The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  When we got in there she started playing with my joint. She said, “Do you want me to say hello to him?” She was marvelous, and she really turned me on, but I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s get into this other thing and then we’ll get back to that.” I was all excited about something new, the heroin. I had made up my mind.

  She had a little glass vial filled with white powder, and she poured some out onto the porcelain top of the toilet, chopped it up with a razor blade, and separated it into little piles, little lines. She asked me if I had a dollar bill. She told me to get the newest one I had. I had one, very clean and very stiff. I took it out of my pocket and she said, “Roll it up.” I started to roll it but she said, “No, not that way.” She made a tube with a small opening at the bottom and a larger opening at the top. Then she went over to the heroin and she said, “Now watch what I do and do this.” She put one finger on her left nostril and she stuck the larger end of the dollar bill into her right nostril. She put the tube at the beginning of one pile, made a little noise, and the pile disappeared. She said, “Now you do that.” I closed my nostril. I even remember it was my left nostril. I sniffed it, and a long, thin pile of heroin disappeared. She told me to do the same with the other nostril. I did six little lines and then she said “Okay, wait a few minutes.” While I’m waiting she’s rubbing my joint and playing with me. I felt a tingly, burning sensation up in my sinuses, and I tasted a bitter taste in my throat, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all that feeling—wanting something but having no idea what it was, thinking it was sex and then when I had a chance to ball a chick not wanting to ball her because I was afraid of some disease and because of the guilt; that wandering and wandering like some derelict; that agony of drinking and drinking and nothing ever being resolved; and . . . no peace at all except when I was playing, and then the minute that I stopped playing there was nothing; that continual, insane search just to pass out somewhere and then to wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, my God,” to wake up and think, “Oh God, here we go again,” to drink a bottle of warm beer so I could vomit, so I could start all over again, so I could start that ridiculous, sickening, horrible, horrible life again—all of a sudden, all of a sudden, the demons and the devils and the wandering and wondering and all the frustrations just vanished and they didn’t exist at all anymore because I’d finally found peace.

  I felt this peace like a kind of warmth. I could feel it start in my stomach. From the whole inside of my body I felt the tranquility. It was so relaxing. It was so gorgeous. Sheila said, “Look at yourself in the mirror! Look in the mirror!” And that’s what I’d always done: I’d stood and looked at myself in the mirror and I’d talk to myself and say how rotten I was—“Why do people hate you? Why are you alone? Why are you so miserable?” I thought, “Oh, no! I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to spoil this feeling that’s coming up in me!” I was afraid that if I looked in the mirror I would see it, my whole past life, and this wonderful feeling would end, but she kept saying, “Look at yourself! Look how beautiful you are! Look at your eyes! Look at your pupils!” I looked in the mirror and I looked like an angel. I looked at my pupils and they were pinpoints; they were tiny, little dots. It was like looking into a whole universe of joy and happiness and contentment.

  I thought of my grandmother always talking about God and inner happiness and peace of mind, being content within yourself not needing anybody else, not worrying about whether anybody loves you, if your father doesn’t love you, if your mother took a coathanger and stuck it up her cunt to try to destroy you because she didn’t want you, because you were an unclean, filthy, dirty, rotten, slimy being that no one wanted, that no one ever wanted, that no one has still ever wanted. I looked at myself and I said, “God, no, I am not that. I’m beautiful. I am the whole, complete thing. There’s nothing more, nothing more that I care about. I don’t care about anybody. I don’t care about Patti. I don’t need to worry about anything at all.” I’d found God.

  I loved myself, everything about myself. I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol that made me vomit and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, “This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I’m going to do, whatever dues I have to pay . . .” And I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn’t be weak; I wouldn’t be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the non-real, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they’re black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feeling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don’t know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, were never intended to be anything.

  All I can say is, at that moment I saw that Id found peace of mind. Synthetically produced, but after what Id been through and all the things I’d done, to trade that misery for total happiness—that was it, you know, that was it. I realized it. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That’s the word they used. That’s the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That’s what I practiced; and that’s what I still am. And that’s what I will die as—a junkie.

  Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper (with Laurie Pepper), 1979

  Herbert Huncke

  (1915–1996)

  Herbert Huncke’s life was a relentless adventure: hobo wanderings in the Depression, pre-war junkie hustling, wartime Merchant Marine service, and serving as tribal elder to Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, in whose books he appears as a character. A peerless raconteur, Huncke published his journals in 1965, followed in 1980 by the collection The Evening Sun Turned Crimson. This selection from that volume evokes a Times Square bop age version of a salon.

