The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Marriage

  Should I get married? Should I be good?

  Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?

  Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries

  tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets

  then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries

  and she going just so far and I understanding why

  not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!

  Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone

  and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky—

  When she introduces me to her parents

  back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,

  should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa

  and not ask Where’s the bathroom?

  How else to feel other than I am,

  often thinking Flash Gordon soap—

  O how terrible it must be for a young man

  seated before a family and the family thinking

  We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!

  After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

  Should I tell them? Would they like me then?

  Say All right get married, we’re losing a daughter

  but we’re gaining a son—

  And should I then ask Where’s the bathroom?

  O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends

  and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded

  just wait to get at the drinks and food—

  And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated

  asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?

  And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!

  I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back

  She’s all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!

  And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on—

  Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes

  Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!

  All streaming into cozy hotels

  All going to do the same thing tonight

  The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen

  The lobby zombies they knowing what

  The whistling elevator man he knowing

  The winking bellboy knowing

  Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!

  Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!

  Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!

  running rampant into those almost climactic suites

  yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!

  O I’d live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls

  I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner

  devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy

  a saint of divorce—

  But I should get married I should be good

  How nice it’d be to come home to her

  and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen

  aproned young and lovely wanting my baby

  and so happy about me she burns the roast beef

  and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair

  saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!

  God what a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!

  So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night

  and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books

  Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower

  like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence

  like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest

  grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!

  And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him

  When are you going to stop people killing whales!

  And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle

  Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust—

  Yet if I should get married and it’s Connecticut and snow

  and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,

  up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,

  finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man

  knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup—

  O what would that be like!

  Surely I’d give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus

  For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records

  Tack Della Francesca all over its crib

  Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib

  And built for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

  No, I doubt I’d be that kind of father

  not rural not snow no quiet window

  but hot smelly tight New York City

  seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls

  a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!

  And five nose running brats in love with Batman

  And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired

  like those hag masses of the 18th century

  all wanting to come in and watch TV

  The landlord wants his rent

  Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus

  Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking—

  No! I should not get married I should never get married!

  But—imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman

  tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves

  holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other

  and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window

  from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on clearer days

  No, can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream—

  O but what about love? I forget love

  not that I am incapable of love

  it’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes—

  I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother

  And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

  And there’s maybe a girl now but she’s already married

  And I don’t like men and—

  but there’s got to be somebody!

  Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married,

  all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear

  and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

  Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible

  then marriage would be possible—

  Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover

  so I wait—bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

  The Happy Birthday of Death, 1960

  Bob Kaufman

  (1925–1986)

  Not just a poet but a griot, Bob Kaufman composed poems in his head and recited them from memory. What’s written here is the text of a poem made not to be read but spoken. He didn’t write his poems down; his wife did so that he could stay purely inside the sound, working in the rhythms of jazz, improvising like a musician, and creating poetry on the spot. Kaufman was a son of New Orleans, a scion of the melting pot: German Jewish Catholic African Hoodoo. A merchant sailor, he met Ginsberg and Kerouac at the New School. Kaufman said he coined the word “beatnik.” A Buddhist, he took a vow of silence to protest the Vietnam War and didn’t speak for ten years, breaking silence the day the war ended with the poem “All Those Ships That Never Sailed.”

  Walking Parker Home

  Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind

  Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/

  Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings

  People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s


  Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times

  Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization

  Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds

  Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight

  Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts

  New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples

  Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates

  Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes

  Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions

  Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.

  Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding

  Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears

  Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions

  Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/

  Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/

  Death and indestructible existence

  In that Jazz corner of life

  Wrapped in a mist of sound

  His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn

  Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams

  Inviting the nerveless to feel once more

  That fierce dying of humans consumed

  In raging fires of Love.

  Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, 1959

  Lester Young

  (1909–1959)

  Lester Young was a great reed man (tenor sax and clarinet) who emerged with the Count Basie Orchestra and became a huge influence on bop and cool jazz as well as a prototypical hipster A cool cat in a porkpie hat known as “Prez” as in President, a nickname he got from Billie Holiday (he returned the favor by calling her “Lady Day”), Young was a legendary neologist, a coiner of hipsterisms who spoke his own semi-private language. Drafted during World War II, he underwent a brutal year of barracks detention for smoking marijuana. His life was marked by alcohol problems and his playing often suffered. In the film Round Midnight Dexter Gordon plays a character based on Young and the similarly afflicted Bud Powell. Prez died in 1959 shortly after this interview was conducted, by French jazz critic François Postif.

  LESTERPARIS59

  Although he wasn’t free until five o’clock in the morning, I was determined to interview Lester. I knew he wasn’t very talkative, but he wanted the interview to be taped, and that encouraged me.

  One afternoon at six o’clock I knocked at his door. Lester told me to come in: he had been waiting for me.

  When he saw my tape recorder he shouted happily. He asked me: “Can I talk slang?” I agreed, and from then on he relaxed. I felt during the interview that he was pleased to be able to speak freely.

  YOU WEREN’T really born in New Orleans?

  Uh, uh. Should I really tell you? I could tell a lie. I was born in Woodville, Mississippi, because my mother went back to the family; so after I was straight, you know, everything was cool, she took me back to New Orleans and we lived in Algiers, which is across the river.

  I left when I was ten. They had trucks going around town advertising for all the dances, and this excited me, you know? So they gave me handbills and I was running all over the city until my tongue was hanging out. From there I went to Memphis and then to Minneapolis. I tried to go to school and all that . . . I wasn’t interested.

  The only person I liked on those trucks in New Orleans was the drummer, you dig?

  Drums now? No eyes. I don’t want to see them. Everytime I’d be in a nice little place, and I’d meet a nice little chick, dig, her mother’d say, ‘Mary, come on, let’s go’. Damn, I’d be trying to pack these drums, because I wanted this little chick, dig? She’d called her once and twice, and I’m trying to get straight, so I just said, I’m through with drums. All those other boys got clarinet cases, trumpet cases, trombone cases and I’m wiggling around with all that s—t, and Lady Francis, I could really play those drums. I’d been playing them for a whole year.

  How did you get started on tenor?

  I was playing alto and they had this evil old cat with a nice, beautiful, background, you know, mother and father and a whole lot of bread and like that, you know, so everytime we’d get a job . . . this was in Salinas, Kansas, so everytime we’d go see him, we’d be waiting ninety years to get us to work while he fixed his face you know, so I told the bossman, his name was Art Bronson. So I said, ‘listen, why do we have to go through this? You go and buy me a tenor saxophone and I’ll play the m-f and we’d be straight then.’

  So he worked with this music store, and we got straight, and we split. That was it for me. The first time I heard it. Because the alto was a little too high.

  When did you learn to read music?

  When I first came up in my father’s band I wasn’t reading music; I was faking it, but I was in the band. My father, he got me an alto out of the pawnshop, and I just picked the m-f up and started playing it. My father played all the instruments and he read, so I had to get close to my sister, you dig, to learn the parts.

  One day my father finally said to me, Kansas, play your part, and he knew goddamn well I couldn’t read. So my sister played her part and then he said, Lester play your part, and I couldn’t read a m-f note, not a damn note. He said get up and learn some scales. Now you know my heart was broke, you dig, and I went and cried my little teardrops, while they went on rehearsing. I went away and learned to read the music, and I came back in the band. All the time I was learning to read, I was playing the records and learning the music at the same time, so I could completely foul them up.

  I don’t like to read music, just soul . . . there you are.

  I got a man in New York writing music for me right now, so when I get back it’ll be for bass violin, two cellos, viola, French Horn and three rhythm. I’ll just take my time with it, if it don’t come out right, I’ll just say f—k it, no. This is the first time, and I always wanted to do that. Norman Granz would never let me make no records with no strings. Yardbird made millions of records with strings. When I was over here the last time I played with strings, the first winners, I think they were. Germans. Anyway I played with them, and they treated me nice and played nice for me.

  Who were your early influences?

  I had a decision to make between Frankie Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey, you dig, and I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to go. I’d buy me all those records and I’d play one by Jimmy and one by Trumbauer, you dig? I didn’t know nothing about Hawk then, and they were the only ones telling a story I liked to hear. I had both of them made.

  Was Bud Freeman an influence?

  Bud Freeman??!! We’re nice friends, I saw him just the other day down at the union, but influence, ladedehumptedorebebob . . . s—t! Did you ever hear him (Trumbauer) play “Singing the Blues”? That tricked me right then and that’s where I went.

  How about Coleman Hawkins?

  As far as I’m concerned, I think Coleman Hawkins was the President first, right? When I first heard him I thought that was some great jazz I was listening to. As far as myself, I think I’m the second one. Not braggadocious, you know I don’t talk like that. There’s only one way to go. If a guy plays tenor, he’s got to sound like Hawk or like Lester. If he plays alto, he’s got to be Bird or Johnny Hodges. There’s another way, the way I hear all the guys playing in New York, running all over the place.

  In Kansas City, when I was with Basie, they told me to go and see Coleman Hawkins, and how great he is; so I wanted to see how great he is, you know. So they shoved me up on the stand, and I grabbed his saxophone, played it, read his clarinet parts, everything! Now I got to run back to my job where there was 13 people and I got to run ten blocks. I don’t think Hawk showed at all. Then I went to Little Rock with Count Basie, and I got this telegram from Fletcher Henderson saying come with me. So I was all excited because this was bigtime, and I showed it around to everyone and asked them what I should do. Count said he couldn’t tell me, so I decided
to split and went to Detroit. But it wasn’t for me. The m-f’s were whispering on me, everytime I played. I can’t make that. I couldn’t take that, those m-f’s whispering on me, Jesus! So I went up to Fletcher and asked him would you give me a nice recommendation? I’m going back to Kansas City. He said “Oh, yeah” right quick. That bitch, she was Fletcher’s wife, she took me down to the basement and played one of those old windup record players, and she’d say, Lester, can’t you play like this? Coleman Hawkins records. But I mean, can’t you hear this? Can’t you get with that? You dig? I split! Every morning that bitch would wake me up at nine o’clock to teach me to play like Coleman Hawkins. And she played trumpet herself . . . circus trumpet! I’m gone!

  How did you first go with Basie?

  I used to hear this tenor player with Basie all the time. You see we’d get off at two in Minneapolis and it would be one in Kansas City, that kind of s—t, you dig. So I sent Basie this telegram telling him I couldn’t stand to hear that m-f, and will you accept me for a job at any time? So he sent me a ticket and I left my madam here and came on.

  How did you get along with Herschel?

  We were nice friends and things, but some nights when we got on the stand it was like a duel, and other nights it would be nice music. He was a nice person, in fact I was the last to see him die. I even paid his doctor bills. I don’t blame him; he loved his instrument, and I loved mine . . .

  Why did you leave the Basie band?

  That’s some deep question you’re asking me now. Skip that one, but I sure could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be sporting. I still have nice eyes. I can’t go around thinking evil and all that. The thing is still cool with me, because I don’t bother about nobody. But you take a person like me, I stay by myself, so how do you know anything about me? Some m-f walked up to me and said, “Prez I thought you were dead!” I’m probably more alive than he is, you dig, from that hearsay.