The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  It was actress Siobhan McKenna’s reading of Irish poetry that the group played again and again in their fuckings. God, it turned them on. They exhausted their love-surge listening to Siobhan McKenna. They talked about writing her a letter inviting her to attend one of their midnight specials the next time she should visit New York. They were especially excited to find out that McKenna had performed as Lady Macbeth in Gaelic at a theatre in Galway.

  “Let’s find out if she had made a recording of the play in Gaelic!” someone exclaimed, bright-eyed with eagerness.

  There was no theory behind the group-gropes—unless the theory of the heated bottom. “Who loves himself loves me who love myself”—the bard sang; and that was the gropers’ theory. They didn’t discuss it really—but fell down regardless into the furrows of the avoidance of coma. If anyone asked, “Why do you think we do this?”—someone carried the hookah-tip over to the person or toppled them onto the mattress with a grope-tackle.

  Some were hesitant, waxing bold later. Others the reverse. It was like that Ezra Pound poem, E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sépulchre, Part IV, only as applied to phonographic fornication. Ava, for instance, wrote long-line poems of religious nature and wore extremely demure attire, but once the police lock was poked into place, became a torrid participant. Brash-mouthed Bill however, who was a veritable Tourette’s disease of obscene expletives, became almost unparticipatingly shy, although he was eager to hop around the mattresses with an ancient box camera. For the most part, the seven relaxed into a common soul and grew to know each others’ bodies and desires and energies to a labyrinthine degree.

  When the sex-hungry poets arrived at the pad: Ava, Bill, Rosebud, Nelson, Rick, Trudy, and a human named Obtak who considered himself to be the reincarnation of Shelley, they drank a round of yohimbine-bark tea that Rick had made during the day after a street-scrounge for mirrors. Right away they stacked the poetry records atop the turntable. Rick had a gentle thing about mirrors and that afternoon he’d collected as many as he could find in the Bowery area from thrown-away dressers. He hauled up five cracked, pitiful specimens which he lined around the mattresses. That was his chief thrill, to watch others reflected fucking in mirrors, at the same time listening, say, to Edith Sitwell, while Ava massaged his pornic area with a banana skin.

  There was a small offset press in the back room on which Ava printed a monthly verse-paper. Ava and Obtak had to work awhile in the room fixing the inking mechanism which had become maladjusted so that only the left side of the page was being printed. When it was fixed, they fell fucking beneath the machine on a blue air mattress, unable to wait for the poesy. Someone in the bedroom put on an e. e. cummings/Luciano Berio composition. After a few minutes, Ava and Obtak came out of the press room, Ava laughing, “I guess it’s time to go to bed.” She leaned against the bathtub and whipped off her blue velour pullover, dropped her jeans skirt, flaming over to turn on the water. She took a bath with the assistance of Nelson, and then appeared at the mattress, dabbing at her hair-ends with a towel.

  There were two mattresses side by side, one double-sized, one single. Before anything they smoked a lot of grass, via the toilet roll dope blow. They took the cardboard inner cylinder and Rick punched a small hole into the top of it, inserting a thick burning bomber in the aperture. At both ends mouths were positioned. One end sucked his/her lungs full of dope. Then, on signal, he/she blew the lungful through the tube into the sucking mouth-lungs of the other, in a fast whoosh. Then it was off to the zone.

  There were variations of this, for instance when Bill inserted his cock through the roll when there was a lit roach burning perpendicularly and several of them took a toke.

  For serious bedside smoking, however, there was a five-tube hookah made out of a jug from an office water cooler. The toke-tubes were long lengths of rubber lab tubing wrapped in velvet ribbons. The carved burl was kept packed with grass and throughout the festivities anyone could lean over from the mattress and snerk.

  They started with an arpeggio of e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, and a flash of Howl. Then it was the McKenna hour. Siobhan McKenna’s voice, soft, full, beautiful, triggered off a cross-mattress grope spasm that turned the arms and legs of the lovers into a quick frenzy of motion like a dropped fistful of jackstraws. When she read Yeats’s The Stolen Child, with the chorus in Gaelic, three suffered orgasm immediately. “Siobhan! Siobhan!”—Bill moaned, as he was engaged in E3- with Obtak, Ava, Rick, and Nelson. E3- was a term used by them to denote concomitant double-handed beatoff plus fellatio by Ava, with simultaneous impletion of Ava from the back.

