When I Was Cool

by Sam Kashner

  Carl had come to Boulder for a purpose. A very odd purpose. Yes, he was friends with Allen, and yes, he wanted to get out of the Bronx for a vacation. But when Carl heard that Allen had been asked to prepare for publication an annotated version of “Howl”— kind of like the Gettysburg Address in all its drafts and versions— he wanted to come and set the record straight. I thought Allen was going to have a stroke when he was on the phone with Carl, who apparently wanted Allen to tamper with his masterpiece. For example, Carl hadn’t really been in Rockland Hospital for mental illness.

  “Allen knows full well it was the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. He should know,” Carl told me shortly after his arrival at Naropa, “because that’s where I met Allen!” Carl also said that he wasn’t given electric shock treatments when Allen said he had had them. “That was six years later at Pilgrim State, for crissakes!” He also was upset that Allen had gotten the story of the thrown potato salad all wrong. “It was off campus,” Carl said, irritated with what he called Allen’s bad reporting, “but I know why he did it—only it’s too important to get it wrong.”

  I didn’t know what he was going on about until I recalled the first section of “Howl,” where Allen wrote that Carl “threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy.”

  Carl felt that Allen had taken his personal life, had garbled its history, and had gotten it all wrong, simply to write a poem. The fact that the poem might be one of the few true masterpieces of twentieth-century American literature didn’t seem to make a difference to him at all.

  “First, it was Brooklyn College, not CCNY,” he explained to anyone who would listen. “I’d never go to CCNY, and anyway, the incident was off campus, so already it was a different type of protest!” Carl said that throwing the potato salad had been an act of Dadaism, something done in jest to impress Carl’s girlfriend on her birthday. “For twenty years I’ve been wanting to tell Al that in the second part of that line about Metrazol and shock treatments —no way! I didn’t have electroshock therapy until I was committed to Pilgrim State, and that was six years later! It all sounds good, but, sorry, Al, I was diagnosed as a neurotic, I wasn’t catatonic.” Carl felt Allen should’ve consulted with him more. The fact that “Howl” was written while Carl Solomon was in the bughouse and Allen was in San Francisco, three thousand miles from Carl’s hospital room, didn’t bother him, though.

  “He can set the record straight now,” Carl said.

  Carl and I were sitting next to each other in the shrine room, waiting for Rinpoche to arrive to give one of his enigmatic lectures. Carl, uncomfortable on his red meditation cushion, had heard from Allen that my family came from Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. He started to tell me about his growing up there, in a private house, where his big, noisy, opinionated extended family read Marx and Freud, and rooted for the Yankees. “By the time I was your age,” Carl said, “I had already dropped out of Brooklyn College. I shipped out as a Merchant Marine. When I met Allen, he admired my collection of books I had picked up in Paris: Artaud, Genet, Tropic of Cancer, Lautréamont. We talked about things.”

  I got the feeling that Carl was more hurt than flattered that Allen had told his story to the whole world in “Howl,” that it became a famous poem and that all of Carl’s pain and suffering had become public, and not just public but a work of art, a kind of private mythology. Carl Solomon was Allen’s Dean Moriarty, his Neal Cassady. Cassady, by most accounts, seemed to dig the notoriety, but I don’t think Carl did. The fact that he had come to Boulder (“There’s nothing to do here,” he groused to Allen after about twelve hours in Boulder, “and those mountains give me claustrophobia. At least in the Catskills, you can go fishing”), traveling all this way to a place he didn’t like, just to help Allen get the details right about “Howl” for Allen’s Collected Poems, made me think he hadn’t really forgiven him. But now he was stuck. He knew “Howl” was a famous work, a masterpiece, even. He was trapped with a variation on his own past inside a great work of literature.

  What a strange problem to have, I thought.

  I wondered what Carl, this Dadaist-anarchist, would make of Rinpoche and the Vadjra guards patting down the shrine room. Allen, after all these years, still saw Carl as he must have twenty- five years earlier, as if he were still capable of some Artaud-like “crime.” Would he throw another plate of potato salad at Rinpoche? I started to worry when Rinpoche came out and sat before a microphone, accepting the deep bows of the crowd.

