When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  “You’re home,” Peter said to me a few minutes later. Allen stepped out of the car. He kissed me good night, on the lips. It was a sweet kiss.

  28. Saint Petersburg

  One morning in the middle of the fall semester, Peter came over early to wash my face—he said I didn’t do it right. He wore a white dress shirt and a pair of garish, green-checked Bermuda shorts and sandals. He said that I must not be washing my face properly because my skin had broken out around my forehead. I was embarrassed; that’s not what I wanted to hear from Allen Ginsberg’s longtime companion.

  My parents almost never brought up the subject of bad skin, that splash of acne on my face, the gift of adolescence. It usually occurred just before some big, important event, and with the first student poetry reading coming up, that was perfect timing. Peter said he and Allen had realized on the farm they had at Cherry Valley, in upstate New York, that washing your face with ice-cold water kept your skin taut, and it seemed to cure pimples.

  Peter had a beautiful complexion. I noticed how a lot of the mountain men—guys who lived by the rivers and streams up in the foothills of the Rockies and came back down the mountain to beg for money and to troll through the Dumpsters behind restaurants— had unusually good complexions. They also looked very rested. I would’ve thought living outdoors, with the constant hunt for food and shelter, would be exhausting.

  Peter said he was going to make me exercise; he was going to make me strong. He said that I looked like “before.”

  “Before what, Peter?” I asked.

  “Like the drawing of ‘before,’” he said, insistent.

  “Someone sitting before an artist, like a model?”

  “No, like Charles Atlas bodybuilding—the drawing of Charles Atlas before he lifted weights.” I was insulted and relieved at the same time. I hadn’t mastered all of Peter’s verbal tics. Allen and Bill spoke perfect “Peter.” They knew what he was talking about at all times.

  Peter said he was very strong. He showed me how he could crack a walnut with his thighs. We shared the walnut. I kept the broken shell. I thought it would be valuable someday.

  After he taught me how to wash my face, Peter asked if I would type up his poems, which were going into his first book. He was very excited about it. He said that everyone thought he was ignorant, and that he just stayed with Allen because Allen was famous, but Peter said he had a lot of poems that he’d saved up through the years. It’s just that for a long time he took care of everyone, but now he wanted to take care of his poems, the poems he’d been saving. He once secretly showed his poems to Frank O’Hara, he said, and Frank told him they were wonderful and he should publish them. “Maybe one day Allen will accompany me to Sweden when I win the Nobel prize,” Peter said, laughing. “Why don’t they give out a Nobel Prize to the person with the cleanest asshole?”

  I wondered about that myself, I told Peter.

  Peter said he wanted to try out his book title on me—it was called “Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs.” Then he read me one of his poems, one about Peter and lepers in India. In the poem, Peter tries to help people with leprosy: “week thin no legs no hands no / fingers, only stubs of joints / with the finger bones pokeing thru. / A bit like pigs feet in clean store jars.” He proudly showed me the poem, with its many misspellings, in which he wrote about caring for a woman

  …rapped in pure dirt…

  still infested with active

  Leprocy growing

  by eating away the flesh…

  I gave some helpfull Indian soul

  to go get her a new fresh Clean

  sarrie a few ruppies…

  …on her Left behind

  I saw a 4 inch ring of open—

  saw infection full of magots

  cralling and happiley alive—

  I was never too great a speller myself. But I thought it would be a mistake to change Peter’s spelling. I remembered how John Clare’s misspellings seemed to make the words even more alive. Peter helping this dying woman on the street in “Banaras” was so sad. Because of his Russian background, and because he cared for his brothers and sister, and because of his brief, former life as an ambulance driver, I started calling Peter “Saint Petersburg.” He liked that.

  In 1971, I found out, Peter had woken up from a sleep on Halloween night and written this poem. He was already thinking like a Buddhist about life, but before meeting Rinpoche I don’t think he was thinking compassionately about his own life. I told Peter he was too hard on himself at the end of the poem, where he wrote: “I feel all the more Lazzey and Dumb and all the more domb & Lazzey Lazzey Bastard of a selfish Human Creap Sleep.”

