Memoirs of a beatnik Read online

  City Spring

  Little John woke seemingly lucid, and announced cryptically, "If I read Baudelaire this morning, I'm going to vomit." "So nu?" I thought in New York Yiddish exasperation, and went out. When I returned in the afternoon, there was John, sitting hale and hearty at the kitchen table. "I read Baudelaire," he grinned, "and I vomited."

  Or there was the afternoon that I sat with O'Reilley at Rienzi's sipping jasmine tea and reading Journey to the East, feeling for all the world like a Lady Writer, when up to our table wandered Big Jack, a mulatto boy about six-foot-six with a glazed look in his eyes. He took his two hands out of his pockets, whereupon we saw that his wrists were cut, rather badly and jaggedly. "My pockets," he announced somewhat sadly, "are full of blood." "I'll bet they are," I said. We took him outside, made tourniquets of napkins from Rienzi's twisted about with a pencil, and then finally made bandages of more napkins and sent him on his way. But he didn't go far. We were eating in Minetta's Tavern on the corner an hour or two later when he wandered in lugubriously calling our names. Fed him our soup, took him home. Runaway Julie's remark: "I think I'm taking it very well for my first suicide." Gave him the sleeping pills left over from Little John's plague. He fell asleep between me and Henry. Julie slept on the floor because, as she said, "I don't want to wake up in the morning next to a corpse." Two days and three suicide attempts later, he seemed somewhat put together. We filled him full of left-over take-home sweet-and-sour Chinese food, sold the pawn tickets for our various possessions and bought him a ticket. Big Jack got on a bus and went back to his people in Worcester, Massachusetts.

  The days got longer. About as long as they get. The changes began, summer changes in New York. Young Jack left for a summer stock job someplace in Indiana. Lauren found a chick his own age with a job, who wanted her own private magician, and he moved in with her. Henry with the Big Ears went off to build a corrugated tin shack on the Brooklyn mud flats together with two dropped-out physicists from MIT. And Runaway Julie went home to Forest Hills. O'Reilley and I lingered on in the pad, eating Pepperidge Farm bread and bleu cheese sandwiches in memory of Tomi, and writing in large grey notebooks.

  66

  City Spring

  Then one evening I was walking crosstown to meet her in the Cafe Montmartre (favorite bar of the season, filled with calypso singers with gold earrings and conga drums, and messianic painters with curly, dirty beards who drank and fucked extravagantly). I had just been job-hunting, and so I trudged along in a blue skirt and blue high heels, half hoping to break them, or at least wear them down faster. A car pulled up alongside me and kept pace with my slow walk, a voice I half-knew called my name and, on my turning to answer, about three voices cried, "Do you want to go to the country?"

  To one who lives in New York City, the country is the country. It is all one whether you mean the Adirondacks or the Arizona desert. The country is simply Not-The-City. It means you can see the sky, and probably something green, and maybe the stars at night. Everyone in New York City always wants to go to the country, is bored to death all the while they are there, drinks as much as possible, and expresses great regret on returning to the city. Of course I wanted to go to the country. I hopped right into the car, stockings and high heels and all, squeezed in between a skinny blonde girl in a Navajo skirt and a young boy with a banjo, and off we went.

  We arrived after dark somewhere on a hill not far from the Hudson. A hill full of bonfires, soft sounds of guitars. Hard to say how many people, maybe about two hundred, scattered in small groups over the landscape.

  I found my way to a fire, blanket less and chilly, and sat still to hear a warm, untrained voice singing "Spanish Is a Loving Tongue." There was a good, rich smell on the breeze which I recognized as pot-I'd been around it often enough, though I'd never had any. Then a fat, loosely rolled joint came into my hands and I took a drag on it.

  Wind soft and balmy, slightly moist and smelling of green things. Young faces in the firelight, young bodies casting long shadows. Young Bill Thompson stopped singing for a minute and threw me a blanket. "You must be cold." Everyone huddled in two and threes in their jeans under Indian blankets, afghans, open sleeping bags.

  City Spring

  The music went on: "The south coast is a wild coast and lonely." Moon coming up on the wane, hardly any light from the pallid thing in the sky.

