I discovered
Beat writers in the summer of 1961 when I was introduced to scientific
research, rationality, and existentialism at a cancer research foundation on Long
Island. I just turned 15. I read everything I could at the local library. Reading Jack Kerouac’s
“On the Road” was like a shot of speed directly into my heart, exciting,
disconcerting, crazy. Along with a few poems from Allen Ginsberg’s
“Empty Mirror,” “Howl,” and “Kaddish,” I read Kerouac’s
“On the Road,” “Dharma Bums,” “Tristessa,” “Big Sur,” all I could. Forgettable Michael
McClure. I soon spent my weekends in
Greenwich Village, hanging out on the streets with other
intellectual kids and visiting coffee shops. We smoked pot, took whatever drugs
were dealt on the streets, very integrated, blacks and whites, having easy
sex wherever we could!
Early
in my senior year in high school, I was given an early admissions acceptance
and scholarship to New York University in the Village. I grabbed it and ignored
all other college
applications. My parents didn't know
one college from another and didn't know the process so I manipulated my future
my way. NYC was less than 2 hours away but I demanded
to live near the "campus" in the Village so I could continue
exploring my precocious post-Beat, pre-hippy search for love, sex, and social
utopia, enhanced by drugs, racial integration, coffee house
tears and intellectual stimulation. Following anarchic seeds planted in my
idealistic, visionary and adolescent psyche by
Ginsberg and Kerouac (although there may be others I can't remember now),
I befriended schizos, queer rapists, druggies,
eccentric young and brilliant misfit scholars and bad dudes on the streets.
I am lucky to have survived alive and unhurt with
oral and anal hymens intact.
I met Allen for the first time in fall 1963 when I was a
freshman at NYU, Washington Square College. The Judson Baptist Church ran an
international student house for graduate students on Thompson Street just south
of the square. It had an art gallery and meeting room for readings, rehearsals,
etc. Allen dropped in for one reason or another. I met him in the kitchen. I
was 17 and was awestruck to meet the great man. I didn't know what to say
other than to tell him I liked his poetry, especially his early volume "Empty
Mirror," before "Howl."
Romanticised suffering
and alienation, free love and free sex, pre-AIDS and innocent of cocaine. I
haven't time nor inclination to describe all the lurid details. The Beats gave
"license" to try anything for 'experience' of other consciousnesses
and union with God. Walt Whitman was behind them all. Without him, depression.
The great American lover Whitman. Racial segregation and white suburban
Churchianity were the antitheses of my search for universal social and
cultural orgasm. John Kennedy's assassination was a big tragedy with many
bohemian tears on the asphalt streets. I was in a stupor, shock, confused. I
saw tough critics and freaks cry.
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
A poem from Allen Ginsberg's "Empty Mirror":
ReplyDeleteIN SOCIETY
I walked into the cocktail party
room and found three or four queers
talking together in queertalk.
I tried to be friendly but heard
myself talking to one in hiptalk.
"I'm glad to see you," he said, and
looked away. "Hmn," I mused. The room
was small and had a double-decker
bed in it, and cooking apparatus:
icebox, cabinet, toasters, stove;
the hosts seemed to live with room
enough only for cooking and sleeping.
My remark on this score was under-
stood but not appreciated. I was
offered refreshments, which I accepted.
I ate a sandwich of pure meat; an
enormous sandwich of human flesh,
I noticed, while I was chewing on it,
it also included a dirty asshole.
More company came, including a
fluffy female who looked like
a princess. She glared at me and
said immediately: "I don't like you,"
turned her head away, and refused
to be introduced. I said, "What!"
in outrage. "Why you shit-faced fool!"
This got everybody's attention.
"Why you narcissistic bitch! How
can you decide when you don't even
know me," I continued in a violent
and messianic voice, inspired at
last, dominating the whole room.
Dream l947