When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  When it came time for me to apply to colleges, my high school guidance counselor didn’t think I’d be able to get into regular college. She wanted me to go to a school in Iowa that was practically a vocational school. She said my only good grades were in English. She had me on the BOCES bus with kids who hated to read. But I fought back. I wrote a lot of poetry and I got into Hamilton College, although she had discouraged me from applying. She said I was fooling myself. I had only applied to Hamilton College because my high school girlfriend, Rosalie, was going to Kirkland, the women’s school across the road from Hamilton, which was still an all-male college. When the acceptance letter came, Miss Nickel, the guidance counselor, pulled me out of class and started dancing with me in the hall. No one from my school had gotten into Hamilton in a long time.

  I, too, was surprised I had gotten in. I told her this must have been how it felt for Kerouac to get a football scholarship to go to Columbia. She had no idea what I was talking about.

  Kerouac had hated playing football for Columbia, the way I hated my six weeks at Hamilton. We both dropped out. But Kerouac went into the Merchant Marine during the Second World War, and I went to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

  But once upon a time they weren’t so disembodied. Just as the rich live together, their neighborhoods gently touching elbows, so, too, the miserable of the world stick together. Kerouac’s weariness of the world made sense to me, as did his furtiveness. They could’ve called themselves the furtive generation, as they seemed to possess some hidden, inner knowledge of the world that 1950s America didn’t share. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I came looking for.

  Six years after Kerouac’s death, I sent in my application to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a subset of Naropa, the first Buddhist college in the country.

  I had been restless at Hamilton College, the strict, all-boys’ school in Clinton in upstate New York, where I started my college career. There weren’t many Jews at Hamilton, and fewer still in Clinton. Hamilton was the only school to give Ezra Pound an honorary degree after the war, after he was convicted of treason. That was enough reason for me to go there. But I was unhappy and I wanted out. Then I saw the brand-new Naropa catalogue: its purple cover with the wheel of the dharma stamped on the front. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Whalen, Kesey—the core faculty, it promised, all in one place. Pull My Daisy with the sound. I was going to be schooled by the Beats. I’d be brought up by them. The son they never wanted. It was going to be nirvana (it wasn’t a band yet). I’d tolerate the Buddhist stuff, the meditation practice they talked about. I was there to join Allen Ginsberg’s reindeer army of skittish boys who wanted to sit at the same table with the only man who could call William Burroughs “Bill.” And, as it said at the back of the catalogue (in very small type), the school had applied for certification.

  By the time I was filling out my application—there really was one, an essay that I answered with quotes from the Ramones—the Beats were legends. By 1975 some of them had known each other for more than thirty years. That was the thing about them that I really liked: the camaraderie of these men who had tried so hard to avoid society, or at least to separate themselves from it.

  In my last year of high school, my parents were hoping my grades would be good enough for me to go to Hofstra. But I didn’t want to stand on the overpass and look down on Hempstead Turnpike. I wanted to burn like a roman candle, or at least a shabbas candle. I wanted to feel myself burning up with life. I wanted the Beat experience, but I didn’t want to get hurt. I wanted Naked Brunch.

  My parents read through the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics catalogue. They saw the picture of the core faculty sitting on a bench: Allen, Bill, Peter, Gregory, and Anne. My mother asked what kind of bathroom facilities the dormitories had. She knew that one of the reasons I didn’t want to go to a conventional college was the shared toilets. “Where will you go pishen ? ” she asked. “What about gayen cocken? ” Just as the Eskimos are said to have two hundred different words for “snow,” the Jews have about eight hundred words for going to the bathroom. I knew them all.

  I told her I’d have my own apartment. It was agreed. I would go to the Jack Kerouac School. I would become a poet. I would join the Beat Generation.

