by Sam Kashner
“You’re a sweet boy,” he said. “So unborn.”
You could say that Neal Cassady was Jack Kerouac’s muse. He’s the main figure, the central character in On the Road. Cassady seemed like Kerouac’s “true brother,” the lost brother. What is it he called him? A “western kinsman of the sun,” or something like that. Cassady was a great talker and driver and cocksman. “Holy Cassady,” is how Allen described him.
Cassady was the only one of the Beats to actually be born “on the road.” He was the ninth child, born in a charity hospital in Salt Lake City, when the Cassadys were driving to California from Des Moines in a Ford House Truck. Once they arrived after their brief stop in Salt Lake City, Neal’s father opened up a barbershop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. He was a volcanic drunk and the marriage broke up, so Neal Jr. and his father moved to Denver. They lived in a one-dollar-a-week cubicle, sharing it with a double amputee named Shorty, in a five-story flophouse called the Metropolitan.
My father once drove me through the Bowery in New York—the windows rolled up—in our Chevrolet, and the men would come out of thin air and lean over to wipe the windshield, making it dirtier and asking for change. My father never gave it to them; instead, he just turned on the windshield wipers.
I never had to wake up on a naked mattress among men having the d.t.’s. Cassady seemed to thrive in the flophouse. “For a time I held a unique position. Among the hundreds of isolated creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown Denver, there was not one so young as myself…I alone as the sharer of their way of life, presented the sole replica of their own childhood.” Neal thought of his childhood as a castle. Eventually Neal moved in with his mother and a twelve-year-old half brother, a sadist named Jimmy. Jimmy had drowned cats in toilets, and he liked to trap Neal in the family Murphy bed, keeping him wedged between the mattress and the wall. Neal felt like he couldn’t yell out because that would only make Jimmy angrier, and he would torture him more. Neal’s mother was no help. Neal turned his terror of being buried alive in the Murphy bed into a kind of visionary experience where he saw time being speeded up, vibrating like a Vornado fan, blurring and fluttering, fluttering and blurring. Years later he would recall the image of the fan as it emerged from his subconscious while he was tripping on LSD.
Cassady’s sexual initiation was no less traumatic. At the age of nine he accompanied his father to the home of a drinking buddy, whose oldest son led his brother and Neal in sexual intercourse with as many sisters as they could hold down. After that experience, all boundaries of sexual decorum evaporated. Neal “sneak-shared” women with his father, and he slept with grandmothers and prepubescent girls in abandoned buildings, barns, and public toilets. Cars, theft, and sex dominated Cassady’s adolescence, all linked in what he called “Adventures in Auto-eroticism.” Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, he stole some five hundred cars. Neal was well read for a car thief, a kind of Grand Theft Auto-didact. He was arrested ten times and convicted six. This impressed me as I never really learned to drive.
Neal was sent to reform school, but as soon as he got out he would catch a glimpse of a car showroom and pick up where he left off, with the “soul-thrilling pleasures” of joyriding through the streets of Denver in a hot car.
It was Kerouac who said that, for Neal Cassady, “sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life.” The one area in which Neal Cassady and I shared similar interests—at least when I was a teenager—was in masturbation. There I was as great as Neal. Maybe greater. He masturbated and also had sexual intercourse. I hoped to give up one for the other. Cassady was a good-looking guy, described as thin-hipped and hard bellied, a champion chin-up artist who could throw a football seventy yards. I couldn’t get my hand around a football, and found it too hard when it hit my chest. It made a noise. Kerouac compared Neal’s face to a young Gene Autry—green eyes, a strong jawline, and a jutting chin. Orlovsky said of Neal’s profile, if he wasn’t a man “his face would have made a beautiful shoe horn.” I think I know what he means. He always bought secondhand clothes, his one suit from a secondhand clothing shop in Chinatown. Kerouac noticed how even Neal’s “dirty work clothes clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn’t buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy.”
