Memoirs of a beatnik (15 page)

And so they would come, each of them the same, but all of them different. They would wake me before they got to the door, the presence and strong telepathic head would do it, like Dirty John, or when they put the key in the lock, subtle and self-assertive, like Ivan, or when they walked possessive and heavy about the kitchen, like Antoine, or when they came to bed and kissed me hello, and I would kiss back, saying "Who?"—or kissing would recognize touch or texture: the smell of Pete's musty clothes, or Don's expensive cologne, or half-sense an aura in the dark.

And they would clamber half-clothed, hastily, into bed, or sit on the blankets and talk me awake, or they would have brought up some grass or some wine, and I would watch, tousled and sleepy, while they made a fire. There would be the B Minor Mass to fuck to, or Bessie Smith, and we would have a moon, and open window breezes off the river, or dank, chilly greyness and rain beating down, bouncing off the windowsill in bright, exploding drops, and it was all good, the core and heart of that time. I thought of it as fucking my comrades, and a year slipped by.

Organs And Orgasms

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twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.

Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn't hit the scene as yet. The affluent post-Korean-war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.

As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the city—who knew what we knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc., but our isolation was total and impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of the "sellout") and to keep our cool: a hard, clean edge and definition in the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us—"media mush." We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for love, and shut out the rest of the world.

Then one evening—it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together-the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, "I think this might interest you." I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . ."

We Set Out

I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening. The phrase "breaking ground" kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us—all few hundreds of us—simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.

The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too. It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were—and now, suddenly, about to speak out. For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends—and even those friends claiming it "couldn't be published"—waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man's era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.

We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

Meanwhile the changes started going down around us thicker and heavier than ever—so that even we couldn't help noticing them. The first thing I noticed, and it gave me quite a jolt, was that the pad was going away, was quite used up. Nothing in particular happened, but it just began to have that air about it, that feeling

when you unlocked the door and walked in, of a place that hadn't been lived in for some time, where the air had not been stirred. Places do that, I've noticed. They turn round without warning, turn in on themselves, and suddenly it's like living in a morgue, or a refrigerator; the vital impulse that made a hearth, a living center of some sort, has changed directions like an ocean current, and that particular island is no longer in its path. You can tell because even in the height of summer there's a chill in the air, a something that gets into your bones.

The rats were part of it. They had moved in, en masse, from the demolished building next door, and they scampered and played about the kitchen at night, making quite a racket. They came in through a hole under the kitchen sink, and we covered it again and again with pieces of tin, till finally there was nothing left to nail the tin to but more tin, and I gave up. But it did often give me a deep shudder as of awe to awaken in the morning and find that a whole loaf of bread in its plastic bag had been carried halfway across the room, or to find, half an inch long, the neat little claw prints of one of my furry roommates in the congealed fat of yesterday's roast.

O'Reilley had already split with our scene more or less completely. Occasionally she did stop down for a night or two, like gingerly putting one toe into some rather scummy water, and then withdrew to the safety and order of her new East Side flat. Don, having completed his movie, decided to take himself seriously and set out for Hollywood. And Pete fell ill, as I have since learned that he does every three or four years: fell seriously, heavily ill with pneumonia and had to be shipped home to Kew Garden Hills in a taxi at his father's expense while his fever raged. The disease itself abated rather quickly, but the weakness remained, and Pete stayed in the comparative luxury of his family's house, eating minute steaks and resting.

It may have been our large rat population that drove Leslie out into the world, but I think it was simply growing pains: he suddenly felt old enough to have a pad of his own, and he set out to get one. He found a loft on Prince Street in a part of the Village that had just opened up. The loft was the top floor of three. They were open to each other at staircase and hall, and they all shared one John. Previous tenants had installed a bathtub and hot water heater on

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the second floor and Leslie's present downstairs neighbor had just added a small washbasin which also served for everyone's dishes. Leslie had a two-burner hotplate on top of a small, rickety office frig, and a table with three wobbly chairs. All the water came from downstairs and was carted up in gallon wine jugs. It was dumped out the window when one didn't feel like making the trip down to the second-floor John. No one worried about sprinkler systems, exits, or other such regulations; living in lofts was illegal, and everyone who could afford it did it.

The light and space in Leslie's place was lovely: huge front room like a big barn, green plants everywhere. White curtains that were probably just sheets let in the play of light. Almost equally large back room faced north on paved courtyard and endless possibilities of rooftops. And kitchen off to one side. It was the most luxurious (and most expensive) apartment that any of us had attempted yet. It cost eighty dollars a month and we all admired Leslie for braving such a rent.