  Spencer’s Pad

  SPENCER HAD a pad on 47th Street. It was one of the coziest pads in New York and one which it was an experience to visit for the first time and to always relax in. It existed in a period when the world was particularly chaotic and New York exceptionally so. For me it represented the one spot at the time where I could seek surcease from tension and invariably find a sense of peace.

  Spencer had gone to some pains to make it attractive. He painted the walls a Persian blue and the woodwork a bone white. He kept the lighting soft and had placed big comfortable chairs around his main room. Along one wall he placed his Capehart with records stacked to one side. Long soft rose drapes hung across his windows. A chest sat between the two windows and opposite a fireplace was a studio couch (the same shade as the drapes) faced with a long coffee table.

  Spencer presided over all this with great benevolence and good will, making each of his guests welcome and concerning himself with their wants.

  Spencer never used drugs—although I have seen him try pot and recently he told me he had sniffed heroin. But anyone was quite free to use whatever he chose and Spencer always managed to maintain environmental conditions conducive to the fullest realization of whatever one happened to be using.

  The Capehart was exceptionally fine and acted as a sort of focal point in the pad. Great sounds issued forth from its speaker and filled the whole place with awe inspiring visions. I can recall one incident clearly when the people on 47th Street stood along the curb listening and some were dancing and they were laughing and we were in the window watching while music flowed out on all sides.

  At the time the streets of New York teemed with soldiers and sailor
s—lonely and bewildered—and many found their way to the pad—where for a little while at least life took on some meaning. Often they gave love and always found it. Some discovered God and hardly knew of their discovery. There many heard the great Bird and felt sadness as Lady Day cried out her anguished heart.

  Others came also—42nd Street hustlers—poets—simple dreamers, thieves, prostitutes (both male and female), and pimps and wise guys and junkies and pot heads and just people—seeking sanctuary in a Blue Glade away from the merciless neon glare.

  There were young boys who came and swaggered and talked wise and then spoke of their dreams and plans and went away refreshed and aware of themselves as having an identity.

  Spencer accepted them all and gave of himself freely to each. The pad was his home and in it he could accept any confession, any seemingly strange behavior, idea, thought, belief and mannerism as part of one, without outward show of censure. Within the confines of his home one could be oneself.

  Spencer lost his pad partly because the people in the building in which it was located resented his show of freedom and partly through a situation which developed out of a relationship with a young man.

  Vernon was a young man who came to New York in search of a meaning to life. He wanted to write, he wanted to act, he wanted to be loved, he wanted to love, he wanted anything and everything. His background was somewhat more interesting because of having been raised by a father who was a minister of the Baptist church in his home town but who apparently was too busy preaching the gospel to give his own son other than scant attention. His mother had made an effort to make up the difference but her main interest remained with her husband.

  Vernon had been in the war and had accomplished nothing except the nickname Angel among his friends because he was always talking about God and because he would listen to anyone’s problems. Also he learned to smoke pot.

  His appearance was rather striking and upon reaching New York he had no trouble making contacts. Just how he eventually met Spencer I don’t know but meet they did and became good friends.

  One night they had both been out drinking—Vernon smoking pot and both taking nembutals—and had returned to the pad to get some sleep. Both stripped naked and fell on to the bed and into a deep sleep. When they awakened they were in Bellevue.

  It seems one or the other must have accidentally brushed against the gas plate opening a valve and that the neighbors, smelling gas in the hallway, upon investigating traced it to Spencer’s and being unable to arouse anyone called the police who broke in and finding them both out cold had them rushed to Bellevue, where after reviving them decided they be held for observation. Spencer has since told me, it was a harrowing experience.

  Meanwhile the people in the building all got together and signed a petition requesting that Spencer be evicted. As one old queen—who had the apartment next to Spencer’s—told me—“My dear—it was really too much. It was a regular black and tan fantasy. Both stark naked—and who knows what they had been doing—Spencer so dark and Vernon pale white. It would have been bad enough if both were the same color. Really, if Spencer wants to end it all he shouldn’t try and take one of his lovers with him.”

  I saw Spencer not long ago and once again he has a charming little place of his own but it isn’t quite the 47th Street pad.

  The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, 1980

  Carl Solomon

  (1928–1993)

  Some hip cats were so fractured by intellect, temperament, and experience that they could never fit into straight society. Carl Solomon was a Marine at sixteen and after his service he traveled in Europe encountering the Surrealists, especially the visionary Antonin Artaud, who seemed to propose madness as a viable pursuit. Returning to the U.S., Solomon promptly committed himself in 1949 to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he met Allen Ginsberg (who would dedicate Howl to him). Solomon described his institutionalization and shock treatments in Mishaps, Perhaps from which the following piece is taken.