  The day I was going to leave, my parents said they had a surprise for me before they took me to the airport for the flight to Denver (the school was located in nearby Boulder, Colorado). I went upstairs and closed the door to my room. I looked out the window above the radiator, and I said farewell to my sea of roofs—the Birnbaums, the Goldbergs, the Weiners, already composing in my head the dramatic masterpiece of my future life—like the Beats, like Allen in “Howl,” fusing life and literature and legend. I was already anticipating my complicated love life, its joys and ineffable sorrows, the straw of my life on Long Island woven into the gold of Denver. What will the weather be like when I get there? I wondered. Will my first girlfriend be dark or fair? Will Allen come on to me? What would I do if he does? In one instant a thousand terrible and wonderful thoughts came over me like a shower of arrows over a covered wagon.

  What I didn’t quite realize as I packed my bags for the Kerouac School was that Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beats were on the downward slope of their fame. Eleven years earlier, Allen had been crowned King of the May in Czechoslovakia. William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, considered a classic novel of nightmare comedy, was nearly twenty years old. Because the core faculty had turned their autobiography into art, their fictional selves lived on in a kind of perpetual youth. But, as I would soon discover, they themselves had grown old. The Beats I would encounter at Naropa were long in the tooth, cranky, full of bowel complaints and the perils of advanced age.

  I came downstairs. My parents had a present for me, waiting for me in the car: it was my father. Seymour Kashner. He would be coming with me to Boulder, to see that I got settled in okay.

  My father going with me to the Jack Kerouac School? In the midst of my happiness—another crisis. I felt the cold hand of embarrassment on my shoulder. “Just for the weekend,” my mother said. With so many secret fears of what life among the Beats would be like I was secretly relieved. I’d have my “naked brunch,” at last. But it would be with my father at the other end of the table, eating Baskin-Robbins.

  On the drive to the airport, Seymour asked me about the school’s unusual name. Why Jack Kerouac? I wondered about that, too—after all, he was the first among them to die. His presence was marked by his absence. And in some ways he had tried to outrun the idea of being “Beat” and had become more politically conservative in the years before his early death. He even showed up on William Buckley’s old TV show Firing Line, bloated and drunk, defending the war in Vietnam. Jack was an old-fashioned American patriot who wanted to put as much distance between himself and the emerging hippie culture as he could. Even his friends had a hard time figuring out why he had run out on them like that. Now that Kerouac had gone, disappearing into Florida and then, as Allen put it, “on the express elevator to heaven,” the three remaining core Beats—Gregory, Bill, and Allen—contemplated Jack’s importance to them and to American literature. Without Kerouac in the room, great claims were made for his work by Allen and his friends.

  Allen described Kerouac as the new Buddha of American prose. He said that his friend had “spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years (1951–56)—On the Road, Visions of Neal, Dr. Sax, Springtime Mary, The Subterraneans, San Francisco Blues, Dharma Bums, Book of Dreams, Wake Up, Mexico City Blues, and Visions of Gerard,” a heartbreaking little book about the short life and death of his younger brother, Gerard, the one the nuns of Lowell thought was a saint. Allen would tell us that Jack had created “spontaneous bop prosody” that also happened to be original classic literature. Several key phrases and the title “Howl” were taken “from his mouth to my ear,” Allen said. (I doubt Kerouac would have made such claims for his own work.)

>   When age and booze started to demolish Kerouac’s youth, he simply removed himself from his friends’ lives. They were left with the feelings he had inspired in them—they were left, in effect, with his soul. Kerouac removed himself, for the sake of his honor. I started to think that he was embarrassed by the spectacle of people dropping out of society clutching a copy of On the Road, which all along was just supposed to be the story of his friends.

  But let me tell you what I found out: by the end of Kerouac’s book, it seemed to be the story of how he came to his vocation, the noble, serious work of being a writer. It made me like the book even more. All of a sudden I couldn’t stand to see those late pictures of Kerouac looking so sad; it was starting to drive me nuts, all that pain and misery painted on his face. It was as if he were bringing back a bad dream that I’d been unable to shake off.

