by Sam Kashner
I started meditating after I heard about Trungpa’s death. I’d heard that several monks had come just to prepare Rinpoche’s body for cremation. They handed out small glass vials of the salt they used to preserve his body until the ceremony. His followers said that if you developed a serious illness, you could always break open the bottle and swallow the contents. It was supposed to have curative powers. Allen and many of Rinpoche’s students meditated with the body around the clock. I thought about going, but I wasn’t feeling so great myself.
I finally told my parents I was meditating after all those years of having successfully avoided it at the Kerouac School. “You can’t beat the Judeo-Christian ethic,” my father reminded me, “especially the Judeo part.” He and my mother certainly didn’t try to talk me out of it. Their paths were different. I think, though, that as a result of meditating, I’ve quit judging people so harshly. Now I believe in every religion. I’m not taking any chances: I meditate, therefore I am not.
Burroughs died in August 1997. He never got the Nobel prize that Allen had tried to nominate him for. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, buried among the other bad hombres of the American frontier. His secretary and assistant, his guardian angel, James Grauerholz, kept him alive longer than any doctor. James was like Ron Howard to John Wayne’s dying gunslinger in The Shootist. He came into Bill’s life after Jubal. Bill was lucky—luckier than his son, whom he outlived by many years. Billy Jr. got placed on a list for a liver transplant, had one, and to celebrate its success, went on a two-week bender. He didn’t want his father coming to the hospital or riding home with him in the car. He made a lot of sad jokes and disappeared with his new liver and a few of the Westies into the dark old bars of Denver. Billy died of a heart attack right after that.
It’s funny the things you think about when you first hear about the death of someone you cared about. Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, at 2:40 A.M. His obituary in the New York Times ran beside the reminder: “Daylight savings time resumed at 2 A.M. today,” the kind of detail Allen would have put into one of his poems. When I first heard of his death, I thought, Now he’ll never get the chance to go on MTV’s Unplugged, which he really wanted to do, with Dylan and Beck as his special guests. He also wanted to have sex with Johnny Depp. Allen had plans.
I wondered who would have the job of packing away all his files. Allen was the most anal-retentive, revolutionary, bohemian poet you could meet. Burroughs said that the only man who loved files more was J. Edgar Hoover, Allen’s bête noire and the man whose agency, he thought, had planted a spy at the Kerouac School.
No one ever did uncover a spy at Naropa, though for one brief moment Allen actually thought it might have been Trungpa Rinpoche himself. The Kerouac School finally got its accreditation. It’s a permanent part of Naropa University now, the first accredited Buddhist college in America. I went to see it recently. It had become something fine and good—a place of sanity and noble thought. I even saw Anne Waldman there, still teaching, still famously beautiful, still unable to be still. She’s going to hate this book, but then, come to think of it, she never liked my poetry, either.
Gregory Corso wrote in his poem “Ode to the West Wind” how he had no home, no income, no status as a poet in America. Well, that’s not entirely true. A wealthy benefactor did come along at the end of his life. So at least he didn’t have to worry about where his next meal was coming from. But other than this generous handout, there wasn’t much in the Corso bank account. He died in his daughter’s home in Minnesota. Robert Frost, the only establishment “old poetman” that Gregory, alone among the other Beats, really liked, said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That’s where Gregory went, and he was taken in. A recording of Gregory’s poems was made at the end of his life, read by him and by Marianne Faithfull, who had started coming to the Kerouac School in the early nineties.
When Gregory, who “lived by the grace of Jews and women,” had stood at Allen’s bedside as he died, he was himself dying of prostate cancer. When he passed away in January 2001, I read about it in the New York Times on the same day I agreed to write this book. I opened the paper and there it was. The Happy Birthday of Death.
Gregory used to refer to himself as a toothless old man when I first met him, but he was only forty-six then. He’d lived long enough to see some of his contemporaries win major accolades, like the poet John Ashbery (whose poems Allen didn’t under- stand), who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many international prizes for his life’s work. Gregory, whose poems you can find in the Norton Anthology of Literature, still didn’t have very much after all those years of poesy. “But I have walked in mine integrity,” Gregory used to say. It was the only time I heard him quote the Bible.
