’t let huh get away!” I figured everything had already fallen apart. Everything about Carla was mixed up inside my head. Her mixed signals were mixing me up.
Allen always had a broken heart. It helped his poetry. As for Burroughs, I wasn’t sure he had a heart at all. He was like those target cutouts you see on a pistol range, the black silhouette of a man. Curiously, it was Gregory who was more reliable on the subject of love. It was Gregory who sent me out after Carla.
“Let me tell you,” Gregory said. “Love is the whole ball game. There isn’t really anything else.”
I ran out of the shrine room after Carla. There was the rain again, the rain that falls alike on the lovers and the lost. I asked her to stay until all the parents had left, until the rain stopped, until I could lean her against a tombstone in the old Boulder cemetery and, stealing a line from Gregory’s great poem “Marriage”: “woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky.” I thought you could talk like that, then, when you were young and in love with the weird, sweet complications of your own heart.
Carla stayed. I went home with her. She put Brian Eno’s Before and After Science on the record player, ambient music for the pretty sleep that comes after love.
The Kerouac School was finally up for accreditation. A team of about seven men and two women from the Association of Middle Colleges arrived in Boulder to observe the Kerouac School during a typical week. They started their work the day that all my teachers in poetics, the administrators, and most of the students were to be arraigned in Jefferson County on the Rocky Flats trespassing charge and for interfering with government activities. The special prosecutor rode to the courthouse from the airport with Allen, who had come back that morning from a poetry reading in the Pacific Northwest.
Attendance was pretty sparse that semester anyway, so Peter had the idea to recruit some of the vagabonds from the mall to sit in the classrooms and look like they were taking notes, five dollars for every hand that went up with a question. Thank God, Allen overruled him.
Accreditation would finally come, though the Kerouac School would have to wait.
52. Graduation and Beyond
I walked back to my apartment, remembering how my father had helped me set it up two years earlier. I couldn’t even think about dismantling the apartment and moving back to Long Island. Yet slowly, in the days leading up to graduation, I started carting home empty boxes I’d gotten from the giant liquor store and filling them up with books. Those dozens of books reminded me of the many reasons for my coming to the Kerouac School in the first place. I kept Balzac’s Lost Illusions, one of the first books we read in Allen’s class, on my shelf as long as possible. It was the story of a young man from the provinces who comes to Paris to become a poet and a great man of letters. Abruptly, I stopped thumbing through it and put that book, too, in a half-empty box. That’s when my apartment really started to have the odor of departure. I had never used the kitchen very much, but now it looked like I had never even boiled water in it.
It would be hard to leave. I thought of my father, how he and his brother had shared a tiny, one-room apartment in New York City on 178th Street in Washington Heights after their parents had died shortly after coming to America. Seymour had been only fifteen at the time. It was strange to think of him living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, the great bridge named for the father of our country. My father lived in that room with my uncle until his wedding day.
My parents used to ask me about Allen’s mother and father, almost as if they wanted to be reassured somehow that Allen’s parents were like them, that maybe they shared with Allen’s parents the suspicion that America was still a dangerous place, and not the paradise it seemed.
I couldn’t take being alone with my thoughts anymore, the wreckage of my half-packed apartment all around me, so I bolted and headed toward Pearl Street. It felt good to be with people who didn’t just commune with the dead like so many of my relatives. “Is Allen a self-hating Jew?” my father once asked me when I was back home briefly between semesters. They were always suspicious of his Buddhism and his Hindu chanting. Having written “Kaddish” wasn’t enough for them. It was the only poem of his they would recognize.
In a used-book store in Boulder, Allen and I had once found a discarded page from an old Hebrew prayer book. It was sticking up out of a spy novel where someone had used it as a book marker. When Allen saw it, he called it to the shopkeeper’s attention. I remember being a little embarrassed, but he and Allen searched the entire shop to restore the page to the book it belonged to. I was secretly proud of Allen that he wanted to find a home for the page of Jewish prayer. When they couldn’t find it, Allen’s eyes filled with tears.
I told Seymour this story. I wanted him to know that, beyond Allen’s Buddhism, beyond that river was the ancient village of Allen’s Jewishness. He knew it; I know he felt it. He always cried when he recited “Kaddish,” written for his unfortunate, schizophrenic mother, Naomi. He knew the wellsprings of his Jewishness as he knew an old friend. Allen Ginsberg, this om-chanting Buddhist meditator, gave me a sense of my own Jewish faith in a way that no rabbi, Hebrew teacher, or bar mitzvah lesson ever did.
The day of graduation arrived. It had taken me four years, just as if I’d gone to a regular school. The ceremony was to be held at night, in the shrine room, which made me realize that I still hadn’t really meditated. Despite Allen’s warning me to “start sitting or I wouldn’t graduate,” I’d managed to avoid the banner-lined room for two years, except for a dance or an occasional talk by Rinpoche.
