MY MOST OUTLANDISH DRUG experience, now that I think about it, didn’t occur with beat Village or Harlem weirdos, but during a brief run with the ten-to-four Mad Ave crowd.

How it happened, this friend of mine who was working at Lance (“The Mag for Men”) phoned me one morning—he knew I was strapped.

“One of the fiction editors is out with syph or something,” he said. “You want to take his place for a while?”

I was still mostly asleep, so I tried to cool it by shooting a few incisive queries as to the nature of the gig—which he couldn’t seem to follow.

“Well,” he said finally, “you won’t have to do anything, if that’s what you mean.” He had a sort of blunt and sullen way about him—John Fox his name was, an ex-Yalie and would-be writer who was constantly having to “put it back on the shelf,” as he expressed it (blunt, sullen), and take one of these hot-shot Mad Ave jobs, and always for some odd reason—like at present, paying for his mom’s analysis.

Anyway, I accepted the post, and now I had been working there about three weeks. It wasn’t true, of course, what he’d said about not having to do anything—I mean the way he had talked I wouldn’t even have to get out of bed—but after three weeks my routine was fairly smooth: up at ten, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, dex, and make it. I had this transistor-shaver I’d copped for five off a junky-booster, so I would shave with it in the cab, and walk into the office at ten-thirty or so, dapper as Dan and hip as Harry. Then into my own small office, lock the door, and start stashing the return postage from the unsolicited mss. We would get an incredible amount of mss.—about two hundred a day—and these were divided into two categories: (l) those from agents, and (2) those that came in cold, straight from the author. The ratio was about 30 to 1, in favor of the latter—which formed a gigantic heap called “the shit pile,” or (by the girl-readers) “the garbage dump.” These always contained a lot of return postage—so right away I was able to supplement my weekly wage by seven or eight dollars a day in postage stamps. Everyone else considered the “shit pile” as something heinously repugnant, especially the sensitive girl (“garbage”) readers, so it was a source of irritation and chagrin to my secretary when I first told her I wished to read “all unsolicited manuscripts and no manuscripts from agents.”

John Fox found it quite incomprehensible.

“You must be out of your nut!” he said. “Ha! Wait until you try to read some of that crap in the shit pile!”

I explained however (and it was actually true in the beginning) that I had this theory about the existence of a pure, primitive, folk-like literature—which, if it did exist, could only turn up among the unsolicited mss. Or weird, something really weird, even insane, might turn up there—whereas I knew the stuff from the agents would be the same old predictably competent tripe. So, aside from stashing the stamps, I would read each of these shit-pile ms. very carefully—reading subtleties, insinuations, multilevel entendre into what was actually just a sort of flat, straightforward simplemindedness. I would think each was a put-on—a fresh and curious parody of some kind, and I would read on, and on, all the way to the end, waiting for the payoff . . . but, of course, that never happened, and I gradually began to revise my theory and to refine my method. By the second week, I was able to reject a ms. after reading the opening sentence, and by the third I could often reject on the basis of title alone—the principle being if an author would allow a blatantly dumbbell title, he was incapable of writing a story worth reading. (This was thoroughly tested and proved before adopting.) Then instead of actually reading mss., I would spend hours, days really, just thinking, trying to refine and extend my method of blitz-rejection. I was able to take it a little farther, but not much. For example, any woman author who used “Mrs.” in her name could be rejected out of hand—unless it was used with only one name, like “by Mrs. Carter,” then it might be a weirdie. And again, any author using a middle initial or a “Jr.” in his name, shoot it right back to him! I knew I was taking a chance with that one (because of Connell and Selby), but I figured what the hell, I could hardly afford to gear the sort of fast-moving synchro-mesh operation I had in mind to a couple of exceptions—which, after all, only went to prove the consarn rule, so to speak. Anyway, there it was, the end of the third week and the old job going smoothly enough, except that I had developed quite a little dexie habit by then—not actually a habit, of course, but a sort of very real dependence . . . having by nature a nocturnal metabolism whereby my day (pre-Lance) would ordinarily begin at three or four in the afternoon and finish at eight or nine in the morning. As a top staffer at Lance, however, I had to make other arrangements. Early on I had actually asked John Fox if it would be possible for me to come in at four and work until midnight.

“Are you out of your nut?” (That was his standard comeback). “Don’t you know what’s happening here? This is a social scene, man—these guys want to see you, they want to get to know you!”

“What are they, faggots?”

“No, they’re not faggots,” he said stoutly, but then seemed hard pressed to explain, and shrugged it off. “It’s just that they don’t have very much, you know, to do.”

It was true in a way that no one seemed to actually do anything—except for the typists, of course, always typing away. But the guys just sort of hung out, or around, buzzing each other, sounding the chicks, that sort of thing.

The point is though that I had to make in by ten, or thereabouts. One reason for this was the “pre-lunch conference,” which Hacker, or the “Old Man” (as, sure enough, the publisher was called), might decide to have on any given day. And so it came to pass that on this particular—Monday it was—morning, up promptly at nine-three-oh, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, all as per usual, and reach for the dex . . . no dex, out of dex. This was especially inopportune because it was on top of two straight white and active nights, and it was somewhat as though an 800-pound bag, of loosely packed sand, began to settle slowly on the head. No panic, just immediate death from fatigue.

At Sheridan Square, where I usually got the taxi, I went into the drugstore. The first-shift pharmacist, naturally a guy I had never seen before, was on duty. He looked like an aging efficiency expert.

“Uh, I’d like to get some Dexamyl, please.”

The pharmacist didn’t say anything, just raised one hand to adjust his steel-rimmed glasses, and put the other one out for the prescription.

“It’s on file here,” I said, nodding toward the back.

“What name?” he wanted to know, then disappeared behind the glass partition, but very briefly indeed. “Nope,” he said, coming back, and was already looking over my shoulder to the next customer.

“Could you call Mr. Robbins?” I asked, “he can tell you about it.” Of course this was simply whistling in the dark, since I was pretty sure Robbins, the night-shift man, didn’t know me by name, but I had to keep the ball rolling.

“I’m not gonna wake Robbins at this hour—he’d blow his stack. Who’s next?”

“Well, listen, can’t you just give me a couple—I’ve, uh, got a long drive ahead.”

“You can’t get dexies without a script,” he said, rather reproachfully, wrapping a box of Tampax for a teenybopper nifty behind me, “you know that.”

“Okay, how about if I get the doctor to phone you?”

“Phone’s up front,” he said, and to the nifty: “That’s seventy-nine.”

The phone was under siege—one person using it, and about five waiting—all, for some weird reason, spade fags and prancing gay. Not that I give a damn about who uses the phone, it was just one of those absurd incongruities that seem so often to conspire to undo sanity in times of crisis. What the hell was going on? They were obviously together, very excited, chattering like magpies. Was it the Katherine Dunham contingent of male dancers? Stranded? Lost? Why out so early? One guy had a list of numbers in his hand the size of a small flag. I stood there for a moment, confused in pointless speculation, then left abruptly and hurried down West Fourth to the dinette. This was doubly to purpose, since not only is there a phone, but the place is frequented by all manner of heads, and a casual score might well be in order—though it was a bit early for the latter, granted.

And this did, in fact, prove to be the case. There was no one there whom I knew—and, worse still, halfway to the phone, I suddenly remembered my so-called doctor (Dr. Friedman, his name was) had gone to California on vacation a few days ago. Christ almighty! I sat down at the counter. This called for a quick think-through. Should I actually call him in California? Have him phone the drugstore from there? Quite a production for a couple of dex. I looked at my watch, it was just after ten. That meant just after seven in Los Angeles—Friedman would blow his stack. I decided to hell with it and ordered a cup of coffee. Then a remarkable thing happened. I had sat down next to a young man who now quite casually removed a small transparent silo-shaped vial from his pocket, and without so much as a glance in any direction, calmly tapped a couple of the belovedly familiar green-hearted darlings into his cupped hand, and tossed them off like two salted peanuts.

Deus ex machina!

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, in the friendliest sort of way, “I just happened to notice you taking a couple of, ha ha, Dexamyl.” And I proceeded to lay my story on him—while he, after one brief look of appraisal, sat listening, his eyes straight ahead, hands still on the counter, one of them half covering the magic vial. Finally he just nodded and shook out two more on the counter. “Have a ball,” he said.

I reached the office about five minutes late for the big pre-lunch confab. John Fox made a face of mild disgust when I came in the conference room. He always seemed to consider my flaws as his responsibility since it was he who had recommended me for the post. Now he glanced uneasily at old Hacker, who was the publisher, editor-in-chief, etc. etc. A man of about fifty-five, he bore a striking resemblance to Edward G. Robinson—an image to which he gave further credence by frequently sitting in a squatlike manner, chewing an unlit cigar butt, and mouthing coarse expressions. He liked to characterize himself as a “tough old bastard,” one of his favorite prefaces being: “I know most of you guys think I’m a tough old bastard, right? Well, maybe I am. In the quality-Lit game you gotta be tough!” And bla-bla-bla.

Anyway as I took my usual seat between Fox and Bert Katz, the feature editor, Old Hack looked at his watch, then back at me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“We’re running a magazine here, young man, not a whorehouse.”

“Right and double right,” I parried crisply. Somehow Old Hack always brought out the schoolboy in me.

“If you want to be late,” he continued, “be late at the whorehouse—and do it on your own time!”

Part of his design in remarks of this sort was to get a reaction from the two girls present—Maxine, his cutiepie private sec, and Miss Rogers, assistant to the art director—both of whom managed, as usual, a polite blush and half-lowered eyes for his benefit.