  The grass went around, again and again. I began to get what I guessed was "stoned." A clear, beautiful focusing-in on each and every person and thing. Hands intensely aware of texture feeling grass and pebbles. Warm total contentment and immobility. I searched out the shadowy faces, breathed deep, looked at the dull moon through the trees.

  The wind died. People began to fall asleep. Then the music stopped. I looked up to see Billy's face, sculptured in the firelight, close to my own. With no thought, my arms went around him and drew him down beside me onto the blanket. With no thought, I undid the layers of clothing that kept us apart. Fine young body, solidly there, beautifully untense but eager. Fine golden glow from the fire, reflected by his flesh, reflected flickering with shadows, fine hairs catching the light, turning golden.

  And lying on my side, my mouth not for one moment leaving his, I took him into me, took his large, red-gold cock, and we made love under the stars. Made love in the firelight, surrounded with the warmth, the other couples fucking or sleeping, delightfully hewn and sculpted by the flame. Made love, and made love again, smell and touch alive as never before, all our skin one flaming organ of touch.

  And fell asleep, his large hand on my hip, his coat over us both, a warm wind stroking our hair.

  I awoke to the blue light of dawn, a few squeaky birds calling to each other over my head, an ant walking on my arm. I moved one foot on the blanket and pulled it back again: except where it had been kept dry by the warmth of our bodies the blanket was clammy with dew.

  I raised my head and looked at the sleeping boy beside me, so different in this blue light than he had seemed in the jewelled darkness of the firelight. A good face: big nose, wide cheekbones; strange to see the white color of his flesh and mine, so deeply imprinted in my memory was our golden-glowing skin. Then he opened his eyes, deep deep brown and luminous, and grinned a friendly, happy good morning and rolled over on top of me. . .

  68

  City Spring

  Morning was soft talk and more dope, as the young sleepy people woke up in twos and threes and greeted each other and the day. The young men stomped about in blue jeans and boots, sharing cigarettes and finding places behind the trees to piss, while the girls sat, still half inside their sleeping bags, pulling on sweaters and peasant skirts and braiding their long hair.

  Then the good smell of food drifted over the hill to us and we wandered toward it. Right near the small farmhouse, someone had built a large fire and on it sat a cauldron of bubbling stew. Billy's father, Big Bill, stood over it, stirring and tasting. He was a tall, spare, hawk-faced man in his forties, very handsome and very black-Irish.

  After breakfast people scattered to walk, to look at the hills, to go see the Hudson, only a couple of miles away. Billy and I fell in with a bunch of kids who were going fishing. A short bumpy car ride took us to a weird, shaky wooden pier thrusting out into the river, where we sat down, got stoned, and watched the shadows of the clouds on the mountains, incidentally dangling some fishing line into the water.

  Things bit, and kept biting. They were all eels. Eels were about the only thing still living in that filthy water. Still, they were a bounty. We pulled them up, watched them thrash and flop around, dying, and when we left we toted them all along with us in a pillowcase.

  We found a quiet piece of woods and, while Billy built a fire, I cleaned the eels with his knife, grateful to my Brooklyn Italian upbringing that had made the process familiar. Then we improvised a kind of grill out of green willow and birch branches and grilled them quickly. We ate sitting on our heels in the wet moss, and washed the fish down with cheap wine that one of the guy
s produced from his back pocket. It was delicious.

  By the time we made it back to the campsite, everyone had gathered around one big fire. The music was already happening: Eric's banjo and Bob's twelve-string guitar were in full swing, and two or three people had started drumming. I lay down next to Billy, and he began to sing, and after a while there were many people singing, and a bass guitar got going, and the stars came out, and Big Bill came and joined us, grinning quietly in the dark.

  City Spring

  70

  Country Spring

  outrageous mistakes, but mostly stuek to things I recognized—that looked approximately as big, and about the same color, as when I bought them in stores in the city—and once in a while I asked Big Bill about something I didn't recognize; I didn't like to do this much, because every one of my questions seemed to call forth a burst of (to me) totally unwarranted mirth.

