“RIGHT ON, BROTHER!” screamed somebody from the audience.
“JESUS CHRIST,” the Great Poet screamed back, “DOESN’T ANYBODY EVEN HAVE A BEER? MY THERMOS IS EMPTY!”
Within 120 seconds the Great Poet had a bottle of beer in his hand. “One place I read the janitor chastised me for drinking beer on campus. He called the National Guard.”
“What campus was that?”
“Kent State . . . Jesus Christ, nobody’s laughing! Whatsa matta with you people? People who go to poetry readings aren’t interested in poetry. They want to see what you look like, they want to see you vomit, they want to see you die. They want to kiss your balls and at the same time pickle them in a glass jar. People who go to poetry readings are peep freaks. They want to fuck the poet or tame him or murder him or marry him or read to him from their own inept works. They laugh at the wrong lines, they are easy to please, and they are also vindictive and hateful. And many are nice and some are beautiful; they are bland and easy, they are soft and put to sleep by the universities. Why a poet should want to read to these outside of anything but sheer economic necessity I will never know.”
“GET THE HELL DOWN FROM THERE! WE WANT TO HEAR ROBERT CREELEY!”
“YOU WANT TO HEAR YOUR OWN FARTS RINGING A COPPER BELL OUTSIDE SOME LAST SYPHILITIC JERUSALEM! JESUS, I NEED ANOTHER BEER! AND DOESN’T ANYBODY HAVE ANYTHING MORE THAN BEER?”
A young blonde girl of some beauty got up from the front row and stuck out a pint of vodka. The Great Poet accepted that, screwed off the top and drained one quarter of the bottle. “I refuse to fuck the coeds and never will. Their youth for my power is not a fair exchange. The American idea of a stud sickens me. I don’t believe that a real man fucks everybody. I believe that a real man fucks somebody. The idea is not to score at random but to select with divinity.” The Great Poet took another hit of the vodka, then searched the front row for the blonde. “Ah, what’s your phone number, honey?”
People were beginning to walk out. The Great Poet sat watching them leave. “I fuck up at readings. Sometimes I get so drunk I can’t finish. I’m an alcoholic first and a poet later. Some readings I don’t remember anything about. But they remember me. They want a circus, they want a fool. I produce. But it’s a fine act. It’s more than the barroom drunk. They’ve paid, or the university has paid, and once you’ve accepted that coin, as 1918 as it sounds, it’s your duty. One form of energy—and that’s money—and as dirty as it sounds—one form of energy deserves another. You owe them and they know it and they’re right. The only holy people are the suicides, they get on out. But if you’re going to stay in the act, know the price; know you’ve got to get into your own ultimate high; they’ll understand it one way or the other IF you get high enough. I’ve watched many of the poets: they just take the money and sit up there and act holy. If you’re going to be a whore you might as well be a good one.”
About one-half the audience remained. The Great Poet became silent and sat drinking the vodka. A very delicate boy, thin, young, stood up in the audience. “Any new books, upcoming publications, unusual adventures, dilemmas, other?” The boy appeared to be reading off a sheet of paper.
“Yes, I know a guy with warts on his dick, I have the flu, my wall heater won’t light, and I have taken to masturbating against women’s faces on my TV set.”
The boy, still standing, read another question from his sheet of paper. “Has telling-it-like-it-is led to many censorship problems in having your work published?”
“Getting published is no problem. My editors are bigger perverts than I am.”
The boy consulted his sheet again. “When did you begin to write (not literally but literarily) and why (i.e., what, if anything, do you hope to achieve in writing)?”
“Story magazine, 1944. What I hope to achieve in writing is never to have to go back to working for the post office again, never having to be a janitor again, never to have to travel with a railroad track gang or work a slaughterhouse or have a woman support me again. What I hope to achieve in writing is the time to love a woman properly.”
“THE WAY YOU DRINK,” came a voice from the audience, “YOU PROBABLY CAN’T GET IT UP!”
“I asked for questions not declarations,” said the Great Poet taking another drink of vodka and chasing it with a swig from a bottle of French wine that had suddenly appeared.
The boy, standing very straight, with his tape recorder turned on, consulted his sheet. “For whom do you write (seeing as the general public, even in this liberated day, no doubt finds and has found—but perhaps will not find—your works grossly perverse and/or pornographic?”
