Lust for Life

I met Allen Ginsberg’s work a few months before I met Allen himself. Soon after “Howl” came out in 1956, a friend came to dinner in my Hell’s Kitchen apartment in Manhattan and brought me a copy. I was moved and delighted. For several years, I had been writing poetry and stories in the “hip” argot of the period--much to the horror of everyone I knew--and now, here it was: Language I loved had broken into print. I felt strong and vindicated.

It’s probably hard for anyone now to realize just how much that book meant to us writers and artists who were in our early 20s back then. It was a difficult time. We had all had our Carl Solomons: Some friend locked away in prison or madhouse or, worse, dead or disabled from electric shock. There was no one in my generation who didn’t carry some such tale in mind and heart, so Allen immediately and at once spoke for all of us. It was his special gift.

If artists are “the antennae of the race,” then poets are articulate antennae, and Allen throughout his life had a particular knack for speaking the concerns that were as yet only on the periphery of consciousness.

I was just 22 and I acted with the quickness of that age: I wrote to Ginsberg in care of City Lights Books in San Francisco, and I sent some work. Not to publish especially, just to share something with like-minded folk. I got an encouraging letter from Lawrence Ferlinghetti almost immediately and a few months later Ginsberg himself appeared at my door. He arrived unannounced (we had no phone in any case) and stayed for a couple of days. He brought several friends with him, including his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and Jack Kerouac. They were all on their way to Europe and Morocco.

Many things transpired in the short time that they were at my house, but suffice it to say that betwixt and between satisfying various voracious and youthful appetites, we talked writing and read our work to each other, morning, noon and night. It was a great feast of the word.

When Allen and Peter returned from that journey, I was living on Houston Street on the Lower East Side. It turned out they had taken an apartment two blocks away. I helped them move in and occasionally came by (I remember that all the kitchen cupboards were full of books), but I had a child by then and didn’t have as much time to hang out. Whenever we did get together, though, the conversation resumed seamlessly: We discussed poetry and sometimes politics, but the subtext was always how to do the work and take care of the growing tribe. It was something we both cared passionately about.

Some years later, Allen returned from a long trip to India sporting a beard and many tales of his encounters with gurus. I was then presiding over a domain that included a husband and three children, a theater and innumerable writing projects. Allen was frequently in and out of my house in those days, asking forthright questions as I chased a baby down the hall (How was my sex life?) or settling in for the evening to lead us all in a satsang. It was a time when we, all of us, cared about mantras.

By 1966, after many adventures and some not inconsiderable battles, my theater was gone. I moved to upstate New York with my family, first to a rented farmhouse, then to Timothy Leary’s community at Millbrook. Allen and Timothy were good friends, and it was at his urging that I kept a detailed journal of daily life there. Millbrook was, he told me, a typical American social experiment, equal in importance to the 19th century utopian communities.

The next year brought a summer of many urban riots. My family and I were back in Manhattan for a brief time, ensconced in the Hotel Albert on University Avenue. This was a time of multiple causes and petitions: Allen and I worked together on many of them.

There was some sense, I think on both our parts, that we could rely on the other in such endeavors. We shared an ethos in some odd way. It was inherited and familial: Allen’s was Jewish and socialist, and mine Italian and anarchist, but when it was time to act, we mostly tended to see eye to eye. And beyond that, Allen had this passion for what William Burroughs recently called “openness,” for not concealing anything at all. Speaking it, writing it, singing it, laughing it, talking about it, bringing everything human into the light of day. And exploring anything at all. What we all knew at that time--were certain of--was that experience itself is good, that we had the right to all possible human experience. And the right to talk about it.

On summer solstice in 1968, I moved tothe West Coast to be closer to my Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, and to work with the Diggers and others on the social and economic changes we deemed to be not only possible but imminent. I’ve been there ever since.

A couple of years later, Allen called to invite me to Boulder to teach at the first summer session of what was to become Naropa Institute and, over the next 22 years, I spent a part of many summers at Naropa. It became a gathering place for the tribe of writers to which I belonged. We would go to Boulder, teach for a week or two and catch up on each other’s lives and thought, and I remember returning home one night, a few years back, to the student housing where we lived. Allen and I were let out of someone’s car at his corner and began our way up the stairs. I distinctly remember the balmy feel of the air, the street lights through the green leaves and the brown color of the building. Allen, his hand on a thin metal banister, paused mid-step, his foot in the air, smiled his wry sad smile that gently laughed at himself and whomever he was talking to and said with, just a touch of astonishment: “We are growing old in this place.”

This past summer, I taught at Naropa for the entire month of the summer program, partly to hang out with Allen and my other poet-friends, while I finished working on my long poem, “Loba,” for Viking Press. The first night, we were all thrown into panic when Allen was taken to a Boulder hospital with what everyone thought was a heart attack. It was finally determined that he was suffering from altitude sickness and exhaustion, but this event, coming as it did at the start of the summer term, colored everything after. Allen went to innumerable readings and other poets’ classes, as he always had, but I think we were all aware that he looked very thin and frail.

