by Sam Kashner
Nancy wore her hair like Louise Brooks, the silent screen actress who played Lulu, the prostitute who gets murdered, “the girl in the black helmet.” Nancy came from a Southern family. Her mother and father grew up in New Orleans; they lived on opposite sides of the Audubon Park Zoo. At night, they could each hear the lions roaring in their cages. I liked Nancy’s stories about her parents. They seemed so exotic. Nancy’s father had been a test pilot in the navy; back in the 1950s, he broke the sound barrier for a living. He’s a very quiet and very nice man who looks like John Wayne. He’s tolerated my social dissonances for fourteen years. Nancy’s mother was a homecoming queen at LSU, whereas my mother had enrolled in Stern College for Women, but had to drop out when the war came. (She had to be home, she later explained, to hide the mail. She didn’t want her parents to know that her brothers had been sent overseas to fight. It was a full-time job to keep the war from my mother’s parents.) That’s how different our parents were.
Nancy and I got married. We had a small reception at a French restaurant on East Eighty-third Street, Le Refuge. I took refuge in marriage.
I didn’t invite Allen. I didn’t invite Gregory. I regretted it. More time passed.
Nancy got a job at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, teaching creative writing. That’s what poets did at the end of the twentieth century. Poetry was turning out to be a mug’s game after all. Whoever said that—I think it was T. S. Eliot, the most successful poet of the century—was right. You wait around for your SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to come back, your poems rejected from The New Yorker in your own handwriting. You see the fiction writers getting all the attention.
You get used to a certain kind of poverty. When Jack Kerouac wrote, “Because I am poor everything belongs to me,” it was the 1950s, maybe earlier. Allen would often write that line on the blackboard at the Jack Kerouac School. But this wasn’t the ’50s anymore, it was the end of the 1980s and nothing belonged to you if you were poor, or even if you were middle class. They never told you that at the Kerouac School. I used to want to be like Allen and Gregory; now I wanted to be like Jayne Anne Phillips and Paul Auster. Jayne Anne used to be a poet; she even studied with Richard Hugo when he was a visiting writer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “Poets don’t have any glory,” she told me, “it’s the novelists who make all the money and have all the fun.” I went to a Paul Auster poetry reading when I first got out of the Kerouac School. It was held at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project where Anne Waldman reigned supreme, even during her increasingly infrequent trips back to New York, only Auster didn’t read any poetry that night; he read from a work-in-progress, something he called “a metaphysical detective story.” It made him famous. Now he makes movies. I was beginning to get the picture. I stopped writing poetry. I’d write novels instead. I studied the field. I’d start at the top. I’d call my first book, The Latest Novel of Joyce Carol Oates. It would be a little like science fiction. Joyce Carol Oates would be in it. She’d get caught in some kind of nuclear compressor with Stephen Hawking. He wrote best-sellers about black holes and things going on behind our backs in outer space. Their molecules would get all mixed up, like in that movie The Fly. When they emerge from the compressor, Joyce Carol Oates would write hundreds of books about serial killers hiding out in black holes that all sound as if they’d been written by a mechanical voice. Stephen Hawking would be able to take up boxing. My novel would be a best-seller. It would make me famous. I’d be cool again.
As a poet you become bitter, so you hold on to a lousy job at a college, where your colleagues don’t think creative writing is a worthy thing, even though they’re teaching Beckett and Shelley and Faulkner and Keats; their whole existence depends on creative writers! Your students feel sorry for you. They think teaching is another form of social work. You help them get through their phase of writing poetry. Then you realize their “phase” is how you have spent your life. This makes you even angrier. It’s a bad idea all around.
You sting yourself like a scorpion and poison your life with the thing you once loved. You know you’ll never again have the joy you once found in it.
I wanted some of that old magic. I wanted to feel drenched in the importance of poetry again. I wanted to look into the past with my own brown eyes and see Allen Ginsberg standing in front of me, with a sheaf of poems for me to type. I had to see him again, or everything would be lost.
