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The
Night I met Allen Ginsberg
An appreciation of
Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady and the other bastards who ruined my life
There I was, age thirteen, eyes shut tight, listening intently to Frampton Comes
Alive over and over again, as some kind of pubescent mantra that helped to
cushion the dementia of just how badly I wanted to whisk Bambi, the beautiful
cheerleader, away from the wedge of peach melba that was the handsome, hunky
football hero. ...
I was daydreaming of taking her out behind the 7-Eleven to drink Boone's Farm
strawberry-apple wine and kiss until our mouths were raw. ZZZZRRRIIIPP!! was the
sound I heard that ripped me from that tender moment. My brother Danny, ten
years my senior and on the verge of committing fratricide, having had more than
enough of "Do you feel like we do?," promptly seized the vinyl off
record player and with a violent heave chucked the sacred album into the
cluttered abyss of my room.
"No more," he hissed. "I can't let you listen to that shit
anymore!"
I sat there snarling at him in that deeply expressive way that only teens
possess, decompressing too fast back into reality. He grabbed a record out of
his own collection and threw it on.
"Try this ... you're better than that stuff. You don't have to listen to
that shit just ’cause other kids do."
"OK, fucker," I thought, "bring it on ... let's have it!"
The music started ... guitar, fretless stand-up bass, flutes and some Creep
pining away about venturing "in the slipstream ... between the viaducts of
your dreams. ..." "Fuck this," I thought, "this is pussy
music -- they're not even plugged in! Those guitars aren't electric!" The
song went a bit further: "Could you find me ... would you kiss my eyes ...
to be born again. ..." The words began to hit home; they didn't play that
kind of stuff on the radio, and as the melody of the song settled in, I was
starting to get kind of used to it. Shit! I even liked it. It was a sound I
hadn't really ever given any attention to before, because of my innate fear of
groups like America, Seals and Crofts, and, most of all, the dreaded Starland
Vocal Band. I didn't give half a fuck about a horse with no name, summer breezes
or afternoon delights! I needed space to be filled!!! Filled with sound ...
distorted guitars, drums, feedback and words ... words that meant something ...
sounds that meant something!
I found myself rummaging and rooting wildly through my brother's record
collection as if it were a newfound treasure, a monumental discovery that no one
-- especially no one my age -- could know about or understand. I listened to it
all! The soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris, Bob Dylan,
Mozart and Brahms ... the whole shebang! I couldn't get enough. I had become
like some kind of junky for the stuff and in turn became a regular pain in the
ass to my brother. I wanted to know all that he did. I wanted to know everything
that rotten white-bread football brute didn't. I was preparing to woo that
fantastic little rah-rah girl out of the sunlight of the ice cream parlor and
into my nocturnal adolescent dreamscape.
And so began my ascension (or descension) into the mysteries of all things
considered Outside. I had burrowed too deep into the counterculture of my
brother's golden repository, and as years went by he would turn me on to other
areas of his expertise, sending me even further into the dark chasm of
alternative learning.
One day he gave me a book that was to become like a Koran for me. A dogeared
paperback, roughed up and stained with God knows what. On the Road, written by
some goofball with a strange frog name that was almost unpronounceable for my
teenage tongue, had found its way from big brother's shelf and into my greedy
little paws. Keep in mind that in all my years of elementary school, junior high
and high school, possibly the only things I'd read up to that point were a
biography of Knute Rockne, some stuff on Evel Knievel and books about WW II. On
the Road was life-changing for me, in the same way that my life had been
metamorphosed when Danny put Van Morrison's Astral Weeks onto the turntable that
day.
I was probably about fifteen by this time, and the cheerleader had begun to fade
from my dreams. I didn't need her now. I needed to wander ... whenever and
wherever I wanted! I'd found myself at the end of my rope as far as school was
concerned; there seemed no particular reason for me to stay. The teachers didn't
want to teach, and I didn't want to learn -- from them. I wanted my education to
come from living life, getting out there in the world, seeing and doing and
moving amongst the other vagabonds who had the same sneaking suspicion that I
did, that there would be no great need for high-end mathematics, nope. ... I was
not going to be doing other people's taxes and going home at 5:37 P.M. to pat my
dog's head and sit down to my one-meat-and-two-vegetable table waiting for
Jeopardy to pop on the glass tit, the Pat Sajak of my own private game show, in
the bellybutton of the universe, Miramar, Florida. A beautiful life, to be sure,
but one I knew I was destined not to have, thanks to big brother Dan and the
French-Canadian with the name Jack Kerouac.
I had found the teachers, the soundtrack and the proper motivation for my life.