Neal liked to seduce men and women. It was part of his con man’s persona. It was like a sexual swindle. He was flattering, he was manic. He was a car salesman of sex. He sounded like a 331?3 rpm record played at 45. Allen talked about Neal’s penis the way my Israeli cousins used to talk about the Empire State Building. Eight inches long and thick. Before I arrived at the Kerouac School I wondered how Allen could know such a thing. I got myself (with the help of my parents) excused from gym—asthmatoid bronchitis was what it said on the note—but not wanting to shower with other fifteen-year-old boys was the real reason.
I wondered how was I going to get along with my hero, Allen Ginsberg, who had, long ago, put “his queer shoulder to the wheel.”
I took several of Allen’s poems home. They were written out in longhand, in Allen’s tiny scrawl. I studied his handwriting. It looked like the ink from a squid that someone had used to write his name in. He had written poems in a notebook on unlined paper. These new poems seemed to be about death, about his failing powers as a lover. More often than not the love poems ended with Allen’s head on the hairless chest of a young boy.
I had come to Naropa to meet girls. I didn’t know what to make of poems like “Love Returned” (“Come twice at last / he offers his ass”).
I panicked. I left Allen’s notebooks on the floor beside my bed, my asthma inhaler on top of the notebooks. I walked out into my first Boulder evening, the mountains pressing up against my eyes. I walked down Pearl Street, which was Boulder’s main Rialto. There, in a metal box with the daily paper inside, I saw the banner head-line: “John Wayne Is Dead.” I thought of Keats’s wonderful line “great spirits on earth are now presiding,” and pondered the departing ghost of John Wayne. What would Allen Ginsberg think about the Duke’s death, a guy who represented everything about America that Allen seemed to stand in stark contrast to?
I looked at the people streaming toward me along the mall. How many of these backpacked strangers were going to wind up at Naropa? What raven-haired girl playing her guitar on the grass in front of the Boulder courthouse was waiting to be a muse, or at least amused by my lonesome self? I had yet to meet any of the other students.
I looked down at my watch (the one my grandfather had sold me on his deathbed, I liked to say, which of course wasn’t true. My mother had given it to me as a going-away present). It was getting close to seven P.M. Oh no! Dinner at Ginsberg’s! I had almost forgotten.
I ran up the impossible hill toward Allen and Peter’s apartment on Broadway. I had forgotten the apartment number, but Bessie Smith’s voice led me to them. The door was open. Would other students be waiting there as well? Shy and in awe, as I was?
I looked around the room. No one was remotely my age. Every face in the room I knew from books. If there was a way to die then, I wanted to know what it was. William Burroughs sat under the lamp that hung above the dining room table. He was dressed in a suit and looked as if he had just been interrogated by the customs bureau. I recognized him as the man who had written Naked Lunch. (I knew that Donald Fagen had taken the name of the dildo in that book for the name of his band, Steely Dan.) I also knew that William Burroughs had accidentally shot his wife after she had goaded him into shooting an apple off her pretty head in Mexico. Burroughs missed. Joan died. Whoever she really was vanished into myth.
I hoped I lived through dinner.
I still had my backpack with me, and in it was an album I wanted to play for Allen on an old hi-fi that he and Peter had brought from New York. It was Gene Vincent, the blue-jeaned, hillbilly rocker who died young and was incredibly popular in England, much more so than he ever was in the States. I told Allen how Vincent, on his way to
England, had only two things in his suitcase when the airport official opened it up: a teddy bear and a gun.
“That’s how I’d like to travel if I could get away with it,” Burroughs drawled. “Instead, I have to bring a velvet-lined suitcase full of vials and victuals, just to keep alive.”
Other people have commented on William Burroughs’s voice, how it could grind gravel, or how it sounded like the bark of a borzoi, the elegant dog on the spine of books published by Alfred A. Knopf. Allen said Burroughs’s voice sounded as if it came up from under the sea, from a kingdom of mermen armed with Kalashnikov rifles.
There was something of T. S. Eliot about Burroughs, I thought. Dressed like a toff in a three-piece suit, Burroughs looked like an undertaker taking night classes. His long face was white as a candle and he smelled of talcum powder and Noxzema.