With the pad, Leslie took on a roommate, a long, lanky, funny-looking boy named Benny Hudson. Benny's ears stuck out, and he had a herringbone coat. He smelled of soap and earnestness and other Midwestern virtues, but he had a job and could pay half of the rent-all of it in emergencies-so here he was. He and Leslie were lovers, of sorts. That is, they were making it, and Benny was in love.

As for me, I still clung, out of sentiment and attachment, to the uptown pad. It was my home base, though I slept there seldom now. I had stopped paying rent several months before, but hung on, muttering "Health Department" at the landlord, whenever he muttered "Eviction" at me. We were at an impasse.

Since I wasn't paying any more rent, the landlord wasn't making any more repairs, which meant that when the local gang broke the windows they stayed broken, and finally nearly all of them were. The place was breezy, but it was getting warm again, and so it didn't matter. Then the lights and gas went off; I took to eating out, eating and bathing in other people's houses, and reading by candlelight, which was scary because of the rats. I didn't relish the thought of meeting a rat as big as a cat by candlelight in my kitchen. I began to look for someplace else to live.

We Set Out

About this time I decided that I wanted to have a baby. It was nothing that I decided with my head, just a vague stirring and impulse in my body, some will to flower, to come to fruition—and something in my cells whispering that the scene as I knew it had gone on long enough, that there were many other states of being to explore. I didn't do anything about it, continued to use a diaphragm when screwing, it was just that my head was in a different place. I began to see everyone as a prospective father, and I found that many people looked ridiculous in this light.

I had been in sporadic correspondence with Allen Ginsberg and some of his friends ever since I read Howl (Lawrence Fer-linghetti had even written a tiny introduction for my "unpublish-able" first book). Now Allen and his gang were in New York and I was eager to meet them. After a few phone calls back and forth they came down to Leslie's, where I was staying, bringing with them a great quantity of cheap wine and some very good grass. We all proceeded to get thoroughly stoned, and Allen, and Jack Kerouac who was with him, rapped down a long, beautiful high-flown rap all about poetry and high endeavor. Jack's belief, which Allen shared at the time, was that one should never change or rewrite anything. He felt that the initial flash of the turned-on mind was best, in life as well as in poetry, and I could see that he probably really lived that way. He seized upon my notebooks and proceeded to uncorrect the poems, rolling the original bumpy lines off his tongue, making the stops and awkwardnesses beautiful while we all got higher and higher.

I proposed that they spend the night. Allen had eyes for Leslie and agreed readily, enlisting his lover Peter's help in moving the couch from the front room to the back, and setting it beside the double bed. They were about the same height and made one extra-wide, only slightly bumpy, sleeping place. They dragged the whole thing into the center of the room, arranging plants around it, and burning sticks of Indian incense which they stuck into the flower pots. Benny watched, horrified.

After kissing us all lingeringly, Peter split-to what mysterious night rituals of his own, we could only surmise. Leslie lit some candles and placed them at the bedside, turning off the overhead light. Immediately, the room seemed immense, mysterious, the

We Set Out

beds an island, a camp in a great forest wilderness (Leslie's rubber plants). We all undressed-Benny with some trepidation-and climbed in.

It was a strange, nondescript kind of orgy. Allen set things going by largely and fully embracing all of us, each in turn and all at once, sliding from body to body in a great wallow of flesh. It was warm and friendly and very unsexy—like being in a bathtub with four other people. To make matters worse, I had my period, and was acutely aware of the little white string of a tampax sticking out of my cunt. I played for a while with the cocks with which I found myself surrounded, planning as soon as I could to get out of the way of the action and go to sleep.

But Jack was straight, and finding himself in a bed with three faggots and me, he wanted some pussy and decided he was going to get it. He began to persuade me to remove the tampax by nuzzling and nudging at my breasts and neck with his handsome head. Meanwhile everyone else was urging me to join in the games. Allen embarked on a long speech on the joys of making it while menstruating: the extra lubrication, the extra excitement due to a change of hormones, animals in heat bleed slightly, etc. Finally, to the cheers of the whole gang, I pulled out the bloody talisman and flung it across the room.

Having done his part to assure a pleasurable evening for Jack and myself, Allen fell to work on the young male bodies beside him, and was soon wrapped round, with Leslie on one side of him and Benny on the other. I heard some squeals, ?,nd felt much humping and bumping about, but in the welter of bedclothes the action was rather obscure. Jack began by gallantly going down on me to prove that he didn't mind a little blood. He had a wildly nestling, hugging sort of approach, and he was a big man; I was taken over, and lay there with legs spread and eyes closed while he snorted and leaped like Pan. When I shut my eyes I was once more aware of the warm ocean of flesh around me, could distinguish the various love-sounds and breathings of all the creatures.