Read Part 1 here.
I was only about nineteen. I had been accepted at Harvard and Yale, but somehow I thought the ticket would be to study at Naropa Institute with Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets. On the second day after my arrival, I was invited to a small dinner party.
Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were there, as were Gregory Corso and his wife Jocelyn Rothschild, and their baby, Max.
The party was in Boulder, Colorado, at one of the Boulder Townhouse apartments. These apartments were very simply designed. They had a circular white table, just outside of a kitchen which had a counter connecting the cooking and refrigerator area with the seating area. I didn’t know why I had been invited. I had only just arrived as a student. I was the only student. The others did all the talking.
Gregory Corso was in a manic phase and talked about how he wanted to eat a cow’s ocular nerve. He kept looking at me as if my shock were some gauge of success. I wasn’t shocked, but was somewhat concerned about him, so he kept trying harder. He dug into the beef and talked about his love for animals as he sloppily chewed the flesh. He didn’t have many teeth left, and his face was a patchwork of collapsed veins. He was an inveterate drug user but could occasionally rise above the needle-marked life and attain elegance in diction and dress. Then he would slip back into craziness. His wife was a genuine Rothschild. She was glamorous and skinny, with a beautiful long dress and lush red hair. She was drunk. She also kept talking about wanting to eat an ocular nerve and kept looking at me for an expression of shock. I had no expression on my face, mostly because I had no idea what was going on.
Ginsberg was busily eating salad. He didn’t know what to do with Corso and his wife, but was trying to make sure their toddler, Max, had something to eat.
Corso’s wife was drunk. She kept talking about wanting to eat an ocular nerve and kept looking at me for an expression of shock. I had no expression on my face, mostly because I had no idea what was going on.
Corso had filled a baby bottle with red wine, and the tiny boy was sucking on the nipple. Corso spotted my objection.
“I am a God!”, he screamed. “My son is drinking ichor! What do you think? Why why why?”
He had nicknamed me Why, because, the day before, I had asked why something was the case in some of his ejaculations about poetry. He claimed that the shadows in one poem interacted with the shadows in the other poem and that shadows knew no boundaries, and that was why poetry and poets were always in the shadows. I had no idea what he was talking about, but no one in his milieu was crazy enough to challenge his assertions. I knew I had no standing at that table, but I would have preferred it if the boy were drinking milk.
Orlovsky spoke.
“Allen”, he said in a very rough voice that sounded like Brooklyn. “D’ya hear that Bob Hope filled an auditorium with his own money just to have listeners? He’s addicted to getting laughs”.
Orlovsky was wearing a white shirt that was twisted behind to expose his abs, which were fairly tight. His graying hair was also tied back in a bun. I think he had probably read the story about Bob Hope in National Enquirer or perhaps in the Post, but I didn’t want to challenge his viewpoint or ask him how he had arrived at this idea. He had a large, powerful, manly body. White shorts, relatively clean, and flip-flops completed his outfit. It was 1977, and he was about forty years old.
The host was a psychiatrist named Steven. I had met him at the swimming pool the previous day. Steven’s wife was going to show up the following day, and he mentioned this in ushering us out.
“Oh?” Everyone nodded out of politeness and finished chowing down.
Suddenly, Orlovsky said, “Star Wars is coming on, Al. Let’s go”.
We walked about a half mile to a cinema up near the University of Colorado bookstore. I didn’t like science fiction and never understood the Star Wars craze. The Beats ate popcorn quietly and watched the show. They were somewhat excited about the film, and Corso loved the bar scene with its exotic alien animals.
“Every bar I go in looks just like that!”, he said as the packed movie theater laughed.
Suddenly, Orlovsky said, “Star Wars is coming on, Al. Let’s go”.
After the movie, we walked back. I felt alienated and wanted to get away from the others, and soon was able to go back into my unlit apartment, and close the door. I could finally breathe. It occurred to me that what Peter Orlovsky had said about Bob Hope was actually true about him and his friends. They loved an audience.
I suffered during my late teens and early twenties from a general sense of unreality. When Ginsberg asked me to come over so he could show me his poems the next day, I also brought a few of mine over. Most of these poems have long since vanished, and the remaining ones are weak. I went into his house and put a tiny sheaf of poems on that ubiquitous white table that stood outside the kitchenette in the Boulderado apartments. Ginsberg sat alone at the table, and he read.