After listening to Gene Vincent for a while, Burroughs suddenly turned to me and asked me what the meaning of “disco” was. I guess he thought that since I was the youngest person in the room, I would know.
“You mean the word ‘disco’?” I asked, a little embarrassed at being spoken to. “It’s from ‘discothèque.’”
Burroughs now had his back to me. He was hammering a nail into the wall in order to hang a picture. I thought to myself that this was how Jesse James got killed, turning his back on Robert Ford while he was hanging a picture on the wall. I thought about the song, about the dirty rotten coward who shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave.
I handed the Gene Vincent album cover to Allen, who liked Gene Vincent’s looks—the pompadour and Vincent’s skinniness. A long discussion ensued about skinny men with big cocks, the skinnier, the bigger.
“I haven’t seen a cock in so long,” Burroughs growled. “I wouldn’t care if it looked like a hedgehog run to ground.” He went back to hanging his picture.
I had absolutely nothing I could add to this conversation. I was conversationally busted. The night might end right here for me. I was saved by Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-a-Lula.”
“It’s not the kind of music I like,” Allen remarked. “I prefer blues, like Elmore James, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, do you know that music?” Allen asked. “Dylan loves this music,” Allen added. It didn’t sound like name-dropping. It just put the discussion out of reach.
“No, I don’t.” It was my first lie to Allen Ginsberg. I did know some of that music. In fact, in junior high school, I was crazy about Son House. When I heard he was living in Rochester, New York, I called information and got his number. His wife answered the phone. “Hello, Mrs. House. Is Mr. House at home?” I asked.
“No, he’s out at the Woolworth’s,” she said. “He went out there to get some foolishness, should I tell him whose call came in?” I could’ve listened to her talk all day. I had wanted to invite Son House to be the entertainment for our school dance. I must have been out of mind (my schoolmates would have preferred disco), but my heart was in the right place. I could’ve told Allen that story, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to sound like I knew anything about anything. I wanted—needed—Allen to be the oracle. I wanted to learn everything there was to know from him, even the things I already knew.
Later that night, after a fascinating but strained evening trying to eat dinner in the company of legends, I tried to finish Allen’s poem about Neal. I read some of the other poems Allen had written about blow jobs, tracking phrases that appeared and making use of them. I was stealing from Ginsberg to write a poem he would later claim as his own. (Was “Howl” written this way? Was “Kaddish” written by somebody else for his (or her) mother?) I didn’t know whether to stay or to pack up and go home to Long Island. Instead, I just cried.
3. Psychic Surgeon
I stayed. A few days later, the core faculty of the Kerouac School held its first faculty meeting, which was also another dinner in Ginsberg’s apartment. William Burroughs took the minutes.
Everyone in Allen’s living room was a great talker. (Anne Waldman, the tall, glamorous poet and a core faculty member at Naropa, had been billing herself as “Fast Talking Woman” after her long poem, which she recited in a breathy rush to adoring crowds.) But I noticed that they all stopped talking and listened to Burroughs whenever he spoke. How could anyone ignore that voice, that ruined patrician’s face, that T. S. Eliot on smack?
There was something enchanted about Burroughs, in a midsummer night’s dream kind of way. It looked as if someone had put a spell on him and he had been changed into a woman, then a man, and then back again, as if they couldn’t quite make up their mind.
I saw he was missing a finger. Well, not an entire finger. Just the top of it. I felt like Robert Donat in that Hitchcock movie my father loved, The 39 Steps, when Donat thinks he’s found sanctuary in the Scottish highlands with the High Sheriff and his family, but then he sees that the High Sheriff is missing a finger, which identifies him as the ringleader of a dangerous group of spies. I wasn’t in the Scottish highlands, I was in the Rocky Mountains, but seeing Burroughs’s left hand silhouetted in the window made me wonder about how safe I was.
Burroughs, I would soon discover, seemed to save his affection for a select few. He had a simple philosophy of friendship: not to spread his good cheer “all over hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.” When I heard that, I crossed Bill’s name off my Chanukah party guest list, the one I was mentally preparing to have when December came around.
