Breathe a word

Forward

This wouldn’t have been written in the style necessary if it weren’t for an amiable Greenwich Village street person-cum-superstar, Basila Sulko.  She combed through my correspondence, even writing some of it for me, substituting things my mother said if it was more entertaining.  As she said, “Anything for Allen, everything for Allen”.  It was plain that the simple tribute I had in mind was getting complicated.  We had lists, poems, diary entries: “stardate - my child ate rubber for the first time”.  Everything would become paragraphs.  Note: worry about music & photographs.  My own marriage came in the midst of all this, I thank my wife for her patience, & especially her ability to sustain a performance as a bearded Jewish poet of seventy years & all other marvellous attributes etc.

Prologue: I climbed the hillside to his house

He kept a menagerie of spirits.  They were perpetual watch-checkers, wanting to go to bed.  I climbed the hillside to his father, in newspaper cuttings.  I had to avoid too many impressions.  I had to stall his excited China predictions.  He wanted to get into the future & I had to hold him fast.  I asked for a bowl of water.  I wanted to see how he would carry it.  I wanted to paint the picture.

1

He asked me if I knew.  If I’d tried the experiment.  I know what it was like to be serious & young, I don’t know if that’s anything like being serious and young.  He said it didn’t matter how international you were, he knew what it was like having an international boyfriend, very parochial, in one case.  I could list shit, I could list dying.  I could metaphorise it till you could stick it on a bit of pastry: a victim’s poison is a murderer’s sugar.  There’s lots of ways to organise it.  Anyone can stand in for an enemy.  Pass me a pillow.

Latin: I have a Latin textbook, friends and acquaintances have studied Latin, my parents of course.  I’m Catholic.  This is sometimes relevant.  I can’t drive.  I drove before I knew any French, but Paris was more comfortable than New York.  This was some time later.  The Beats had their own language & critics; the non-beat novel of the time was a lesson in how to talk square.  In 1967 I was an ambulance driver, & in that capacity I attended the rallies against the Vietnam war.  I was too young or immature to appreciate what they were all about.  I thought they were fun.  I brought champagne, offered it to everybody after the police charges, even the police.  I was studying a poem by Homer, & thought I saw the young Homer, when Allen Ginsberg was speaking.  There’s been plenty of changes since that time, even a couple of bomb blasts, but I didn’t think to describe anything.  If anything’s preserved by words, I suppose it’s been done.  I remember boys in caps; if only I’d known what they were selling.  Allen was for giving.

2

There's beautiful things out there, beautiful bones under horrible skins.  How to use your body?

On the train I was too tired, too tired to recognise other than Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky.  Like a start, like a chord, there.  I ate a cheese roll.  Chocolate.  What’s an Australian doing in this part of town, I bet you’re Australian?  I was used to having my accent thought all sorts of things.  That was the only thread needed for Allen to grasp.  I learned something about interesting people: he was interesting & he asked all the questions.  They were like easy uncles.  I was touching the envelope called history.  My beard flowed to their tune, I was ready to unlearn.  They gossiped about everyone, perhaps just because they knew I wanted gossip.  They were living art, of a time before they were born.  Allen had climbed down a church wall, & wasn’t going back while he had breath.  They talked like a two man orchestra, Allen leading the waltz.  I told them about my friends & they picked up on all the links and attributes.  They started comparing their friends to mine, & they were often spot on.

3

You don’t have to be just one thing; people try really hard to be one thing; you can be good & sexual & committed & overseas & poetic...

Allen always gave room for the discourse of others - but you had to keep up.  He introduced me to the subway, like it was a car & he was sending up cartalk.  We spent an afternoon admiring noses.  He knew all the delis, and he knew all the boys in the delis.  There was nothing and no one not worth trying.  I was in the habit of making half-hearted suggestions.  It woke me that he treated them like heartfelt requests.  He said Warhol’s triple Elvis was nothing to his cavorting multiple Elvis.  But New York got too cold for such thoughts & dallying.  “After the thaw,” we said.

4

I like to keep twenty dollars under my pillow in case I wake up cold.  I look at, I feel my money.  I can love money, I just can’t get excited about it - I don’t have enough.

Allen Ginsberg died fifty years after an operation for a malignant tumour failed to save Gertrude Stein.  His obituary appeared in the Melbourne Age two days after his own death.  Again like Gertrude Stein he worked with punk groups.  His bongoplay (an adaptation of paragraphs by J.G. Ballard) is still running in suburban theatres.  Among local elites, dead Ginsberg dolls wrapped in pink cellophane have replaced chocolates.  His future projects include a reading for the benefit of the ozone layer.  Yoko Ono has produced a cd called Naked Sound which features Ginsberg in the bath with his accent removed.  Jeff Koons’ Sunflower President sculpture & accompanying comic, I Like Him, I Think He’s Alright, is rumoured to be shown soon.  Those who admitted (including some publishing house staff) that they thought Allen Ginsberg was a brand of beer were pillaged by survey teams.  His diets have been featured in gay & women’s magazines.  Try submitting photocopies of Howl & Other Poems to conservative groups to get it rebanned.