Two doves are perched – gloved white hands.
They are replaced by a sun –
Tassled hair on fire.
A white sky encircles us,
We will not leave our fingerprints on it.
Ginsberg read the poem, and wrote in my evaluation, “Kirby Olson is a poet of classic beauty, perhaps surreal in genre”. “Does the world exist?”, I asked Allen.
“It both does and it doesn’t”, he said. “What authors do you like?”
I mentioned Jean Cocteau. It seemed suitably French. I was, among other pretentions, a Francophile. I wanted to live in Paris, and have my ashes sprinkled in the Seine. Cocteau was still a big player in the late 1970s, as the extent of his collaboration with the Vichy and Nazi regimes was still not well-known. Later, as this information came out, he disappeared from reading lists and is now almost completely unread in America. I loved the sense of unreality in Cocteau’s films and stories. I didn’t understand the objection within the surrealist movement to the French Quisling.
Many of the students wanted to know Ginsberg and Corso. For some reason, I saw both men almost every day, and they talked with me often. I was very amused by them.
Ginsberg gave me advice.
“Write a big dirty sex poem. Write everything about sex that you can think about, and then bring it back. Also, take methedrine. It speeds up your mind. Do you want some?”
I didn’t drink or smoke, and didn’t want methedrine, or understand what he meant about a big dirty sex poem. I tried not to have sex with people and was quite successful at it. I daydreamed about women all the time, but found it very hard to be around anyone for more than about a minute. I preferred an ideal world of perfect forms. I looked at Ginsberg. His face was not terrible. It had a pleasant demeanor, and he laughed a lot. I liked that he was clean, and that his face radiated intelligence. If I had sex with someone, it would be within the context of a very long-term relationship in which I trusted the other person. Should I just make sex up out of the exposure I had had through finding a porn journal in the cavity of a tree out in the woods, and through my exertions with my one high school girlfriend, which had lasted a few months? I sometimes thought about having sex with a few friends I knew in college, but it all seemed too messy. I liked the intensely real life of the Beats, and how they were always arguing with each other, working in the dirt and sweat of life, attending orgies, ranting about politics, and listening to jazz, but I also knew it wasn’t for me. In meeting the other students, I found that a few of them had lived in a ghost town in Nevada, and they invited me to live with them. I didn’t understand how they got groceries.
Ginsberg gave me advice: “Write a big dirty sex poem. Write everything about sex that you can think about, and then bring it back. Also, take methedrine. It speeds up your mind. Do you want some?”
Every day I called my mom on a public phone that was down in the laundry room. As I spoke to her, I could see Gregory Corso coming and going with one of his many girlfriends. I wanted to talk with Corso, but finding intellectual coherence in Corso was like finding reasoned argument in Harpo Marx.
...
On my very first day at Naropa, my front door was open and Gregory Corso walked in.
“Whaddya got for food in here?”, he asked in a growly voice.
My suite mate, Barbara Milton (she later became a well-known short-story writer), wasn’t there. I knew she had some eggs and there was a cast-iron skillet. I had some Jarlsberg cheese. I asked Corso if he wanted an omelette.
“Yeah!”, he said.
I made the eggs, although I didn’t have permission to use the skillet. I had actually never made an omelette before, but tried to pretend I knew what I was doing. I cracked the eggs and spilled in four, and added some of the cheese and put ketchup on the side along with two burnt pieces of toast. Corso wolfed it down.
“I heard you write poems”, he said. “I will look at them now”.
I ran downstairs and brought up four poems. I can only remember one of them, as it’s the one he liked.
The Beauty of the Living
I have often met the beauty of the living.
It was in the magenta sunset.
It was in the hummingbird.
It was a child reaching up to kiss his mother goodnight.
I wondered how Corso would react. Kids in all the classes were writing destructive poems about the United States and the war in Vietnam, or about big messy sexual affairs, or ranting against the government. I loved my mom and dad, and I liked how pretty the world was.
Corso said, “Top shot!”
He handed me that poem back and ripped the other three in half. Whenever he would talk about a poet, he would try to ascertain what was the best poem by the writer. This he would call the “top shot”.
I asked him why he liked that poem the best. He took his glasses off his nose and stared at me as if he were about to become apoplectic. His neck got purple.