  Fanning himself in the overheated room, Rinpoche began to talk about poetry as a meditative discipline, how a poem develops from “ground, to path, to fruition.” Allen and Anne were taking notes; a lot of people were writing things down. Carl wasn’t. He pulled one of his shirttails out and started cleaning his eyeglasses. I considered the fact that I was sitting next to a man who had stolen a peanut butter sandwich from the Brooklyn College cafeteria and then surrendered himself to a policeman and wound up on the sixth floor of Columbia Psychiatric.

  Rinpoche talked about the poetry he had written as a young man upon the deaths of his teachers. He said they were never sad poems. He talked about direct experience, about writing what you see, about a direct path to the mind. He spoke in a kind of rasping whisper. It was hard to follow. We all perked up when he mentioned the Jack Kerouac School. He said the school was becoming possible because of a spiritual breakthrough, because America was freaking out and this was a good thing. He invited Allen to come up and share the stage with him. Gregory was applauding and whistling for Ginzy to go up onstage, as if he had just won at bingo.

  Allen took the stage and began to talk about the Kerouac School. It was becoming obvious to me that they had planned this bit of spontaneous poetics because they needed to pitch the Kerouac School to a full house. It made me sad. I didn’t want any other students to come. I wanted the Beats to myself, but I knew other students would be coming. In fact, some of them were already here and would be around for the spring semester, scattered among the meditation students and flower-arranging students. I felt jealous about sharing Gregory’s put-downs with anyone else. It was the Stockholm syndrome, all right. I didn’t want anyone to come and rescue me, not even my parents.

  Allen spoke to the throng about the school. He said that Kerouac had taken LSD in Allen’s apartment and that Allen had asked him what he had thought about, if he had had any psychological breakthroughs while on acid. “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day,” Kerouac had said.

  “We are just beginning,” Allen continued. Then he said that the Kerouac School was different from every other writing school in that it would teach, as well as practice, writing that reflected the mind and nature observed during actual composition: creating poetry “out of mind,” in “spontaneous and unrevised utterances.” As in “first thought, best thought.”

  Rinpoche interrupted Allen. “‘First thought, best thought’— that was an idea I expressed to you, Allen, to help explain the idea of purity of thought, being helpful to describe the shapeliness of mind.”

  “But it’s a Kerouacian idea,” Allen countered, beginning to pout a little. “It’s even in ‘Belief and Technique in Modern Prose,’ number twenty-one: ‘struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.’”

  “Allen,” Rinpoche said, “you are so quick to apply what you have learned, and you are so arrogant and humble and resourceful, I’m sure you will remember, even teachers can have problems with appropriation of materials and self-satisfaction.”

  Carl looked at me. I looked at Carl. “This is like the fight at a board of directors meeting at Temple Emanuel,” Carl whispered to me. I couldn’t believe it. Allen and Rinpoche were fighting over who was the first one to think up “first thought, best thought.” Was it Allen, Rinpoche, or Kerouac?

  “I’m not sure first thought is best thought,” Carl said to me in a stage whi
sper that everyone could hear.

  Then Rinpoche started laughing. Allen started to laugh. The whole shrine room seemed to shift a little uncomfortably. We had been sitting a long time on our cushions anyway (I still didn’t have the hang of it). At last Trungpa got up to leave. We stood up, as when a judge leaves the courtroom. The Vadjra guards followed him out. There was a collective sigh from the crowd in the shrine room. Allen walked back to our group.

  “Does anyone think I took a wrong turn?” Allen asked. “Did I make the wrong decision, spiritually, I mean?”

  Anne said you never contradict the teacher.

  Gregory said, “Trungpa loves it when people give him a hard time.”

  Carl said it was good theater and that it’ll give him something to think about when he goes back home and sits under the City Island Bridge, in his rowboat, fishing. “I’ll ask the fish: do I take you home and fry you or throw you back? First thought or best thought?” I laughed at that, but nobody else did.

