by Sam Kashner
Carla said that Rinpoche was always surrounded by a court. Because he had grown up in England instead of Tibet, he had come to admire the English system, and he modeled his spiritual kingdom, called Shambhala, after the English court. Rinpoche’s wife actually had ladies-in-waiting and he took some of them to his bed, although some of his consorts were married to his students and members of his court. Carla told me that most of the men whose wives Rinpoche had slept with considered it an honor that Rinpoche had chosen them. Carla said that she wasn’t interested in Rinpoche in that way, but she still considered him a great man and enlightened. She said that Rinpoche had helped her with her fears, and she did seem unafraid of the world.
One of her shoulder straps slid off her shoulders. It was a thin black cord and it looked sexy where it had fallen. She had a voluptuous figure. She seemed more interested in me than in the famous writers at the table. She had a youthful face, although she said she was thirty, which made her practically a wizard of age in my eyes. She had raven hair and a strong jawline that gave her a look of maturity and dignity. Hers was a face full of contrasts—listening quietly when Burroughs was holding forth, then becoming animated when Gregory said something outlandish to Anne.
As usual, Carla wasn’t making a big impression on Allen or Peter or Bill. They wouldn’t have been interested in her anyway. I liked that.
Carla asked if I was having a good time. She asked me what I thought of my teachers, with most of them sitting right there. Carla had that quality that F. Scott Fitzgerald gave to his flapper heroines: she had “moxie.” That was the word I thought of when I looked at her. She also seemed to be jumping out of her skin just to talk to me.
Carla took out a leopard-skin wallet to pay for her drinks. I noticed that she had on black fishnet stockings and a jacket with a faux leopard collar. I felt like I had discovered the illegitimate daughter of Mike Hammer and his secretary Velma, the one he was always flirting with and promising to settle down and marry. The one he tries to save before the world blows up in Murder My Sweet. Then it hit me. Through all the chatter at the table, I remembered the French movie director Jean-Luc Godard. One of my teachers, Michael Brownstein, had handed out a mimeographed copy of an interview with him in English; he said it was essential reading. It was a great interview. In it, Godard gave his formula for love: it was time + poetry = love.
We had a black waiter that night in Tom’s Tavern, which was rare for Boulder. When he walked away with our order, Burroughs suddenly said, “Did you know that Warren Harding was a quadroon? Did you know that, Allen?”
Allen mentioned that Bill wasn’t drinking these days, but I had seen him drunk and weepy in his room. Jubal was a bad influence on Burroughs, I thought. He seemed to be keeping him under his thumb, which was easier to do with bottles of whiskey and the drugs that Jubal brought into the house. Perversely, Jubal kept a set of “works”—spoon and needle—wrapped in a Buddhist prayer cloth. He kept it hidden in Bill’s house. I wanted to tell Allen, because I feared it could wind up getting Bill arrested, humiliated in his old age. But Jubal said Bill needed heroin to survive because he’d been dependent on it for so long, and to stop now would kill him. Jubal said Bill’s doctors knew all about it.
Carla told Burroughs that she had spent a lot of time in Tangier, buying things for her store. She said it was a magical place. Once she was in her hotel room and couldn’t sleep and so she opened the window to let the night air in. Suddenly, she heard a sound like no other she’d ever heard; she looked out and saw a wild horse running on the beach.
Burroughs answered her, thank god. I was afraid the women at the table were all going to be ignored, because Allen and Burroughs usually ignored them. Except for Anne, who was paying attention to her friends, to Nanette and Calliope and Kitty.
Burroughs told Carla that Tangier was his dream town. “In the mid-forties,” Burroughs said, “I had a dream in which I came into a harbor. When I looked around, I felt completely at home; I knew instinctively in my dream that that was the place I wanted to be.”
The waiter came back and placed a small shot glass in front of Bill. Burroughs finished the story by saying that toward the end of his time in Tangier, he went rowing on a lake and came into a harbor he recognized as the one in his dream.