“I write like many a good fellow, to keep from going bawdy asshole crazy. The public may or may not arrive. What counts mainly is a good smoke, a mirror to squeeze my blackheads in and, of course, unclogged bowels.”
“THE ONE THING YOU DON’T HAVE,” came a voice from the audience, “IS UNCLOGGED BOWELS.”
“That fellow out there,” said the Great Poet chasing a drink of wine with a drink of vodka, “is a plant to make me look good. I write his lines. In his spare time he teaches a private advanced poetry workshop. In the Fall he is accepting a professorship at the University of Madrid to teach the Literature of the Ages to all Spanish seamen who have caught the clap more than five times.”
Still standing and still reading off of his sheet the boy continued. “What kind of mood inspires a writing session?”
“A breakup of a good love experience or a $150 loss at the track. The latter is the more formidable.”
“YOU MEAN,” came the voice from the audience, “THAT YOU CONSIDER LOVE WORTH LESS THAN $150?”
“Especially,” said the Great Poet, finishing the vodka, “in Calcutta. The heart dies without the stomach. And whether you like it or not, bastard, the world is moving more and more toward Calcutta.”
Three Women’s Liberationists, four homosexuals, two lesbians, one bisexual, one Catholic priest got up and left, followed by a fellow who had one snort of H remaining in his apartment. That left 13.
“Notwithstanding the fundamental (and only relevant) fact that you write, I can’t help probing your literary roots and offshoots and the rest of the peripheral lore. That brings me to queries like: ‘What do you think of New Orleans?’”
“When I think of New Orleans I think of Streetcar and when I think of Streetcar I think that T. Williams is, finally, not a very good writer.”
“HOW MANY PLAYS HAVE YOU HAD ON BROADWAY?” came the voice from the audience.
“Listen, wino, if you hook your toes over the headboard and do a deep back bend you may meet your soul in your mouth. I thought I paid you off? Why don’t you go back to Bolinas and hook chestnuts into the fire with Gerard Malanga?”
The boy continued to read from his paper: “How could you possibly have given 14 years of your wonderfully mad life to the Post Office, and, in spite of it, remained wonderfully mad?”
“I suppose that all the wonderful madmen really did wish they were wonderfully mad. But I’m not wonderfully mad. Most of the time I am very dull and I sit around waiting. Waiting is the essence. And while you’re waiting anybody can come along and carry away your girl and your housecat. And if it works that way they deserve each other.”
Six more of the audience left. That left seven. The Great Poet still had half a bottle of wine left. The boy read on: “This may seem too personal—but whatever possessed you to go the institutional route and get married? Are you/ were you happily so?”
“She was the first one to call me a genius. No. No.”
“What’s your historical perspective, i.e., do you like to picture your writings as dissertation material, as the subject of scholarly analysis, in literary anthologies, etc. or does this immortalization status matter to you at all?”
“I’m like anybody else: I guess it’s better to be talked about than never mentioned at all, especially when you have to pay the rent.”
The Great Poet began to sway . . . to sway and s
way, back and forth on his tiny chair. He was drunk, he was tired.
“In your various claims to genius (innate) of a mythical misfit, or the literary genius (cultivated) of an original writer, or the tongue-in-cheek genius (designated) of high I.Q., prodigious inventive, and social acclaim—the term has always been fascinatingly exclusive to us—what do you mean by ‘genius?’”
The Great Poet finished the bottle of wine, attempted to roll and cigarette and failed. “I don’t know.”
There were more questions such as, Do you feel Art (creative expression) has any function beyond itself? Were you influenced by any great writers (or ungreat writers) in particular? Do you consider anything sacred? What is your fondest hope and your greatest fear? If you had to do it over again, with a prenatal option, would you choose the life you have lived, would you choose again, in fact?
But the Great Poet was very drunk. There were two who got him off the stage both from the Department of the Humanities. One of them gave him a neat long envelope which the Great Poet placed in his inner coat pocket. He walked out of the auditorium, got lost down one hall, turned, found his way out, and walked across the campus lawn. A young girl sitting on the cement bench heard his last words: “Easy money.” Then the Great Poet walked over the hill of green grass, down the other side, and was gone.
