by Sam Kashner
I suddenly remembered that Head of the Poet Peter Orlovsky was the name of Robert LaVigne’s painting that Allen had seen before meeting Peter in Foster’s Cafeteria in San Francisco so many years ago. LaVigne had painted Peter’s giant head on a canvas four feet by six feet. Peter, from a Russian family, looked a lot like Sergei Essenin, the poet who married Isadora Duncan and who had once prowled the halls of the Plaza Hotel, naked, wielding a pistol. Essenin was one of Allen’s heroes; he kept a tape recording of Essenin declaring his poetry to a Russian throng in the 1920s. Whenever Allen played it, he cried. Essenin slit his wrists in a hotel room and wrote his last poem in his own blood. Allen once recited that poem to me, his eyes filling up with tears: “In this life, there’s nothing new in dying, / But nor, of course, is living any newer.” He said the poem is called “Goodbye, My Friend, Goodbye.” I thought at the time that you would really have to be a serious poet—if not a great one—to give a title to a poem after you had slit your wrists.
Allen would play the tape on an old reel-to-reel, looking over at Peter sitting up straight in his chair, hands splayed out on his thighs, like he was posing for another portrait or had become a piece of Russian sculpture. Allen would gaze at Peter’s beautiful Russian head and hair as if Essenin himself were in the room with him.
Allen and Peter had an unusual relationship. They had taken a vow, a kind of marriage vow, but Allen seemed to have hundreds of lovers, young men from the streets of Boulder and Naropa students, and Peter wanted to have a family. “But,” Allen later told me, “I’d have to support Peter, his wife, and a baby. I’m too old for that. At the same time,” Allen said, “Peter can’t live on his own, he doesn’t know how.”
I don’t think anyone in the Orlovsky family was ready to live on his own. Allen showed me a photograph he had taken of all the Orlovskys seated together on a bed. Allen was a wonderful photographer; his Leica, which he kept in an old-fashioned brown leather case, was never far from his hand or eye. When Peter visited his family some years earlier, Allen took their picture.
It was a terrifying sight, like a picture out of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Peter’s mother, Katherine Orlovsky, sits on the rumpled bed in a housecoat, barefoot, completely deaf from a botched mastoid operation, the nerves of her face severely damaged, looking like Charles Laughton. Peter’s brother Lafcadio, in slippered feet, sits next to shirtless Peter, Lafcadio’s hand touching him tenderly around the neck. Katherine holds Lafcadio’s hand, and Lafcadio’s half sister, Marie, stares sullenly at the camera, barefoot in a polyester dress. Marie had once lived with Allen and Peter for a time on the Lower East Side. She had to quit natal nursing school because she started hearing voices. “The voices traded in filthy gossip,” Allen said. “She would roar things at people from the window of the apartment.” The Orlovskys all lived together on a lonely road somewhere on Long Island, cashing their various disability checks, spending a small fortune in taxicab fare to do their errands and to go to the supermarket, which they did all together, never wanting to be separated. I remember Peter looking over our shoulders at the picture, beaming with pride at his family. He told me that another brother, Julius, lived in a group home with patients from the state hospital at Binghamton. “It’s run by a nice woman and her husband,” Peter said. “Mr. and Mrs. Finch. Like the bird, only they have a large family, not of birds, of patients, and my brother is one of them.”
Now, sitting in Allen’s living room across from Rinpoche, Peter struck me more and more like John Clare, the nineteenth-century English poet who loved nature and a girl named Mary, slept outdoors, and always ran away from the madhouse to return to his rural English village. Clare suffered from a delusion that he was Lord Byron. His poems are full of misspellings, like Peter’s, he spent time in the madhouse, like Peter, and he loved nature, like Peter. And, like Peter, he “kept his spirit with the free.” Peter was luckier than John Clare, though—Peter had Allen. Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in the asylum, and he continued to write about nature and his village, Helpston, as if he still lived there. Like John Clare, Peter too was reckless with his poems. “It would be hard,” Allen said, “to rescue Peter’s poems from all the places they might be—guitar cases, the backseat of cars, old notebooks. It’s time to preserve Peter’s poems,” Allen said with great tenderness, as if to say, “I’ve preserved Peter all these years, why not his poems?”
