Memoirs of a beatnik

by Di Prima, Diane

  Being a woman to three men was an interesting trip. Big Bill had eyes for me, but I put him off for a while. I didn't know how Billy would feel about it if I made it with his dad, and I dug him too much to fuck things up.

  We finally got together one weekend when Billy and Little John were off on a two-day hike. After supper Big Bill just sat down on the sofa beside me and began to undo my shirt. His deliberation and assurance came on like restraint, and the man-smell of his body—sweat and earth and tobacco—was tremendously exciting to me. Except for being raped by Serge Klebert I had never made it with an older man, and I was pleasantly surprised. Big Bill's body was lean and hard, the muscles well-defined, steel-like under the smooth, mobile skin. His prick, when I drew it from his work

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  Country Spring

  pants, was slimmer than Billy's but slightly longer. It had a kind, worldly-wise air about it, as if it had drawn wisdom from all the cunts it had entered. There was a competence and strength in his long fingers as he took hold of me, a skill and understanding in his lips on my breast that was reassuring and delightful. I was about to embark on a voyage with a seasoned sailor, one who knew the trip and every turn of the wind. He made me sense my youth and awkwardness, and see them as something precious, not easily come by.

  We passed a beautiful night on the couch, fucking and dozing till dawn. And then, when it turned light, we stumbled off to our separate beds for a few hours of sleep.

  The scene with Little John was something else. We were too much alike in our littleness, our high energy and our toughness to interest each other. Though we did try making out once or twice experimentally in the afternoon when Big Bill and Billy were off at work and John had not yet gotten a job on the road crew with them, it never went anywhere and we never thought much about it, one way or the other.

  Evenings would find the four of us listening to the world on Big Bill's short-wave radio—the outside world that seemed so far away from our farmhouse, but would suddenly loom: close, treacherous and threatening as soon as we turned the knob. Or we would play chess, or read plays together. Big Bill really dug amateur theatricals and his idea of the way to spend a country evening was to do staged readings. He had a good voice and was really fine at it: Shakespeare or Brecht, found Cocteau too thin, boomed lines at us while insects crash-landed by the thousands on the screens, attracted by our late-burning lights.

  Yes, it was good, being a chick to three men, and each of them on his own trip, each wanting a different thing, so that the world filled out, and interplay, like a triple-exposed photo, made infinite space. I have since found that it is usually a good thing to be the woman of many men at once, or to be one of many women on one man's scene, or to be one of many women in a household with many men, and the scene between all of you shifting and ambiguous. What is not good, what is claustrophobic and deadening, is the regular one-to-one relationship. OK for a weekend, or a month in the mountains, but not OK for a long-time thing, not OK once you

  Country Spring

  have both told yourselves that this is to be the form of your lives. Then begin endless claims, and jugglings to avoid boredom, and the slow inexorable closing of God's infinite horizon, like the red-hot tightening walls in Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," walls that move in inexorably and choke the life out of your world.

  In the Middle Ages there was the chastity belt—but that at least could be dealt with, with a hacksaw if nothing else. In our parents' day there was marriage, there sometimes still is, and that is ugly enough, but it is a legal form, and can be dealt with by more of the same, more papers. It is unpleasant, but it is only one form of the monster. The real horror, the nightmare in which most of us are spending our adult lives, is the deep-rooted insidious belief in the one-to-one world. The world of "this is my old man." Live with one man, and you begin to have a claim on him. Live with five, and you have the same claim, but it is spread out, ambiguous, undefined. What is unfilled by one will be filled by another easily, no one hung up guilty and inadequate, no one pushed to the wall by demands that he/she can't meet.

  I remember reading in the books of that great woman explorer, Alexandra David-Neel that in Tibet both polygamy and polyandry were once practiced freely. Would love to know more about that social structure, how it worked, how they got it to work, who lived with whom. In the photos the women are beautiful, strong, free creatures, sufficient to themselves; I read that they owned land and businesses like their menfolk; and the men—well, the men and women together created one of the wildest magics this planet has ever witnessed.

  We flourished on our Hudson River farm, functioned for each other. Big Bill took care of my head-his largesse and stability, his confidence made me feel safe and well, as I had never felt in my life, his gallantry made me feel beautiful. Billy was fleshmate and comrade, we were well-matched: I could hold my own with him hiking, or weeding, or fucking: my life-force matched his well. And Little John was brother and friend; I heard my paranoia echoing in his head, he found his secrets spelled out in my poems. Many a stalemate game of chess went down between us.

  It was a different life from any that I had known before: the quiet of those long twilights, when we would pass the grass around and mumble warm laconic sentences at each other in the bare,

  Country Spring

  dowdy living room with its worn-out sofa and dumpy chairs. Billy sometimes singing to us; Big Bill reminiscing, telling anecdotes of Woody Guthrie, or running down the wartime rackets in New York City, filling us in; Little John scribbling in notebooks, biting his nails in a corner. I got used to the slow, spaced rhythm of my days and for a while it seemed to me that I had never known any other pace than this timeless one, days colored green by the garden, and nights colored gold by the oil lamp. I lost myself in my new-found woman's role, the position defined and revealed by my sex: the baking and mending, the mothering and fucking, the girls' parts in the plays—and I was content.