  “But, Peter,” I told him, “you are not selfish—you should be more so! And you were not sleeping a ‘human creap sleep,’ you were just tired! It’s hard work caring for other people.”

  “I have to take care of Allen,” he answered. “I said I would do it forever, even though sometimes Allen gets mad, but that he can work out with Rinpoche.”

  Peter then mentioned that he’d dropped by to ask if I would stay in their house when he and Allen go to California.

  “Allen’s going to give a poetry reading,” Peter said. “Maybe I’ll bring back an ugly girl and we can all live together.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” I said.

  Peter had also come to my apartment to await the arrival of a friend. I expected a woman to show up, but a man arrived, whom Peter introduced as Long. He told me that Long lived deep in the woods and got his food from a creek. “If I could, I would live like that,” Peter said, “but Allen wouldn’t go for it, because now that he’s a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences he can’t live in the country.”

  Long, or Mr. Long, as I called him, was short but powerfully built. He looked like a little machine, with strong arms and a thick neck. He reminded me of a generator, he even seemed to hum when he walked. Mr. Long showed me pictures of the place he and Peter were building in a very gloomy spot in the woods. Peter said this would be the place that he would live in with Allen and the baby if they had one together, with Peter’s undiscovered girlfriend.

  “The sun never comes through the woods, so we have to cut down some trees,” Peter said.

  “You can’t walk around without a club to kill the snakes, that’s how bad it is,” Long said.

  Peter said some snakes are beautiful.

  “They just can’t be counted on to share your friendliness,” Long said. “They’re like some people I know.”

  Peter asked Long to take me up there and show me the property.

  I said, “That’s all right, Peter, some other time.”

  Long seemed uninterested in Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso; the idea of the Beats didn’t appeal to him at all. Every time their names came up he just acted as if he didn’t hear you.

  And then a noise like thunder came from the mountains. The sky got dark and Long took Peter away.

  That night, Gregory and I went to John’s, the most expensive restaurant in Boulder (paid for with Seymour’s Diner’s Club). We sat there drinking martinis like they were going out of style. I told Gregory about Peter’s poems, and Gregory said loudly that Peter was “obsessed with assholes” because he didn’t like having that kind of sex anymore with Allen. (The other people in the restaurant were looking at us by now.) In fact, Gregory didn’t think Peter was at all queer, and that his true self was finally coming through: what Peter really wanted was to have a girlfriend and to have a baby.

  Later, when I asked Allen about Peter’s plan to have a baby with an ugly girl and the three of them living in Long’s cabin, Allen said that Peter had always wanted a family; he wanted to fill up his house with boys and girls who would look like him and live on after him, because he grew up in a house that wasn’t really a home. “Peter just had to content himself with a house full of ghosts,” Allen said thoughtfully. “I just hope he doesn’t regret the last twenty years, I hope he doesn’t think he just got sidetracked.�
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  29. Menstrual Pudding

  I agreed to look after Allen and Peter’s place when they were gone. I had the keys. It was like being given Neptune’s scepter. I called my friend Jason back on Long Island to tell him I was sitting at Allen’s desk, surrounded by his books and papers, and was drinking tea out of Allen Ginsberg’s tea glass! I was seeing the things Allen saw when he woke up, like his tiny framed detail of Rimbaud, with his angelic face and nimbus cloud of hair, his wrist bent under his chin, part of a group portrait of Rimbaud and his lover poet Paul Verlaine and their friends in a café in Paris. I looked into the bearded face, also framed, of Allen’s old courage-teacher, Walt Whitman, hanging near Allen’s refrigerator in the kitchen. I didn’t dare sit on the zafu in the shrine area, though I wanted to pick up the strange, ancient- looking objects that were lying on the orange cloth that draped the table. Cameos of Allen’s Buddhist teachers, a portrait of Rinpoche, and a mandala hung above the shrine on the wall. There was even a tiny gong to call Allen and Peter back to their practice cushions. One of the objects on the table reminded me of the silver pointer that you use to point to the words in an opened Torah.