As the shrine room filled up with students, faculty, and proud parents, I looked around and noticed there weren’t many poets graduating with me from the Kerouac School. A poet named Dan Goldstein, however, was one of them. Besides being a devoted poetry stude
nt, Goldstein was an incredible thief. He could steal anything. Allen used to say, after telling him it was wrong to steal, that Dan was “the reincarnation of Neal Cassady.” In fact, his parents were Jewish furniture salesmen in Toronto. He came from money, but he liked to steal. He was the official thief of Naropa. He stole things for Jubal and for Gregory. Books were his specialty. He single-handedly cleaned out the University of Colorado bookstore. Not surprisingly, his favorite poet was François Villon. Now we were graduating together, about to receive our official diplomas from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Rinpoche was late. Very late. He gave the shortest talk of his career. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “when you go out into the world, have a little dignity.” He told us to be brave, to have courage, and to conduct our lives like a samurai sword: with straight backs made of impenetrable steel and, as in the edge of the sword, with hearts sharp as a razor but open enough to be moved. He then took out a samurai sword and waved it around. I saw Anne duck; she was sitting with Allen and Gregory and Bill on the stage of the shrine room. Rinpoche then turned to Allen, who called out my name. I was going to receive the first diploma, which stated that I was graduating in the Year of the Earth Horse. Rinpoche offered me his good hand to shake. He looked crocked to me. He had a big Little Red Riding Hood basket full of diplomas. Anne gave a short talk. She said something about how we now had to go out and do the Jack Kerouac School proud by becoming great poets. She said we had a tradition to live up to.
As she said this, I suddenly felt a chill, as if a great wave of oblivion had just passed over me. I didn’t particularly like Anne, I wasn’t going to miss her, but when she started to cry as she gave her talk, I felt guilty. I thought Anne was wasting her time saying farewell to people she had never talked to in the first place. Then the band Oregon played some music, which involved endless drumming. Next there was a dance recital which Barbara Dilley called a dance about fire and water. I wanted to throw myself into the water and let the current carry me away. I felt the knot in my throat pushing at the knot in my necktie.
Allen stood up in his linen suit and read two poems, one by Rinpoche and one of his own. His was a poem I had always loved. He had asked me what he should read at my graduation, and now he was reading it, and so I felt he was reading it to me:
Because I lay my head on pillows, Because I weep in the tombed studio…Because I get scared—because I raise my voice singing to my beloved self, because I do love thee my darling, my other, my living bride, my friend, my lord of soft tender eyes…seeking still seeking the thrill—delicious bliss in the heart abdomen loins and thighs Not refusing this 38 yr. 145lb. Head arms & feet of meat…Nor one single Whitmanic toenail contemn nor hair prophetic banish to remorseless hell, Because wrapped with machinery I confess my ashamed desire.
Approaching the dais to receive my diploma was like stepping into a spotlight as the last light of the day fell across the stage. When they called my name a few hands started to applaud. Feeling a sense of occasion, I bowed deeply from the waist toward Allen, who put his hand over his heart and bowed back to me. Whatever distance there had been between us (the distance of love unrequited to the nth degree) seemed suddenly to melt away.
I sat back down with my diploma unfurled like a napkin on my lap, my eyes brimming, Allen’s voice cracking up in the void, the big shrine room full of its bright banners hanging from the ceiling, the floor covered with rice as if a wedding had taken place. I thought of all the lunatics I had known at the Kerouac School and how I would miss them. And Gregory—where was he?
Suddenly I could hear a howl from outside, like Quasimodo in the bell tower. It sounded like someone was yelling “Penguin dust!” It reached us in the shrine room while Allen was finishing his poem. It was Gregory’s voice, shouting from outside the shrine room: “Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit! That’s it! Tell Sam Kashner—that’s the title of our book!”
Allen, when he reached the end of his poem, wrote down the title as casually as if Gregory had been sitting across from him at tea.
Of all the lunatics, I would miss Gregory the most. I had come to the Kerouac School, had come to knock on Allen’s door so that he would teach me to write and to become a poet. But Allen was a famous man who had other famous men around him, and others still who depended upon him and clung to him like a life raft, who sapped his energies and often left him too exhausted for his own work. There was a kind of terror in the way Allen insisted on being the one who held everything together. In our nuthouse, Allen was king.
But it was Gregory who had become my courage teacher, who had pulled over to the side of the road and made me watch the last few hours of sunlight going down through the mountains. He saw his own youth slipping away, but he wasn’t sorry. He was grateful. “I wish I could stop being young,” Gregory said to me the last time we were together. “To watch youth walk away would be a beautiful thing, to see it for what it’s worth, its vanity, and to take a final look at it and then cross to the other side of Time.”