  But slowly, imperceptibly, the days began to shorten, the grass turned brown, and with the first crickets a restlessness stirred in me for the quick combat and hard living of the city, for the play and the strife and the inexhaustible human interchange that was New York to me then. I would catch myself listening for the traffic, or the background sound of "Bird" being played on a cheap phonograph in the next apartment, and I knew it was time for me to be on my way. So I took my leave of Billy for the time being-he would be back in New York in the Fall—gave him back his baggy Levis and donned my office skirt and blouse. Big Bill drove me to a bus station, and within an hour I was back in New York.

  Country Spring

  Summer

  ment man with a big broom would come by and wake me. He swept my bed and went away again, and I and the half-dozen other people, all complete strangers, who shared these quarters, would exchange dazed greetings and go back to sleep till ten or so, when people started to arrive.

  There was a regular crew of about eight of us who slept there, four to six of the eight being there on any given night, and we all got to know each other pretty well, as far as moods and habits and aura went, but we never spoke. Something about the intimacy of our shared space and the code of coolness in effect at that time would have made it unseemly for us to know each other by name, or have anything more to say to each other than the minimum morning greeting. It would have been intrusion, filling each other's turf and head with rattling chatter and conversation, and the inevitable unfolding of our emotional lives would have destroyed the space that the indifference of the city gave each and every one as her most precious gift.

  At ten I would get up, stretch, look around me, and read for an hour or so till I was thoroughly awake. Then, stuffing all my accoutrements into the attache case that served as my portable home and contained a raincoat, a toothbrush, notebooks, pens, and a change of underwear, I would pick it up and set off for the Chinese laundry on Waverly Place. I kept all my clothes there on separate tickets: one pair of slacks and one shirt on each ticket. I wou
ld take out a ticket's worth, and, carrying now attache case and laundry package, I'd amble to Rienzi's, which opened at eleven, and order a breakfast, usually some kind of sweet and espresso coffee, though occasionally I'd splurge and treat myself to eggs and English muffins, or even some sausages or bacon. While the order was making, I'd find my way to the bathroom which was hidden away downstairs; down a rank, damp staircase with oozing walls, and along a corridor straight out of the Count of Monte Cristo to a tiny, cramped room, fortunately vaguely cleaned, where I would wash my face and feet and hands, brush my teeth, and change clothes, stuffing the dirty ones into a paper bag I carried in the attache case for that purpose. Would then pull a brush through my hair and tie it up, and, feeling vaguely human, would grope my way up the stairs and to my breakfast.

  Summer

  Great pleasure it is to sit in an unhurried, uncrowded shop, drinking good, strong coffee and reading while your friends come in and out and the morning draws to a close and you write stray words in a notebook. I would linger as long as I could, usually a couple of hours, leaving finally to go to my afternoon's "work." The man to whom Duncan Sinclair had been selling his pictures, a real porn tycoon named Nelson Swan, had been busted, and that market was dead for the moment, but I had found it simpler and pleasanter, though much less lucrative, to work for some of the older painters on the scene—painters who were one or two generations older than the abstract expressionists, and still used models.

  They were gentle, friendly folk who had come of age during the depression and were given to painting what in the thirties had been known as "Social Realism"—people with a sad, haunting sense that the world had changed since their "day," and a persistent kindly determination to discover of what the change consisted. Most of them were within walking distance of Washington Square, and I would walk up to the studio where I was expected, stopping along the way to drop off the bag with my yesterday's clothes at the Chinese laundry. I would perch on a high stool, or recline on a couch, in Moses Soyer's studio, while his wife rattled in and out chattering and Moses told me the gossip about his other models: who was going to have a baby, who was leaving for San Francisco, and almost one could believe oneself in that haunting and haunted world of nineteeth-century Paris, would catch the bold and flashy faces from La Boheme out of the corners of one's eyes. The money I got for two hours modeling was enough to buy me dinner and next morning's breakfast and to take another outfit out of the laundry, and, as I had no other needs, I thought myself quite rich.

  After a while a certain number of luxuries attached themselves to this routine: I met Victor Romero, a young photographer with a job and an apartment, and he gave me a key to his place, which had a shower; and occasionally I would work two jobs in one day and take Rene or O'Reilley out to dinner; and I got a card at the New York Public Library, which varied my reading considerably.

  Then one day I wandered into the Quixote Bookstore on MacDougal Street and Norman Verne, the proprietor, offered me a job: he and his wife Gypsy wanted to go canoeing on the Canadian

  Summer

  lakes for a month, and would I like to manage the store? The store came with a kitchen in the back, complete with stove and refrigerator, and there was an army cot to set up in the middle of the back room, where one could sleep in comparative luxury. The rains and thunderstorms of late August had begun, and the park was neither as pleasant nor as convenient as it had been, so I accepted, gave a few days' notice to all my painters, and moved in, attache case and all, and Norm and Gypsy took off.