  I liked the fact that Allen had encouraged Kerouac to take his writing seriously, to treat it as a calling—I wanted encouragement from Allen too! Going to the Kerouac School would put me right there in the lineage with Kerouac and with Burroughs, the line continuing. But what did I know? I was intoxicated by my numbskull love of Howl and On the Road. I wanted to eat of that luminous cake! Later, Kerouac would describe his group of friends as “the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America but had to admire in my admiring youth.”

  If Kerouac had lived longer and gotten to write out his endless Duluoz legend, he would have seen what I saw: the Beat Generation in a weird retirement phase. Not quite ready for assisted living, but famous enough to need assistants. I was going to be one of them. I had grown up wanting to be “Beat”—to eat death and live poetry. And my parents, in their generous good hearts, let me do it, they let me go, though a dangerous if not terrible world awaited me.

  1. A Postcard from Allen

  Growing up on Long Island, my father used to tease me. He said that I knew John F. Kennedy’s birthday but that I didn’t know his. May 29, 1917—that was Kennedy’s; my father was right. But I knew the year John Kennedy was born only because Seymour was born the same year. My mother, Marion, was younger. She grew up in her own house in Brooklyn, my father in a cramped apartment on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My parents met in the Weiss & Klau building on Grand Street in lower Manhattan. They had a four-year courtship. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, Lilly Greengrass, used to call my father “the undertaker” because he always looked so serious and wore dark suits.

  They got married in 1950. Only recently did that start to sound like a long time ago. We lived in Brooklyn on Avenue J, in my grandmother’s old apartment. She had since moved to South Fallsburg, up in the Catskill Mountains, with my grandfather, a retired furrier. They rented rooms and little apartments in an old house they bought. Eventually, my father moved us to Long Island, around 1960. I remembered watching television on a rolling stand in our new house empty of furniture, our front lawn just sand and rock. Our house stood on filled-in swampland before it was a town named for a tribe of Indians called Merokes (translated as Merrick).

  I watched John Kennedy being sworn in as president on television that year, but all I remember is that you could see his breath when he spoke, and I liked how his hand chopped the air as if he were chopping through ice so I could see him better.

  My sister was two; I was five. As we watched America’s youngest president chop the air, I sat in my fire chief’s car and she stood in her crib. My mother was upstairs with the first friend she had made in Merrick, Mary Stamler. Like Mrs. Weiner, Mrs. Stamler was very glamorous looking. I didn’t know it at the time but my mother was also beautiful. I do remember that I wouldn’t let her get old. When I started to notice her gray hair (I was about seven years old), I asked her to get blond hair. So she went to the beauty parlor and had her hair dyed. She looked like television and the things on it that caught my eye. I never really saw my mother then, in those days. But I can see her now.

  My sister is named Gella. It had been my father’s mother’s name before she came to America. They called her Gertrude in America, but Marion thought “Gertrude” was too old-fashioned and it would be a burden in the playgrounds of Merrick, where we kids played baseball and climbed the monkey bars over the burial grounds of the Meroke Indians. So the name Gella came back to America, as everything comes back, one way or another.

  My sister was a smart, dark-haired little girl with cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie blowing his crooked trumpet. She always made the honor roll. I did not. She was always a good girl. She cried the first time she cursed in front of my parents. She hit her elbow and said “shit,” and then looked at our parents and the tears came. They thought it was funny and told her nothing bad would happen just because she had said “shit.” This was only a moment, but it shows what the rest of her life might be like.

  I wasn’t that way. I was more of a contrarian. If my life was easy, I wanted it to be hard. When it was hard, I wanted it to be easy. Before I knew what the word meant, I wanted life to be “beat,” but I also wanted a hot towel waiting for me when I got out of the shower. Maybe my parents sheltered me with too much love, too much affection—is that possible? Maybe they should have made me go to a conventional college. Maybe I should I have brought my laundry home every weekend. Instead, I sent home Allen Ginsberg’s laundry once a month. I started sending Allen’s laundry home because when he gave it to me to do, I didn’t know how to work the machines.