  After everyone had left, I found a little black book, with a blue ribbon for marking your place, lying next to me on the floor of the shrine room. I looked inside. It belonged to Aphrodite, one of Gregory’s young girlfriends. He had named her after the goddess of beauty and sex. I looked through it. I shouldn’t have. But I still had Burroughs’s and Allen’s assignment. There was a spy among us. I had to do my homework.

  38. Billy at the Boulderado

  Have you ever slapped a dead man? That’s how it felt trying to wake up William Burroughs Jr. It was already dusk, but I needed to talk to Billy, who was sleeping through the days and waking up at night. I knew I would get the truth from him. He had been through so much nuttiness in his life. He was the only one in and around the Kerouac School who was at all cynical about the place. He was also the only one with a genuine sense of humor. He liked reading S. J. Perelman, the New Yorker writer whom Allen dismissed with the wave of his hand as if he were swatting away a fly. Not unlike his father, Billy had a deadpan style, a sarcastic, witless wit.

  Billy shuffled along the halls of the Buddhist rooming house like an old man. Like a Parkinsonian, Billy’s hands shook when he held anything except a shot glass, which he forcefully brought to his lips. The rest of the time, though, he was the most passive guy I ever knew. He still seemed shell-shocked, like someone whose willpower had been sucked out of him while he slept.

  Billy had a job now, working in a ski shop for a born-again Christian ski instructor and his wife. He took people’s skis and planed them, made them sharp for the slopes. Billy himself hated skiing. He didn’t even like snow. I visited him once at the shop, which was tucked away on one of the side streets off the Pearl Street mall. There was a big cross, made out of two skis, on a wall of the shop. This was one in a series of odd jobs Billy had in his life, and it was just his luck that all of Billy’s bosses seemed crazy. He had a knack for finding them.

  I had stopped by Billy’s apartment one evening after another snowfall to show him the address book I’d picked up from the shrine room floor. I wanted to tell him about Old Bill’s assignment: to bring in a spy, the one Allen said might be planted here by Cointelpro to sabotage the Jack Kerouac School. I thought he might know something.

  As usual, Billy’s apartment was a mess. There was ancient beef stew on the burner, and ancient, uneaten dinners now covered over with what looked like ice but what was actually congealed fat. His rooms smelled like hashish. Billy kept moving his couch, which he used as his bed. It was never in the same place two nights in a row. He kept thinking the location of his bed would help him sleep better, because Billy had bad dreams. He dreamed a lot about his wife, Karen. They weren’t together anymore; they had broken up just before Billy had moved to Boulder. He had met Karen at a school for kids with problems where Billy’s grandparents had sent him when he was younger. Every kid has problems, but Billy went to a special school for his. He said it was worse than the farm they’d sent him to in order to get off drugs. That’s where Billy said he had learned to grow pot.

  Karen was a wild girl and had kept Billy in trouble. That seemed to be the family pattern. Allen once said that Billy’s deceased mother, Joan, was far wilder than Burroughs himself. “He was the Rock of Gibraltar next to Joan,” Allen had said.

  I woke up Billy, who was burrowed into the cushions of his couch, which had been moved to the center of the living room. I showed him Aphrodite’s address book, admitting that I had pawed through it. It even had a little poem of Gregory’s that he had written in the front of it, with a funny drawing of Aphrodite and Gregory in bed. I would have stolen it for that reason alone, but instead I came to Billy with the book.

  Aphrodite’s notebook didn’t just have phone numbers in it. It had appointments. And, curiously, almost every name was a man’s. Straight-sounding names, like Bob Doan, or Chris Korshak. Well, it’s true, “Chris” could be a woman, but I noticed how Aphrodite seemed to have an appointment every few hours, and only with men. FBI men?

  I asked Billy what he thought. Could Gregory’s girlfriend be a spy? “Then clever to woo Gregory,” I said.

  “You knucklehead,” Billy answered. “She’s a call girl! A prostitutie. Didn’t you see Klute? ”

  I didn’t know what to say. “And Gregory knows?” I asked finally.