L.A. Free Press, November 22, 1974
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
H.P., New Jersey
April 3, 1975
Hello Mom:
Like I promised you that I’d write, I’m writing. This is the third letter since the new term began, and I know you’re interested in how I’m doing in college but I wrote you about that in my last two letters. But I know you also want to know how I’m doing out of college. A bunch of us live together in this roominghouse. This old guy cooks for us and he stands in the kitchen cooking, dressed in these red leotards. He just keeps cooking and cooking all the time, standing in the kitchen, cooking and humming. He wears this amulet around his neck on a silver chain and it says, “I’m number one!” Bobby is his name and he has this white hair. We sit around with plates of food in the other room and somebody will say, “This food SUCKS!” Then he’ll throw the plate against the wall. Nobody cleans up anything. The ants are everywhere and we’ve vomited in the closet and in the dresser drawers. It really stinks here, we’re always vomiting, even the ants are vomiting. Bobby’s specialty is meatballs and spaghetti. The other night he’s standing in there humming and cooking and somebody throws a meatball against the wall in the kitchen. It hits the wall in there, breaks, and it spatters like a hand grenade, little pieces of it falling all over him. He just goes on humming and cooking, singing little words . . . “Hummmmmmmm, hummmmmm, love is just so marvelous!” And somebody says, “Jesus Christ, look, Bobby is wearing meatballs in his hair!” And sure enough, he is. There are these little pieces of meat hanging in his white hair. Then a guy finds this machete. He takes the machete and starts breaking up plates with it. “If we break all these plates the son of a bitch will have nothing to put his food on!” Then somebody else says, “Well, just why don’t we run his ass out of here, why not run him down the street?” “All right.” “All right.” “All right.” So we get up behind him and we break his ass out of his red leotards and he’s got on these black silk panties on underneath. Now, Mom, I’ve got nothing especially against fags and/or transvestites but those black panties have these large netted areas for the flesh to show through, but instead his balls have dropped on down through and they dangle, hanging out there. “Awful!” “Oh, how awful!” We ran him down the street, his balls flying.
This caretaker here, Al Williams, he takes care of the grounds and the plumbing, all that. He’s got this strange thing about squirrels. He hates squirrels. He’ll go into it about the squirrels. All kinds of things. “They chew the wires out in the attic,” he says. He’s always catching squirrels. He has this large cage and he baits it with food, good stuff, none of Bobby’s and when he gets one he brings the cage inside, he carries it in and he says, “Looky, boys, I got me one of those rotten sons of bitches! Ha!” First time I saw him do it he sat the cage down and then came back with a can of gasoline. He poured the gas all over the squirrel. Then he lit a match and turned to us: “No energy shortage here, fellas.” Then he tossed the match. The squirrel starts running and twisting, making sounds, whirling, flipping. Al watches and takes his coat off: “Hmmmm . . . gettin’ kind of warm here, you noticed, fellas?”
There are dead squirrels everywhere. You go out in the yard and here’s one and there’s one. Here’s one that’s been burned, the paw twisted-up near its nose. In the wintertime he freezes them. You walk along and all of a sudden here’s a squirrel. It looks up at you out of a block of ice.
But Al’s funny too. This roominghouse is chopped in half by a yard in the center. We’ve got women on one side and men on the other. One day Al’s mowing the lawn, stopping to throw dead squirrels into the rose bushes when he notices some old gal peering at him from the tiny slit under the shade. She’s got this shade almost pulled down and she’s watching. Al mows the lawn. She’s down on her knees in her room there, peering out. He sees it. Next whirl around the lawn he whips out his dick and he lets it dangle as he walks along. She keeps looking. Too much. So he walks over and with her peering at him there on her knees he begins to whack-off. She doesn’t move, her two little gnat-eyes peering. As he comes, spurting white semen into the screen at her, he screams out, “Christ died for our sins, you fucking Nazi!”