The next ten minutes were spent talking about whether to send our own exclusive third-rate photographer to Viet Nam or to use the rejects of a second-rate one who had just come back.

“Even with the rejects we could still run our E.L. trade,” said Katz, referring to an italicized phrase Exclusively Lance which appeared under photographs and meant they were not being published elsewhere—though less through exclusivity, in my view, than general crappiness.

Without really resolving this, we went on to the subject of “Twiggy,” the British fashion-model who had just arrived in New York and about whose boyish hair and bust-line raged a storm of controversy. What did it mean philosophically? Aesthetically? Did it signal a new trend? Should we adjust our center-spread requirements (traditionally 42-24-38) to meet current taste? Or was it simply a flash fad?

“Come next issue,” said Hack, “we don’t want to find ourselves holding the wrong end of the shit-stick, now do we?” Everyone was quick to agree.

“Well, I think she’s absolutely delightful,” exclaimed Ronnie Ron-dell, the art director (prancing gay and proud of it), “she’s so much more . . . sensitive-looking and . . . delicate than those awful . . . milk-factories!” He gave a little shiver of revulsion and looked around excitedly for corroboration.

Hack, who had a deep-rooted antifag streak, stared at him for a moment like he was some kind of weird lizard, and he seemed about to say something cruel and uncalled for to Ron, but then he suddenly turned on me instead.

“Well, Mister Whorehouse man, isn’t it about time we heard from you? Got any ideas that might conceivably keep this operation out of the shithouse for another issue or two?”

“Yeah, well I’ve been thinking,” I said, winging it completely, “I mean, Fox here and I had an idea for a series of interviews with unusual persons. . .”

“Unusual persons?” he growled, “what the hell does that mean?”

“Well, you know, a whole new department, like a regular feature. Maybe call it, uh, ‘Lance Visits. . . .’ ”

He was scowling, but he was also nodding vigorously. “ ‘Lance Visits. . . .’ Yeh, yeh, you wantta gimme a fer instance?”

“Well, you know, like, uh, . . . ‘Lance Visits a Typical Teeny-bopper’—cute teenybopper tells about cute teen-use of Saran Wrap as a contraceptive, etcetera . . . and uh, let’s see . . . ‘Lance Visits a Giant Spade Commie Bull-Dike’ . . . ‘Lance Visits the Author of Masturbation Now!’, a really fun-guy.”

Now that I was getting warmed up, I was aware that Fox, on my left, had raised a hand to his face and was slowly massaging it, mouth open, eyes closed. I didn’t look at Hack, but I knew he had stopped nodding. I pressed on . . . “You see, it could become a sort of regular department, we could do a ‘T.L.’ on it . . . ‘Another Exclusive Lance Visit.’ How about this one: ‘Lance Visits a Cute Junkie Hooker’ . . . ‘Lance Visits a Zany Ex-Nun Nympho’ . . . ‘Lance Visits the Fabulous Rose Chan, beautiful research and development technician for the so-called French Tickler . . .”

“Okay,” said Hack, “how about this one: ‘Lance Visits Lance,’—know where? Up shit-creek without a paddle! Because that’s where we’d be if we tried any of that stuff.” He shook his head in a lament of disgust and pity. “Jeez, that’s some sense of humor you got, boy.” Then he turned to Fox. “What rock you say you found him under? Jeez.

Fox, as per usual, made no discernible effort to defend me, simply pretended to suppress a yawn, eyes averted, continuing to doodle on his “Think Pad,” as it was called, one of which lay by each of our ashtrays.

“Okay,” said Hack, lighting a new cigar, “suppose I come up with an idea? I mean, I don’t wantta surprise you guys, cause any heart attacks . . . by me coming up with an idea,” he saying this with a benign serpent smile, then adding in grim significance, “after twenty-seven years in this goddam game!” He took a sip of water, as though trying to cool his irritation at being (as per usual) “the only slob around here who delivers.” “Now let’s just stroke this one for a while,” he said, “and see if it gets stiff. Okay, lemme ask you a question: what’s the hottest thing in mags at this time? What’s raising all the stink and hullabaloo? The Manchester book, right? The suppressed passages, right?” He was referring, of course, to a highly publicized account of the assassination of President Kennedy—certain passages of which had allegedly been deleted. “Okay, now all this stink and hullabaloo—I don’t like it, you don’t like it. In the first place, it’s infringement on freedom of the press. In the second, they’ve exaggerated it all out of proportion. I mean, what the hell was in those passages? See what I mean? All right, suppose we do a takeoff on those same passages?”

He gave me a slow look, eyes narrowed—ostensibly to protect them from his cigar smoke, but with a Mephistophelian effect. He knew that I knew that his “idea” was actually an idea I had gotten from Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, a few evenings earlier, and had mentioned, en passant so to speak, at the last prelunch confab. He seemed to be wondering if I would crack.

A test, like. I avoided his eyes, doodled on the “Think Pad.”

He exhaled in my direction, and continued: “Know what I mean? Something light, something zany, kid the pants off the guys who suppressed it in the first place. A satire like. Get the slant?”

No one at the table seemed to. Except for Hack we were all in our thirties or early forties, and each had been hurt in some way by the President’s death. It was not easy to imagine any particular “zaniness” in that regard.

Fox was the first to speak, somewhat painfully it seemed. “I’m, uh, not quite sure I follow,” he said. “You mean it would be done in the style of the book?”

“Right,” said Hack, “but get this, we don’t say it is the real thing, we say it purports to be the real thing. And editorially we challenge the authenticity of it! Am I getting through to you?”

“Well, uh, yeah,” said Fox, “but I’m not sure it can be, you know, uh, funny.”

Hack shrugged. “So? You’re not sure, I’m not sure. Nobody’s sure it can be funny. We all take a crack at it—just stroke it a while and see if we get any jism—right?”

Right.

After work that evening I picked up a new Dexamyl prescription and stopped off at Sheridan Square to get it filled. Coming out of the drugstore, I paused momentarily to take in the scene. It was a fantastic evening—late spring evening, warm breeze promise of great summer evenings imminent—and teenies in minies floating by like ballerinas, young thighs flashing. Summer, I thought, will be the acid test for minies when it gets too warm for tights, body-stockings, that sort of thing. It should be quite an interesting phenomenon. On a surge of sex-dope impulse I decided to fall by the dinette and see if anything of special import was shaking, so to speak.

Curious that the first person I should see there, hunched over his coffee, frozen saintlike, black shades around his head as though a hippy crown of thorns, should be the young man who had given me the dex that very morning. I had the feeling he hadn’t moved all day. But this wasn’t true because he now had on a white linen suit and was sitting in a booth. He nodded in that brief formal way it is possible to nod and mean more than just hello. I sat down opposite him.

“I see you got yourself all straightened out,” he said with a wan smile, nodding again, this time at my little paper bag with the pharmacy label on it.

I took out the vial of dex and popped a quick one, thinking to do a bit of the old creative Lit later on. Then I shook out four or five and gave them to the young man.

“Here’s some interest.”

“Anytime,” he said, dropping them in his top pocket, and after a pause, “You ever in the mood for something beside dexies?”

“Like what?”

He shrugged, “Oh, you know,” he said, raising a vague limp hand, then added with a smile, “I mean you know your moods better than I do.”

During the next five minutes he proved to be the most acquisitive pusher, despite his tender years, I have ever encountered. His range was extensive—beginning with New Jersey pot, and ending with something called a “Frisco Speedball,” a concoction of heroin and cocaine, with a touch of acid (“gives it a little color”). While we were sitting there, a veritable parade of his far-flung connections commenced, sauntering over, or past the booth, pausing just long enough to inquire if he wanted to score—for sleepers, leapers, creepers . . . acid in cubes, vials, capsules, tablets, powder . . . “hash, baby, it’s black as O” . . . mushrooms, mescalin, buttons . . . cosanyl, codeine, coke . . . coke in crystals, coke in powder, coke that looked like karo syrup . . . red birds, yellow jackets, purple hearts . . . “liquid-O, it comes straight from Indochina, stamped right on the can” . . . and from time to time the young man (“Trick” he was called) would turn to me and say: “Got eyes?”

After committing to a modest (thirty dollars) score for crystals, and again for two ounces of what was purported to be ‘Panamanian Green’ (“It’s ‘one-poke pot’, baby.”), I declined further inducement.

Then an extremely down-and-out type, a guy I had known before whose actual name was Rattman, but who was known with simple familiarity as “Rat,” and even more familiarly, though somehow obscurely, as “The Rat-Prick Man,” half staggered past the booth, clocked the acquisitive Trick, paused, moved uncertainly towards the booth, took a crumpled brown paper bag out of his coat pocket, and opened it to show.

“Trick,” he muttered, almost without moving his lips, “. . . Trick, can you use any Lights? Two-bits for the bunch.” We both looked in, on some commodity quite unrecognizable—tiny, dark cylinder-shaped capsules, sticky with a brown-black guk, flat on each end, and apparently made of plastic. There was about a handful of them.

The young man made a weary face of distaste and annoyance.

“Man,” he asked softly, plaintively, looking up at Rattman, “when are you going to get buried?”

But the latter, impervious, gave a soundless guffaw, and shuffled on.

“What,” I wanted to know, “were those things?” asking this of the young man half in genuine interest, half in annoyance at not knowing. He shrugged, raised a vague wave of dismissal. “Lights they’re called . . . they’re used nicotine-filters. You know, those nicotine filters you put in a certain kind of cigarette holder.”

“Used nicotine-filters? What do you do with them?”

“Well, you know, drop two or three in a cup of coffee—gives you a little buzz.”