  “He’s probably making all the business arrangements,” Billy explained. “You must be here on one of those ‘born yesterday’ scholarships the Jack Kerouac School gives out.”

  I decided to let that pass. “Who are these men?” I asked. “Where do they come from?”

  “From their mother’s wombs,” he said. “And they all got there from fucking—we all got here from fucking.”

  “I know. But why did you have to tell me that a week from my mother’s birthday?” It would be Marion’s first birthday with me in captivity at the Kerouac School, I thought. Birthdays weren’t a big deal to the Beats. Except for Allen. He called his stepmother every Sunday. Deep down, Allen was a nice Jewish boy. No wonder I felt safe in Allen’s house—safe and unsafe, familiar and strange.

  “Well, now that I took it, how can I just casually give it back to her?” I asked Billy about Aphrodite’s address book. “And where does she do this? Does she go to their houses?”

  Billy sat up wearily and bent over to put on his shoes— moccasins, really—which were underneath the couch. He was dressed; he had slept in his clothes. He got up, rubbed his eyes, and we shuffled off to Pearl Street. Billy said he would show me the ropes.

  “Someday, my boy,” he said, imitating W. C. Fields, “all these ropes will be yours.”

  We arrived at the Boulderado Hotel just as the sun was going down. We noticed Anne holding court on the veranda. Her bracelets sliding up and down her long arms made a clicking sound I liked. I liked almost everything about Anne. I wondered why she didn’t like me.

  We went over to say hello. Anne looked up but mostly made eye contact with Billy. Who’s famous son do you have to be to get attention around here? I thought to myself. After a few minutes, Billy said we had to go. He ordered a drink and took it with him up to the second floor. I followed.

  On the second floor were two dark rooms connected by French doors. Two or three men sat around reading the Daily Camera, Boulder’s newspaper. I thought to myself, the Daily Camera is missing a big story: there’s a brothel right here in the Boulderado Hotel. The madam was a stewardess. She recruited her girlfriends; it was being done more for fun than for profit. A friend had loaned them antiques from her antiques shop in town—antimacassars, highboys, night tables. The madam greeted Billy more affectionately than any mother. I think it was the most affection he’d ever gotten. I suddenly felt like the Goody Two-shoes brother in East of Eden, who gets taken by James Dean to meet his mother, played by Jo Van Fleet, at her house of ill repute. Someone was playing David Bowie’s Low on a tape player, then the music stopped, and Carla’s friend Kitty came out. She was wearing a red slip. She looked beautiful and utterly beyond my depth. I didn’t even
know she knew Billy.

  Billy whispered something in her ear that made her laugh. She came over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Kitty said that Nanette and Monica would be ready to come downstairs soon and join us for a drink. I discovered that most of the women in Anne’s court seemed to be working here. Her sirens were calling men up to the second floor of the Boulderado.

  Later on, when Allen Ginsberg and Daniel Ellsberg tried to shut down the Rocky Flats nuclear facility, which manufactured the triggers for nuclear weapons, the women from the bordello sat down on the railroad tracks. The protest was successful—the girls all had their days free.

  Billy must have explained how surprised I was to find out there was a bordello right in the middle of town, so Nanette told me that she loved the work. “In fact, it isn’t work,” she said. Kitty, it seemed, had two jobs—cutting hair and sleeping with men. She said that she was learning to live on exhaustion. Monica, the last to show up, was a large woman with very blond, almost white, hair. She had a little upturned nose and looked like she was always looking up, like a dolphin under the ice. Monica said that she had just had her first customer ever.

  “And you know what?” she asked. “I came for the first time!”

  “You girls are lucky,” Billy said. “Someone actually pays you to have sex. I wish someone would pay me to have sex, or not to have sex.”

  “We have some of those, too,” Kitty said. All the girls laughed.

  I felt almost delirious. I felt that now it was impossible to fulfill my original mission, which was to somehow give Aphrodite back her address book.

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Billy said, almost reading my thoughts.