  Besides Big Bill and Billy, Little John (who had formerly had the bubonic plague) was staying at the place, and I found I really dug being woman to the three men, cleaning and mending and cooking for them. Looking back on it now, I think it was because they were all working so hard that they came home relaxed and easy, pleased with the food, pleased with the house, delighted to have a woman around at all.

  Billy and I dug making it in the morning. We would often wake up before it was light, thrown back to the surface from the deep place of our sleep by our hunger for each other, a hunger which had fed all night long on the brushing and gentle touch of flesh on flesh as we dreamed.

  Our bed was under the window, and when I woke first I would look at the sky to see if the morning star was out. If it was, I would reach out and touch the boy beside me, the smooth flesh of stomach, dip of navel as he lay on his side, my hand slipping over his wide chest, fingers touching his lips which were half-open to his breathing. He would turn toward me, still asleep, and I would kiss him, a slight trembling in my body which was desire, and sleepiness, and the chill of the early morning dampness.

  Then we would waken, large warm hands would take hold of me, would slip under the small of my back and raise me closer to him. We would explore each other with slow, swimming gestures, the gestures of sleep, our dreams still upon our eyes, the flavor of them filling each other's mouths as we kissed, long and endlessly.

  Billy's legs were so beautiful, I loved to run my hands over his thighs, to slip my hand between them, to feel his smooth, muscled ass. Then, slowly, the trembling would stop as I grew warm, as I ceased to tense my body against desire, and I would lie moist and open, full in my very hunger, and he would enter me. We would move together in the semi-darkness, slow and long, savoring our pleasure, building it slowly, slowly, lying sometimes at right angles

  Country Spring

  to one another, sometimes parallel and side by side, and sometimes, briefly, Billy would be on me, or I on him.

  At last his excitement would grow, he would begin pumping faster and faster, would sit up and pull me to a sitting position, impaled on his long, thick cock, so that I sat full on him, with my legs wrapped around him, my arms around his neck, and looking full into his eyes as I moved up and down on his lap, aided by the movement of his thighs, I would come, falling forward against his chest while he moaned and jerked, filling me with the juices of his being.

  Then he would lie back, his arms around me, his cock still in me, and we would lie together motionless while I smelled the smells of the old house, the damp, rotting wood and mouldy earth smells, and the light came slowly into the room.

  And often as not as we lay there, his limp, wet cock still inside me, I would feel it stir and begin to come to life again, and I would begin to stroke and smooth his large, beautiful balls. His prick would slip out of me, only half-hard, and I would close my mouth over it; the musky taste of my own come and the salty, slightly bitter taste of his would mingle in my mouth, the point of my tongue would seek out the small opening of his prick, my fingers on his asshole and the underside of his balls would stir him back to desire.

  Then he would turn me over, and slip his wet, slippery cock into my ass and his fingers into my cunt so that I was completely filled with him, pressed against the cool, musty-smelling mattress, my hands thrown over my head or reaching back to stroke and fondle him. And he would nip and nuzzle at my neck and back, moaning great, boyish, animal moans, while I felt as if I would literally explode with the fullness, the total submergence of my being in his incredible male desire. I would be set quivering in every fibre of my flesh, and would cry out in the still morning, while I came again in an endless spasm of release which left me hollow, concave and empty, white light like lightning exploding in my brain.

  Country Spring

  Fuck The Pill: A Digression

  On his first trip to town, Billy had embarrassedly purchased some Trojans, and he used them on our first night in our cottage-and, at my insistence, never used them again. I understood and appreciated the thought behind them, but they were a drag. Up to that time, I had never used any contraceptives at all. In fact, for the first few years of my running around town I never used anything to avoid pregnancy, and never once got pregnant. Some kind of youthful charisma kept the thing going.*

  The one time I thought I was knocked up, two weeks late with my period, I took a long walk in the broiling sun (it was a July) with a red-haired maniac junkie named Ambrose, down along West Street, past the trucks and the cobblestones. Came to a ferry landing, and embarked on a ferry for Jersey City, where we were followed and hooted at by a band of youngsters, bought bologna sandwiches at a local delicatessen, and found our way into the town cemetery, where we sat down on tombstones to eat and recite Keats to each other. A huge white dog came out of nowhere and laid his head on my lap like a unicorn in an old tapestry while I sat on the tombstone, and immediately the bleeding started. This is a method of abortion that I highly recommend, though I have never heard of anyone else who tried it, either successfully or unsuccessfully. Only thing was, when it was time to go back to Manhattan, we could find no ferry and were told by the bus driver who took us to the Hudson tube that the ferry hadn't run in several years. . . .

