I danced with Allen Ginsberg.
Do not squander your life.
To subscribe to the Arclist send a message to melcher@nets.com* * * * * * * * * *
It was in 1980 at the Mercury Cafe in Denver at the coming out party for his recording of 'Birdbrain' with the punk band The Gluons. "Birdbrain wrote Das Kapital ! authored the Bible ! penned The Wealth of Nations !...Birdbrain runs the world!" and we danced, forward and backward and shake and bow and turn, Ginsberg with microphone in hand in front of electric guitars, ecstatic as always, chanting his poetry as always. This was before Harmonic Convergence and the ecological apocalyptic dreams that promised the End of The World. This was before moving to Santa Fe and getting out of the giant bus terminal and construction site and AIDS graveyard that was Denver in the 80's.
I saw Ginsberg 10 years before, in Cleveland at a cathedral on the Case Western Reserve campus, chanting “Hare Krishna” and playing the harmonium, before we all sat down on the street, Euclid Avenue, and dared the horse mounted cops to break us up during rush hour, before we took over buildings and camped out on the roofs barricading the doors, before the Kent State murders and the doomed end of a lousy war.
The other day I saw the movie 'Howl' with James Franco playing Ginsberg between the wars in the deep dungeon of the fifties. In the years just after those times I was a high school student commuting to the East Side of Cleveland, being picked up, oblivious, by a friendly homosexual in the basement of the Terminal Tower. I didn't even know what was going on before I found myself in a sleazy downtown motel politely declining to enter his room. It was before I hitchhiked out west and got a ride across San Francisco from a sweet and openly gay person of a completely different persuasion from that guy in the basement, who never once tried to 'trick' me and instead gave me a pleasant ride and cheery conversation as we crossed town to the Golden Gate. This was before I'd ever heard the word 'gay' referring to someone who was queer. It was before I tracked down my lost boots, left in somebody's trunk, to a cottage under redwoods in northern California, where a collection of costumed characters of all sexual persuasions gathered under the roof owned by a charming doctor. In the evening he invited me to his bed and when he recognized I wasn't queer sweetly apologized and still accepted me graciously as his houseguest. This was before I found myself in Washington at an Episcopal Church filled with the scent of patchouli and a congregation headed by a gay minister, getting ready for a demonstration against another escalation of war, and then I had no more fear of men or women who’d thrown off the heterosexual ritual. Instead I sensed the exhilarating freedom and revolutionary sense of release that goes along with storming the sexual barricades.
Since then I've come to see that behind all the conflicts of war and poverty and even race there is the politics of sex.
In the movie 'Howl' young actors portray Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassidy, Ferlinghetti and all those friends who crisscrossed America and changed everything about the way we saw ourselves and talked about it. Almost a shock to realize how young they all were back then. So young. I thought of myself at that age driving from Cleveland to Vermont and Boston with friend Bill Halas, making up poetry based on road signs, "Pass With Care", and ending up selling green carnations to office workers and sleeping in a freezing condemned building in Roxbury where poor families squatted and drunken anger broke windows in the middle of the night.
Bill Halas was my high school friend, who turned me on to Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman and the possibilities of seeing and fully accepting a world view that didn't fit any of the models we were given at the time.
My own teenaged point of view was shaped through the unusual courtesy of the last Democratic president who had real power, LBJ, and his famous War On Poverty. I was recruited as someone disadvantaged by lack of wealth and inattention to grades but apparently gifted with intelligence. I spent my summers living across town and the river Cuyahoga that split Cleveland into two segregated cities, on the campus of a University among a student body that was mostly black and from the poor ghetto communities of the East Side. We took college prep courses together and got exposed to a wider world of culture and politics by young graduate students, many of them activists in the civil rights movement of the day. I watched black guys straightening their hair at night in the dorm bathroom and was introduced to Motown and jazz music and marijuana and slow heavy dancing. I had my first girlfriend, a Puerto Rican who could sing opera and was almost elected president of the student body. I stood with my friends at the third floor dormitory window and watched the whole horizon filled with flame as the neighborhoods burned in a wave of insurrection that swept through black urban America. Later we attended classes among armed National Guard troops that used the campus as their staging area. I watched a guardsman, helmet off, rifle leaning against the piano, playing Gershwin alone in the student union. After the fires cooled at least eight of us piled into a Corvair owned by one of the counselors and went to hear Duke Ellington and Count Basie playing jazz in playground concerts sponsored by the government in order to bring calm and a sense of normalcy and identity back to the neighborhoods.
After all of this I could in no way see white culture in the way I had before. In the fall I returned to the West Side and a school full of people brought up in straight white semi-suburban America. I was destined to rise above my extreme self-consciousness to become a trouble maker in the eyes of administrators who saw themselves as custodians of the culture.
My friends were among the school elite, the intelligentsia who were bound for college and respectable careers. I was an export who had gotten a special transfer from an inner city school but who could barely keep up academically, as my brain started rejecting the abstractions of math and the slow and superficial pace of english and history, insisting once and for all that it be allowed to go its own way.
Bill Halas lived across the street from John Marshall High. After school the two of us would cross over and go to his room or else sit in the living room with his mother and argue about politics and art, both sensing in the other some exotic sense of perception that was out of kilter with almost anyone else we knew. We shared an insatiable curiosity about the way things worked, along with feelings of endless insecurity. As time went on the people we gathered with were those that felt a similar sense of alienation. Halas might have been a short skip ahead of a lot of people in perceiving the dissolution of certainty, but soon enough just about everyone was compelled to come along as American culture poured over the edge into a world no one had been prepared for.
