Frank M. Tedesco writes

I was precocious teenager. I had been sick in bed most of my early years, with asthma, measles and more. I also was with my maternal grandparents when they died at home. Sometime before age 6, I lost hearing and balance in my right ear. Then, at 12 I was in a solitary bicycle accident where I fractured my T5 vertebrae and was in a body brace nearly a year. My parents could not explain anything to me, Catholicism was empty, memorized nonsense. I discovered philosophy in the summer of my 10th hs year (1961) when I was a cancer research assistant at Waldemar Cancer Research Foundation on Long Island. I met brilliant kids from Ivy League schools there who introduced me to existentialism and critical thinking. Lots of reading led to Zen writers like Hubert Benoit, Alan Watts, etc. “Reading Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” by Paul Reps, I realized I had always been a Buddhist. I began going to the First Zen Institute in Manhattan, by myself, 1961-1963.

I have met with Gary Snyder on many occasions in NY, Philadelphia, SF, Berkeley and Seoul. I can't say his dharma had much influence on me. He scrambled Indian tantra with native American shamanism - lots of outward gazing romantic stuff but not true dharma confronting death and impermanence. My dharma has gotten more subtle and deeper over the years - much simpler and less tolerant of cultural accretions, hierarchy, and Hindu-Christian interfaith foggy thinking about gods and God-BS. I have become more of a scientist, and more sensitive to near death and afterlife communications. BS=BS

Yosemite Yin Yang: Portrait of Gary Snyder -- Steve Justice

Frank M. Tedesco writes

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

Frank M. Tedesco writes

I met Jill Johnston at the opening party of Yoko Ono's performance art The Stone at the famous Judson Gallery of the Judson Memorial Church on Thompson Street, Washington Square, Greenwich Village, NYC in the fall, 1963. I went home with her to her second floor apartment on Houston Street that night. We coupled on a mattress in the dining room she dragged out of her two children's bedroom. She was 34 then and "very heterosexual". She thought I was in my twenties but I was actually only 17 and a freshman at NYU. It must have been my cute goatee and the weed I was smoking in a corncob pipe. The party was crowded with notables like Allen Ginsberg and others whose names I can't remember. Allen was quite amused by my affair with Jill who wrote an innovative dance column for the Village Voice for years. I visited her often. Not for conversation but pure unmitigated lust. One day she called me to report she was pregnant and demanded I pay for an abortion. Well, I was a poor student on a scholarship with an allowance from my hard-working parents who lived on Long Island. They would have :died: if they knew of my fling! A few weeks later Jill called to tell me she had a natural miscarriage. Blood poured down her legs one morning while she was brushing her teeth. No need for money now. No need to see me again, either. End of story. She wrote Lesbian Nation a few years later in which she claimed that she had had many pregnancies, got impregnated very easily and easily miscarried, too. Our child must have been one of them.

"Love is the form of murder humans devised when they outlawed cannibalism."  -- Jill Johnston

Jill Johnston -- Diane Davis