Gregory, his glasses flying from the lariat around his neck, suddenly got up and left the table, with Calliope following him out the door. Too many people crowded the booth, I thought; too close quarters. Gregory’s fear of crowds—his fear, Bill says, of death in the moment—must have kicked in, and he was out the door.
“Why doesn’t he just have a good cry?” Anne asked when Gregory bolted. “We’re all here to comfort him,” she said, laughing. It sounded like a good idea to me.
“Did you know,” Bill drawled, “that tears rid the body of poisonous wastes, like sweat and urine? In jaundice, your tears are bright yellow. In short, grief or despair causes metabolic poisons to accumulate. The old idea that someone who is greatly afflicted must cry or die has a sound basis in human biology.”
The conversation jumped from Caryl Chessman to the Scottsboro boys to Allen’s writing of “Kaddish,” which was provoked by someone at the table asking for ketchup, which led to someone else talking about tomatoes, which resulted in a question for Allen about the reference to the “first poisonous tomatoes in America” in that poem. Allen said that it was a reference to Russian immigrants, like my grandmother, at the turn of the century who had never seen tomatoes before; they stayed away from tomatoes, thinking they were poison.
It suddenly occurred to me: the best minds of Allen’s generation were sitting at Tom’s Tavern, and I was sitting with them, included by all except Anne, who hardly spoke to me.
My triumph at the reading that night seemed to annoy Anne. She didn’t seem to feel about it the way I thought she would, that I was representing the good work of the Jack Kerouac School and that people seemed to respond to my poems. I thought she would take some teacherly pride in that, but I was wrong. Anne’s circle of exotic women and exotically pretty boys seemed impenetrable to me. She spent most the evening talking about what a sensation her two handsome protégés, Stephen Low and Brad Gooch, had been back in New York at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. It seemed like she was going out of her way to say that my achievement here at the Kerouac School somehow didn’t count.
I walked Carla home. I asked her if she’d heard Anne on the subject of the St. Mark’s reading, hoping that Carla wasn’t also discounting my triumph. She answered me by telling me about the Six Worlds. She said it was a Buddhist concept that helped to explain human nature. Carla said that the Six Worlds, or Six Realms, were Heaven, Human, Hungry Ghost, Hell, Animal, and Angry Warrior Realm, that they were all held together in the delusion of time by things like pride, anger, and ignorance. She explained vanity was one of them, and that Anne, like all of us, suffered from that. Carla said she had a Buddhist painting of all the realms, and she’d like to show it to me.
My vanity realm wanted to come up and see it, but my fear realm held me back.
I said it was late and that I’d already taken up too much of her time with my poetry.
She asked me if I’d like to go out with her to a Mexican restaurant one night, in a nearby town, with a beautiful cherrywood bar from the old cowboy days of Colorado. She would drive us.
Before I had a chance to answer, we came to a street filled with older homes and Carla stopped beside a carriage house. “This is where I live,” she said. She kissed me. She touched the back of my head with her small hand and brought my head a little closer to hers. And then she disappeared into her house.
I walked home through the dark, empty streets of Boulder. A breeze from the mountains seemed to push me home a little faster. In a few days I would go to Carla’s place of business, sit in a rattan chair with a price tag on it, and watch her conduct business in the human world—a realm I knew so little about.
The next morning I was supposed to go to Billy Burro
ughs’s apartment to pick him up for lunch with his father. He had asked me to come along, but I didn’t want to. Gregory and his wife were going to come by, with Max, and we had planned to drive into Denver to a museum. Gregory wanted to see a show with paintings about warfare, depicting soldiers from Achilles to General Patton. I didn’t want to miss the chance to go with them.
Besides, I preferred playing with Max to spending time with Billy and Bill Burroughs. Max wasn’t famous. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t make me nervous. He was just a little boy who liked to make funny noises, who thought I was funny without having to be witty.
Around eleven-thirty in the morning I went by Billy’s apartment. He was drunk or stoned, or both. He said he didn’t want to go and have lunch with his father.