I heard that someone in Gregory’s family planned to take his ashes to Italy and scatter them in the English cemetery in Rome, where Keats is buried and where Gregory had found his cat, Horace, which he’d brought to America and left on my doorstep, along with his manuscript of poems.
When Gregory’s book Herald the Autochthonic Spirit finally came out—Allen had sent it to me—I eagerly opened it and looked for my name. Gregory hadn’t thanked me, not anywhere, for all those months of baby-sitting him. All I could do was laugh.
Allen, by the time he had come to Virginia, was already a great man; at least, he was accepted, and he wasn’t being kept out of the academies, or the anthologies, any more. He had his pin from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. And, like W. B. Yeats in Auden’s memorial poem, Allen had survived it all. For Yeats it was Ireland, for Allen it was his mother’s madness that had hurt him into poetry.
As for me, I had eaten the luminous cake of Allen’s poetry. It was still there, glowing inside me.
I wonder if he can still see it after all this time.
Author’s Note
I would like all readers to note that many of the names in When I Was Cool have been changed to avoid embarrassing people involved in events that took place many years ago, and who would not have known that their exploits might end up in a book someday. The following is a list of pseudonyms: Carla Fannetti, Linda Louie and Mickey Louie, Hadrian, Bonnie and Nanette, Simone, Kitty, Monica, Barbara the Barber, Jubal, Felice Duncan, and Dan Goldstein. Peace.
Acknowledgments
How good of Diane Reverand to let me grow up and write this book when she was an editor at HarperCollins and of Jeff Kellogg to adopt it after Diane’s departure. As the editor of When I Was Cool, Jeff gave shape to this book and saved it from drowning, more than once. Jeff satisfies all the laws of friendship and remains indispensable. I’d also like to express my appreciation to David Hirshey and two other early readers at HarperCollins, Emily McDonald and Kate Travers; their sharp eyes and ineffable hipness helped things along. And thanks to Andrew Proctor, whose enthusiasm and erudition sent this book on its way. Also thanks to Chris Goff for his brilliant legal vetting of When I Was Cool. To the three graces of Nineteenth Street: Anna Bliss, Catherine Crawford, and Jenni Lapidus, my deepest gratitude. Thank you to Gordon Ball, Allen’s Boswell, whose sweetness can be seen in those wonderful pictures he was kind enough to let me use. Praise be to Nat Sobel, my friend and the literary agent who tolerates my social dissonances and is there to pick up the pieces. And to Johnny Depp, who wears Jack Kerouac’s old raincoat through the streets of Paris.
About the Author
SAM KASHNER is the author of three nonfiction books and one novel, Sinatraland, and is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and GQ. He divides his time between New York and Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, the writer Nancy Schoenberger.
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PRAISE FOR
When I Was Cool
“Spirited and generous…. Half the time you pity young Sam, the other half you envy him…plenty of downright magical moments.”
—New York Times Book Rev
iew
“Engaging [and] illuminating.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Quick, funny…. Despite the frequent humor in When I Was Cool Kashner’s memoir never feels belittling or like a betrayal of the Kerouac School faculty; rather it serves as an inspired footnote to literary lives of unquestionable esteem and influence.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Fond, funny, and finally heartbreaking.”
—Village Voice
“Enticing vinegary Burroughs out of his orgone box to care for his son, keeping rowdy Corso as straight as possible, completing and typing moody Ginsberg’s poems while calculating the sexual permutations would tax the abilities of any apprentice bard, especially one carrying his father’s credit card. It was scary certainly, attending those mythic Olympians, heroes passing into hipsters or junkies. And it was clearly wonderful.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Kashner’s tome brings these men into a sharper, less romantic focus. But this clarity doesn’t destroy their works, only allows one to see a little deeper into their creation.”
—San Diego City Beat
“Hilarious and touching.”