  The bed was unmade. I was planning on sleeping in my own bed and coming to the apartment just to check on it, water the ferns that Peter had brought into the house, and get rid of the sour milk. Peter also left a note on the door for me to “Get the compost reddy!” I couldn’t imagine what compost they would have in a student apartment complex. I should’ve asked someone before throwing the garbage down the chute, but I didn’t.

  The phone rang. It was Diane di Prima. She was coming over to teach me how to write a play based entirely on chance, as she had promised me the night of her reading. A roll of the dice to make art. “That’s all it is,” Diane said. “Expect me late.”

  I was nervous about her impending visit. I still thought she was kind of scary. Reading about her sexual exploits made me even more afraid of her. I prepared Allen’s place as if I were expecting Marilyn Monroe for dinner. I made Allen and Peter’s bed, I even filled a pail with ice, made sure there were cigarettes around— Gitanes—even though I didn’t know whether or not she smoked. I checked to see if the bath towels smelled bad. They didn’t, so they could stay. I spent the rest of the day preparing for Diane’s visit. At the appointed time, she appeared.

  She had fierce black eyes that stared out at me in the doorway and coal black hair, and as if that weren’t dramatic enough she wore eye shadow. When she looked at you, you forgot that she wasn’t very tall, or very chic, or conventionally beautiful. She had arrived at Allen’s apartment alone—no husband, no boyfriend, no lawn gnome (I didn’t even know his name, so I couldn’t ask about him). The apartment building was unusually quiet. It was like we were the only two people in the world. I didn’t like it.

  Diane said she wanted to cook and she seemed to know her way around Allen’s kitchen. She took over. She said that when she was a teenager in New York, she used to make something called “menstrual pudding,” just tomato sauce and potatoes, no meat and no spices, because she couldn’t afford them then. You had to pretend there was meat and spices in the pot you were stirring. I asked how it got its name, and she explained that someone in the apartment she lived in at the time—“some cat named Jack”— called it that. Then she made spaghetti and garlic bread and poured us lots of red wine.

  My head was swimming. I never drank that much wine before. It felt like there was a sun in my chest and it was burning through my shirt. Diane said she thought the wine might’ve gone off. I said I was going to lie down, maybe on the couch. She said I should get into bed. She opened the windows. There was a delicious breeze; I could hear the trees outside bending. She said good night. Then she asked if she could get into bed with me for a few minutes. I remembered one of Diane’s laments, a tiny poem she had written and recited to us in Allen’s class: “I have the upper hand but if I keep it I’ll lose the circulation in one arm.” I didn’t have the upper hand. I was in some Elysian field with Diane di Prima. “I can show you baby enough love to break your heart forever.” I could feel her breath on my eyes. I was lost. I had deserted my post. This was a woman who had used the word “cunt” in a lot of poems. We lay there for a few minutes with our arms around each other, talking about something, about nothing. Before I knew it she was going down on me and I didn’t do anything to stop her.

  I think I had had the fantasy of Diane di Prima as beatnik-sexfiend since the moment she came into Allen’s classroom. I wondered if the lawn gnome would come and change me into something. There was something about being in Allen’s house that seemed to encourage having sex. I fell asleep in Allen’s bed, and woke up alone.

  The next day, however, Diane returned with her boyfriend. She put her arm around me and told me she was going to give me her playwriting lesson, using the books and an old blues records in Allen’s place. We went back into Allen’s bedroom, alone, and looked through Allen’s records, but nothing was said about the night before. Her boyfriend sat downstairs and waited for us to come down. I kept thinking he was going to say something. Did he even know? Did she get any pleasure from it? All I remembered was I’d passed out with her mouth around me, overcome by the wine.

  Before she left I wanted her to send me her address, or a picture—I wanted to keep in touch. I was crazy. I didn’t know how things were done. I had had only one girlfriend throughout high school. The Beats seemed to know something I would never know about sex. They were like sexual Houdinis, slipping out of padlocked trunks thrown into the river. They always managed to get out and get away.