So I invited Allen to come to Williamsburg to give a reading. I was teaching a class or two, so as not to go crazy in Virginia, where I felt like I was in the witness protection program, talking to my neighbors about crabgrass and the weather.
I was teaching a course on the Beats. I was taking students away from the other teachers, even the ones with tenure. I had to keep the enrollment down to thirty or forty students, as so many wanted in. They hung on my every word about Allen and Gregory and Bill. They talked about Rimbaud like he was Rambo. They brought in CDs of Tom Waits reading Kerouac. I made them read “Sunflower Sutra” and “Howl” and “Kaddish,” On the Road, Vanity of Duluoz, and Visions of Cody. They talked about Neal and Jack and Allen like they were living with them in their dorms. I saw myself in these kids, these young hipsters.
Allen was older now. There was a lot of gray in his beard. We picked him up at the airport in Norfolk in the fall of 1991 and brought him to our house, a Dutch Colonial on a tree-lined street just off campus. As soon as he arrived he wanted to lie down. He always had the happy capacity for taking naps in the middle of the day, wherever he was. His secretary had faxed from New York a list of all the things Allen needed for his travels, what kind of salt-free meals he had to have because of his blood pressure, the brand of chamomile tea he liked to have onstage. The fax made a big deal of the microphone, and how to arrange the prayer scarf on the table where he kept his books and finger cymbals. It also listed the medicines he was taking, in case he lost them or ran out. He had liver trouble now, and his stomach sometimes gave him a hard time. He’d never quite lost the slight palsy in his face.
We tried to have everything ready.
When Nancy and I first met him at the airport, in what passes for autumn in that part of Virginia, I wanted to cry. I kissed him on the lips. He said I had gotten even skinnier. While I was getting skinny, Allen was getting old. He came to life, however, whenever he was around students. They started hanging out at our house at all hours over the weekend that he stayed with us. Allen, who had seemed so tired, so wrung out, still had never abandoned that wonderful ability to appear interested in everything. Maybe it was meditation, all those years of Buddhism. Maybe he really did come to see the world as holy.
Then, just as easily, he could turn it off and seem very far away, or fly into a fit or a rage. Here was a man who had been to some of the most interesting and exotic places in the world: China, eastern Europe, Cuba, the Ganges, Paris and London in the 1950s and 1960s. But he almost never went there as a tourist. So I wasn’t about to show him Colonial Williamsburg. I didn’t think he’d be interested. But he wanted to see it, so I took him to watch the colonial-era reenactors, the village smithy, the barber who bled you, the wigmaker. Allen said that next we’d be paying to see Robert Frank’s America—photographs of Americans drinking Coca-Cola and shoving quarters into jukeboxes. (He was right; a few years later, Disney tried to develop a theme park in northern Virginia, which would contain as an exhibit an actual family farm. To me, that sounded like the beginning of the end of America as we knew it.)
Allen put his arm around me and we walked into the house. He didn’t seem too interested in my marriage. Suddenly we were above sea level again, back in Boulder, where the women in Allen’s life seemed as distant and as interchangeable as clouds.
I wondered about Peter and Allen. I had heard things, but I never said anything to Allen. I had heard that Peter was drinking heavily, despite the fact that he was still taking antidepressants. I heard that he was back in Bellevue, not as an orderly but as a patient.
He would fly into psychotic rages after drinking. I heard that he’d run down the street naked, wielding a knife. I even heard that poor Allen had to sign the papers committing him. But mostly I was worried about the reading the next night; would there be enough people? The reading was to be held in an old movie theater that had been around since the 1930s. It held about five hundred people, and it had had one night of glory sixty years earlier: the premiere of a Judy Garland film. That theater was the only place in Colonial Williamsburg where I felt an authentic sense of history.