  After they were gone, I discovered that the store also came with its own built-in junkie: a very beautiful, ghostlike blonde boy named Luke Taylor, who played a very heavy shade blues guitar and shot a lot of heroin—"horse" as we called it then. I had seen Luke around the scene for some time-he used to frequent the Saturday night "rent parties" that were held in a loft around Twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue—and I had eyes for him from the first time I heard him sing. Something about the supercool, wasted look: the flattened, broken nose, the drooping green eyes, thin pinched junkie face with its drawn mouth—the mixture of hungry and bitter—cut right through me, and left me wanting to touch, to fondle, to somehow warm that chilly flesh. I was in love with Luke then, and for some time to come.

  On the first night that I was taking care of the store—it opened around four in the afternoon and stayed open till midnight in order to cover the tourist trade—I was standing in the doorway, looking out at the scene on MacDougal Street. The Village had gotten tougher as the summer had worn on. It was one of those years in the middle of the nineteen-fifties when the Italians who lived below Bleecker Street, getting more and more uptight behind the huge influx of "new Bohemians" (the word "beatnik" had not yet been coined) were beginning to retaliate with raids and forays into what we had traditionally considered our territory: the streets north of Bleecker. On their side, it must be admitted that we were invading, moving into their turf en masse. Many new apartments on Sullivan Street, Thompson Street, etc., had been opened up to us by the real estate moguls. They were cheap, convenient to the Village scene, and in the heart of the Italian neighborhood. Into them flocked unheeding the boys and girls of the new Village: men who wore sandals, or went barefoot, and sometimes wore jewelry, girls who favored heavy eye makeup and lived with a variety of men,

  Summer

  outright faggots, and—worst crime of all to the Italian slum mind—racially mixed couples.

  The police were run by Tammany Hall, and Tammany was itself the heart of the Italian Village, and so they tended to ignore the escapades of the Italian youth. Only two days before, I had stood in Washington Square and watched a police car cruise slowly up the block and away, while about twenty young men pursued Francois, a quiet, pale-skinned mulatto boy from the Bahamas, into a building then under construction. The twenty hoodlums milled about in the empty lot next door, shouting obscenities and afraid to enter the building, till someone started, and they all took up, the chant "Get a pipe! Get a pipe!" The police car pulled smoothly away to the tune of this bloodthirsty chant, with never a backward glance. Francois, whom I knew slightly, had been making it with Linda, a pretty white chick of about sixteen, since he hit the Village at the beginning of the summer.

  On this particular evening, I stood on the steps of my new store and watched three young faggots get beaten up by their dago brothers. A not unusual evening's entertainment. A cool breeze was coming up and many people were out enjoying the soft summer air. The young men ducked into a hallway two doors away from me. Scuffling and screams. The police pulled up. They bravely entered the building, arrested the three gay men and drove away. About three minutes later, the young gangsters emerged from the building and continued their stroll up the block.

  Somebody came into the shop and asked for Vestal Lady on Brattle, Gregory Corso's first book, which had just been printed in Cambridge. There was no "beat poetry" as yet, it was just another poetry book. After the customer left, I settled down on the stoop to read a copy. I was deep into Gregory's peculiarly beautiful head when Luke appeared, guitar in hand.

  "Where's Norm?" he asked hoarsely. His voice was always hoarse, was hardly more than a whisper, with that peculiar junk roughness.

  "He's gone," I said, "for four weeks. Gone camping with Gypsy in Canada."

  Luke muttered some obscenity, started to take off, then came back and sat down beside me on the metal steps.

  "You watching the store?" he asked.

  Summer

  I nodded.

  "You gonna be sleeping here?" he persisted, edging toward the thing that was on his mind.

  I nodded again. Supercool, me too.

  "Oh," he said. He was silent for a few minutes, and we both watched the street.

  Then he said, "I was living in back here. Didn't Norm tell you?"

  Now, Norm had told me nothing-whether because he wanted to cool the scene with Luke and was hoping I would get rid of him, or for whatever reasons of his own, I didn't know.


  "No," I said. I was quite surprised. One of the things I had really been looking forward to was having that combination kitchen-bedroom all to myself, and cooking little things, and puttering, and playing the hi-fi: playing house, for all the world as if it were mine, and mine alone. After you've been on the streets for a while, living alone becomes the ultimate luxury.

  I was quiet, but Luke, I was sure, could hear me thinking, with that telepathy people develop when they are continually at the mercy of others. I glanced sidelong at him and my heart went out to him. I wanted to touch those long, skinny, dirty fingers-beautifully articulate hands with the mercilessly bitten nails. A pang of desire shot like lightning through my groin.

  "No, I didn't know you were staying here," I said softly, "but if you want to, I guess you still can. I mean—we can figure something out so we both fit." I didn't look at him. "Why don't you go on back and stash your guitar?"

  "Yeah," he said, and I met his eyes, and he flashed a smile. "Yeah, thanks. All I want to do right now is fall out."