  30. Human Beings Need Meat

  My parents called. They wanted to know how I was doing. They wanted to know how Allen was doing. My father asked if I’d grown a long beard yet. My mother wanted to be sure that I wasn’t a complete vegetarian. She said human beings need meat. She told me that as soon as I had a dream about steak or liver, I should go out and get a steak dinner. She reminded me that it should be a good cut of meat and that I had my father’s Diner’s Club card if I couldn’t pay for it.

  “He still has my Diner’s Club card, Marion?” my father asked her over the extension in his office. “No wonder I can’t find it. What does he need with my credit card at Beatnik Camp?”

  “Dad, it’s not a beatnik camp, it’s not a camp at all. I hate camp. It’s a college, a school, the first Buddhist university in the Western world,” I said, waving my nonexistent Naropa banner, and waving it high.

  “Bub,” my mother said to my father on the extension—she always calls him Bub, short for the Yiddish endearment bubbalah. “Your son is going to college with Allen Ginsberg.” My parents often got into arguments like this while they were on the phone with me. I’d be completely quiet and they would continue to argue on the two telephones in their own house. Sometimes I’d hang up and call them back, and the line would be engaged—they were still arguing.

  They wanted to know if I would be getting a report card. They wanted to know if they would have to sign it. I told them it didn’t work that way. In fact, I was getting ready to go to William Burroughs’s lecture, held in the shrine room at Naropa, so I managed to get off the phone while they continued their conversation without me.

  Burroughs always had a big audience for his talks. He didn’t teach in the conventional way, walking down an aisle of desks asking questions or writing on the blackboard. He conducted his classes like a customs official behind a long table, and he was telling you what you were allowed to bring into the country and what was prohibited. Except he took more pleasure in what was contraband. Burroughs took his teaching very seriously, though. He came prepared, unlike Gregory, who winged everything and riffed like a jazz musician.

  Burroughs had given me a printed sheet with certain reading assignments. I expected titles of books to read, but what I got were samizdat copies of obscure reports Bill said were prepared as top- secret documents by the U.S. Air Force about flying saucers. Then there was a book by Peter Bander
called Voices from the Tapes, and articles that had appeared in Psychic News, and something called “References to Hitler Are Dangerous.” The rest were books by William Burroughs, such as Exterminator! That was something Bill knew a thing or two about, as he had briefly been an exterminator. The list included The Last Words of Dutch Schultz and of course Naked Lunch. For today’s class, Bill had given me Your Tape Recorder: A Tracking Station for Paranormal Voices from the Handbook of Psychic Discoveries, a book I had to order from the University of Colorado bookstore. It took a long time to get it.

  I sat with Billy Burroughs in the back of the class, which was really just a row of seats in the shrine room that shimmered in the heat. Bill sat behind a long table. He could’ve performed an autopsy on it. He put down his hat and rested his cane at one end of the table. He had an old-fashioned tape recorder in front of him.

  “Certain tape recordings,” Burroughs snarled, “made with no apparent input have turned up unexplained voices. Actual recorded voices, faint, and of unknown origin appear to have been recorded. The most complete source on this is Breakthrough by Konstantin Raudive. These voices seemed an appropriate topic to take up at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.”

  Burroughs began by talking about Brion Gysin, his partner in the cut-up, which had become Bill’s modus operandi, the way he seemed to create most of his writing. He talked about how cut-ups put you in touch with what you know and what you do not know that you know. Burroughs and his partner Gysin had turned their attention to the tape recorder as a means for juxtaposition. “We went on to exploit the potentials of the tape recorder,” Burroughs explained to the class. “Cut up, slow down, speed up, run backwards, inch the tape, play several tracks at once, cut back and forth between two recorders.” Bill turned on the tape recorder to demonstrate what one of the tapes sounded like. “I have gotten words and voices from barking dogs,” he explained.