When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  We moved my few belongings into a small, semifurnished student apartment on Broadway (making me more than a little homesick for New York City). It would prove an ideal location, however, as Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky’s apartment was in the same complex: a three-story, slightly down-at-heels apartment complex with outdoor walkways that made it look like a prison compound. It’s where many of Naropa’s students stayed.

  I said goodbye to my father, fiercely biting back tears, and he drove back to the Denver airport alone, dressed, as usual, in dark jacket and trousers suitable for funerals.

  When I met Ginsberg, his beard was missing. My first meeting with Allen Ginsberg and his beard was gone! It was by that beard—that magnificent untidy brisket that appeared in Fred McDarrah’s photograph of Allen wearing an Uncle Sam hat—that I had irritated my uncles, upset my parents, and made a name for myself at John F. Kennedy High School. And now it was gone.

  On my first official day at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, I was told to go to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment and introduce myself to him. He was wearing a T-shirt with Naropa’s logo on it: an image of the karmic wheel. It looked to me like the wheel of a great ship, the kind of wheel you’d tie yourself to during a storm at sea, like the sea captain had on the ship Dracula used to cross the ocean from Transylvania to Carfax Abbey. All these thoughts swam through my brain as I crossed the threshold, my heart racing, to meet my hero—the author of Howl, Bob Dylan’s mentor, Jack Kerouac’s champion and best pal.

  The first summer of Naropa, all the poets, writers, and musicians lived in the Varsity Apartments, down the hill from the University of Colorado, where I was staying. Dancers sunned themselves on the catwalk terraces in front of the apartments. Most of the doors were open. I always hated sandals, so I was dressed in shiny black Beatle boots and a short-sleeved madras shirt on my first day at the Kerouac School. At least I was dressed.

  Allen was sitting in his living room at a round glass table fit for all meals. My appointment was for lunch. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, white socks, and his shoes were off. He had wire-rimmed glasses that looked silver. His eyes were red. He kept his hair long, though he had already lost a lot of it. I wondered how anyone could think of him now as Sasquatch, a great hairy mess, a brunette Whitman. With his long hair pulled back and his shaved face, he looked more like the manager of the Stage Delicatessen in New York. (I would go there with my friend Roger Lemay one night in the early 1970s after Allen, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso had all read together at Columbia University. I remember I had the Danny Thomas.)

  I was so nervous to be sitting at Allen Ginsberg’s table that dust came out of my mouth. It felt as if someone with a shovel was turning ashes over in my stomach. And then Orlovsky came through the front door, carrying two bags of groceries.

  Peter looked like childhood drawings I had seen of Hercules. He had a long gray ponytail and a chest that looked like it was full of brine and pickles. He also wore shorts and sandals. Where was his chariot? So this was Allen’s lover. His literary wife. I had heard that Allen first fell in love with Peter in a painting. That is, a painting of Peter that Allen had seen in Robert LaVigne’s apartment in San Francisco. Peter’s fate was sealed when Allen first clapped eyes on him in that painting, and before long they were pledging their life’s love to each other late one night in a twenty-four-hour cafeteria. Much later in the summer, I asked Peter about that night. He was drunk, and happy, stepping into a hot tub with a girl. He said he could remember only the coffee and the macaroni and cheese. He said that he and Allen held hands over their dinners. Someone nearby thought they were saying grace. It cracked them up.

  Peter put the groceries on the counter. Allen introduced me as a young poet, here to help him. This was what I had come to Naropa for: to become Allen’s apprentice. (I remember going to a Young People’s Concert, given by Leonard Bernstein. He was introducing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” He said, “Being an apprentice to a sorcerer, how exciting that would be, but leaving the sorcerer to go out on your own, that would be tricky!” Leave it to Leonard Bernstein to scare children at a Young People’s Concert.) I was going to be Allen’s apprentice, I was going to learn to become a poet, to become great, which really meant he was going to teach me to live an epic kind of life. I was nineteen years old.

  Peter, in a voice that would always remind me of Lenny in Of Mice and Men, asked me if I wanted any tea.