I would later learn from Anne Waldman the story of Bill’s missing finger. It seems that Burroughs, in his youth, had been in love with a young man named Jack Anderson, who did odd jobs in an office and, on the side, hustled both men and women. Anderson knew of Burroughs’s infatuation and tortured him with his other affairs. They lived next to each other in a shabby apartment building, and Bill could hear his boyfriend having sex with other people. He was miserable and angry about these infidelities, or at least the feelings they created, so one day he bought a pair of poultry shears. He later said they reminded him of his Thanksgiving dinners.
“He looked in his dresser mirror, all the while composing his face into the supercilious mask of an eighteenth-century dandy,” Burroughs later wrote about the incident, and then he severed the tip from the little finger of his left hand. He watched the blood rushing out of the wound, eventually bandaged the finger, and put the offending digit into his vest pocket, as if he were putting away a handkerchief or returning a fountain pen to his pocket. “I’ve done it,” Bill said to himself. After that, Burroughs noticed, “a lifetime of defensive hostility had fallen away.”
That was when Burroughs gave up his dream of becoming a psychoanalyst. Smart move, I thought. It was hard to imagine this silent man, tall and pale, as having been Allen’s and Jack’s teacher and therapist. (Kerouac had taken one look at Burroughs’s mad, bony skull and described him as a Kansas minister.)
I wonder if that missing finger was the reason Allen sent me over to do some typing for Bill the following week. I knew that Kerouac had been Bill’s favorite typist. It was Kerouac who typed up the manuscript for what would become Naked Lunch. Kerouac was like a one-man secretarial pool, an almost mystical typist, Allen thought, really fast and accurate. I, on the other hand, had failed the Regents exam in typing. Not only did I make Abraham Lincoln look like Sigmund Freud, I typed out John F. Kennedy’s silhouette but ran out of time and left a big hole in the back of his head. The teacher thought I had done it on purpose. I didn’t. I just messed up.
When I arrived at Burroughs’s apartment one week after the first faculty meeting, I wanted to impress him with my efficiency, so I marched right over to his electric typewriter and tried to turn it on. I couldn’t find the power button.
“Use your brains, dammit,” Burroughs snarled at me. While he watched my distress, he began telling me how to catch a rabbit for food, in case I ever needed to do that. “Start by building a contraption with a shotgun,” he explained, “but be careful it doesn’t go off in your face.” His point was:
Think clearly when you’re going to kill something, and not act like I did now—the paragon of butter-fingered incompetence.
I would soon learn that Burroughs liked words no one really used in conversation. His small talk sent you to the dictionary. Words like “jeremiad.” Burroughs no longer cultivated the role of the dandy, but he still seemed to be playing a part. The part of the man with a virulent strain of something he’ll never get rid of. He seemed perfectly happy with his old age. Whereas Allen seemed to want to be young, Burroughs seemed to find a way to defeat death by never stopping to believe in his own death; it was in this way that he seemed to come alive. He had found the perfect role to play in this theater of the Beats—as not death’s, but life’s avenger.
Burroughs talked while I typed; he liked to tell stories about his youth, as if I were too young to hear anything else. Or maybe my own youth made him think about the past. He liked talking about being eight years old. At that age Burroughs had a little hiding place under the back steps of his parents’ house, a secret place where he kept a box, and in the box was a spoon, a candle, and some type of instrument for investigating the forging of hard metals for weapons. It was also around the time he said that he shot off his first gun and wrote his first story. It was called “Autobiography of a Wolf,” a ten-page story about an animal who lost his mate and was killed by a grizzly bear. Burroughs said his parents had listened politely to the story. “Surely you mean biography of a wolf,” his father had told him. “No,” Burroughs insisted. “I mean the autobiography of a wolf.” They sent him to Harvard. Now he was, he said, “the Payne-Whitney Professor of Bellevue Studies at the Jack Kerouac School.”
It dawned on me, leaving Burroughs’s apartment and walking home in the cool night air that held the hint of autumn, that Burroughs had just named two psychiatric hospitals for his college chair.