  Later, after I moved uptown, I got a diaphragm at the Sanger Clinic, with much trepidation and lying about being married, and I would scramble out of bed in that freezing cold-water flat, and go into the room called the Woodshed, where I would stand, trembling with cold, as I slipped the small rubber disk into place. And by the time I came back, shivering and with cold feet, to the bed,

  *N.B. 1988-Please, folks, this is not, repeat is not an encouragement to avoid condoms now. Flirting with pregnancy is one thing: having a kid can be a great celebration of life; flirting with AIDS is something else: is simply courting a quick and ugly death.

  Country Spring

  it would be a matter of starting all over again, of somehow working up to the passion we had set so easily and naturally going in the first place.

  Well, you may flatter yourself, that's all in the past, the lucky girls have the pill now, and they can do what they please, are as free as men, etc., etc. The pill, the pill, the pill! I am so tired of hearing about the pill, hearing the praises of the pill! Let me tell you about the pill. It makes you fat, the pill does. It makes you hungry. Gives you sore breasts, slight morning sickness, condemns you, who have avoided pregnancy, to live in a perpetual state of early pregnancy: woozy, and nauseous, and likely to burst into tears. And—crowning irony—it makes you, who have finally achieved the full freedom to fuck, much less likely to want to fuck, cuts down on the sex drive. So much for the pill.

  Then there is the cunning little gadget known as the IUD—intrauterine device. A funny little plastic spring they stick in your womb. Why not? Principle on which it works (they think) is that it drives your womb frantic, trying to get rid of it, and everything inside of you happens that much more quickly: the monthly egg passes through your system in two or three hours, instead of as many days. Only a few little things wrong with the IUD: cramps, inter
mittent bleeding, a general state of tension. It also has a habit of wandering, and may turn up just about anywhere, or not turn up at all. There are two strings attached to the clever, little contraption and sticking out of the neck of your womb, and you are supposed to check, by poking around in your vagina, whether or not the strings are still there. Nobody has told me what you do about it if they aren't. Also, since the IUD does allow nature a narrow margin of functioning, there are a few hours when you can get pregnant, and, if you're going to get pregnant, I guess you probably will, in those few hours. Nurse once told me of delivering a baby with a coil embedded in the afterbirth.

  What then? What does that leave us? Leaves us ye olde-fashioned diaphragm, and we all know what a drag that is, and ye almost-as-olde creams and foams, which purportedly can be used without a diaphragm, and are good for exactly twenty minutes to a half hour after insertion, which means you have to work pretty fast, with one eye on the clock. They also drip and run and are

  Country Spring

  unspeakably gooey, and add to the natural joyous gooey-ness of lust a certain chemical texture and taste, which could, I suppose, with determination, become an acquired taste, but is at least slightly unpleasant to the uninitiated. And up you get, if he gets his up again, and you insert into all the gooey mess inside you some more foam. Medieval, I'd say.

  Or it leaves us having babies. Having babies has certain advantages, not to be gainsaid. One is that you don't have to do anything about it—when you want to fuck, you just fuck. Nothing gooey, nothing tension-making. If you get knocked up, the discomfort of early pregnancy tends to last only two or three months-whereas with the pill it lasts forever. Pregnancy always makes me want to fuck more, too, and I enjoy it more. And in those last months, the delights of ingenuity are added, and many new joys discovered. As for childbirth, having a baby is a matter of lying down and having it. After the first one, nothing could be easier if you forget the rules: forget doctors, hospitals, enemas, shaving of pubic hair, forget stoicism and "painless childbirth"—simply holler and push the damned thing out. Takes less time, trouble, and thought than any of the so-called "modern methods of birth control." And to support the creature? Get welfare, quit working, stay home, stay stoned, and fuck.