“A little buzz?” I said, “are you kidding? How about a little cancer? That’s all tar and nicotine in there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, well, you know . . .” he chuckled dryly, “anything for kicks. Right?”

Right, right, right.

And it was just about then he sprung it—first giving me his look of odd appraisal, then the sigh, the tired smile, the haltering deference: “Listen, man . . . you ever made red-split?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, you know—the blood of a wig.”

“No,” I said, not really understanding, “I don’t believe I have.”

“Well, it’s something else, baby, I can tell you that.”

“Uh, well, what did you call it—I’m not sure I understood. . . .”

“ ‘Red-split,’ man, it’s called ‘red-split’—it’s schizo-juice . . . blood . . . the blood of a wig.”

“Oh, I see.” I had, in fact, read about it in a recent article in the Times—how they had shot up a bunch of volunteer prisoners (very normal, healthy guys, of course) with the blood of schizophrenia patients—and the effect had been quite pronounced . . . in some cases, manic; in other cases, depressive—about 50/50 as I recalled.

“But that can be a big bring-down, can’t it?”

He shook his head somberly. “Not with this juice it can’t. You know who this is out of?” Then he revealed the source—Chin Lee, it was, a famous East Village resident, a Chinese symbolist poet, who was presently residing at Bellevue in a straightjacket. “Nobody,” he said, “and I mean nobody, baby, has gone anywhere but up, up, up on this taste!”

I thought that it might be an interesting experience, but using caution as my watchword (the Times article had been very sketchy) I had to know more about this so-called red-split, blood of a wig. “Well, how long does it, uh, you know, last?”

He seemed a little vague about that—almost to the point of resenting the question. “It’s a trip, man—four hours, six if you’re lucky. It all depends. It’s a question of combination—how your blood makes it with his, you dig?” He paused and gave me a very straight look. “I’ll tell you this much, baby, it cuts acid and STP . . .” He nodded vigorously. “That’s right, cuts both them. Back, down, and sideways.”

“Really?”

He must have felt he was getting a bit too loquacious, a bit too much on the old hard-sell side, because then he just cooled it, and nodded. “That’s right,” he said, so soft and serious that it wasn’t really audible.

“How much?” I asked, finally, uncertain of any other approach.

“I’ll level with you,” he said, “I’ve got this connection—a ward attendant . . . you know, a male nurse . . . has, what you might call access to the hospital pharmacy . . . does a little trading with the guards on the fifth floor—that’s where the monstro-wigs are—‘High Five’ it’s called. That’s where Chin Lee’s at. Anyway, he’s operating at cost right now—I mean, he’ll cop as much M, or whatever other hard-shit he can, from the pharmacy, then he’ll go up to High Five and trade for the juice—you know, just fresh, straight, uncut wig-juice—go c.c.’s, that’s the regular hit, about an ounce, I guess . . . I mean, that’s what they hit the wigs for, a go c.c. syringeful, then they cap the spike and put the whole outfit in an insulated wrapper. Like it’s supposed to stay at body temperature, you dig? They’re very strict about that—about how much they tap the wig for, and about keeping it fresh and warm, that sort of thing. Which is okay, because that’s the trip—go c.c’s, ‘piping hot,’ as they say.” He gave a tired little laugh at the curious image. “Anyway the point is, he never knows in front what the price will be, my friend doesn’t, because he never knows what kind of M score he’ll make. I mean like if he scores for half-a-bill of M, then that’s what he charges for the split, you dig?”

To me, with my Mad Ave savvy, this seemed fairly illogical.

“Can’t he hold out on the High Five guys?” I asked, “. . . you know, tell them he only got half what he really got, and save it for later?”

He shrugged, almost unhappily. “He’s a very ethical guy,” he said, “I mean like he’s pretty weird. He’s not really interested in narcotics, just changes. I mean, like he lets them do the count on the M—they tell him how much it’s worth and that’s what he charges for the split.”

“That is weird,” I agreed.

“Yeah, well it’s like a new market, you know. I mean there’s no established price yet, he’s trying to develop a clientele—can you make half-a-bill?”

While I pondered, he smiled his brave tired smile, and said: “There’s one thing about the cat, being so ethical and all—he’ll never burn you.”

So in the end it was agreed, and he went off to complete the arrangements.

The effect of red-split was “as advertised” so to speak—in this case, quite gleeful. Sense-derangementwise, it was unlike acid in that it was not a question of the “Essential I” having new insights, but of becoming a different person entirely. So that in a way there was nothing very scary about it, just extremely weird, and as it turned out, somewhat mischievous (Chin Lee, incidentally, was not merely a great wig, but also a great wag).

At about six in the morning I started to work on the alleged “Manchester passages.” Krassner might be cross, I thought, but what the hell, you can’t copyright an idea. Also I intended to give him full and ample credit. “Darn good exposure for Paul” I mused benignly, taking up the old magic quill.

The first few passages were fairly innocuous, the emphasis being on a style identical to that of the work in question. Towards the end of Chapter Six, however, I really started cooking: “. . . wan, and wholly bereft, she steals away from the others, moving trancelike towards the darkened rear-compartment where the casket rests. She enters, and a whispery circle of light shrouds her bowed head as she closes the door behind her and leans against it. Slowly she raises her eyes and takes a solemn step forward. She gasps, and is literally slammed back against the door by the sheer impact of the outrageous horror confronting her: i.e., the hulking Texan silhouette at the casket, its lid half raised, and he hunching bestially, his coarse animal member thrusting into the casket, and indeed into the neck-wound itself.

“Great God,” she cries, “how heinous! It must be a case of . . . of . . . NECK-ROPHILIA!”

I finished at about ten, dexed, and made it to the office. I went directly into Fox’s cubicle (the “Lair” it was called).

“You know,” I began, lending the inflection a childlike candor, “I could be wrong but I think I’ve got it,” and I handled him the ms.

“Got what?” he countered dryly, “the clap?”

“You know, that Manchester thing we discussed at the last prelunch confab.” While he read, I paced about, flapped my arms in a gesture of uncertainty and humble doubt. “Oh, it may need a little tightening up, brightening up, granted, but I hope you’ll agree that the essence is there.”

For a while he didn’t speak, just sat with his head resting on one hand staring down at the last page. Finally he raised his eyes; his eyes were always somehow sad. “You really are out of your nut, aren’t you?

“Sorry, John,” I said. “Don’t follow.”

He looked back at the ms., moved his hands a little away from it as though it were a poisonous thing. Then he spoke with great seriousness: “I think you ought to have your head examined.”

“My head is swell,” I said, and wished to elaborate, “my head . . .” but suddenly I felt very weary. I had evidently hit on a cow sacred even to the cynical Fox.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not a prude or anything like that, but this . . .”—he touched the ms. with a cough which seemed to stifle a retch— . . . “I mean, this is the most . . . grotesque . . . obscene . . . well, I’d rather not even discuss it. Frankly, I think you’re in very real need of psychiatric attention.”

“Do you think Hack will go for it?” I asked in perfect frankness.

Fox averted his eyes and began to drum his fingers on the desk.

“Look, uh, I’ve got quite a bit of work to do this morning, so, you know, if you don’t mind. . . .”

“Gone too far, have I, Fox? Is that it? Maybe you’re missing the point of the thing—ever consider that?”

“Listen,” said Fox stoutly, lips tightened, one finger raised in accusation, “you show this . . . this thing to anybody else, you’re liable to get a big smack in the kisser!” There was an unmistakable heat and resentment in his tone—a sort of controlled hysteria.

“How do you know I’m not from the C.I.A.?” I asked quietly. “How do you know this isn’t a test?” I gave him a shrewd narrow look of appraisal. “Isn’t it just possible, Fox, that this quasi-indignation of yours is, in point of fact, simply an act? A farce? A charade? An act, in short, to save your own skin!?!”

He had succeeded in putting me on the defensive. But now, steeped in Chink poet cunning, I had decided that an offense was the best defense, and so plunged ahead. “Isn’t it true, Fox, that in this parable you see certain underlying homosexual tendencies which you unhappily recognize in yourself? Tendencies, I say, which to confront would bring you to the very brink of, ‘fear and trembling,’ so to speak.” I was counting on the Kierkegaard allusion to bring him to his senses.

“You crazy son of a bitch,” he said flatly, rising behind his desk, hands clenching and unclenching. He actually seemed to be moving towards me in some weird menacing way.

It was then I changed my tack. “Well listen,” I said, “what would you say if I told you that it wasn’t actually me who did that, but a Chinese poet? Probably a Commie . . . an insane Commie-fag-spade-Chinese poet. Then we could view it objectively, right?”

Fox, now crazed with his own righteous adrenalin, and somewhat encouraged by my lolling helplessly in the chair, played his indignation to the hilt. “Okay, Buster,” he said, towering above me, “keep talking, but make it good.”

“Well, uh, let’s see now. . . .” So I begin to tell him about my experience with the red-split. And speaking in a slow, deliberate, very serious way, I managed to cool him. And then I told him about an insight I had gained into Viet Nam, Cassius Clay, Chessman, the Rosenbergs, and all sorts of interesting things. He couldn’t believe it. But, of course, no one ever really does—do they?

©  Terry Southern

Terry Southern (1924–1995) was an American satirist, author, journalist, screenwriter, and educator and is considered one of the great literary minds of the second half of the twentieth century. His bestselling novels—Candy (1958), a spoof on pornography based on Voltaire’s Candide, and The Magic Christian (1959), a satire of the grossly rich also made into a movie starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr—established Southern as a literary and pop culture icon. Literary achievement evolved into a successful film career, with the Academy Award–nominated screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which he wrote with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George, and Easy Rider  (1969), which he wrote with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern was educated at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He served in the Army during World War II, and was part of the expatriate American café society of 1950s Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. In Paris, he befriended writers James Baldwin, James Jones, Mordecai Richler, and Christopher Logue, among others, and met the prominent French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. His short story “The Accident” was published in the inaugural issue of the Paris Review in 1953, and he became closely identified with the magazine’s founders, Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who became his lifelong friends. It was in Paris that Southern wrote his first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), a satire of 1950s Los Angeles.