  After Philip Weiner went to college, my two best friends on Long Island were Fred Mollin and Neal Warshaw. Fred lived in the older part of Merrick, called North Merrick because it was north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Fred’s father worked as the manager of a Key Food store. He was a grumpy guy with three children. Fred was the youngest. He had long, long red hair. He loved music and was something of a genius on the guitar. He wrote songs. I was his manager. I wrote a letter to John Hammond, the record producer who had “discovered” Bob Dylan; he must have taken pity on my terrible handwriting and guessed that what I wanted was for him to hear my friend. So he invited us to come into the city and play for him in his office at the CBS building.

  We took the day off from school. Fred carried his guitar in a big black case. He had his song titles Scotch-taped to the side of the guitar. He played a few songs for Mr. Hammond, who sat behind his desk with the shortest gray-haired crew cut I had ever seen. He liked Fred’s songs, but he said he wanted a second opinion, so he called for someone to come into his office. He introduced us to Al Kooper.

  Al Kooper had played organ on “Like a Rolling Stone” for Bob Dylan. Fred, who was already pale and nervous, started playing for Kooper. Both men looked at each other and smiled. It was the kind of smile mothers have for their children, watching them play in the park. But somehow I knew Fred wasn’t going to get his record contract.

  Mr. Hammond told me to take Fred to Gerde’s Folk City in the Village on West Fourth Street. “It’s where Bobby started,” he said. A week later I found out when Gerde’s had an open-mike night, and we snuck out of school and took the Long Island Rail Road to Gerde’s. You never know who might be in the audience.

  Fred said I should get up and read one of my poems. I said no, that it was his night, but I had stuffed a few poems in my pocket, just in case.

  There we were, sitting backstage at Gerde’s. Fred was tuning up, I was muttering my poems to myself, just in case. Suddenly Fred’s father stood there, backstage. He had a murderous look in his eye. I’m sure he was angry about having to drive back into New York City after coming home to Merrick and figuring out where we were. He made Fred put away his guitar and leave with him.

  Mr. Mollin drove home with Fred in the front seat. I sat in the back. We couldn’t look at each other. Fred looked like he was going to cry. I felt like we had been caught stealing rabbits or something. I leaned over and whispered in his ear. I wanted him to know we would be back and that he was a great songwriter. I hated his father. I thought he was cruel. Fred, who usually talked back to his parents in a wa
y that inspired awe in us, didn’t say a word. (It was always amazing to us how Fred would tell his parents to go fuck themselves, and they didn’t punish him for it.) Maybe Fred never got over the humiliation of being dragged out of Gerde’s by his father, because at sixteen Fred left school to become a musician. His parents told him he was making a mistake, that music was a nasty business for him to be getting into. He told them they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Then he made them buy him an electric guitar. They did. He became even more of a god to us than before. Ten years later, Leonard Cohen came to Fred’s wedding.

  My other friend was Neal. He wore a cape and smoked a pipe. He read Marianne Moore and wrote poetry and took pictures of his girlfriends naked. He was sixteen. But even Fred and Neal were surprised that my parents had let me go to the Jack Kerouac School.

  I had been accepted as a “summer apprentice,” so there we were, Seymour and I, flying to the Denver, Colorado, airport in the late spring of 1976.

  Allen and Peter were supposed to meet us—the manufacturer’s rep and his son, the might-be-first graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But when we arrived, Allen and Peter hadn’t shown up. My father said under his breath, “This is a great beginning,” but he rented us a car and we drove the sixty miles to Boulder, climbing in elevation the closer we got.

  “You can’t expect Allen Ginsberg to greet every student at the airport,” I said, secretly relieved. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know I was the only poetry student, so far, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. As the mountains of Boulder loomed in the distance, I looked over at my father and felt a sudden surge of loneliness, and I was grateful that Seymour had come with me. I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye.