When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  “I had a wonderful time,” she said. “Bob sang a song he dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud, and then he looked at me.”

  “What song was it?” Allen asked.

  “I never heard it before,” she said. “I remember the image of the street and the dogs on it barking, and night is falling.”

  “‘One Too Many Mornings,’” I told Anne, and I wrote that down in the minutes.

  She frowned. I knew the song title, and I wasn’t even invited to the concert. I thought then that Anne and I were on some kind of collision course. She didn’t like it when one of Allen’s assistants showed her up—someone not under her wing. I was like an outlaw who retreats to the sanctuary of Allen Ginsberg, and Allen stands in front of the doors of the synagogue and says, “You can’t come in here, he’s under my protection.” That’s how it felt.

  Allen beamed when I mentioned the song title.

  “That’s right. I love that song,” Allen said. “Good, boychick,” he said to me. “Rimbaud would’ve liked that song; he could’ve sung it sitting with one leg and strumming the guitar with a country dog chasing fireflies in Charleville at night.”

  Rimbaud’s lost leg, his phantom limb, had kicked Anne under the table for me, kicked her in the shins, schoolboy-style, across time.

  23. Heroin Doesn’t Make You Immortal

  It wasn’t just Allen’s idea that poets could be rock stars. After all, Allen thought that Dylan was really a poet masquerading as a rock musician. A “troubadour,” he kept calling him. He and Anne said that a lot. “The troubadour just called,” or, “The troubadour is coming to Denver, we should get spruced up and go,” Anne had said. In fact, all the Beats at Naropa wanted to be rock stars. They were the ones who seemed to be inheriting the Beat gift for social dissonance and for outrageous behavior. They also seemed to be the ones who were getting all the press. Not to mention money and sex. During that summer, when the big rock tours were announced, Burroughs surprised everyone by sulking about it.

  “The goddamn Rolling Stones,” Burroughs said one afternoon in the backyard of one of Rinpoche’s wealthy supporters, who had thrown a garden party for the Jack Kerouac School faculty, some of the other teachers at Naropa, and its only officially enrolled poetry student. “Mick Jagger pretends to be sinister,” Buroughs explained, balancing a teacup and saucer on his bony knees, along with his cane. “I can’t stand all that Aleister Crowley crap and the Stones in their wizard hats. The real evils are the Central Intelligence Agency, and childhood carcinoma. You could bring most of them”—meaning the Stones—“home to Mother.” Everyone laughed.

  “Even Keith Richards?” someone asked.

  “Keith Richards made one mistake about heroin,” Burroughs explained, ignoring the laughter among the Buddhists. “It doesn’t make you immortal, it makes you improbable.” It was the first time I had heard Burroughs say something about heroin that didn’t sound like a travel brochure to some exotic island. But even Burroughs had appreciated the fact that Donald Fagen had called his group Steely Dan after the dildo in Naked Lunch and that Patti Smith had posed with him in New York, wearing a T-shirt with a silk-screened likeness of Rimbaud as a young, cravated schoolboy who had just finished writing some of the most powerful poems in the history of the world (or at least that’s what I thought at the time).

  Only Gregory, of all the Beats, didn’t care about rock music or about wanting to be a rock star. He didn’t care about sharing the stage with Bob Dylan or Patti Smith or Jim Carroll, who was another poet having success as a musician, writing songs like “People Who Died,” a necrology of all the friends Carroll had lost, some to heroin. Carroll was addicted himself for a while—to the drug and to the danger of life. Corso loved opera, particularly the Italians, and especially Rossini. He loved Renata Tebaldi’s voice. He said he heard her singing in heaven once.

  But as little as Gregory cared for rock ’n’ roll fame, that’s how much Anne wanted it. She had seen Jim Carroll, with his long-legged skinniness and strawberry-blond hair, become something of a rock star. Jim was already a notorious presence on the Lower East Side, thanks to The Basketball Diaries, his story of being an inner-city basketball star and junkie. I picked up the book in what passed for the Naropa library, a small room that had mostly books Allen had donated or had sent from New York. I couldn’t believe the sex in it. Jim was just a teenager but he claimed to have slept with women from every strata of New York society, from waitresses in Queens to Park Avenue matrons and even a few of his teachers. He also loved the movies like I did, and he wrote a whole book of poems about cutting school in favor of slouching down in the dark at the St. Mark’s Theater, watching Montgomery Clift go to the electric chair in A Place in the Sun. Carroll, like Patti Smith and even Sam Shepard, had cut his teeth performing in the parish hall of the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. So Anne watched this success and she wanted it. She wanted it bad.

  Anne had an agent, well, a “manager,” a woman named Linda who had married a man named Mickey Louie. She liked calling herself Linda Louie. It gave her, a Jewish woman from Teaneck, New Jersey, a kind of gangster chic. Linda Louie had curly black hair that was thinning. She seemed old to me at the time, though she was probably about thirty. She had a baby named Hadrian. “After the emperor,” she explained. She liked me. She liked my poetry. She had very large breasts. I thought about them a lot.

  Linda Louie said she had plans for Anne. She was going to make her a big star—a poetry star. Anne would give concertlike recitals, like they have in the Soviet Union. She’ll fill soccer stadiums. She thought Anne should take some voice lessons and learn how to sing her poems. She and Allen could tour.

  Because Linda Louie had a kid, she wasn’t technically a part of Anne’s entourage of sirens, like Calliope, Kitty, and Nanette. And because she often spoke to Anne in private meetings about Anne’s future, the other women were excluded from these strategy meetings, and I think they resented her because she had Anne’s undivided attention whenever she wanted it.

  Allen hardly acknowledged Linda Louie at all. I had seen him treat most women somewhat invisibly, unless they were older, like his stepmother, his father Louis Ginsberg’s wife, whom he genuinely loved and admired. Those women came closer to reminding Allen of his mother—they had “corsets and eyes.” The younger women were ghosts to him.

  Linda Louie’s husband, Mickey, had long hair he kept in a ponytail, but he had a receding hairline that he often examined in restaurants, scrutinizing his reflection in a knife or a soup spoon. He was a short guy and very skinny. Linda told me Mickey might not look like much, but “ohhh, when it comes to lovin’ me, he’s got a huge sock.” It occurred to me later that she had said cock. It was the first thing she had said to me, after I had been introduced to her husband. I could never quite regard him in the same way after that. But Mickey Louie’s big “sock” didn’t keep him from being the subject of other rumors. The most unkind was that the little boy Mickey was raising with Linda Louie wasn’t really his.

  Apparently, Linda Louie was able to devote herself to Anne’s career because she had unlimited funds. The reason for it, people said, was her relationship with something of value: a connection to a lucrative pot and cocaine deal with Cubans living in Miami and quite a few who had stayed behind on the island. A small plane would deliver the pot to the Louies, and they would pay for it with money they carried in money belts, ferrying the pot by cross-country road trips or driving all night from Florida to New York and then over into Colorado. I wondered what my mother and father would’ve thought of this conversation I was having. I thought of Anne Waldman, who was relying on this couple to bring her fame.

  Anne told Linda Louie that Allen had invited Diane di Prima to come from San Francisco to visit Naropa and give a poetry reading and perhaps stay to teach a class in the summer program when all the students would finally show up at the Jack Kerouac School. But Naropa didn’t know how to pay her, and Anne asked if Linda Louie would help. She bailed out Naropa more than once th
at first year— a legacy of the Cuban revolution. I felt like Meyer Lansky just standing around with them trying to figure out how the Cuban connection could help bring di Prima and her impeccable beatnik credentials to Naropa for a couple of weeks.

  Diane di Prima was one of the women poets Allen could see. She had a reputation as a very sexual Beat chick; she used words like cock and cunt and fuck in her work. She had Italian ancestors. She was born in New York and had dropped out of college— Swarthmore, I think—to become a writer, to try to become an artist. A few years before coming to Naropa she had written her beatnik memoirs. She had five kids, and one of her daughters with Leroi Jones was going to come to Naropa later in the year as a student. I took the news personally, as if she had told me I was soon going to have a friend.