  A Diabolist

  PERVERSITY IN all forms appeals to those who desire a new reality. The quintessence of evil suddenly seems desirable because you are bored with “What’s new?” and “How do you do?” Of all poets, the perverts seem most interesting.

  Turn off the ball game. Do something odd. Run a bath and stay in for three hours, or talk to an odd-looking man you meet on the street. Then you are on the path of what certain writers call the marvelous. The end is dementia praecox. What you have been seeking is absolutely dementia, a seclusion room by yourself or a straitjacket all your own. This because you desired to turn things around to make the ugly beautiful. Such alchemy is not a pretense and is not limited to one writer. It is domain on which any daring individual may trespass. It has existed for many centuries. And the unusual says Lautréamont is to be found in the banal. The extraordinary is to be found where you sit. I cannot break the fascination with this view of life, call it the bright orange view as opposed to the gray view.

  This is better than a hobby; it is almost the equivalent of a religion.

  I shall make up a dream I never dreamed and you may explore it for significance. I was sitting on a beach; a dog came up to me and licked my leg; a fat boy came by; he wanted to play ball. It seems that we played ball for years. Then the dream ended. What a silly dream!

  Sometimes the diabolist regrets his sins against nature and dreams of gods or reality. But reality persists in being boring.

  Who can understand my odd nature. My passion for the absurd or the prank. I live for these things. I have traveled and travel is a flop so far as I am concerned. Wherever you go you are a tourist, that is to say some sucker to the odd denizens of the place. Give me my home, my imagination and my dreams.

  It is almost as though the “real” world were an asylum and the unreal world is a super-asylum . . . for those who have gone insane in the outer madhouse and been placed in this outer void. It is a place where those who don’t know they are insane are placed. Those who know they are ill are outside consulting psychiatrists. Pilgrim is the sort of place you leave by asserting that the correct date is actually the date and the correct man is actually the president. There is a definite letdown in being released . . . you feel upon leaving the Insane Asylum as though you are entering the Sane Asylum.

  This all is a task too difficult to describe once you have attained this dimension. It is like hearing the inaudible . . . seeing the invisible.

  Mishaps, Perhaps, 1966

  Neal Cassady

  (1926–1968)

  A juvenile car thief and reform-school graduate, a con man, and bigamist, Neal Cassady inhabited the road that Kerouac celebrated. He served time, lived with Ginsberg, and drove Ken Kesey’s magic Merry Pranksters bus through Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and into legend. Cassady was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and Cody Pomeray in other Kerouac novels. His hundreds of letters to Kerouac inspired and fed the fire of what Ginsberg called “spontaneous bop prosody.” Cassady died at forty-two under mysterious circumstances and his own autobiographical novel The First Third was published posthumously.

  Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.)

  DEAR JACK:

  I am sitting in a bar on Market St. I’m drunk, well, not quite, but I soon will be. I am here for 2 reasons; I must wait 5 hours for the bus to Denver & lastly but, most importantly, I’m here (drinking) because, of course, because of a woman & what a woman! To be chronological about it:

  I was sitting on the bus when it took on more passengers at Indianapolis, Indiana—a perfectly proportioned beautiful, intellectual, passionate, personification of Venus De Milo asked me if the seat beside me was taken!!! I gulped, (I’m drunk) gargled & stammered NO! (Paradox of expression, after all, how can one stammer No!!?) She sat—I sweated—She started to speak, I knew it would be generalities, so to tempt her I remained silent.

  She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 pm (Dark!) I didn’t speak until 10 pm—in the interve
ning 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT.

  I naturally can’t quote the conversation verbally, however, I shall attempt to give you the gist of it from 10 pm to 2 am.

  Without the slightest preliminaries of objective remarks (what’s your name? where are you going? etc.) I plunged into a completely knowing, completely subjective, personal & so to speak “penetrating her core” way of speech; to be shorter, (since I’m getting unable to write) by 2 am I had her swearing eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction. I, anticipating even more pleasure, wouldn’t allow her to blow me on the bus, instead we played, as they say, with each other.

  Knowing her supremely perfect being was completely mine (when I’m more coherent, I’ll tell you her complete history & psychological reason for loving me) I could conceive of no obstacle to my satisfaction, well, “the best laid plans of mice & men go astray” and my nemesis was her sister, the bitch.

  Pat had told me her reason for going to St. Louis was to see her sister; she had wired her to meet her at the depot. So, to get rid of the sister, we peeked around the depot when we arrived at St. Louis at 4 am to see if she (her sister) was present. If not, Pat would claim her suitcase, change clothes in the rest room & she and I proceed to a hotel room for a night (years?) of perfect bliss. The sister was not in sight, so She (note the capital) claimed her bag & retired to the toilet to change______long dash______