When he returned to the States, Southern moved to Greenwich Village, where he took an apartment with Aram Avakian (whom he’d met in Paris) and quickly became a major part of the artistic, literary, and music scene populated by Larry Rivers, David Amram, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac, among others. After marrying Carol Kauffman in 1956, he settled in Geneva until 1959. There he wrote Candy with friend and poet Mason Hoffenberg, and The Magic Christian. Carol and Terry’s son, Nile, was born in 1960 after the couple moved to Connecticut, near the novelist William Styron, another lifelong friend.

Three years later, Southern was invited by Stanley Kubrick to work on his new film starring Peter Sellers, which became, Dr. Strangelove. Candy, initially banned in France and England, pushed all of America’s post-war puritanical buttons and became a bestseller. Southern’s short pieces have appeared in the Paris Review, Esquire, the Realist, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Argosy, Playboy, and the Nation, among others. His journalism for Esquire, particularly his 1962 piece “Twirling at Ole Miss,” was credited by Tom Wolfe for beginning the New Journalism style. In 1964 Southern was one of the most famous writers in the United States, with a successful career in journalism, his novel Candy at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and Dr. Strangelove a hit at the box office.

After his success with Strangelove, Southern worked on a series of films, including the hugely successful Easy Rider. Other film credits include The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Barbarella, and The End of the Road. He achieved pop-culture immortality when he was featured on the famous album cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. However, despite working with some of the biggest names in film, music, and television, and a period in which he was making quite a lot of money (1964–1969), by 1970, Southern was plagued by financial troubles.

He published two more books: Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), a collection of stories and other short pieces, and Blue Movie (1970), a bawdy satire of Hollywood. In the 1980s, Southern wrote for Saturday Night Live, and his final novel, Texas Summer, was published in 1992. In his final years, Southern lectured on screenwriting at New York University and Columbia University.  He collapsed on his way to class at Columbia on October 25, 1995, and died four days later.

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John Calley and Terry (photo courtesy of Steve Schapiro)

Introduction by Mike Golden

“WHAT’S THE DELAY?”

Without a shadow of a doubt the hippest dicitonary you can find is too lame to define hip. Anyway, hipsters are hep, not hip. Or at least according to the dictionary definitions, which all sort of hem and haw, not wanting to be caught showing their well informed, but stylish cube, in case a real hipster is looking it up. Of course a real hipster would never look it up; if you have to ask I can’t tell you is the line that pretty much defines the state of the understatment. In short, people who talk about it are on the far end of the Adoption Curve, so by the time whatever it is that they think it is gets to them, it’s already over and being reinvented back at the source.

Only one underground figure has ever come through that mundane mulch after crossing over the bridge into the mainstream miasma and come back to the cognescenti with his edge intact. I speak of the real Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Terry SOUTHERN himself, American screenwriting’s high priest of hiposie, Godfather of Head Lit, and galloping guru of what lengths the twisted postmodern psyche will go thru just to get off.

On October 29th, 1995, SOUTHERN finally got off for good, passing away at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Manhattan, of a respiratory ailment. While lying there waiting for the inevitable his last words (to his son Nile) were, “What’s the delay?” He had collapsed four days earlier while on the way to teach a screenwriting class at Columbia University.

The major bridge between the black humor and beat aesthetic, SOUTHERN was a co-screenwriter of such classic films as Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), and Easy Rider (1969), and also worked on The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Barbarella (1968) and The End Of The Road (1970), which he also produced. His books included the novel Candy (1958), which he wrote jointly with Mason Hoffenberg; the novels Flash and Filigree (1958), The Magic Christian - for which he also wrote the script (1959), Blue Movie (1970), and Texas Summer(1992); and Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), a collection of short fiction and other writing, as well as Virgin (an illustrated history of Virgin Records – 1995).

This interview started in February of 1989, and went on in numerous different sessions into 1992. I’d been trying to interview him for months for an article I was writing about Maurice Girodias and Olympia Press, but hadn’t had much success reaching him until he called out of the blue one day from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and said he wanted to talk. I imagined I was about get one of those truly weird, bizarre ritualistic death bed confessionals, but everything was benign that time, buffs, and Terry wasn’t close to digging himself the deep six just yet. In fact, when we met he looked as chipper as he did on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. We talked for about four hours that night, then just as I was about to leave he whipped open his bathrobe like a world class flasher who’s just been discovered by The Wide World of Sports, and with impeccable timing asked, “Want to see my scars?”

We met at least a dozen times over the next few years, talked often on the phone, and even more often he left long, wildly funny (duck) messages on my machine about other writers he admired and the act of writing itself. “The important thing about writing,” he once said, “is the capacity to astonish.” And his worked proved that was certainly his trademark. As this interview shows he obviously had more than a few things he wanted to get off his chest. At one point, after he agreed to work with me on a mini-series based on my article on Paris in the 50s, I asked him if he minded if we fictionalized that portion of his life. Without missing a beat, he said, “My life is fiction.”

- Mike Golden -

“. . .now dig this. . .”

THE TERRY SOUTHERN: INTERVIEW

SMOKE SIGNALS: How long did it take to write Candy?

TERRY SOUTHERN: It dragged on because a lot of times we were in different places. He would be in the south of France, and I would be in Paris, then it might be the other way around. So we’d be mailing each other the stuff. And we’re talking pre-FedX, of course, so it took awhile.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was that your first novel?

SOUTHERN: No, that was Flash And The Filagree.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Is that the one you wrote on the barge?

SOUTHERN: I started that on the barge, yes.

SMOKE SIGNALS: And Alex (Trocchi) was on an accompanying barge writing Cain’s Book?

SOUTHERN: (chuckles)Yes, we were barge ‘Captains,’ as they called themselves – rather eupemistically since it was a job so lowly that it was ordinarily held by guys who had been kicked out of the Longshore-man’s Union – old winos and the like – being replaced now by this new breed, the dope head writer. But it was one of those classic writer’s jobs, like hotel clerk, night watchman, fire-tower guy, etcetra, with practically no duties (“Just keep her tied up and pumped out”). Alex found it by chance, wandering around the West Side docks after a few hours at the White Horse Tavern. The guy who did the hiring happened to be Scottish – a Scotsman, called ‘Scotty’, in fact. So he took a fancy to Alex, Alex being a Ludgate Scholar from Glasgow, and boss-charm besides. (Scottish accent; “Have ye had any experience at sea, lad?” “Only with small craft, sir – punting on the Clyde and the like.” “Good enough, lad, I like the cut of yer jib.”) So Alex was in. And about half a dozen of us – of similar stamp and kidney – were quick to follow. . .under auspices of The Great Trok.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Weren’t they garbage scows?

SOUTHERN: The ones we were on carried rocks. They were hauling huge boulders up to the sea wall they were building, a great ocean-jetty a few miles off shore. Hauling these rocks down from a quarry at the top of the Hudson, about a three-day trip. And you could take people along. It got to be a ‘social must’, going up river on the barge. Nelson Algren came a couple of times, David Solomon and Seymour Krim, Chris-topher Logue and Jimmy Baldwin. And, of course, Mason would come along quite often. I remember once, after a great hash rave-up, Jimmy just sort of collaposed over the side and Mason had to pull him back aboard, after extracting some sort of weird promise. In jest, of course. So life on the barge was not without interest.

SMOKE SIGNALS: When was this? The early 50′s?

SOUTHERN: That sounds about right, ’52, ’53. I’m the worst on dates.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was this right after you came back from Paris?

SOUTHERN: Yes, when I came back from Paris, Alex was working on the barges. Before that I never knew that their was anyone on a barge. But there’s a cabin with a bed and coal stove, and, of course, a deck about the size of a football field. It could accomodate a lot of stowaways, even when it was loaded with these gigantic boulders. Sometimes we would be staked out in the middle of the river, several barges tied together. So we could party. Any-way it was a good job for a writer in those days.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Sounds like a good job for a writer right now.

SOUTHERN: Maybe we should check it out.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Maybe we should. Was this about the time Olympia released Candy?

SOUTHERN: Yes, and it was being smuggled through customs and circulated around New York. You could get it at the Gotham Book Mart. In fact, Mason and I brought in a few copies ourselves and sold them to her (Frances Stelloff). And there was this one guy, Peter Israel, an editor at Putnam, who was very perceptive about certain things, and he realized the book had some kind of interesting potential, so he was good enough not to ask us to “tone it down,” as everyone suggested. Actually it turned out not to have many four-letter words anyway, so toning it down would have destroyed it. Then it just took off. It was on the bestseller list for about 11 months.

SMOKE SIGNALS: It was a phenomena. It must have made a lot of money. . .

SOUTHERN: No, just before the six months royalty statement was due, Girodias made a deal with some fellow for a pirated edition. So the royalties were held up, indefinitely.

SMOKE SIGNALS: By this time the copyright was gone?

SOUTHERN: Yeah. It was one of those things where if a book in English is first published outside the U.S., you have to apply for something called an ‘ad-interim copyright’, which is good for six months, then has to be renewed – every six months until it’s published here. Well, we knew nothing about this, but I guess Girodias did because a whole swarm of paperback publishers started putting it out, fly by night. One in particular–

SMOKE SIGNALS: Lancer?