That’s what Gregory had to say, but they wouldn’t let him say it at graduation. They didn’t even let him in the room. “For only the lovers of life are fit to die,” Gregory shouted through the high windows of the shrine room. And then again, “Penguin dust!” That was the last thing I heard him say. I ran out of my graduation ceremony and around the side of the building to find him, but there was no one there. You’d have a hard time talking me out of the idea that he was never really outside at all. Perhaps I just heard him, the one who made me laugh, roaming around inside my head. After the ceremony I dashed home and looked up autochthonic: “he loves the earth on which he walks.”
Later that night, Dan Goldstein threw a graduation party in his apartment. It had a couple of thousand books in it, a table full of expensive wine, and fabulous food—a great spread, all stolen. I don’t think my teachers knew what a beggars’ banquet it was.
Allen and Peter and I left the party early. Allen said he had something to give me—my last job as an apprentice. Allen handed me a piece of paper. He said it was his latest poem. He said he was up half the night writing it. He wanted me to type it up. Peter said it was best if I read it at home. I opened up the piece of paper, which was folded into thirds like a letter. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to type another poem for Allen on the same day I had graduated from the Kerouac School!
The poem was in Allen’s by now familiar, tiny notebook handwriting. It was called “Forgotten Birthday: Sammy’s Lament.” My last assignment was a poem Allen had written for me. It was about how sad he felt now that Peter was often missing from the house, now that Peter was sleeping with Juanita, and how he had forgotten Peter’s birthday for the first time in twenty years until I’d reminded him, and then he realized he’d forgotten my birthday, too. The poem went on to say how he was glad we were both born and knew each other and had become friends and that, even if we wandered away from each other, we would have a home in each other’s hearts. It was pretty sentimental for an Allen Ginsberg poem. But I already knew that about Allen, his sentimental streak, his schoolgirl crushes.
It’s hard to tell you what that meant to me, to have this poem from Allen, this incredible gift that gave me my passport into this world I had willed myself into, as if in a dream from which I refused to wake. I’m sure it didn’t mean as much to him. I doubt he had stayed up half the night writing it. He dashed it off. I had seen him do it. It didn’t matter. It was the moon and stars to me. I would carry it in my pocket and, when it grew too fragile for my pocket, keep it in my wallet. Then one day, while taking it out to read on the subway, incredibly, I left it behind. I never even bothered to memorize it because I wanted it always to seem new.
I hated my life when I lost it. I’m older now; I don’t see the weight, the tragedy of it. I don’t let such things stab my joy anymore. I can’t afford to. Once I left the Kerouac School, I had no choice. I had to put their books away: Howl, Kaddish, Naked Lunch. I had to take Sal Paradi
se at his word, that it was time to “go out, dig the river, the people and smell the world.”
Coda
I would see just one of them again.
After ten years of trying to become a poet in America at the end of the twentieth century, I moved into an apartment on Lafayette Street in New York City. The statue of Puck looked out over the street. Carla tried living there, too, while I spent most of the time out on Long Island working for my father in the window shade business. I took Carla to the Mudd Club on weekends. She didn’t need me. Every time we went there, she seemed to know more and more people. Eventually, the gatekeeper let her in as soon as he saw her. She had a secret life while I was with my parents. Her old boyfriend, the violinist, came back into her life. I didn’t like it. I asked her if she was seeing him, if I should consider it “official dating” of an old boyfriend.
“You can’t tell me who to fuck,” she said. “You don’t control me.” I think that’s when I realized the relationship was really over.
We went out one last time, to see the Feelies on Washington’s birthday. They were a rock band that, in the beginning, performed only on national holidays. The lead guitarist, with his oversized glasses and curly hair, looked just like a young Allen Ginsberg. I never saw Carla after that. I wanted my James Dean plastic life mask back. She wouldn’t give it back. For a while, I was haunted by the memory of this love affair.
I would get married. I would be good. I didn’t astound the girl next door…as Gregory wrote in “Marriage.” But I met a woman named Nancy in a poetry writing class. She was the teacher. She wore pearls and a red sweater. I thought she was beautiful. She worked for an outfit called the Academy of American Poets. She arranged the readings and raised money. Nancy worked for an old, rich woman named Mrs. Bullock; when she stepped down it was taken over by a younger rich woman named Mrs. Chase, who turned out to be Chevy Chase’s stepmother. She liked Nancy and was kind to me, and she threw us a big engagement party at her Park Avenue apartment. The Academy poets were everything the Beats were not: they wore suits, they won prizes, they had readings—not in church graveyards or coffeehouses but in places with fancy zip codes, like the Guggenheim or at the library across the street from the Museum of Modern Art, even the Morgan library.