By fall, Allen seemed better. He and I played the DNA Lounge, a club south of Market Street here in San Francisco. The reading was a benefit for Pema Osel Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist center in the Santa Cruz Mountains run by my teacher, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche. We performed with Marc Olmsted and Peter Marti, West Coast poets who were old friends of Allen and students of Tharchin. It was the last time I saw Allen.

The whole affair was quite wonderful: neopunks mingled with aging hippies and beatniks who had never changed their 1950s style. The place was crowded and in the front row sat Thubten Tulku, a Tibetan monk from Pema Osel Ling in his early 20s, bright-eyed and humorous and interested in everything that was going on around him.

For the first half of the show, Allen and I sat upstairs in the green room to escape the ubiquitous cigarette smoke. I watched him eat his macrobiotic dinner, which someone had prepared to his specifications and brought along. He kept offering me some, but I wasn’t hungry, having found and devoured a dubious sausage sandwich along the way. When Allen finished eating, his curiosity got the better of him and he slipped out onto the balcony so that he could see as well as hear the performances of his younger friends. As for me, all I wanted was to stay out of the smoke long enough to have a voice left when it was my turn to read.

After the break, Allen interviewed Tulku onstage, asking him what it felt like to be celibate, how he managed it and so forth. Unabashed, Tulku echoed Allen’s gentle ribbing tone in his answers. Then I read and Allen read and sang with his musicians. At the end of the evening, there was a sign-up sheet for folks who wanted to receive meditation instruction at some later date. So many crowded around that the backs of several of my poems, and all my pens, were pressed into service.

I escaped back upstairs to the green room. Allen was already at work on his next project: giving an interview on Buddhist philosophy to Pacifica Radio. He asked me to join in and the two of us talked with the reporter for some time, while a small entourage of friends hung out and listened. We exchanged what turned out to be our final goodbye hugs in the chilly San Francisco night, after Allen had ascertained for sure that I had a ride home.

I got the news of Allen’s illness late on March 31, when Peter Levitt, a Zen practitioner and fellow poet, called from Los Angeles. The prognosis, Peter told me, was one to three months. I called Allen’s office in New York the next morning. I was flying east in a couple of days to do some teaching “on the road” and thought to stop in New York when I was done to say goodbye to my old friend. Both Allen and I, I knew, had been Buddhist long enough to have a matter-of-fact attitude about our deaths.

I got Bob Rosenthal, Allen’s longtime secretary, and he suggested I call just before coming down: Allen was expected home in a day or so, the staff was arranging for hospice care and he hoped everything would be in place and a visit would be possible. He said he was worried about how many people would want to visit and how to handle the whole thing. Would I please not tell anyone the news for a day or two, so Allen could get settled in before there was an influx of questions and folks from the news media? Of course, he added with a touch of resignation, that Allen had been on the phone at the hospital all day long. I promised not to put the word out and called Levitt to warn him off also.

That same evening, April 1, around 8:30 San Francisco time, I got a call from Allen. He told me he was dying and sounded calm and interested. He spoke more slowly than usual but in a steady stream and, as always, it was hard to get a word in. He thought he might have a few weeks and he had plenty of plans. His plan was to rent a grand piano and put it in his new loft, so that people could come and make music with him. He had a contract for three records and, though he had plenty of material, he was full of new ideas. He had been feeling ill, he said, for about four months and during that time, he had written a whole new book of poems. He was especially excited about a poem describing his fantasies of his funeral. “I realized,” he told me, “that everyone fantasizes about their funeral, and it was a terrific thing to write about. It’s a very funny poem.”

We talked for about half an hour. Allen was pleased that he had gotten all his affairs in order; he would go out with no loose ends. For Naropa Institute, ever dear to his heart, he had arranged a large contribution from a philanthropist friend. “When you’re dying,” he told me with a chuckle, “you can ask for anything.” We agreed I’d come down and see him on April 14. “Call Bob,” he told me. “We can always find a half hour.” Then I passed the phone on to my partner, Sheppard Powell. He had known Allen since the early ‘70s, when, as a young student, he had left Goddard College to do a special project: work for Allen on the Lower Eastside for a few months.

On April 3, Allen slipped into a coma. His Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche, flew out to be with him. He died at 2:39 a.m. on April 5.

I got the call about 11 in Syracuse, N.Y., a staging point on the journey to my poetry gig. It was just a few months more than 40 years since he had burst with Kerouac into my cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen. It will take awhile to really know he’s gone.

“What has the world lost?” a public radio announcer asked me, a few days later. “Nothing,” I told him. “There are the things Allen didn’t get to do, the poems he didn’t write. But he didn’t write them. You can’t lose what you never had.”

I wish it were true.