  “I just bought Swiss Kriss if you need it,” he said, in those flat tones that made me think—if just for a minute—of brain damage. “Keeps you regular. I told that to Bill. He hasn’t moved his bowels since he got here.”

  “It’s the smack,” Allen said to me, with a tiny giggle. “After fifty years, heroin’s given Bill impacted bowels.” The author of The Nova Express had trouble moving down the line. Peter didn’t wait for me to answer. He simply brought over a pot of tea for us, served on a tray with a peacock painted on it. He put his hands together and bowed. It suddenly dawned on me: Peter Orlovsky was Allen Ginsberg’s geisha.

  Allen must have thought I was scrutinizing him—I was just in awe to be in his presence—so he apologized for his mouth being tilted to one side, as if he’d had a stroke.

  “I was on an airplane,” he told me, “and I was taking two different kinds of medicine. They interfered with each other and when I went into the bathroom on the plane, I saw that my mouth was crooked. The doctor says it will go away eventually. I hate the way it looks. It’s hard to kiss.” (I remembered that Kaddish and Other Poems had been dedicated to Peter Orlovsky, “in Paradise,” it read, and, “Taste my mouth in your ear.”)

  Peter was still puttering around the kitchen, putting the groceries away. He had a big belly. The rest of him was quite lean. Allen began to explain the work to me, what he required of his apprentices, when Peter threw his long mane of gray hair back like a wet horse and gathered it together into an elastic holder. Until then, I had only seen girls do that in school or on the bus. I always thought it was beautiful. I didn’t know what to think about Peter’s doing it. Allen stopped to look also. I looked at him admiring Peter. I think he was still in love with him then. They didn’t speak much when I was there. I’m sure Peter was staying out of our way, simply being polite, because “Allen was working.” But they also reminded me of my parents, their silences, the way they sometimes became annoyed with each other.

  When I thought about it, it seemed fitting that I was spending the summer of the bicentennial—our nation’s two hundredth birthday—with the man who had told America to “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” in his poem “America.” Allen Ginsberg was the father of my country. Throughout my youth, I always saw a different kind of Mount Rushmore—Ginsberg’s bearded head was there, and Jack Kerouac’s, whose handsome profile already looked carved out of rock. Gregory Corso, the shaggy-haired poet-thief, the François Villon of the Lower East Side, looked out on the clouds where Teddy Roosevelt was for everybody else, and William Burroughs’s death’s-head rictus formed the narrow slope at the end of my Mount Rushmore. I loved poetry and especially Rimbaud, or at least the idea of Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French poet who had written all his masterpieces by the age of seventeen and renounced poetry to run guns out of Africa, who had to have one of his legs amputated, who spent the rest of his short life being cared for by his sister, playing the guitar and making up songs under a Belgian, Magritte-blue sky.

  So when Allen, between sips of steaming tea, asked me what I knew about Arthur Rimbaud, I had an answer.

  “The derangement of the senses?” I said, aware only that the phrase appeared in Rimbaud’s poetry. If only I could’ve said it in French, I thought. That would have been très cool.

  “Rimbaud is in the pantheon,” Allen said. “There are others. Mayakovsky.” (Knew it, I thought, and said a silent prayer of thanks.) “Breton and Tristan Tzara.”

  “Sammi Rosenstock,” I said.

  “Who’s Sammi Rosenstock?” asked Al
len Ginsberg.

  “That’s Tristan Tzara’s real name.” I thought this would impress him. I prayed it would impress him, this great man with the slightly crooked mouth who had just come back from traveling in New England with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue (that’s what I really wanted to ask him about, but I was too shy).

  “Sammi Rosenstock” fell on Allen’s bad ear. No reaction. Worse than no reaction. He looked bored. I felt my nerve slipping away. The tea felt like battery acid at the back of my throat. There was now a serious possibility, even without the heat, of passing out. Where, oh, where were the other students? The other “poetics” students?