  Diane had written a poem that became very controversial, “Brass Furnace Going Out,” about having an abortion as a young girl. She hated the fact that people opposed to abortion had appropriated the poem and were reading it at huge rallies.

  There were a lot of sexy pictures of Diane around, and I had fantasies about meeting her. In one picture she was wearing a scarf and a dark sweater with a black skirt and white socks; you could see the calves of her legs. In another photograph, she was staring down into a book, looking thoughtful and horny. I couldn’t wait to meet her.

  24. Diane di Prima Loved Food

  Once the fall semester was under way, Anne brought Diane di Prima into Allen’s class, held in one of the Naropa schoolrooms above the New York Deli on Pearl Street—Boulder’s main stem, which filled up with students and tourists most weekends.

  She wasn’t what I expected. Gone was the little sparrow on her book covers and in those famous photographs—Diane di Prima didn’t look like herself at all. I saw a woman who looked more like someone who’d stepped out of a Brueghel painting. She had long wild hair that hung stiffly down past her shoulders and looked like it had broken many a comb. She was short and built like a middleweight known for punching power, not speed, and she was wearing a tie-dyed hippie dress and a peasant blouse that had once been white but was unraveling at the sleeve. She was standing with a man even shorter than she was, who had long hair and a beard that was so long it seemed to pull down his young face, making him appear slightly hunched over. He made a lot of quick turns of his head and moved in speedy little gestures; he looked like a lawn gnome suddenly jarred awake after a hundred years. I think this was Diane’s boyfriend, maybe her husband even.

  I didn’t know a lot about beauty. I didn’t even think I cared that much about it. Some of the Beats looked as I imagined they would—they resembled the selves that had appeared in photographs and on album covers I had studied back on Long Island, or the few times I had seen them on television. I had watched Allen chanting over giggles on the Merv Griffin Show, talking about “the planet” before it became a fashionable phrase, a cliché even. Allen had made everyone else on the show look square. He made Arthur Treacher, Merv’s sidekick, seem dead as the Greek language. They didn’t get him, but I did. We did.

  That afternoon at Naropa, Allen stopped talking to the few students in our class, which consisted of some kids who had wandered in off the mall and Naropa students from Dance or Buddhist Psychology who wanted to attend Allen’s talks, plus a couple of hard-core meditators I recognized from Rinpoche’s wildly popular weekend lectures. (Those lectures were held in the gymnasium of the local parochial school, Sacred Heart. I found them fascinating, though sometimes my attention would wander to the mural above the basketball hoops, depicting Jesus holding his flaming heart in his hands, offering it to the people in the grandstands. Once Rinpoche looked up at it and asked softly into the microphone, in his Tibetan-accented English, “What will they think of next?”)

  Allen introduced Diane as a poet from Hunter High School in New York and a lover of Leroi Jones. Diane looked a little upset.

  “Allen, I love you,” she said, “but you’re always doing that.” Diane was tough.

  “What, what did I do now?” Allen wanted to know. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too, but you’re always introducing me that way. You do that to all the girls. You need to know who they’ve slept with to figure out why they’re important to you. It’s annoying. It’s like a tic or something, so cut it out.”

  I started scribbling something in my notebook. Anne introduced Diane a little more properly and said that she would be staying with us for a little while. She then announced that I was to meet them after class and show Diane around. Somehow this didn’t seem as fraught with peril as baby-sitting Gregory or helping Burroughs move stiffly through a crowd of admirers. Except for Anne, the women who came through the Jack Kerouac School made me feel more comfortable, more able to be myself. I could finally talk to someone without feeling as if I were holding my breath underwater. But it’s interesting to see how wrong you can be, and how often you can be wrong.

  Diane di Prima loved food. I could see that. But she loved talking about it as well. She seemed to remember every meal she’d ever eaten. She even wrote a book about her food experiences. She asked me to tell her about all the restaurants in Boulder. She asked if I could cook, if I liked to cook at home. I didn’t really. I liked going out to eat. I told her about the fish at Pelican Pete’s, the pasta at Sage’s, the exquisite dining at John’s restaurant, which people seemed to go to for special occasions. I told her that Burroughs and Jubal seemed to go there all the time.