Did Allen know that Peter liked talking to me about his affection for “girls,” as he called them? Peter often said he wanted to get married. He said he had always wanted to, but that he took a vow with Allen and could never leave him. Peter said that in the beginning he was simply too shy to tell Allen that he liked girls and wanted to have a family of his own. He was getting over his shyness now, he told me.
A lull fell over the conversation. Then Peter asked whether or not Rinpoche was going to come to the first Naropa dance, and if he was going to bless the first Naropa class. He then pointed to me.
“That’s Sam Kashner,” Peter said. “He’s our first Naropa poetry student. Allen says he writes good poetry but no one can understand it. I like to write simple poems. Poems about compost heaps, and trying to remember what pussy tastes like. Sam doesn’t write poetry about that.”
Rinpoche nodded and smiled.
Allen was taking forever shaving off his beard. It was a shock to see him so obedient. They had known each other for about five years, Allen and Trungpa. Trungpa liked to tell the story of Allen “stealing” his taxicab in front of town hall; Allen had just wanted to get his father, who was sick, off the street and back into bed.
At last, Allen emerged clean-shaven, like the first day I saw him several weeks earlier. I noticed he had cut himself pretty badly on one side of his face. It made me mad at Trungpa. Rinpoche, I think, loved Allen, but I would later conclude that he wanted some of Allen’s fame and some of the same devotion that people felt for Ginsberg. Trungpa might be enlightened, but I came to believe that he also harbored some old-fashioned, Western-style jealousy. He was pushing Allen to improvise most of his poems and to let go hippies of his ego. He came up with a phrase he liked to use on Allen and on his friends: “Ginsberg resentment.” He said that all American had it. He warned Allen to prepare himself for death.
I came to Naropa because I wanted to meet the writer who, in the 1950s, told off America, who said sarcastically that his mental health depended on Time magazine. I fell in love with “Ginsberg resentment”—the aggression and anger in Allen’s poetry was a beacon to my aggrieved teenage life. I carried those City Lights books to school in my pants pocket. My heart was in my pocket, right next to Howl and Other Poems.
But it was Allen Ginsberg made gentle—pacified by Rinpoche, sent on retreats where he had to sit and meditate all day and couldn’t write—that I found waiting for me at Naropa. The CIA-mafia-FBI paranoia of the Chicago Seven Trial now seemed to be a kind of dream. Had I made it up in junior high school just to express my own weird angers, to feel better about my life?
After the Vadjra guards had cleared the room and helped Rinpoche out of his chair and down the stairs, Allen kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie. I went upstairs to bring down some of the work we had put away for Rinpoche’s visit. I went into the bathroom to tidy up—it was one of my jobs.
A cigar box peered out at me from a stack of towels. I lifted up the striped towels and reached for the box. I opened it. It was full of what looked like curly iron filings, like that game where you dragged the filings with a magnet along the face of a man to give him a beard. That was it. These were the hairs from Allen Ginsberg’s famous beard. The beard that his ego was too attached to, according to Rinpoche. I put the box back between the beach towels.
When I came back downstairs Allen looked at me, as if he knew I had found the box. “No one will recognize me without the beard,” he complained. “I’ll be the most famous, unknown poet in America. No one will come to the Jack Kerouac School if they don’t believe I’m here.�
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“I believe you’re here,” Peter said.
“Me, too,” I said. “But I still like ‘Ginsberg resentment.’ That’s why I came here.” Allen smiled. I think it was good for his ego to hear that.
If Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Cassady were the core group of the Beats, added to that were two muses, Orlovsky and Herbert Huncke. Some people thought that it was Herbert Huncke who had first introduced the word “beat,” or the idea of it, anyway. Huncke was a writer, but first and foremost he was a thief and a junkie. His character appears in Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, as well as On the Road; there are glimpses of him in Burroughs’s early dime novel, Junky, which he published under the nom de needle William Lee (a book that Allen always loved for its “just the facts, ma’am”–style of storytelling; he called it a “dry classic”). Ginsberg wrote about Huncke, too, who walks on the snow-bank docks with his shoes full of blood in the middle of “Howl.” Kerouac got a lot of stories from Huncke and thought he was a great, natural storyteller.