5

Will I let that thing come in me, come the time?  I like to think I can take anything, but death?  Good old death, muted by movies, disgraced by dickheads, aren’t you just a bumpy ride to Mexico, they take things differently down there?

Ginsberg wrote Howl, and made a lot of friends at court.  He had judges up all night composing epics: “The flatulent filth I’ve seen before me / The flattering horns that seek to gore me...” He loved them, he quoted them in his defence.  He liked the effect of love on people.  He bested a lot of people that would’ve preferred a fight.  Later, of course, they’d queue.  There were other lovers in the family, his Russian cousins melted the ice from the herring.  They often had to live on it.  They masturbated to visions of “Uncle Vanya”.  On campus toilet walls, he scrawled Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, along with his (Ginsberg’s) phone number.  All he’d say later was “early days”.  He was expelled from Cambridge after an obscene bee-like performance with Emily Dickinson’s Free Fuck Jazz Band.  He pursued the dean with love; academia he foreswore.  It was around this time he wrote The Gospel According To Saint Dick, which didn’t shock his family: they knew the ways of christians.  He found that if he followed, he would get somewhere.  That’s where everyone was.  & he had what fun he could on the way.

6

I took a treatment for anger once, cleaned me up good.  It was mine, why did I want to lose it?  So I could get on with things.  What things?  Clean up Manhattan, I mean get rid of the clean, get all those rude waffles & coffees & make them say good morning, turn Wall Street into the soul of Wall Street, meet someone on the street, take them home & give them a shower, get all activated about them, find I left my anger somewhere on the street with the other trash.

He wore an overcoat with Whitman & Dostoevsky in his pockets.  A high William Burroughs showed him how to gear out of the middle class; Allen couldn’t quite manage Bill’s tactics, but he was a big help.  Allen turned into a warehouse which could come alive at any time.  Does he talk like that?  Wondered the apostles who bought his tapes.  It was easy enough to find out.  He could see the Big Pinball Machine.  He could see the real figures getting smashed up.  It was no bullfight.  It was obscene, it was fucked-up.  He put it on trial.  He tried a thrill.  They were spies for the other side screaming out info in their torture.  It was not that he couldn’t run out of things to say, there was a formula involved; it churned up experiments in its wake.  Cliche was a barn you had to go out of your way to photograph.

7

Into this industry, into the sea ... He abbreviated the boy’s name only.  In sleep the old’s patched, the new’s wrenchless; temptation turns to pressure.  How far I went is there, yet the ordinary, which friends know all too well, becomes the new bizarre real.  The neighbour’s all that’s needed.  He was the one in ten, the one per cent, enlarged by 99.  That’s why I need it so badly, to approximate the memory of 100.

I didn’t read his poems or see his face in Interview.  I went to New York and he was in Morocco and Mexico and Monaco teaching Caroline to smoke.  By 1979 his poems on the Australian bush were appearing, a little man on a stump I recognised as myself.  By then I was writing seriously, stories of alcoholics and roach spray allergics.  Once I panned across two men in bed, black hair flowing over the sheets.  You could hear the salami in the fridge.  My tongue pushed a cigarette against my teeth.  Each time I met him he’d absorbed more personality.  He had a third eye.  Anything more than a goatee on me felt pretentious; I was not cosmic.  He was friends with one of those New York painters, who wanted souvenirs from his head.  He offered to blow his nose on the canvas.  I went to one of his readings and he read a Stein poem, for my pleasure.

“America is my toilet, New York where I sit down,” he claimed.  “On a clear day I can find my way home.”  He gave some of his beard to Jimi Hendrix.  He thought Mexico more civilised, “they’re more likely to murder someone they know”.  He was liked by a Native American chief, something his brother didn’t say when they met.  He stole objects from museums and returned them to General Electric.  He had a few brushes with the law: they painted scenes for their dying for corruption kids.  Gore Vidal pooh-poohed it all.  What else could he do?  Have I said that Allen could shutup?

One night when he was particularly stoned he called me Rick Springfield.  He kept singing “Speak to the sky...” and “Jesse is a friend...”  I said “Call me Bruce”.  I think he saw me as a symbol.  God knows he was too big for that.  He avoided what I could have construed as wise.

He would always be known, he always wanted to be well-known and know well.  He would always be younger than those who completed their degrees at Columbia.  With William Burroughs he would survive them.  Was it different drugs?  Hard to say while under the influence...