  Just two months earlier, Allen’s postcard had reached me at my grandmother’s house in South Fallsburg, New York, in the Catskills, up the road from Brown’s Hotel (that billboards for fifty miles along the thruway advertised as “My Favorite Hotel” with a gigantic picture of Jerry Lewis on them). It had read: “Dear Mr. Kashner, You have been accepted as one of the Naropa summer apprentices. Here is my telephone number. Please call to arrange for an appointment. I look forward to meeting you. I hope you can type. Sincerely yours, A. Ginsberg.” On the other side was printed a small poem of Allen’s about sitting under a tree and reading a book when a bug of some kind lands on the page and Allen blows the “tiny mite into the void.”

  My happiness at getting Allen’s postcard, his phone number and his signature, was more than I could bear. It never occurred to me what being an apprentice might mean, why it mattered whether or not I could type. I could, but not very well. The treasure was the postcard. Hadn’t Allen sent Kerouac a postcard every day for a year in the early stage of their friendship? This was my diploma, even before attending a single class. I read it over and over again at the kitchen table in the old boardinghouse my grandmother ran in the mountains. Suddenly, I remembered that I had failed typing in high school.

  Allen had written one other thing in his postcard. His father was very ill. He would be late in coming to Naropa. He and Peter had gone to take care of him. “We’re reading to him from ‘Tintern Abbey,’” he wrote. I looked it up. Allen was telling his father that all souls return to God. It didn’t sound like him. I didn’t want to think about death that summer. After all, I was about to leave home and enroll in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I had never heard of someone going to care for a dying parent. Whenever someone got sick in our family, they went into the hospital and we never saw them again. Already, Allen Ginsberg’s “Golden Book of Life,” as he called it, was opening up to me, whether I liked it or not.

  2. Allen Can’t Find His Poems

  The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the Naropa Institute were established in 1975 by Allen Ginsberg and a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. They met arguing over a taxicab. Trungpa was heading downtown, so was Ginsberg. They got in the cab together. It changed both their lives. Allen said that Trungpa (as they called him) had saved his life. “I was like Dylan before the motorcycle accident,” Allen told me, referring to the time in 1966 when Bob Dylan had injured himself riding his Triumph motorcycle in upstate New York, and how his recovery forced him to slow down, to reconsider things in his life. Even Dylan’s voice seemed to change after the accident, as revealed on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline, into the voice of a laconic cowboy.

  To get to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics you had to get to the mall on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, and then climb the stairs next to the New York Delicatessen, a deli, by the way, started by two hippies from Brooklyn who missed their grandmother’s babka and matzoh ball soup. I knew I’d come to the right place when I saw three Buddhist monks in saffron robes sit-ting at a table outside the New York Deli, scrutinizing their matzoh balls. I went upstairs.

  Naropa, named by Rinpoche after an ancient Buddhist teacher, existed in a long series of rooms that Rinpoche’s young followers had taken over, polishing the floors and painting the walls bright yellow and red (the colors of Buddhist shrine rooms). Rinpoche’s framed calligraphy hung on the brightly colored walls. There were mandalas and tanka paintings hung throughout the sparsely furnished rooms. I got the feeling that the meager furnishings had come from the University of Colorado in Boulder—stuff that had been put out on the street. Except for Rinpoche’s office. His room was exquisitely furnished with plush leather chairs and a beautiful couch. I also noticed that Rinpoche’s door was different from all the others: it was a thick, beautiful wooden door that looked as if it had been carved in the Middle Ages and had come from a monastery. Maybe it did. Someone told me that the doorknob was a religious object that had once been held by a tulku, or religious teacher. Whenever that door was closed, it meant that Rinpoche was in the building. To me, Rinpoche was as elusive as Elvis.

  By the time I arrived at Naropa, Allen Ginsberg had been famous for a long time. Two obscenity trials had made Allen and his friend William Burroughs famous: those of Howl and Naked Lunch. I knew those books the way an earlier generation knew Catcher in the Rye, with its all-maroon cover with the yellow letters. But I never saw Catcher in the Rye in my sleep the way I saw the City Lights copies of Howl and Kaddish and Other Poems, with their black borders and the words “The Pocket Poets Series” at the top, as if it were just another broadside you could take with you to work on the thirty-eighth floor of an unfinished office building and read it while sitting on a girder eating your lunch, then stuff into your back pocket and wait for the foreman to send you home. The books were small, no bigger than your hand, and Allen told me he loved them that way, because it made him think of the railroad handbook that Jack and Neal used to read —The Brakeman’s Handbook— when they were getting ready to go to work for the railroad. Allen had taken a picture of Jack Kerouac with handbook in his jacket pocket, smoking on the fire escape outside Allen’s apartment on the Lower East Side. I noticed there was a copy of the photograph torn from a magazine Scotch-taped to Allen’s desk in his apartment. I remember thinking, How weird is that? He was the one who took the picture, but he gets his copy out of a magazine.