SOUTHERN: Yeah, Lancer.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was that the Maxwell Kenton edition?

SOUTHERN: Yeah, Maxwell Kenton. Girodias was forced into that once when he was ultra-hot with Customs. They had this list of books that were not allowed out of France or into the U.S., so to beat this rap, he changed the title. For a while it was called Lollipop.

SMOKE SIGNALS: That’s major trivia.

SOUTHERN: Yeah. And the name of the author was Maxwell Kenton. A name I first used with David Burnett, of all people. He was the son of Martha Foley and Whit Burnett of The Best American Short Stories fame. We were collaborating on some short detective stuff, and even sold a couple to Argosy Magazine, and we used the pseudonym ‘Maxwell Kenton’. So when Mason at one point had an attack of conscience and said, “Man, I’ve decided I don’t want my mother to know about this book,” we took the name Maxwell Kenton so his mother would be spared anguish at her Mah-Jong parties.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Were any of those early Maxwell Kenton stories reprinted?

SOUTHERN: They were printed, but not reprinted.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Were any of your stories printed in Merlin?

SOUTHERN: Yeah. It’s awfully hard to find though. Have you seen it?

SMOKE SIGNALS: I have one issue Iris Owens gave me. Actually she was the one who turned me on to the whole Paris-Olympia scene. I’d already read you of course, but not Alex (Trocchi) – well that’s not exactly true – I’d read Frances Lengel down at the dirty book store before I knew he was Trocchi. (laughter) Was it actually a real scene there? Or is that my romantic exaggeration?

SOUTHERN: Oh it was a terrific scene. Because the cafes were such great places to hang out, they were so open, you could smoke hash at the tables, if you were fairly discreet. There was the expatriot crowd, which was more or less comprised of interesting people, creatively inclined. So we would fall out there at one of the cafes, about four in the afternoon, sip Pernod until dinner, then afterwards go to a jazz club. Bird and Diz, and Miles and Bud Powell, and Monk were all there, and if not someone else. Lester Young and Don Byas. It was a period when The Village and St. Germain des Pres were sort of interchangeable, just going back and forth. The thing to do was take a freighter – it was the cheapest way to go. And it was a comfortable and interesting way to go because it was long – 13 days. And the Scandinavian ones had pretty good food. Relative to what we were used to. There were only about eight passengers. We’d eat at The Captain’s Table – and he was invariably some kind of great lush. So he was always fun. And The Village was swinging then. Once in a while you’d find yourself homesick, for one place or the other, but it was okay, because both were good places to arrive at.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was this about a five year period?

SOUTHERN: From about ’48 to ’52. It was also the bullfight era’. Sort of checking out Hemingway, beginning with San Sebastian, then going on to Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and ending up in Seville. Mason and I did that a few times, and in 1950 or ’51 we ran with the bulls in Pamplona. That was pretty weird. He talked me into that, like he did with joining the kibbutz that time. He was very persuasisve.

SMOKE SIGNALS: He talked you into it.

SOUTHERN: Yes, we would save up some money and just take off, ‘On the Road’ style. Sometimes we had a car, other times we took the train. It was always a gas.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I never met him, but I’ve heard amazing stories about Mason.

SOUTHERN: (laughing) Well, he was a poet. A poet with a sense of humor. And I like I say, he was ultra persusive. Boss persuasion. Once he convinced me to join a kibbutz with him and go to Israel, despite my complete ignorance of anything Jewish. So we packed some books and clothes and checked into the Holland-American kibbutz freighter, into a dormitory type situation, with about 60 other guys. The ship was still at the dock, on 11th Avenue – not far from the old barge, as a matter of fact, and we had a couple of days to wait until they got their full roster. So we were put to work in the hole, cleaning the boilers – an unbelievable shitty job, plunging our arms up to the shoulder into these furnace pipes and bringing out mountains of wet black soot. Gross City. Anyway on the first morning when we woke up, one guy is already awake, breaking out over the fact that 30 dollars is missing from his footlocker. Someone else says “Okay, we’ve got to put locks on the footlockers.” Someone else says “No, we’ve got to trust each other. Whoever took the money needed it.” This doesn’t go over to well with the guy who lost the 30 bucks. He’s still ranting. So immediately this tight-knit and brotherly group is divided ito two bickering factions. Hardly the utopian comraderie we had expected. So we split. Went to the White Horse and had a couple of tall ones.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Sounds like you were really stretched to the nth.

SOUTHERN: Well yeah, it was great until the problems with drugs started.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Did that start with Alex?

SOUTHERN: I think with Alex and Mason picking up on it in The Village.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Alex wasn’t doing junk in Paris? John Caulder told me Cocteau turned him on.

SOUTHERN: Yes, well he was doing a lot of things, a lot of opium, but there it was really recreational. Cerebal. Had a nice decadent, upper class tone to it. When it got back here they really got hooked into a bad scene. You’d have to be very wealthy indeed not to get involved in anti social behavior to support your habit. Alex putting his girl on the street. . . Did you meet Lyn?

SMOKE SIGNALS: No.

SOUTHERN: She’s dead now.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was this all happening at the same time Hollywood came calling for Candy?

SOUTHERN: That was later on.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Wasn’t Blue Movie based on the shooting of Candy?

SOUTHERN: No. Blue Movie was based on an idea that Stanley Kubrick had. Somebody came by one day with some porn footage. So we looked at it, and he said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if one day someone who was an artist would do that – using really beautiful actors and good equipment.” So that was the genesis. Of course I was hoping he would do it as a film. But he’s surprisingly puritanical and shy. When he read part of it, still in manuscript, he said, “Congratulations, you’ve written the definitive blow job.” There actually was a tremendous amount of interest in doing Blue Movie. It nearly happened a couple of times, and one of those times it was fantastic. Ringo Starr had the option – he had it for a couple of years. And John Cally, who was a very hip Producer at MGM – he produced The Loved One that I worked on, and he became the President of Warner Brothers for a brief time, so he was in this heavy decision-making position, and said, “Well now it’s time to do Blue Movie.” He was convinced that the first studio to come out with a quality full length film showing erection and penetration, using stars, would go over the top. “It’ll be like Gone With The Wind,” he kept saying. Super enthusiastic about it. So he got Mike Nichols to direct. And since John was practically living with Julie Andrews at the time, he was able to get her of all people, as the girl. John’s diabolical genius envisioned Mary Poppins getting banged for the world. And so Mike Nichols was ready to go – ready to do it – I couldn’t believe it – so John called Nichols, put me on the other phone and said, “Terry Southern’s here now, and he’s worried you’re not going to do erection and penetration.” It could actually be cut in, or simulated, but it had to look like it – you know, like a pan instead of a cut. So he said, “yes.” And they reassured me on the phone. So I went to see Ringo, and I said, “Look, there’s this chance to do this.” He said, “Right, right, right. . .just make sure you’ve got a proper deal.” I think they might try to use Buck Henry on the script. But the whole thing got bogged down in lawyers. It turned out that Mike Nichols has something like a superstition about allowing other people to be cut into his projects. And the deal fell through, in a grotesque hangup between Nichols and Ringo’s lawyers. But if it had been done, with those kind of credentials, between Nichols and Julie Andrews, they could hardly have dismissed it as shabby porn.

SMOKE SIGNALS: That’s tough to top, but what was the real story of Easy Rider? Did Dennis Hopper actually write it?

SOUTHERN: (laughs) If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting room floor he’ll put in for screenplay credit. That’s the name of the game of a certain Den Hopper. No, it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film – but, by George, he manages to do it every time. The precise way it came down was that Dennis and Peter (Fonda) came to me with an idea. Peter was under contract to A.I.P. for several motorcycle movies, and he still owed them one. Dennis persuaded him to let him (Dennis) direct the next one, and, under the guise of making an ordinary A.I.P. potboiler they would make something interesting and worthwhile – which I would write. So they came to my place on 36th street in New York, with an idea for a story – a sort of hippy / dope / caper. Peter was to be the actor / producer, Dennis the actor / director, and a certain yours truly, the writer. I was able to put them up there – in a room, incidentally, later immortalized by the sojourn of Dr. W. S. Benway (Burroughs). So we began smoking dope in earnest and having a non-stop story-conference. The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score, and split. Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and indeed was already slated to be the film’s final poetic sequence. We would occasionally dictate to an elderly woman typist who firmly believed in the arrival, and presence everywhere of the inhabitants of Venus, so she would talk about this. Finally I started taping her and then had her rap about it transcribed, how they were everywhere – Jack Nicholson’s thing was based on that So you can see that during these conferences the hippy/dope/caper premise went through quite a few changes. The first notion was that they not be bikers but a duo of daredevil car drivers barnstorming around the U.S. being exploited by a series of unscrupulous promoters until they were finally disgusted enough to quit. Then one day the dope smoke cleared long enough to remember that Peter’s commitment was for a motorcycle flic, and we switched over pronto. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension – when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred and intolerance for anything that is remotely different from himself – somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper (imitates Hopper in Apocalypse Now): “You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!?” I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system. Sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that it (their death) was more or less mandatory.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Are you saying there was no improvisation in the film?

SOUTHERN: No, no, I’m saying that the improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene – a scene which already existed.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Then how did Dennis and Peter get included in the screenplay credits?