Later, when I had the occasion to meet him through Allen, I thought Huncke was scary. He appeared in Allen’s apartment one night, hunched over the kitchen table, and with his death’s head he looked like Yorick holding out his own skull and talking to it. He kept talking about how the law is a dangerous thing, how he hated honest work, how honest work is for suckers. What he really was, though, was a sucker for crime. He seemed to love the idea that he was a criminal, or that people thought of him as one. Whenever Allen spoke of him, it was with veneration, the way women in a small Irish town talk about the parish priest. Huncke said this, Huncke once did that. He seemed like the kind of person who could have murdered someone once, somewhere. Huncke seemed to believe that more people would go into crime as a profession if it weren’t for the risks involved. The idea of Herbert Huncke might have been exciting, but Huncke himself scared me.
I don’t think Huncke really liked Allen, and Allen’s veneration for Herbert made me wonder about his judgment. Whenever Allen left the room, Huncke seemed to attack his old friend, although Ginsberg had often given him money and had looked after him. Huncke complained that “life’s been hard for all of Allen’s friends, but not for Allen.” He said that Allen had been living off his friends, not with money but by living off their lives. He said, “Allen’s a big talker, but he’s really timid, really careful. That’s why he’s a big deal now, and here we are standing with our hands out—it’s a nice little gimmick.”
I wasn’t enjoying this conversation with Huncke. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t leave in the middle of Huncke’s coughing fit. He coughed up a whole cemetery right there in Allen’s apartment. He coughed himself into a blur of a human being. He couldn’t seem to stop himself; he seemed to be sputtering about the window, how it needed to be closed so he could stop coughing. But closing the window didn’t help. He was still choking, his hands held up to his face like an old gardenia wilting in the night. I remember thinking it didn’t seem worth it—to live so desperately just to come up with the word “beat” and be remembered for it.
7. A Shady Character
By the time the summer session was nearing a close and I was gearing up for the fall semester to begin (and bring with it more poetry students?), I was becoming a shady character.
I was working late in Allen’s apartment one night, looking over a section on Whitman, “old courage teacher,” for a lecture Allen was preparing for Naropa. Whitman in his old age had become a fascinating topic for Ginsberg. Whitman had given Allen the courage to grow old, to write about death, the body falling apart, a soft cock. Ginsberg admired the old Blake, the ancient Pound. They sanctified old age by writing about it, by choosing it as a subject. He loved the fact that Whitman wasn’t trying to top himself, that he had kept current. Allen tried to do that, too; he was trying hard to like punk music. He called it “crybaby music,” until he met the Clash. They invited him to play on one of their upcoming albums and Ginsberg happily accepted.
Allen was rewriting his journals from the sixties. At first I thought it would be hard for someone like Allen to grow old. After all, he worshiped beauty and youth. He told me my ass looked good in my dungarees. I always put up a kind of wall when questions of sex came up between us. I was too shy, too much in awe to give Allen a straight answer about whether or not I was queer. I would say things like, “How should I know? But that’s the way it is.” Or, “I never thought about it before.”
It was dark when I left Ginsberg’s apartment. Suddenly, I heard Johnnie Ray’s 1952 song “Cry” playing on an eight-track tape, as Billy pulled up in front of the apartment complex in his car. It could’ve been something Neal Cassady had driven from his girlfriend’s apartment in the Bronx to the Golden Gate Bridge in one of those automotive rants, with Cassady driving for forty-eight hours straight.
I loved reading about Neal’s capacity for driving, Allen’s descriptions of Neal in a muscle shirt, driving with his elbows so that he could light up endless joints and cigarettes. I used to read about Neal’s driving when I sat in the backseat of the car during driver’s ed at John F. Kennedy High School in Bellmore, Long Island. I never finished it. They took Neal’s book, The First Third, away from me. He wrote about stealing cars and driving them around. They asked me to leave driver’s ed. They said I was a threat to myself and the other students. But my driving teacher, Mr. Baitinger, said I shouldn’t feel too bad. He said Jack Kerouac never liked to drive and he became a great writer. My poetic license hadn’t been revoked.