“Old Bill can be a prick. He’s just a shitkicker,” Billy said. “My father should’ve been an overseer at a plantation. He missed his calling.” Billy suddenly switched to a Southern accent, saying, “The smell of magnolias pervades the old manse and I see Old Bill sittin’ outside with a shotgun pickin’ off pickaninnies.”
I didn’t know if I could handle this. We walked over to Burroughs’s apartment and then to the New York Deli. On the way, I walked between father and son, who had nothing to say to each other. At the deli, we scrambled into a booth. That is, I scrambled and Billy folded himself into the seat, practically putting his head on the table and rubbing the menus together like he was trying to start a fire with them, Boy Scout style. “Old Bill” took his time, seating himself with his customary arthritic abandon, leaning his cane against the side of the table.
“Where’s Harry Belafonte?” Bill growled, referring to the handsome, light-skinned black waiter we had had at Tom’s the night before. Burroughs was mixed up about what restaurant we were in. It was the first time I wanted Gregory to show up on time and take me with him.
I told both Burroughses about Allen’s theory that there might be a spy coming to Naropa, or one already here at the Kerouac School. Bill said with authority that it was unlikely. He said that George Lincoln Rockwell, who had been the head of the American Nazi Party, probably spoke at rallies made up of nothing but Jews from the D.A.’s office and FBI agents, goose-stepping and giving him the fascist salute. Billy laughed.
“He’s probably got about two real followers; one’s completely deaf and the other is marginally literate and thinks the swastika is an Aztec symbol,” Burroughs added.
I saw what passed for a smile cross Burroughs’s face. It was like the crack in a mummy that appears after a thousand years. Burroughs had the newspaper with him. I think the pope was in Poland. Burroughs started to talk about communism. He said it was doomed to failure because it was being run like the phone company. Then there was silence. Silence for a long time. Our food arrived, and the two men started eating across from each other, Billy staring into his bowl of matzoh ball soup and Bill looking at his Reuben sandwich, unwilling to take it on.
“I am seized with the panic of one buried alive,” Burroughs said, in his best W. C. Fields imitation. He pushed the sandwich aside. It occurred to me that I’d never really seen Burroughs eat anything. Like a vampire, he sat staring at his food. I expected him to say, “I only drink…wine.”
To my relief, Gregory appeared, rolling through the skinny aisle between the elevated booths on one side and the counter on the other, holding Max and looking like he’d gotten some sleep for a change. He appeared at our table, saving me from the cone of silence I was trapped under. Suddenly, I felt sad at having to leave the two of them alone in the restaurant, gulping down all that dead air. Gregory reached out to pull off some of the melted cheese from Bill’s sandwich. He ate some and fed some to Max.
“Bill,” Gregory said to Burroughs, “you are always Bill and always will be. We are the Daddies of the age.”
As if summoned by the Muse, I followed Gregory out the door, like Sabu following Ganesh’s curled trunk away from the mountains and toward the teeming city.
33. “The Death of General Wolfe”
I wasn’t prepared for what awaited me in the car Gregory had shanghai’d for our trip to the Denver museum. The car contained all the chaos of Gregory’s life. Gregory had had three children and four wives, plus his current girlfriend, Calliope. There was Max, climbing out of his mother Lisa’s lap to recline in the well above the backseat like that famous Manet painting of Olympia. Like Olympia, Max didn’t have any clothes on—Lisa had just removed them, probably because they were wet. Calliope was also there; she was going to drive us. Miranda, one of Gregory’s two daughters from an earlier marriage, was also in the car. Miranda was Gregory’s New York daughter. (He had recently started writing poems about her. “She walks in grace like a sharp New Yorker,” Gregory said. He wanted me to put that into one of his poems. He really dug “her proud walk.”)
I squeezed myself into this leaky lifeboat, and soon we were bouncing along while thermoses of lemonade and whiskey, not to mention Max’s bottle, were passed around the overheated, noisy car.