Kerouac's train-of-thought writing style gave great inspiration for a
train-of-thought existence -- for better or for worse. The idea to live day to
day in a "true pedestrian" way, to keep walking, moving forward, no
matter what. A sanctified juggernaut.
Through this introduction to Kerouac, I then learned of his fellow conspirators
Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Huncke, Cassady and the rest of the unruly lot. I
dove into their world full on and sponged up as much as I possibly could of
their works. The Howl of Ginsberg left me babbling like an idiot, stunned that
someone could regurgitate such honesty to paper. Burroughs' Naked Lunch sent me
into fits of hysterical laughter, with the imagery of talking assholes and shady
reptilian characters looming, always not far behind. Cassady's The First Third
rants on beatifically like a high-speed circular saw. The riches I was able to
walk away with from these heroes, teachers and mentors are not available in any
school that I've ever heard of. Their infinite wisdom and hypersensitivity were
their greatest attributes and in some cases --as I believe it was with Kerouac
-- played a huge part in their ultimate demise.
I had the honor of meeting and getting to know Allen Ginsberg for a short time.
The initial meeting was at a soundstage in New York City, where we were both
doing a bit in the film The United States of Poetry. I was reading a piece from
Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, the "2nth Chorus," and as I was
rehearsing it for camera, I could see a familiar face out of the corner of my
eye: "Fuck me," I thought, "that's Ginsberg!" We were
introduced, and he then immediately launched into a blistering rendition of said
chorus, so as to show me the proper way for it to be done.
"As Jack would have done it!" he emphasized.
I was looking straight down the barrel at one of the most gifted and important
poets of the twentieth century, and with all the truth and guts I could muster
up, I said in response, "Yeah, but I'm not reading it as him, I'm reading
it as me. It's my interpretation of his piece."
Silence -- a LONNNGG silence. Ticktock tickrock ticktock
I was smiling nervously, my eyes sort of wavering between his face and the floor.
I sucked down about half of my 5,000th cigarette of the day in one monster drag
and filled the air around us with my poison. It was at that point that I
remembered his "Don't Smoke!" poem ... oops ... too fucking late now,
boy, you done stepped in shit! I looked at Ginsberg, he looked at me, and the
director looked at us both as the crew looked at him, and it was quite a little
moment, for a moment there. Allen's eyes squinted ever so slightly and then
began to twinkle like bright lights. He smiled that mystic smile, and I felt as
though God himself had forgiven me a dreadful sin.
After the shoot, we took a car back to his apartment on the Lower East Side and
had some tea. He was gracious enough to speak to me about the early years with
Kerouac, Cassady and the others. We spoke of many things, from the cost of a
limo ride to the high-pitched voice of Oscar Wilde; he actually had a recording
of Wilde reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He flirted unabashedly and nonstop
for the duration of my visit, even allowing me to smoke, as long as I sat next
to the kitchen window and exhaled in that direction. He kindly signed a book to
me and a couple of autographs (one for my brother, of course), and then I made
my way back to the hotel, only to have already received a call from him,
inviting me to some kind of something or other.
From that day forward, we stayed in touch with each other over the next few
years and even spent time together from time to time. Our communication
continued until our final conversation, which was just three days before he
passed on. He called me to say that he was dying, and that it would be nice to
see each other again before he checked out. He was so calm and so peaceful about
it that I had to ask how he felt given this situation. He gracefully said that
it was like a ripple on a sea of tranquillity. He then cried a little, as did I;
he said, "I love you," and so did I. I told him I would get to New
York as soon as possible, and fuckin' A, I was gonna go -- the call came only
days later.
Ginsberg was a great man, like his old pals, who had paved the way for many, and
many more to come. The contribution of these people goes way beyond their own
works. Without On the Road, Howl or Naked Lunch, for example, would we have been
blessed with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Dylan? Or countless other
writers and poets of that caliber who were born in the Fifties and Sixties?
Where would we be without modern classics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or
The Times They Are A-Changin'?
So much has happened to me in the twenty years since I first sat down and took
that long drag on Kerouac's masterpiece. I have been a construction laborer, a
gas-station attendant, a bad mechanic, a screen printer, a musician, a
telemarketing phone salesman, an actor, and a tabloid target -- but there's
never been a second that went by in which I deviated from the road that ol' Jack
put me on, via my brother. It has been an interesting ride all the way --
emotionally and psychologically taxing -- but a mother-fucker straight down the
pike. And I know that without these great writers' holy words seared into my
brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State
Hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure.
So in the end, what can anyone ... scholar, professor, student or biographer ...
really say about these angels and devils who once walked among us, though maybe
just a bit higher off the ground?
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