SOUTHERN: After they had seen a couple of screenings of it on the coast, I got a call from Peter. He said that he and Dennis liked the film so much they wanted to be in on the screenplay credits. Well, one of them was the producer and other was the director so there was no way the Writer’s Guild was going to allow them to take a screenplay credit unless I insisted. And even then they said there was supposed to be a ‘compulsory arbitration’ because too often producers and directors will muscle themselves into a screenplay credit through some under-the-table deal with the writer. They (the WGA) said I would be crazy to allow it and wanted to be assured I wasn’t being coerced or bribed in any way. Because they hate the idea of these ‘hyphenates’ – you know, writer-producer, director-producer. . .because of that history of muscle I mentioned. Anyway, we were great friends at the time, so I went along with it without much thought. So I actually did it out of a sense of comraderi, said that they could use it, and would help them out. So I just went along with it. (Hopper’s) always been extremely insecure, and I gave him credit because I wanted to pull him out. In Interview he pretty much claimed credit for the whole script. I called him, and I called the woman who interviewed him. He said he didn’t remember saying it. Then I heard he said it somewhere else.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Writers appear to be the lowest of the breed in the film biz.

SOUTHERN: Yes. Except we still have persuasion. Which can be considerable sometimes. Which Tony Richardson was great about. Suggestions. . .Of course Stanley(Kubrick), Stanley was like Chaplin. . .He always tried to compose his own music – he’d get Public Domain stuff, existing stuff, he’d hardly ever use a composer, ’cause he liked it to read a film by Stanley Kubrick. But of course, he deserves that.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was that a good working situation?

SOUTHERN: Working with Stanley was terrific. It was ideal, although the circum-stances may seem peculiar – in the back seat of a big car. The film was being shot at Shepperton, outside London, in the winter. So he would pick me up at 4:30 in the morning and we would make this hour-long trip to the studio. It was a big Bentley or a Rolls, so the passenger part was something like a railway compartment, with folding-out writing desks and good lighting. It would be pitch black outside and really cold, and we would be in this cozy-rosey compartment, in a creative groove, working on the scene to be shot that day.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Writing it? Or rewriting it?

SOUTHERN: Well, let’s say trying to improve it. Kubrick would say “Now what’s the most outrageous thing this guy (a character in the scene) would say at this point?” and hopefully I could come up with something like “If you try any preversion in there, I’ll blow your head off.”

SMOKE SIGNALS: Keenen Wynn to Peter Sellers in the phone booth?

SOUTHERN: Yes. Col. ‘Bat’ Guano (“if, indeed, that is your name”) to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. The thing about Kubrick is that he’s not only extraordinarily creative, but he will encourage the other person to go all out, and not try to keep a ‘reasonable lid’ on it. Stanley’s like a kind of chess playing poet. One side of his brain is very scientific, the other very poetic.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Over the years I heard talk of a ‘missing scene’ or a sequence that was deleted from Strangelove. What’s the story on that?

SOUTHERN: Well that would be the fabulous so-called pie-fight episode. You may recall the scene near the end of the film, in the War Room, after the bomb has been dropped, and Strangelove suddenly stands up from his wheelchair, and says, Mine Fuehrer, I can valk!” And he takes a step? Recall that?

SMOKE SIGNALS: I do indeed.

SOUTHERN: Well, in the missing sequence, after taking one step he falls flat on his face and starts trying to get back in his wheelchair, but each time it scoots out of his grasp. Meanwhile, parallel to this action in another part of the War Room, the Russian Ambassador is caught again trying to take pictures of the “Big Board’, George C. Scott nails him and again they’re fighting in the War Room.’ So Scott exposes about 18 micro-mini spy cameras on the Ambassador – in his wrist-watch, cuff-links, tie-pin, on his ring-finger, everywhere. But Scott says, “I think these are dummy cameras. I think he’s got the real McCoy concealed on his person.” And he turns to the detail of MP’s who have come in. “I want you to search him very carefully, boys,” he says, “and don’t overlook any of the six bodily orifices.” And the Russian Ambassador goes through this quick calculation, “vun. . .two. . .” and then when he reaches the last one, he freaks. “Vhy you Capitalist swine,” he says, and he reaches out of the frame, gets something and throws it at George C. Scott. I should mention that we have previously established a huge catering table that was wheeled in, laden with food, so they don’t have to leave the War Room during this crisis. So the Ambassador reaches out of the frame, grabs something from the table and throws it at Scott. We don’t see what it is immediately but Scott ducks, and this big custard pie hits the President in the face. The mere indignity of this is so monstrous that the President just faints dead away. Scott grabs him and keeps him from falling, and he’s holding him in his arms like a martyred hero, “Gentlemen,” he says to the others, “Our President has been struck down in the prime of his life. . .by a custard pie. I say ‘Massive Retaliation!” And he throws something at the Ambassador. And it misses and hits one of the other Joint Chiefs. So this immense pie-fight begins – between Army, Navy, Air Force – a bit of inter-service rivalry, if you grasp the innuendo. Now while this pie-fight is going on, Strangelove is still trying to get back into this wheelchair, moving like a snake across the floor of the War Room, and the chair continuing to scoot out of his grasp each time he reaches for it. Finally he gets to the end of the War Room, and the chair is against the wall and it looks like he’s got it this time. But it scoots away again. So Strangelove pulls himself up so that he’s sitting with his back against the wall. And he’s watching the pie-fight in the distance. Then his hand – his uncontrollable right hand – reaches inside his coat and comes out with a Luger pistol and points it at his head. He grabs his wrist with his other hand and grapples for the pistol, which goes off with a tremendous roar. Then cut to the long shot of all these generals in a freeze frame. And Strangelove says, “Enough of these childish games. We have work to do.” So they all stand there staring at him in complete silence, until Scott recognizes this is the guy to get tight with, so he walks all the way across the War Room floor, and says, “Doctor, may I help you?” And helps him into his wheelchair. He starts pushing him back across the floor, which by now is so deep in custard pies it resembles a beach – and sure enough we quickly pass the President and the Russian ambassador sitting there crosslegged like two children, doing sand castles, making mountains. And Strange-love says, “Ah too bad. Apparently their minds have snapped under the strain. Perhaps they’ll have to be institution-alized.” And so Scott continues pushing him across to this group of officers and CIA types, who are so covered they look like ghosts. And he says, “Well, boys, I think the future of this great nation of ours is in the hands of people like Doc Strangelove, and I think we owe him a vote of thanks. Let’s hear it for the good Doctor.” And in a really eerie (whispering) voice, they go, “hip-hip hooray, hip-hip hooray.” And then he continues pushing him across the floor as they start singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow.” So this counter camera pulls up so you’ve got this long shot of the ultimate allegiance between this mad scientist and this general from The Joint Chief of Staff. And then they cut to the explosion and the song “We’ll Meet Again,” comes in – and the credits rise.

SMOKE SIGNALS: That was the cut?

SOUTHERN: Not without good reason. The problem was that Stanley, great genius director that he is, forgot to say, “Listen, what we’re representing here is interservice rivalry.” Which is one of the most evil things – each time there’s an appropriation to one group the other says, “listen, we’ve got to have that too.” And there’s no stopping the Pentagon on this level. It’s viscous. And he forgot to tell them it’s viscous. So what’s happening in this pie fight is that people are laughing, and they shouldn’t be laugh-ing. It’s supposed to be deadly serious. And it was such a funny situation, that people outside the periphery, including Stanley and myself, were tossing pies into the melee, you see. And so it lost its edge. It was like a comedy scene, when everything else in the film had been played straight, except once when the Coca-Cola machine spurted in Keenan Wynn’s face. So that’s why he decided not to have it in. I saw it again recently, and think it holds up well.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Me too. So does The Loved One. It recently came out for the first time on video, after all these years. Why did it take so long?

SOUTHERN: For some weird reason, they held it back – it’s an MGM film – Haskell Wexler, who was the coproducer and cinemaphotographer, had a copy he sent me, and I got a duplicate made, but you couldn’t get it. The casting on that was great. Re-member that sequence with Milton Berle and Margarite Leighton when the dog dies and she doesn’t want to let them bury the dog?

SMOKE SIGNALS: Yeah. that was played really strong. But Rod Steiger – Joyboy and his mother was too outrageous to describe.

SOUTHERN: Everytime I see Rod Steiger, rather, the few times I’ve seen him, he always talks about that. He was carried away by that role, he got into that role so much. . .He had his hair in rollers on the set. Running around on the set when he should have been resting, dishing with the girls. It had such a great cast: John Gielgud, Lionel Stander, Robert Morley, Jonathan Winters, Robert Morse. . .

SMOKE SIGNALS: You wrote the scripts for The Cincinnati Kid, Barberella, The End of The Road and The Magic Christian, right. What happened to The Magic Christian? I loved the book, the book has a whole life outside itself – was Guy Grand based on anybody in particular?

SOUTHERN: Well it’s sort of a composite of people I’ve known or imagined. For some reason I’ve always thought of the actor Robert Morley, as the physical type. He has a nice absurdly pompous look about him.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I couldn’t wait for the movie, but. . .

SOUTHERN: Well, I had written a really good script of The Magic Christian for Peter Sellers, then he and the director, Joe McGrath, were in London, supposedly setting up the film while I finished working on an adaptation of John Barth’s End Of The Road - which incidentally, was one of the most interesting films I’ve been involved with. But instead of waiting for me to get to London, Peter who was always ultra-hypper and antsy about everything, gets Spike Milligan and a couple of his Goon Show cronies to rewrite a few scenes – without having ever read the book. Dig that for gross weird. All they knew was that it was about an eccentric billionaire who staged elaborate practical jokes. So they slipped into a bit of infantile self-indulgence, with some pointlessly des-tructive behavior by Guy Grand. Totally out of character. They had him cutting up Rembrants for Chistsake! So I’m afraid that film has, in my view, some serious lapses.

SMOKE SIGNALS: The book had an incredible following – I met a number of drug dealers over the years who kept it locked up along with their personal stash.