  Allen couldn’t find his poems. The day before, Peter had apparently moved them to give a massage to Barbara Dilley, one of the heads of the dance department at Naropa. She had danced with Merce Cunningham and everyone talked about “The Union Jack” as one of the famous dances she had participated in. She had short hair and looked like pictures of Joan of Arc. She didn’t move like a dancer, she moved like a boxer, a very good middleweight. Peter had moved Allen’s poems when Barbara came in. Allen was mad.

  “I have apprentices coming all day,” he barked to Peter, still bustling around the kitchen. “I have to know where things are!”

  I saw the poems, a stack of paper on a bar stool near the kitchen. I went over to get them. I brought Allen’s poems back to him. I felt like I had found the holy fucking grail. My first job as an apprentice was complete—and a success! I was going to call my parents and tell them. Maybe the Daily Camera, Boulder’s only newspaper, would interview me on finding the poet’s poems.

  “I have a lot of work,” Allen told me. “I’m putting together my collected poems, I need help. I have to finish poems I haven’t written yet! Take this one, for example, it’s a long poem about Neal.” (He must mean Neal Cassady, I thought, but what if I’m wrong and he means Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon?) I didn’t know Allen well enough to know.

  After an hour or so in Allen’s presence, I didn’t have a sense of who I was dealing with, except that it was really him, that he had really lived this life that I did know something about, and that by putting himself in a kind of lineage with Walt Whitman, I felt Walt Whitman’s breath passing over me. Though it was really Allen’s and he was eat-ing a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat bread that Peter had prepared for him, one that I had refused out of sheer nervousness.

  The poem Allen handed to me was interesting, but scary, about two men lying on a cot. It sounded like they were in a flophouse, or
maybe just a cheap hotel, in Denver, where I think Neal’s father, a drunk, had lived and worked as a barber, though it sounded like he was a bum or at best a hobo, which is how Allen described him. Anyway, the two men are getting ready for bed, and if I’m reading Allen’s handwriting correctly, Allen gives Neal a blow job. As Allen watched me reading the poem, his eyes seemed to say, Are you getting to the good part? The poem stops with Neal throwing his head back in the throes of ecstasy.

  “I haven’t been able to finish it,” Allen said. “That’s where you come in, that’s your first assignment, finish the poem for me. I want to know what happens,” Allen said.

  He wasn’t laughing. I had to finish Allen Ginsberg’s poem about giving Neal Cassady a blow job. I wasn’t sure that I had ever had one myself, even from my girlfriend, Rosalie, and we were together all through high school. I would have remembered it. Where do I go for advice, for help, for inspiration? I didn’t know anyone else at Naropa. Maybe the Naropa librarian could help me? I was still thinking about the epigraph in Kaddish: “Taste my mouth in your ear.” Maybe it was a test, I thought, a test to see if I was interested in Allen. In Allen giving me a blow job. All of a sudden I didn’t feel very good. Maybe I should’ve gone to Nassau Community College after all. Why had Allen given me this assignment? I wasn’t gay. At least I didn’t think I was. Maybe Allen knew something about me that I didn’t know myself. After all, at the beginning of my life at the Kerouac School, I thought Allen Ginsberg could see through walls. Then certainly he could see through me.

  I remembered Allen’s beautiful poem about Cassady’s cremation. He described Neal’s ashes, “anneal’d, and all that muscle and strength and beauty reduced to ash.” I could pretend to know what that would feel like, but giving Neal a blow job? My first task as Allen’s first apprentice might turn out to be my last. I might be banished from the kingdom of Shambhala. It’s a good thing I didn’t unpack.