  There were numerous combinations but usually they paired and trio’d off by the end of the records. Ava and Nelson slept together. They always seemed to pair off and indeed, of them all, were the only ones to live together. Ava pushed her slight frame against him. Soon she was atop and seesaw bumping. She was able to come that way, rocking, rubbing forward, sliding into the happiness. Next to the frenzying Ava/Nelson, Rick and Rosebud lay side by side, Rick bringing her to a moaning cliff-leap by means of an extraordinary device fashioned from a furry pipe cleaner.

  Obtak and Trudy, she side, he at her back, eyes shut tight, making it on the single mattress. Trudy was able to lift her leg and move it back and forth across the partner’s chest during conjunction.

  As for Bill, he usually fell asleep after a single act of love culminating in a long warbling scream they called the “yohimbine yodel.” Bill had read a poem that night at The House of Nothingness titled Homage to the Buttock. Later on, Bill and Ava were seeing how hard they could whack themselves together and the pops filled the air from the pubic cymbals. Perhaps thinking of his poem, Ava whisper-urged him to climb upon, nay, to impinge himself within, her buttocks. He became confused and soon had to stop, thinking she had bidden buttockal pain upon herself because of his poem—for verily there are few who trod the paths of Mt. Bulgar.

  He continued to think so except that he gradually learned that she genuinely was an adept of buttockery. Forever he remembered her lying topless upon her stomach on the sleeping bag on the air mattress in blue tights and Rick pushed his hand upon her behind and into the inward-curving, rotating the muscles circularly. “Don’t stop, don’t stop”—she whispered. “That arouses me more than anything all night.”

  Bill and Trudy loved Dylan Thomas, especially when he read Fern Hill. It drove them crazy. That night they played it over and over, seven times, until Bill was constrained to utter his famed yohimbine yodel after which he was soon asleep.

  Hours oozed. They talked. They smoked. They wrote. They ate. Some departed. Some slept. Some kissed till dawn. And the gatherings went on each Monday for ten weeks before their Galaxy spiraled into dissolution. One went one way, one another.

  During the ensuing decade, the seven ran into each other occasionally—at Orly Airport, in domes of meditation Colorado mountains, and so forth. “Remember those nights of Siobhan McKenna?”

  “I sure do.”

  And always the friendship. bloomed. to renew again. the pleasures. of former. commingling.

  Recorded poets grope-list:

  Yeats (Siobhan McKenna reading)

  e. e. cummings

  Ezra Pound

  T. S. Eliot

  Dylan Thomas

  Edith Sitwell

  A. Ginsberg

  Marianne Moore

  W. C. Williams

  Delmore Schwartz

  Arthur Rimbaud (Germaine Bree reading)

  E. A. Poe

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  W. H. Auden.

  Tales of Beatnik Glory, 1975; expanded edition, 1990

  Rudolph Wurlitzer

  (b. 1937)

  A descendant of the jukebox tycoon, Rudy Wurlitzer began writing while a young merchant seaman. After stints at Columbia and in the U.S. Army, he became Robert Graves’s secretary in Majorca, absorbing Graves’s lessons in the craft of writing. His
first novel (Nog) and first screenplay (for Jim McBride’s Glen and Randa) both date from 1969. Later screenplays include Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah), Walker (Alex Cox), Candy Mountain (Robert Frank), and Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci). His novels—after Nog came Flats, Quake, Slow Fade, and The Drop Edge of Yonder—found a fiercely appreciative readership. Thomas Pynchon said of Nog: “The novel of bullshit is dead.”

  from Nog

  YESTERDAY AFTERNOON a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufactured, when that girl stooped for sea shells. There was something about her large breasts under her faded blue tee shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs in their rolled-up white jeans, her thin ankles—it was her feet, actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant. It was that thin-boned brittle movement with her feet that did it, that touched some spot that I had forgotten to smother. The way those thin feet remained planted, yet shifting slightly in the sand as she bent down quickly for a clamshell, sent my heart thumping, my mouth dry, no exaggeration, there was something gay and insane about that tiny gesture because it had nothing to do with her.

  I went to Smitty’s, a roadhouse a quarter of a mile down the beach. When I came back, she was gone. I could not sit in my room. The walls closed in on me. I could see the walls closing in on me, and my situation, if that is what it is, a situation, seemed suddenly so dull and hopeless; this cheap thrown-together guest house of imitation redwood on the California coast with its smell of mold and bad plumbing, the inane view from my window of driftwood and seaweed, flat predictable waves, corny writings in the sand, pot-bellied fishermen and bronzed godlike volleyball players. I had to pull out, I thought, I was beginning to notice things, lists were forming, comparisons were on the way. And now I don’t have the octopus. I suppose that is what there is to tell about. Then I’ll move on. Last night there was a storm, and I abandoned the octopus. I didn’t really abandon the octopus, it’s still in the bathysphere on the truck bed, and the truck bed is still up on blocks, but it’s not the same any more. I’m going to move on alone.

  I have money and I can make money. I want to say that now. I’m not reprobate, nor am I a drain on anyone. My great aunt left me two thousand a year, and I have, or had, an octopus and a truck. A man sold me the octopus and truck in Oregon. I met him in a bar in one of those logging towns on the Coast where the only attractive spot is the village dump, which at least has the advantage of facing the sea. Nog, he was apparently of Finnish extraction, was one of those semireligious lunatics you see wandering around the Sierras on bread and tea, or gulping down peyote in Nevada with the Indians. He was dressed in black motorcycle boots, jeans and an old army shirt with sergeant chevrons still on the sleeves. His face was lean and hatchet-edged, with huge fuzzy eyes sunk deep in his skull like bullet holes. He kept complaining about a yellow light that had lately been streaming out of his chest from a spot the size of a half dollar. We drank and talked about the spot and the small burning sensation it gave him early in the morning and about his octopus. He had become disillusioned about traveling with the octopus and had begun having aggressive dreams about it. He wanted to sell it. We bought a bottle and walked out beyond the town into logged-off hills that looked like old battlefields. A low mist hung over a struggling second growth of redwood and Douglas fir. The tracks of giant caterpillar tractors wound everywhere. Pits and ditches were scattered about like shell holes. Thousands of frogs croaked and salamanders hung suspended between lids of green slime and rotting logs. I felt vaguely elated, like a witness to some ancient slaughter.

  Nog lived in what had once been a water tank in the middle of a rough field. The octopus was there, all right. It was sitting inside a bathysphere on a truck bed. Nog had built a mold out of plaster of Paris for the tentacles and another one for the obese body with its parrot-like beak and bulging eyes. Then he had poured liquid latex rubber into the molds. The bathysphere was carefully fashioned out of a large butane gas tank and stolen pieces of metal from a nearby bridge. There were three portholes from which you could watch the octopus move its eight tentacles around in the bubbling water. Nog had been traveling to all the state and county fairs through the West and Midwest, charging kids a dime and adults a quarter. Most people believed the octopus was real, but whenever there was a loud doubt Nog would tell them the truth. He would never give money back, and occasionally there would be fights. In Bird City, Utah, the bathysphere had been tipped over by three men who had just been on a losing softball team. He was weary of the whole thing, he kept repeating. We sat down on a bench in front of his house, and he filled me in on octopus lore. The crowd appreciated the devilfish myth the most, and it was important to tell them how dangerous octopi are and how they can drown and mangle a human or sink a small boat. One should never tell them the truth, which is that octopi are quite friendly. I refused any more information. We sat quietly and it grew dark. Finally Nog said that he had stopped knowing how to entertain himself. He said he guessed that was my trouble, too, but that I should take a chance with the octopus. He suggested I transform it into a totem that I didn’t mind seeing every day.

  I bought the octopus, and for a year I traveled through the country with it.

  Nog is not quite clear enough. I have to invent more. It always comes down to that. I never get a chance to rest. I have never been able, for instance, to understand the yellow light streaming from his chest. But now that the octopus has faded away, Nog might emerge into a clearer focus. Those were sentimental and fuzzy days, those trips through the West with the octopus, and sometimes I find myself wishing more of it were true. (I find, when I ruminate like this, that I invent a great deal of my memories—three now, to be exact—because otherwise I have trouble getting interested.) But I have gotten faster with myself and more even-tempered since I met Nog. Perhaps not even-tempered but certainly more dulcet. I think about trips, bits and pieces of trips, but I no longer try and put anything together (my mind has become blessedly slower), nor do I try as much to invent a suitable character who can handle the fragments. But I don’t want to get into all that. There is always the danger that I might become impressed by what once was a misplaced decision for solitude.

  I’m thinking about trying the East. I will go to New York and get a small room on the top of a hotel.

  When I was on the road with the octopus I did a lot of reminiscing about New York. New York was, in fact, my favorite memory for four or five months, until it got out of hand and I had to drop it. I lived in a comfortable duplex apartment on top of an old hotel overlooking a small park and harbor. I was sort of an erotic spy on myself then, but managed to survive, at least for those four or five months, by keeping an alert and fastidious watch on the terrifying view outside. I watched ships glide and push into huge docks, and far below, through silvery leaves, the quiet violence in the park. At night I stayed up with the fantastic lights of cars and subways as they flowed over the concrete ramps that weaved around the hotel. I lived precariously in the center of brutal combinations of energy, and gradually, as I closed in on myself, the bridges transformed into massive spider webs imprisoning the subways as they rumbled like mechanical snakes across the black river. The subways shot off green and yellow sparks in defense, in specific relays of time, always getting through. I had to drop that memory. But now, with more miles and memories in control, I might attempt New York.

  From my window I can see the beach. An old couple digs razorbacked clams, and a small boy writes “David Salte Hates the Slug” on the sand with a large knotted stick. It has never been enough for me to have a stick and some sand to draw in. I am not
indifferent enough. I am too self-engrossed to play in the sand. But yesterday afternoon I was trying to at least get ready to play, trying to find the right approach, the right kind of silence, when the girl walked by. That touch of elegance ruined my confidence. It made me dwell on the time I have spent just getting by, made me hate the octopus and the kingdom of the octopus, the small towns, the long monotonous highways, the squalid fairgrounds. It made me take a walk on the beach.

  It’s a glorious beach, I suppose; usually empty, very wide and sandy. In back there are warm and green mountains, and most of the time the sea is well-behaved, although it was rough then and it had begun to rain. I began to think of beaches. I have been on eighty-seven beaches in the last fifteen years. Before that it is easier to be vague. Lately I have been reviewing each beach, although it isn’t a satisfactory way of getting through the day. Too much of my life has been spent on beaches: Cannes, Far Rockaway, Stinson Beach, one beach in Ireland, two in Crete, Lido, Curaçao, Luquillo, Curadado, Malibu, Deya, Nice, Tangiers, Cob, the Virgin Islands—to name a few. I never run into the water. I am actually afraid of moving water. Nor do I get a suntan. I lie in one place, usually on my stomach, and do nothing. For me, beaches are profane.

  So there I was, reaching the end of the beach, thinking about beaches, when I saw the girl again. She was standing near a black rock, a yellow shawl wrapped around her face, staring inanely at the sea. I walked up to her, and standing a little apart and to the rear of her, I too stared at the sea. The waves were rushing in and out, quite furious now, sucking at the stones. I looked at her. She seemed not to have noticed me, and for this I was grateful. I was happy enough just to stand there, next to her, for my former feelings about her foot were quite in control. In fact, I inspected her feet and it didn’t seem possible that one of them should have acted as such a catalyst. Her feet were like her face, too broad and splotchy, rather crude and used up. Her dull features reassured me so much that I thought I might be able to stay on for another few months.