SOUTHERN: The ultimate compliment? Peter Sellers, despite what happened to the film, bought a hundred copies when it first came out in England. He would give them to friends at Christmas. In fact, he was the one who turned Stanley (Kubrick) on to. . .this unique brand of humor.

SMOKE SIGNALS: You seem to have been able to go back and forth between films and prose easier than most writers. When you started writing films, was it hard to write prose?

SOUTHERN: I think it was just the monetary thing. I got hooked on the bread.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Do you find a physical difference between writing prose and writing screenplays.

SOUTHERN: Well, there’s quite a differ-ence in the deadline aspect of it. I’ve always sort of visualized things when I wrote prose, so that part comes easy to me. In fact easier than prose, because what I really like to write is dialogue.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I heard Paddy Chayefsky once said, “Terry SOUTHERN: writes the best dialogue in America.”

TERRY SOUTHERN: He wrote that in a letter to Peter Beard. He was the best around, so coming from him that means quite a bit.

SMOKE SIGNALS: The first dialogue that ever totally blew me away was from Red Dirt Marijuana and Razor Fight, the first two stories in the Red Dirt collection. In fact, back in 1970 or 71, I started adapting those stories for Richard Pryor.

SOUTHERN: Without an option, of course.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I was going to come to you when the first draft was finished. C.K. was the perfect vehicle for Pryor to become a movie star. But before we could see if it was going to work as a screenplay, or get in touch with you to option it, Lady Sings The Blues hit, and WANGO, he became a movie star, and unfortunately the money came rolling over him and that was the end of any chance he had to do film work that was on the same level as his standup.

SOUTHERN: I can see how that happened.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was A Texas Summer based on Red Dirt Marijuana and Razor Fight?

SOUTHERN: Not exactly. The first two stories in Red Dirt Marijuana are excerpts from A Texas Summer. It just took me another 20 years to finish it as a novel.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Were you the white kid, Hal? Is it based on you growing up in Texas?

SOUTHERN: Reading it over, it seems to be based quite a bit on that. Not consciously, but I certainly drew on my childhood experiences. It’s about one summer in the life of an impressionable 13-year-old farmboy, and especially his relationship with a 35-year-old black, who’s the hired hand. And he – the black guy – is relatively hip and laid back, with a terrific sense of humor – he was, you know, one of those classic ‘great-spades-of-Texas’ types; works hard, drinks sweet Lucy, smokes a little dope, fabulous story teller, great ball player, great crap shooter, eats bar-b-que so hot it makes your eyes water, gets into the occasional razor fight, the whole store. Well, I knew a guy like that. Fantastic guy. A tremendous influence on every white kid he came across. Real down home guru, without realizing it, of course.

SMOKE SIGNALS: How did growing up in Texas shape you as a writer.

SOUTHERN: Well Texas is probably a good place for a boy to grow up, in a Huck Finn sort of way, like one big outdoor playground, with a lot of hunting and fishing Dad-and-Lad stuff going on. But, as Liz Taylor said, “It’s hell on horses and women.” Because it’s a cultural desert. But once, when I was seven or eight and sick in in bed, my mother decided to read to me. The book she chose, for some odd reason, since her own leaning was more towards Louis Bromfield, was a volume of the great E. A. Poe – The Gold Bug, if memory serves. Well, for a young Texas lout, E. A. Poe was heady brew. And it was a perfect turn-on to “Quality-lit,” of a weirdo bent. I was hooked on Poe. And Poe, of course, is the gateway to the greatest. If marijuana leads to cocaine, Poe most certainly leads to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce, Celine, Lautreamont, Huysmans, Nathaniel West, Faulkner, Sartre, etcetra, etcetra, ad glorium.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Ad glorium. . .

Peter Fonda showed up at the carriage house on East 36th Street one rainy night in November of 1967. The son of Henry Fonda and sister of Jane, Peter gave an impressive Golden Globe-nominated performance as a solider in The Victors (1963) but the studios tabbed him a new romantic lead pairing him with Sandra Dee in the corny Tammy and the Doctor (1963) and with Sharon Hugueny in The Young Lovers (1964). Fonda was saved from becoming another Troy Donahue when American International Pictures asked him to step in at the last minute as a replacement for actor George Chakiris who balked at doing his own motorcycle riding in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966). Peter played Heavenly Blues the leader of a local Hell’s Angels motorcycle club chapter. The film was an immediate hit and suddenly a long-haired Peter Fonda was cool in the eyes of the youth culture. Signed to do two more films for AIP, Fonda next starred as a TV commercial director who decides to experiment with LSD in The Trip (1967). He had one more film owed on his contract and that’s when he knocked on our door.

Terry had known Peter Fonda from the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1964 when it was a sleepy town in the doldrums between cinematic highs, and the children of the great stars of another era were trying to develop careers … or not. Terry and I would spend time at the Malibu home of Bobby Walker where we met and became friendly with Peter.

Terry was expecting Peter when he turned up at our doorstep on that chilly autumn night. While Terry was in Rome a few weeks prior he had lunch with Peter who was making a movie for Roger Vadim and where he shared with Terry an idea for a film that came to him in a hotel room in Toronto. Per Terry it was first about two daredevil racecar drivers being exploited by greedy promoters but then morphed into a tale about two bikers who score some dope, go on a road trip, and have a series of “interesting incidences” when Peter realized that he owed American International Pictures one more biker film.

Terry was very enthusiastic about the project but Peter felt he wouldn’t have enough in the budget to pay Terry’s fee to write the script. After I let Peter into our home he reiterated the plot once again to Terry and said he had a title for the movie, something like The Loners. Terry, sitting on our golden couch, raised his hand to indicate a marquee, and said, “Why not call it Easy Rider.” Terry once again expressed great interest in writing the screenplay. As I remember, which differs from Peter’s recollection, the rest of the conversation went something as follows:

Peter: “We can’t afford you Terry. Can you do it on deferment?”

Terry: “I can’t, but I’ll do it for scale and a percentage. Who is going to direct?”

Peter: “Dennis Hopper.”

Terry: “Are you sure!?!”

Dennis had never directed before and had such a bad reputation at this time. Despite his trepidation about Hopper, Terry agreed with the understanding of receiving a percentage of the profits and was to come up with the “interesting incidences.” Fonda was pleased, and rushed out into the night. This was the era of oral agreements and handshake deals, and Terry had no reason to doubt Peter.

Despite the fact that he had co-authored such classic movies as Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and Barbarella, Terry wasn’t getting any offers in the U.S. at this time. I thought it was a little strange, (soon we would learn that the FBI had a hand in Terry not working) but was not involved in his business. I assumed he had smart New York and Los Angeles people looking after his “best interests,” but it seems that they were looking out for their own welfare, where Terry only thought of the next project. Terry said to me once, “An agent never got me a job, but was always there to take their percentage.”

Peter returned after the holidays and moved into the monk-like half furnished room on the third floor. He and Terry finally got down to business, hired a typist from a typing pool in Washington D.C who came to the house, and started on the series of “interesting incidences.” They worked nonstop all day for about a month, Terry with his yellow pad and pencil, and Peter pacing around the living room—the better to think. The typist would come by about five o’clock in the afternoon and type up the pages, triple spaced, and then Terry would work on the script some more into the wee hours of the night.

One night, very late, Peter had gone out on the town. Terry continued to work with the typist. They finished up and were just talking while I made drinks. The typist mentioned that she had done a lot of typing for the government, and that these classified documents she was working on had to do with how there are alien people from outer space walking around amongst us, and working for the government. They looked just like us, and had infiltrated the highest offices, and had blended right in.

After she left, Terry got right to work on it and incorporated this into a scene he wrote with his good friend Rip Torn in mind. The part was that of the “Faulkner-like” country lawyer eventually played by Jack Nicholson in the movie. As Wyatt and Billy sit around a campfire with the lawyer getting stoned, he regales the bikers with this conspiracy theory about the government covering up the existence of aliens. Terry showed the scene to Rip and asked if he would do it. Rip was busy with rehearsals for his new play called The Cuban Thing, which coincidentally was the same play I had auditioned for but didn’t get. Rip said he would try to do the movie if his schedule worked out.

Eventually Dennis Hopper, who was to direct Easy Rider, arrived. Early in his career Hopper was being compared to James Dean. A confrontation with legendary director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958 pretty much blackballed him from the film industry though he remained active on television. Terry had met Dennis in 1965 when he was hired by Vogue to do a magazine piece on Hopper’s then-wife Brooke Hayward, daughter of the Broadway producer Leland Hayward. Dennis was not working as an actor at the time, but as a photographer. They had a house in the Hollywood Hills, and Dennis had quite a collection of contemporary art. Terry entitled his article, “The Loved House of the Dennis Hopper’s.”

We stayed friendly with Brooke and Dennis (Terry, always with the nicknames, called him “Den”), and we’d go to the house for dinner. Brooke would serve something wonderful and wisely go to bed. Dennis and Terry would retire, with drinks in hand, to the living room, which had a disconcerting dentist’s chair. I would find a cozy sofa and watch Dennis and Terry talk. Dennis would expound on his idea of how Shakespeare should be spoken, and rant on about a film he wanted to direct called The Last Movie, which he eventually managed to make. Terry loved madness and people behaving badly (and you couldn’t get any madder or badder than Hopper). Terry would draw this behavior out, and then go home and write “fiction.”