—Newsday
“A memoir worth some howling.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“As their first (and for a while only) student, Kashner’s assignments included finishing and typing Allen Ginsberg’s poetry; preventing Gregory Corso from scoring heroin; cleaning the home of their guru, Rinpoche; and mediating between William Burroughs Sr. and Jr., not to mention attending the off lecture…. Were this justa saga of an innocent in Beat Bohemia, Kashner’s chronicle would be merely amusing, but his genuine love for his crazy-wise mentors makes this a curiously affecting coming-of-age story.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Kashner] generously allows his heroes to speak for themselves, revealing all the fears, weaknesses, and brilliance of flesh-and-blood people.”
—Esquire.com
“[Kashner is] an honest, sensitive, and funny storyteller, a perceptive observer who sheds light and shares discovery with his readers. His memoir is about enlightenment, the kind that comes from looking back with compassion but with eyes wide open.”
—Booklist
“His portrayal of [the Beats’] wild escapades contains incidents that will surprise you, as well as descriptions of lives not always fulfilled that will leave you almost in tears.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Kashner’s first-hand portrait of William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Ginsberg in their latter years offers a fascinating counterpoint to the myths and legends these men developed over the years. Kashner’s quick-paced and efficient style successfully conveys this eventful time when he lived amongst the aging hipsters. That it is delivered by someone with genuine affection for them gives the figures a real humanity.”
—Las Vegas Weekly
“Frequently humorous, often touching…more than just Kashner’s coming-of-age tale…[When I Was Cool] is an ode to the poets who inspired him.”
—Daily Camera (Boulder)
Also by Sam Kashner
NONFICTION
A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant
(with Nancy Schoenberger)
Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady,
and the Death of Superman (with Nancy Schoenberger)
The Bad & the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties
(with Jennifer MacNair)
FICTION
Sinatraland: A Novel
POETRY
Driving at Night
No More Mr. Nice Guy (with drawings by Glen Baxter)
Don Quixote in America
Copyright
“Come Rain or Come Shine,” by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen © 1946 (Renewed) Chappell & Co. Rights for Extended Renewal term in U.S. assigned to The Johnny Mercer Foundation and SA Music. All rights o/b/o The Johnny Mercer Foundation administered by WB Music Corp. All rights outside the U.S. controlled by Chappell & Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
Gregory Corso, excerpt from “I Miss My Dear Cats” from Gasoline. Copyright © 1958 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. Excerpts from “I Met This Guy Who Died,” “For Miranda,” “Ancestry,” and “Columbia U Poesy Reading—1975” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Copyright © 1973 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “Army” from The Happy Birthday of Death. Copyright © 1960 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted with permission.
Diane Di Prima, excerpts from “Three Laments,” and “Song for Baby-O, Unborn” from Pieces of a Song. Copyright © 1990 by Diane Di Prima. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.
Allen Ginsberg, dedication from Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960. Copyright © 1961 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. Excerpts from “Love Returned,” “Father Death Blues,” “Pussy Blues,” “Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby,” “Lack Love,” “Howl,” “Gospel Noble Truths,” “Why Is God Love, Jack?” from Collected Poems 1947–1980. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. and Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958–1996, edited by David Carter. Copyright © 2001 by the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Excerpt from “Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don’t Smoke)” from Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992. Copyright © 1994 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. and Penguin Books, Ltd.
Jack Kerouac, excerpts from “211th Chorus” from Mexico City Blues (New York: Grove, 1959). Copyright © 1959 by Jack Kerouac. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
Peter Orlovsky, excerpts from “Lepers Cry” from Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs. Copyright © 1978 by Peter Orlovsky. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.
Anne Waldman, excerpt from “Fast Speaking Woman” and poem about Allen Ginsberg, from Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems 1966–1988. Copyright © 1989 by Anne Waldman. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
William Butler Yeats, excerpt from “A Prayer For Old Age,” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and A. P. Watt, Ltd., on behalf of Michael Yeats.
WHEN I WAS COOL. Copyright © 2004 by Sam Kashner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061873034
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