“Hey, Sam,” Billy shouted. “Get in the car.”
Billy was in the front seat but he wasn’t driving; one of the freckled Westies with a gold front tooth was behind the wheel. Jubal was in the back, with Peter and Burroughs. In the dark, Burroughs wore a kind of kerchief on his head, like the ones Jacqueline Kennedy liked to wear walking around Manhattan. It was even tied under his chin. He looked like a Daumier drawing that could’ve been called “The Toothache.” Jubal sat beside him in the one thing Jubal ever wore, an expensive-looking suit, without a tie. In fact, Jubal wasn’t wearing anything under his jacket. I saw some chest hair spilling out like moss. Burroughs’s cane was laid out across his lap. I thought of Kerouac’s description of a much younger Burroughs in Texas, sitting on the front porch with a shotgun on his knees, watching the sun go down into the bloody earth.
“Ah, Peter. It’s you!” I said gratefully as I climbed in and sat between Billy and the driver. I was comforted to see Orlovsky in the car, the only one sensibly dressed for the cold air of the mountains, even in early fall. He looked like a Sherpa. I didn’t quite know where we were going, but I felt sure it would be an adventure. And I thought that looking after Billy was still somehow part of my job.
We made the slow, perilous climb up the hill, which turned into a slow, perilous climb up the mountain, until you couldn’t quite see the town of Boulder anymore, just lights twinkling in the distance that looked remote as stars. We parked on a cliff, not strictly speaking, but it was the edge of something. Everyone piled out of the car. Peter looked down and yelled into the abyss, “Has anybody seen my dinosaur? My dinosaur is missing, please hellllp!” It was very dark. It seemed like the place where someone might be killed. Burroughs took off his tie. Suddenly it crossed my mind that maybe I could be strangled up there.
Burroughs’s concentration was intense. The high beams from the car flooded the place with light as if it were a movie set. I watched Burroughs, his skin drawn tight over his cheekbones and his mouth full of large teeth. He was nearly bald on his pate and his hands had brown spots. I couldn’t tell if they were liver spots or freckles. He had a sharp nose that made him look like a bird of prey. And he had thin lips, which he moistened while he studied the situation. He had a remarkable memory, especially for obscure facts and for studies no one had ever heard of. His memory was important tonight.
“I can see it from here. I wonder if we’ve given it enough cover. We’ll need our own trucks. Prob
ably should have done this four miles farther up. The growth there is better. I’d say it could mean the difference between eight and ten thousand dollars. It’s just a guess, without having a table of freight rates at hand.”
“You’re right about it, except for one thing,” Jubal said.
“Where am I wrong?” Burroughs asked.
“You weren’t here, so you don’t know that most of this has been moved. I moved it. So you owe me an apology. You’ll have to be more careful in the future.” Jubal began yelling. “Don’t go off half-cocked. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a next time. You better sit in the car, Bill.”
Jubal called himself the “chief engineer” of the project. He was the engine running the whole thing. Jubal was treating Burroughs like a little boy, punishing him for not knowing the full story about the pot they had planted up in the mountain. I couldn’t believe it when Burroughs went back to sit in the car.
The others began harvesting the pot while I went back to sit in the car with Burroughs. I put the tape back on. Johnnie Ray again. I put in another tape. I couldn’t really see in the dark. It was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I suddenly realized that William Burroughs was on the cover of that album. His head begins to eclipse Marilyn Monroe’s. Edgar Allan Poe rises above Burroughs like a chimney.
Burroughs asked me to put the overhead light on in the car. He laid some blueprints out on the backseat. He reminded me of Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. One thing was certain; he was not the kind of prospector who put on hobnailed boots and danced a jig when he found his treasure. But he seemed to want to come out of that tradition. He was one of those scions who, though they are born rich, want to go backwards and make nothing of himself.