Many of Nancy’s friends were poets she knew from the Academy; they were very presentable. She didn’t know the Beat poets very well. Just before the reading, Allen panicked. He said he’d forgotten his harmonium and he couldn’t perform without it—he needed it for the reading that night. Nancy said she would run back to the house and look for it. She took a long time. She came back empty-handed.
“I looked,” she said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find it.”
“It’s a big wooden box with stickers on it from around the world,” Allen explained, sounding desperate.
Nancy turned red with embarrassment. She had been looking for a copy of Wallace Stevens’s first book, called Harmonium. Their two worlds had collided.
We went back to get it.
It was an unforgettable night. A line of people stretched for almost a mile outside the theater. I didn’t know there were so many hipsters in Williamsburg. Two hundred people had to be turned away; some had come from as far away as Washington, D.C. The ones who got in sat in awe.
I stepped onstage to introduce Allen. My psychiatrist and my internist sat in the front row with their wives. The table had been set behind me, according to Allen’s instructions, with a stick of incense just starting to burn from the stage. I had prepared an introduction but I was too nervous to read it. I acknowledged the fact that Allen was in Williamsburg, Virginia, by introducing him as “the father of my country.” The audience gave him a standing ovation when he appeared in front of the curtain. He played a few songs on his rhythm sticks, some of the ones he had written in Boulder, under the watchful eye of Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
He launched into “Don’t Smoke, Don’t Smoke, it’s a thirty billion dollar capitalist joke…” Everyone laughed and applauded, but when he got to the part about where he urged people to smoke pot instead—or at least suck cock—I saw one of the oldest members of the English faculty get up to leave. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.
I was ecstatic. I was glad Allen hadn’t lost his gift, his ability to offend. I wanted him to become again the frantic, demonic poet of his youth. We were together now, and Allen was rolling back the years for both of us, attempting to prove that neither one of us had really changed. I knew that it wasn’t true, but it was such a wonderful lie.
Then he read the poem about giving Neal Cassady a blow job, the one he’d asked me to finish for him a million years ago. A few more people walked out. But most of them stayed, and cheered, and loved it. They were standing up now, and hollering their support back to Allen.
Later that night, they wouldn’t let him leave the College Delly, where I had taken him for a midnight snack. He was the King of May again. A girl took a flower she was wearing from behind her ear and put it behind Allen’s ear. They were rushing around, spreading the word that Allen Ginsberg was here, sitting at a table outside! A hundred glasses of beer seemed to be sloshing around our table, encircling Allen like golden candles. He defied the strict dietary laws sent down from New York. He had a hamburger, a pitcher of beer, and bummed a cigarette. He looked happy.
I never let Allen know I had stopped writing poetry. I knew no one was reading it, not my poetry at any rate. Only the magazines that the Kerouac School put out, like Bombay Gin, Trungpa’s name for the school’s literary magazine, or Rocky Ledge, put out by Anne Waldman and her husband, Reed Bye, were publishing me with any regularity. A small press called Hanging Loose in Brooklyn had put out a book of mine. It was called Driving at Night. It included poems I had written as far back as junior high school. I remember how excited I was when the editors told me that they had just gotten an order for six thousand copies, an extraordinary number for a book of poems by an unknown poet. But then they had to give all the money back when it turned out that the orders had come from a driving school in Iowa. They thought the book was a manual on how to drive after dark.
I couldn’t buy a break as a poet, so I started writing prose. I wrote a biography and a novel and some journalism. I felt about my jumping ship from poetry to prose the way Oscar Levant felt about Milton Berle when he announced his conversion from Judaism to Christian Science. “Our loss is their loss,” Levant had said. My poetry didn’t set the world on fire, but that’s all right with me. The world’s on fire enough as it is.