  After her reading, Diane and I sat at an umbrella’d table in front of the New York Deli. We drank coffee and I told her I really liked the babka—they toasted it with a little butter on it. I offered some to Diane, adding that it was fun to share food.

  “It’s never fun to share food,” she corrected me, before ordering her own strawberry babka. When it arrived at the table, I thought Diane, too, looked a little babka-like. “The two babkas,” I thought, one sitting in front of the other. One big, about to devour the other.

  Diane said that the summer reminded her of being a young writer and of drinking iced coffee made out of powdered skim milk, and putting coffee ice cubes into the drink. She was still in high school when she and her girlfriends would wear something they had designed themselves, a kind of slip or half slip that was draped just above the breast and “tied with a sash just under your breasts or around your middle” or on your hips like a flapper. “They were very cool in the August New York city heat,” she said.

  “It was great then in New York,” she continued, warming to her subject, “wearing these Isadora Duncan clothes and sleeping with girlfriends on mattresses on the floor, drinking iced coffee with the windows open. She later wrote about it in Dinners and Nightmares: “Sometimes a breeze would enter the room and the gathering of maidens would sigh and sit on their mattresses and make their plans about being great artists and having passionate love affairs, and then we’d fall asleep, like sirens on a rock.”

  Diane spent the afternoon talking about her life in New York. She spent the hour it took to eat our babka talking about how much she loved Oreos, and how one winter in New York that’s all she did was eat Oreos, and that it used to be her favorite snack while reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. “Oreos can make you fat,” she said. “That’s the only problem with food, Oreos especially. Even if you don’t eat anything else and you think, shit, how can I get fat? I haven’t had breakfast or lunch or anything like that, but I was kidding myself. Oreos make you fat!” She wrote about that, too.

  She asked me if I was going to finish my babka. I said no. She moved our plates around so that her empty plate sat in front of me, and my unfinished babka sat in front of her. She finished it.

  Diane said she was sleepy. It had been a long trip from San Francisco, and she wanted to see her apartment. But before leaving the deli, Diane leaned over and said she was going to teach me how to write a play with a pair of dice.

  “There are certain rules you have to know,” she confided, but she felt sure that I woul
d learn quickly. She said it was a good way to pass the time. She said that you make it up out of things close at hand—she used the radio and Elizabethan plays (a collection that she kept by her bed). She said she wrote this while waiting for one of her lovers to come to her apartment with a bottle of wine. He was going to teach her how to eat clams, to open them after they’ve been steamed and pick out the flesh with a tiny fork.

  As we left the deli and headed for the apartment reserved for her visit, Diane said she would visit me at Allen’s apartment soon. She heard that I’d be looking after the place once Allen and Peter had gone out to California for a reading. She’d teach me the playwriting technique then.

  The thought of being alone with a woman in Allen’s apartment reminded me of waiting for my first girlfriend to come over after my parents had left for my grandmother’s bungalow in the Catskill Mountains. As soon as I was old enough to convince them I could stay home alone, I did. I would call up Rosalie and tell her that the coast was clear. The doorbell ringing a few minutes later would make my heart practically explode. Ten hours wooing her, as Gregory would say, then—the constellation of the stars.

  25. Billy and Tangier

  As the fall weather settled in, Billy Burroughs looked worse. A sad- looking guy, he looked even sadder as the weeks flew by. A skinny guy who used a rope to keep his pants up, he seemed skinnier than usual. I thought his skin looked gray—blue and gray, the color of ash. There was some kind of bump in his neck. Something was wrong. The only one who didn’t seem to notice was his father. But Billy was used to his father not knowing what was wrong.

  Billy liked his privacy, but when he got tired of that he wanted somebody to talk to. His friends, the Westies or whatever they were called, seemed to come to him only for alcohol and grass. They also liked his beatnik pedigree and hanging out with the son of the man who wrote Naked Lunch. I guess, in that way, they were a lot like me.