Raucous times with beat poets

Duane Davis, Special To The News

Published January 30, 2004 at midnight

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In the summer of 1976, Sam Kashner, a nice 19-year-old Jewish boy from Long Island who happened to be in love with the beat generation, came to Boulder to become the first, and for a while, only, student at the newly established Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.

Kashner had somehow convinced his otherwise-sane parents, Seymour and Marion, that flying off to Boulder to study in the company of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Anne Waldman in a writing program that had yet to achieve accreditation was, somehow, a good idea. Not that Kashner's mother didn't have some reservations. Knowing her son's modesty in regard to using public restrooms, Kashner writes, she asked him, " 'Where will you go pishen ... What about the gayen coken?' Just as the Eskimos are said to have two hundred different words for 'snow,' the Jews have about eight hundred words for going to the bathroom. I knew them all."

And this was the boy who was going to go to school with the infamous beats: Allen Ginsberg, the author of Howl and possibly the most famous homosexual in America; and William Burroughs, whose novel, Naked Lunch, was the subject of the last big obscenity trial in American Letters, a man who had accidentally shot his wife to death while playing William Tell with a handgun and can of beer, and, possibly, the most famous heroin junkie in America.

Out of this clash of cultures and expectations, Kashner has fashioned a book that is memoir, tribute, lament, and payback all in one. From his first hilarious meeting with Ginsberg (who greets Kashner wearing nothing but boxer shorts and is soon asking him to help finish a poem he is writing about performing, shall we say, an indecent act on Neal Cassidy, the hero of Kerouac's On the Road), to his graduation three years later, the book is consistently funny, occasionally moving, and always sharply observed.

The picture of these 'beat' heroes that emerges in these pages is far more homely than their reputations would lead one to expect.

Kashner arrives in Boulder ready to "eat death and live poetry" at the feet of the these Wild Men of the Fifties, who experimented with drugs, sex, sanity, and words with mad, reckless abandon. What he found were old men: in 1976, William Burroughs was 62; Ginsberg was 50; Jack Kerouac had been dead seven years. As Kashner points out, this was "the Beat Generation in a weird retirement phase."

Not that they had lost all their moxie. No sooner has Kashner settled into his student apartment, than he is enlisted in a midnight drive into the mountains with Burroughs and a few others to harvest a marijuana field the old renegades have been tending.

Kashner's first epiphany on this trip comes when he realizes that the tape playing during the drive of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band features the man sitting next to him on its cover - Burroughs is stuck in the collage next to Marilyn Monroe and Edgar Allen Poe.

The second is that these are still some scary folks - an insight given weight by one of the gardening partners showing his displeasure with Burroughs by sticking a gun in the car window. According to Kashner, "Jubal took out a gun. It had a long nozzle and he pointed it through the window, not at Bill, and not quite at me, but it was definitely in the car with us . . . I thought I might pass out."

Burroughs, cool, unflappable, beat to the end, merely remarks, " 'We must return to the mother ship.'" They fill the trunk with bales of pot and drive back down the mountain.

When the company heads for Tom's Tavern for a celebratory drink, Kashner, nervous and wrecked, begs off, walking back to his apartment thinking, " 'Are all poets crazy? Am I crazy, too, just without any talent?' "

It is hard to resist the temptation to give you a "greatest hits" of observations from the book: For example, Gregory Corso, savagely sardonic, telling Kashner that Bob Dylan's Just Like A Woman is about Allen Ginsberg! Or, Allen throwing a tantrum when asked to recycle at his apartment complex: " 'I can't separate plastic from aluminum,' Allen had shrieked one afternoon. 'I can't tell the difference, and besides, I have important work to do.'" Or Allen's psychiatrist telling Kashner that for Allen, "homosexuality is an incendiary device, a Molotov cocktail to throw into the windows of polite society." Or Burroughs on politics: " 'You don't complain,' Burroughs said. 'You don't fight city hall, you just approach it on all fours, lift your leg, and pee on it. And when in doubt, book passage on a transatlantic ocean liner.'"

Though Kashner excels at this sort of gossipy, over-the-back-fence airing of beat laundry, he does have a more serious side, which he reveals in fairly lengthy portraits of Corso, a minor beat poet, and Billy Burroughs, the hapless and luckless son of William Burroughs.

Kashner's detailing of his friendship with these two needy, prickly, difficult and doomed men is sympathetic and clear-eyed, a vivid cautionary tale about the costs of the artistic life - Corso is revealed as a talented junkie who squanders his talent in search of easy kicks, a man who uses 'honesty' as a stick to beat anyone who gets too close to him; Billy is an addict like his father, a man who seems to barely know who he is and whose best idea for helping Billy with the physical problems that will eventually kill him is to take him to a 'psychic surgeon.'

The book does suffer from a jumbled, jumpy chronology that makes it hard to follow at times, and, though it is fun to see references to Denver and Boulder landmarks like Duffy's and Tom's Tavern, Kashner was here long enough to know that Denver is not 60 miles from Boulder and that there are no armadillos on the highway between the two cities.

Still, this is a fun, fast read and romp in which, if nothing else, Kashner learns that the beats, just like the rest of us, take off their pants one leg at a time - they just took them off a lot more often.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton

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