Gregory saw himself in some way as a Romantic poet; it wasn’t just the nineteenth-century diction that he loved, but the epic battles, the grottoes of hell, quarreling gods. He wasn’t ashamed to talk about the poet as a Great Messenger. Gregory believed in his calling as a poet. I was starting to feel that it gave him permission to live this messy and hopped-up life, one that, in some ways, was exciting to be around. Around Gregory, I sometimes felt drawn into a whirlpool, undone by my own curiosity to find out what it would be like inside the belly of the whale, to strap on Mercury’s sandals and jump not just into the symbols of life but into life itself.
The trust-fund Buddhists I was meeting in Boulder, who kept talking about crazy wisdom, well, it was as if they were just looking for an excuse to misbehave. Sad to leave college, they needed another reason to go crazy in the world. But Gregory seemed like crazy wisdom incarnate—or was he just crazy?
To Gregory, the gods were real. Looking at himself in the rear- view mirror, sitting beside Calliope, Gregory spouted, “Hermes, you orphan god! Behold Nunzio, Behold Gregory…I take back all you took! My beautiful hair is dead.” Gregory was intoning his old poem as he checked the gray hairs sprouting on his scalp, like someone checking his garden after a rainstorm.
Gregory, I thought to myself, you don’t have to worry about your hair, you still have so much of it, and you’re sitting here in this chariot with your wife and your girlfriend—not many men I know could say that.
I know that Gregory believed that time was robbing him. His street-kid life was no more. He was becoming more and more preoccupied with time passing. He kept referring to himself as “a penniless legend.” He was feeling more and more like Villon, his brother in crime and poesy. Both orphans, both altar boys “attending the priest’s skirt.”
Gregory wanted to know how much it would cost to get into the museum. “Kerouac, you know, said that line, how ‘everything is his, everything belongs to him because he’s poor.’ It’s bullshit!” Gregory said. “Nothing is mine. Here I am, a prince of poetry and I’m made to roam the world, with women and Jews.”
Gregory scrunched up his face and snorted out a laugh. He liked to insult me, or at least see how much I could take. And he really hated it when I tried to be nice to him.
We arrived at the museum. I didn’t care what Gregory thought, or how much I’d pay for it later in abuse, so I paid for everyone, and everyone followed me inside.
Gregory and I moved faster than the wind through every wing of the museum, like that scene in Godard’s Band of Outsiders where the three friends break a record hurtling through the Louvre, a record set by an eleven-year-old American boy named Jimmy Johnson. Max, to Gregory’s delight, climbed up on a bust of Homer, unnoticed by the guards, and waved “bye-bye” at a group of Japanese tourists with cameras around their necks. Lisa rescued a shrieking Max from falling.
Gregory took my elbow and we scurried into the room with paintings of Greek and Roman warriors. Gregory stoppe
d and admired them.
“Growing old is nothing new,” he said suddenly, “but I don’t know what it feels like yet. I’m not old, you know, not really. Lisa is younger than you!” Apparently, he was still thinking about the gray hairs sprouting on his head. Actually, Lisa was in her early twenties and thus somewhat older than I, but I didn’t correct Gregory.
“My son is just two and a half. I will be young for some time to come,” he said, reassuring himself, stealing from his own poetry. “But in twenty years, that’s the hard part of the ball game. Lisa’ll be in her forties and Max will be in his early twenties. But that’s the year 2000. The twenty-first century. Achilles will always be young. I see him that way,” Gregory said. “You see with old eyes,” Gregory admonished me. “You shouldn’t worship old poetmen.”
“Look at that,” his old eyes brightening as he stood in front of a painting of a Greek soldier. “Look at that shield and helmet of a Greek warrior! It might have been Alexander, curly hair hanging around muscular shoulders, leading infantry across a tented landscape!”
Gregory fell out amid all that glorious sacrifice. There was a full moon in the painting that seemed to light up the armor. Gregory said he had always loved going to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to see the knights on their horses, but his friends had made fun of him for going, so he went in secret to admire the ancient power of the knights errant. “I think of wars,” Gregory recited to me in the empty gallery, “tales of mythical wars flowing from the wrinkled mouths of bards.”