We listened to early experiments in electronic minimalism by Steve Reich. We played "Come Out" in 1966 loud on his father's stereo. We shared a certain distrust of the world and a sense of the melancholy felt by outsiders toward its' inherent unfairness. Our brooding over loneliness and the human condition was tempered in my case by a persistent idealism that refused to believe people couldn't do better. Bill's unease was calmed by an obsessive desire to know things to their most intimate core. Neither of us liked Elvis Presley or could identify with him outside of the movies we had watched during lunch break in junior high. Elvis was a little too forward in his personality and in his way with girls. I was able to befriend girls but was too awkward to cross the unmarked borders between friendship and something more. Neither of us had girlfriends. We both preferred jazz.
I saw Bill as the the scientist and the cynic and me as the fantasist and idealist. Sometimes I referred to us as Aristotle and Plato. Later on, in our college years, when we made the rounds of apartments and smoky parties or took his mother’s Honda on long trips across the northern Ohio countrysides, we agreed and disagreed on everything. We challenged one another always to see the world in other ways. His insatiable but skeptical curiosity was backed by my own urge to jump fully into the new.
We were companions in a world that made us uncomfortable with the incomprehensible injustice accentuated by the early death of our fathers. We grew up on a cusp where the dams of white protestant culture would crack under an exposure to history and under the glow of television screens. We witnessed assassinations and race riots and wars and an explosion of liberated feeling that swept away the world our parents knew.
I wanted to understand everything and how it all fit together. I couldn't get fixed on a particular field of study or a premeditated career path so I was an impossible student, more interested in the links between subjects than in the subjects themselves. Bill was born into a family of craft persons, his father an artist who had worked for Hallmark Cards and his older brother the winner of an award for a short documentary about his own ugly divorce. Halas lived with his mother and both were dedicated gardeners and experimenters, their lives wrapped in each other ever since the older siblings had left home and his father had died when he was barely in his teens. Whenever I cruised over to their house after school Bill and I would retreat to his upstairs bedroom refuge where we would listen to the stereo and talk about all sorts of ephemera, from experimental music to underground film making to politics.
Bill went to Chicago for the Democratic Convention in 1965, experiencing the police riot first hand with his camera, taking lots of pictures of the tear gassed city that he eagerly showed me as evidence that a world we knew was crumbling. Later on we got involved with a small group of young socialist intellectuals and took trains to the East side where we used their office mimeograph to crank out our own underground journals. We attended Marxist lectures in the basement apartment of Ted Dostel, an old union fighter and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his wife. Very early on we would walk around in tight circles watched by plain clothes cops while we handed out anti-war leaflets very early on. The last time I saw Ted Dostel he was the only one being beaten and arrested and thrown into a police car at a student demonstration that took place around the time of the massacre at Kent State.
Halas and I were both shy and more than a little alienated from the high school scene of girls and cars and sports, so we started a journal with a few of our brightest friends. We wrote about culture and politics. It started out as an innocent creative project, but eventually it got us all disciplined. We were brought into serious conferences with our bewildered parents which we refused to take seriously. After graduation the administrators were glad to see us go.
Only much later did I realize that Bill's shyness was a product of his unresolved homosexuality and that part of our friendship was the result of a long-playing high school crush. Although these days it might appear strange, in those days there were no accepted codes by which such affections could be expressed. My own social awkwardness at the time masked both incredible insecurity and insufferable arrogance. I was oblivious of his secret affections until almost the end of our friendship.
The edge is where I knew Halas. Later on the culture of change met the culture of commerce and the revolution became the basis for marketing strategies. Baby boomers hit a sharp upward incline on the economic bell curve and politics began to devolve toward cynicism. While we looked in our pockets for new directions or retreated into spiritual communities the age of Reagan came upon us. Bill Halas, caught between revelation and paranoia, visionary release and sexual ambiguity, fled into the Vermont woods and was never seen or heard from again.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Allen Ginsberg's Howl
Lyrics to Birdbrain
* * * * * * * * * * Do not squander your life.
To subscribe to the Arclist send a message to melcher@nets.com* * * * * * * * * *
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Myriad
Blinddream
Carmen Dorsey
John Yates
M.Stan Yow
Ben Sen
Salon.com
Comments
I spent more than one New Year's Eve at the Merc. The last I saw the old girl, she still had that eclectic overtone full of dark corners and hand produced masks, but it was her upstairs dance area which jazzed us all. I once had a party with the old pool table as our dining surface. You've brought back a lot of memories of Denver in the 80's, all the old haunts......The Monastery.....Mile High Stadium.....Big Mack Auditorium.........
Thank you
Rated
I met Philip Whalen in Santa Fe where he was for a time part of the literary scene here. One of my good friends was his caretaker up until his death in San Francisco. The original scroll of 'On the Road' was displayed here a couple of years ago on my birthday. For some reason it brought me to tears. Whatever you think of the writing it was one of the more influential books of the twentieth century. I would characterize the style as a headlong attack on the boundaries between poetry and prose. Same with Burroughs. I loved them all.
I was part of the avant-garde film and poetry scene in New York in the 60's and would see Allen frequently. Lovely man.
Rob and Jeffrey's "Howl" is marvelous and James Franco (my new imaginary boyfriend) gets Allen's speakign cadences perfectly.
I hope you'll write more about this.
rate