It was close to three A.M. when we returned home. We tried to get back into the house, but for some reason Nancy’s keys didn’t work in the lock. A student of Nancy’s—a kid from an old Virginia family who spoke French and loved the Beats—tried putting his shoulder to the wheel and forcing the door open. Nothing happened. I couldn’t believe we were locked out of our own house, with a tired Allen Ginsberg, exhausted, in the middle of the night in Colonial Williamsburg. I had dreams like this that ended better.
A police car saw the four of us trying to break down the door of our house and stopped to investigate. He couldn’t get the door opened, either, so he used his police radio to call a locksmith. We found one in Toano, about twenty miles away, who would take the job, but it was going to take a half hour at least before he could get to us—he’d been getting ready for bed when we’d called him. We had no choice but to wait.
Finally, the locksmith arrived. He was a stout, middle-aged man, a retired Vietnam War veteran, who brought with him a metal device for forcing the doorjamb. The locksmith apologized for taking so long. He said he usually goes to sleep early because there wasn’t much call for a locksmith after the sun goes down. Allen admired the locksmith’s strength when he finally forced the door open with a loud pop. I thought of the epigraph Allen had placed in Howl and Other Poems: “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” It was from Whitman.
The rug had apparently become caught up under the door; Nancy said she must have accidentally kicked it in her haste to get out of the house after searching for Allen’s harmonium.
The locksmith said that he owed his strength to tai chi. Allen asked him to show him some moves, so out on the front lawn, close to four A.M., Allen Ginsberg and the heavyset locksmith practiced tai chi, while the policeman shone the beams of his headlights on the front lawn.
When we were finally back in the house, Allen wanted to stay up for a while and talk. He wanted to discuss the reading. He was full of insecurity about it: did he read too fast, did he read the right poems? His concerns were endless. He couldn’t get settled with the idea that he had done a great job. He had given a wonderful performance.
Allen left the next day. A car picked him up; I still couldn’t drive, so I could not take him to the airport myself. Upstairs in the guest room, he’d left a copy of his Collected Poems. He wrote in it, “This is from my heart to yours, still young old friend. Love, Allen.”
I looked for the Neal Cassady blow job poem. It wasn’t there. Not that particular one, anyway. (Allen loved writing about giving head.) I searched for my birthday lament. That wasn’t in there, either. Immortality denied!
I never saw him again.
Allen sold his papers, all those files, even the one he kept on Gregory’s cat, titled “CAT—CORSO, GREGORY. ANIMALS POET PLAYED WITH,” to the University of California at Stanford for some real bread. He was able to buy a loft with an elevator in New York City—all those stairs on East Twelfth Street had finally become too much for him. He moved his father’s second wife, whom he revered, into the same building. He was finally able to afford health insurance. He needed it. Liver trouble was one of t
he things on Allen’s list of ailments. Whenever he got hysterical and overwhelmed he would say, “I have Bell’s palsy, high blood pressure, spastic bowel, and liver trouble. I can’t deal with this now.” So you’d back off, take your problem elsewhere. But “liver trouble” was really hepatitis C, which became liver cancer, which meant the end for a worn-out body, even one as stout and indefatigable as Allen’s. Wasn’t it Allen’s father who blurted out that weird couplet in the middle of dinner with Rinpoche at the Flagstaff House in Boulder so many years ago: “Is life worth living? It depends on the liver.”
Trungpa was the first to go. He died in Nova Scotia in 1987. He was forty-seven years old, pretty young for an old soul. His doctors wouldn’t say what exactly was wrong with him, except that his liver was shot. Too much sake. His students said that he just wasn’t attached to his body in the way nonenlightened people are. Some of Trungpa’s students said that he knew he was wearing out his body, but that he didn’t care. It was, they said, the ultimate act of crazy wisdom.
I was jealous. It’s not that I wanted to die, I just didn’t want to be afraid of death. Allen wrote songs to death; he wasn’t afraid. Not when it counted, anyway, at the end. I think life is just too damn short. I want to be late for my death. I want the people I love to live forever, and the people I hate never to be born. It’s too late for both: the hours and years mow us all down.