But things are happening outside of this roominghouse, too. The cops are driving me crazy. These N.J. cops aren’t anything like L.A. cops. You know, L.A. cops are pretty pale boys taught to say nice polite speeches. They’ll kill you if they have to but mostly they’re interested in paying off homes in Altadena where they have crazy wives who keep making bed quilts by hand, one after the other, until there are so many bed quilts they stack them in the closets and in the garage and on top of the refrigerator. N.J. cops are different, though. They have guns and clubs and it makes them feel good. They do whatever they want to do and say whatever they want to say. If they have wives, their wives give them handjobs in the bathtub after work. So I’m driving along and this cop pulls me over. He walks up. None of that: “Sir, do you realize what you have done wrong?” “Oh no, thank you, officer, do tell me.” This cop just walks up and says, “Hey, Jackoff, your turn-blinkers aren’t cuttin’ jackcheese on Halloween night!” “Well, look, kid,” I tell him, “my mind happens to be in the variances of the monosyllable.” There’s this tidal wave roar and then I hear him: “Look, Jackoff, mess with me, just MESS with me, burn-out, TRY to mess with me you jackoff burn-out, I’ll blow your FUCKING BALLS OFF! I’ll blow ’em into jelly-slices of hot BLOODY SHIT!”
That’s a N.J. cop, Mom.
So after that ticket I decide I need to hide out so I go into the first movie house I can find. The feature film’s not very good, so what you do is just forget it and you start staring at the leading lady’s ear. Those whirls. And down in there, most probably wax. So she’s talking all this lasagna and she’s got wax in the ear. Then, all of a sudden, there’s another N.J. cop. He’s stopped at the thick, sound doors just outside the seats. All he’s got to do is to push them open and walk in. But he’s standing out there and he’s got his gun out and he’s waving it around. “Hey! Open this place up! Open these goddamned doors and let me in! I’m the fucking heat!” I can’t believe it. He keeps pounding. Some guy gets scared and lets him in. The cop swings on in. He’s got one of these huge tins of popcorn and a walky-talky. He sits down in the back row. There’s the walky-talky . . . . . . . . “SLeeeeech BAaar Skleetch . . .” “Hello, this is patrolman Evans reporting from the Pink Ivor Theatre . . . .” “Skeeeeeeetch SKeeeee RRrroweeweeeeeee . . .” Then he starts cracking old deaddog jokes into the walky-talky and jamming this popcorn into his mouth. It goes on like this for 15 or 20 minutes. Finally some guy asks him, “Sir, can you tell me what you’re d
oing here?” The cop laughs and says, “Sure, I’ll tell you. We got reports that a bunch of you punks are sitting around here beating your dandelions and scraping the dried snot and gum out from under the bottoms of the seats and eating it. Any more goddamned questions?” “No sir, thank you.” “The tax-paying citizens of this town demand protection from you goddamned perverts! . . . Skee, SKeeeeel, Wrrrorrrr, SKEeeellllllll . . . SPITZttzzz!”
I get out of there and I get in my car and all of a sudden the steering wheel slips out of my hand and I see myself headed right at this telephone pole. I can’t get out of it—I duck my head down into the wheel at the last moment and the car spins upright and stops. I pull back and look. I’m pointed toward the sky like a rocket ship and some of the wires from the telephone pole had dropped down and they are whipping against the car. The wires jump back and forth and each time one of them touches the car it shoots off like a rifle shot. I ought to be dead, I think, but I’m not. I still don’t believe much in God, even then. A whole gang of people with nothing to do gather around me, not too close, but they gather around anyhow and watch these snakes of lightning flick against the car. I’m in there hooked in with the seatbelt and I’m looking at them and they’re looking at me. I catch one guy grinning at me and then he reaches down and rubs his balls. Too much. I turn the key in the ignition, put the car in reverse, hit the gas and the car just climbs back down that pole and rolls back on the ground. That’s it. They’re still looking. I back it out a little more, shift gears, and then I gun it down the street. It feels good. Then I look into the rear view: two red lights. Two more N.J. pigs. I pull up. One cop stands back with his hand on his gun holster. The other walks up, a big one with club drawn, and he motions for my driver’s license. I’ve lost it. I tell him so.
“Hey, hey, hey, queen of the May, he lost his driver’s license! Ho, ho, ho!” He takes his club and he beats it across the hood of my car, making these big dents. “Hey, hey, hey!” Then he goes to work on the left front fender. He finishes that, then reaches up, and smashes my sideview mirror to bits. “And, ho, ho! He don’t have a sideview mirror!”
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way Page 12