When Dennis showed up at our house in New York we let him stay in Nile’s room, which he complained about and rudely called “a closet.” I tried to stay out of the way as best I could. Dennis was there for about two weeks, and at night he and Peter would be pacing around my living room, gesturing, and throwing out ideas between passing joints between the three of them. Though Terry was a martini man he would just hold the joint and pass it along most times. Somebody had to stay straight to do the writing so Terry sat with his pencil and a long yellow pad on our golden couch, scribbling away. He would hand the pages to the typist and she would type them up immediately. Dennis would rant and rave, using a lot of four-letter words, and the typist would break into tears, and run sobbing out into the night. Terry would have to call the typing pool the next day, and get another typist. Terry suggested that they change the “drug of choice” from marijuana to cocaine, which was not in fashion yet, because pot was too bulky to be carrying on the motorcycles. Dennis thought that running the credits upside down might be interesting, and he also whined about why the two characters had to die.

Terry loved collaborating with other people. He always felt that two heads were better than one when creating a story or screenplay. Terry was really in his element sharing concepts with Peter and Dennis. He just loved to work in this free-for-all fashion with people yelling out story ideas while nestled on the sofa he jotted down the better ones in pencil on his yellow legal pad. Peter once remarked that Terry agreed to work on Easy Rider on a handshake “just for the sake of having the freedom to play with an idea that appealed to his individual nature.” This statement is oh-so-true.

Terry had the scripts neatly bound and held on to the original. He handed copies to Peter and Dennis, and off they went back to Hollywood. Terry also gave a script to Rip Torn who retained his copy after all these years.

Peter, who owed American International Pictures one more movie, took the script to studio heads James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. Peter and Dennis were trying to use this biker movie to make a more interesting statement about the current state of affairs in the U.S. but also as a springboard to launch Dennis’ directing career. But due to the proposed budget and the rampant drug use, AIP turned it down to Sam Arkoff’s forever regrets. Fonda then made an agreement with Bert Schneider who, along with director Bob Rafelson, brought The Monkees to television and produced their movie Head in 1968. Bert had a production deal with Columbia Pictures, which wound up distributing the movie. However, there was a stipulation as the studio gave Dennis and Peter about $40,000 to go to New Orleans Mardi Gras to shoot some test footage, which was eventually used in the film, to see if they could really pull off making a movie.

This shoot was scheduled to commence in March. At the last minute someone was bright enough to check and discovered Mardi Gras that year was in February so the rush was on to get to New Orleans for the parade, where one of the last scenes was to be shot in a graveyard. It was Peter’s soliloquy, and a photo exists of Terry and Peter discussing it, with Fonda clutching the script.

Terry and I flew down to New Orleans and found the cast and crew settled in a crummy motel at the airport. We caught the end of the parade and then went to the graveyard for Peter’s scene. When night came there was no crew to light the set. In the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind, a crew member said that there was so much chaos someone’s girlfriend had to hold the Sun Gun. I was that person. I had no idea what a Sun Gun was when I volunteered to help while standing late at night in a boggy, soggy New Orleans cemetery. Some guy’s voice came out of the dark, and said, “We have no one to hold the Sun Gun.” Trying to be helpful, I chirped, “I’ll do it!” Before I knew what was happening, a couple of burly guys strapped this giant, heavy battery pack around my waist, which caused me to sink further into the bog. I was to hold this pole the size of a broomstick with a bright light on the end and keep it steady on Peter’s face while he did his monologue. This was a lengthy speech and it took all night to shoot. I tried so hard to keep the pole steady, while I continued to sink further and further into the misty marsh. Peter was emoting like mad, and the crew was concentrating, knowing this was going to be a one-take shot that they only had one chance to get. Luckily, we got it. If not, I’m afraid that I might have disappeared completely into the bog never to be heard from again.

Everyone slept all the next day, which is odd for people who are supposed to be shooting a movie. In the morning I went wandering, and found a classic New Orleans funeral. I saw the Dirge and later the joyful exit, and the Second Line with umbrellas in the light drizzle of rain. Later that afternoon, we gathered in someone’s room in the motel. It had been raining all day, and Dennis insisted he needed the camera to film the neon lights reflected in the puddles. No one was about to give Dennis a camera. I went back to our room and didn’t see the camera go through the motel’s plate glass window.

The next day I told Terry that I was going back to New York. I returned home to East 36th Street, and a few days later Terry showed up. He looked perturbed but was tight-lipped about it. When I asked him what went on down there after I left, all he would manage to bark out was a “Hrrrmph.” Actress Karen Black, who played a New Orleans prostitute in the film, said Dennis’ behavior became so unruly that Terry turned to him and said, “The cacophony of your verbiage is driving me insane.” There was nothing more to shoot in New Orleans that I know of, and I guess they all de-camped. The filming was finished for the moment. Peter and Dennis returned to Hollywood with the screenplay to raise the rest of the money. Everyone in the film business knows you can’t get financing without a script.

Later, in the early summer after Columbia agreed to release Easy Rider, there was a meeting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side to discuss shooting the rest of the movie with Peter, Dennis, Terry, Rip Torn, myself, and a director whose name I can’t remember. Dennis was late so we went ahead and ordered drinks and appetizers. Terry was sitting on my left and Dennis’ place was on my right. I was the only woman at the table. Rip was on the other side of the round table, and so was Peter, who was talking to a couple of pretty girls sitting nearby. Dennis soon showed up in full Easy Rider regalia—long hair, bushy mustache, and fringed buckskin jacket. He didn’t sit down but continued to stand on my right at his place at the table. Agitated, he exclaimed, “Man, I’ve been lookin’ for shootin’ locations in Texas and man, I’m lucky I’m still alive—those mother-fuckin’, redneck bastards!” He then spotted Rip across the table and said, “Hey Rip, you’re from fuckin’ Texas, aren’t you?” Rip replied, “Yes, but don’t judge all bastards by me.” Dennis continued his ranting and, still standing, picked up the knife at his place setting and leaned across the table, brandishing the knife at Rip. Rip, who had been in the army and was a tough Texan, didn’t even get up, but leaned over the table, grabbed Dennis’ wrist, and twisted. The knife clanked to the table. Peter, who had been leaning back in his chair and balancing on two legs so he could flirt with the girls, fell over backwards. Rip, controlling his temper, offered to meet Dennis outside to finish the fight, and left the restaurant. Dennis sat down, acting as if nothing had happened, and continued to dominate the conversation all through dinner.

Needless to say, Rip refused to work with Dennis Hopper and backed out of the movie. He not only lost out on a memorable movie role but unfortunately for Rip the controversial play he was starring in The Cuban Thing about a Cuban family during Fidel Castro’s revolution closed after opening night. During previews a Cuban resistance group bombed the theatre in protest of the play.

Scrambling to find a replacement for Rip, Peter purportedly talked with William Wellman, Jr. about a role but when Wellman learned that Dennis was co-starring and directing he opted to work in a Bob Hope comedy instead. Finally, they found someone who would work with Dennis—Jack Nicholson who was recommended by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider. It was a star-making role for Jack, which was not surprising as Terry wrote wonderful dialogue for the character and Jack brilliantly brought to life this straight laconic Southern lawyer who smokes marijuana for the first time. At this point Terry had moved onto his next endeavor while Peter and Dennis traveled the country filming Easy Rider from Terry’s script.

Sometime in late 1968, Terry and I were in Southern California staying at the Chateau Marmont. We had brought his son Nile and Terry’s favorite dog Hunter (the dumbest pure bred English Pointer I had ever met). I decided to take a walk to the liquor store when who should pull up in his car—Dennis Hopper. He gave me a lift and then whined the whole way about how Peter and the producers snatched the Easy Rider negative away from him because they weren’t happy with his three-hour cut of the movie. He complained and bemoaned that they were going to ruin his vision never once giving Terry credit for any of the story ideas. We left LA for a skiing jaunt in Big Bear without ever finding out who won the battle between Dennis and Peter. It was to be the first of many between those two. Instead, Nile and I enjoyed our time on the slopes while Terry, pencil and pad in hand, remained at the bar hard at work on his next project, which he rarely would reveal to me.

Even though Terry created most of the dialogue for the movie, Peter and Dennis wanted a co-writing credit. They called him after watching a few screenings in LA. Though he felt it was an unfair demand, Terry got on the phone to the Writers Guild anyway, secure in his position as creator of Easy Rider. The Guild at first balked as it is apparently very strict about not giving directors and producers writing credit. Terry convinced the Guild that indeed they had done their share. He said, “The lads need a break.” Terry’s decision to help them out was all done in the spirit of “camaraderie.” They were all great friends at the time so Terry did it without much thought. Little did he know how much his “good buddies” would take advantage in the end.

Terry and I were in Europe when Easy Rider was released and by the time we returned to the States Terry was dumbfounded that the movie had become such a huge hit with the public. It resonated with a restless younger audience who was dissatisfied with the establishment and rebelled against it every way they could from taking drugs to practicing free love to protesting the Vietnam War. They identified with Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) two non-conformist outlaw hippie bikers who after scoring some cocaine in Mexico and selling it to a big time dealer (the notorious Phil Spector) in Los Angeles, stuff the cash in a plastic tube hidden in their gas tanks, and head out on the highway toward an imagined Utopian life in Florida. Along the way Wyatt and Billy smoke lots of grass and have some “interesting incidences” with a colorful cast of characters including a hitchhiking hippie (Luke Askew), some free-spirited commune dwellers (Robert Walker, Jr, Sabrina Scharf, Luana Anders), a drunken Southern ACLU lawyer named George who gets high for the first time (Jack Nicholson), two New Orleans hookers (Karen Black, Toni Basil), and various local hippie-hating rednecks two of which do them in. Despite the surprise downbeat ending, the film was extremely popular and featured stunning photography, courtesy of Laslo Kovacs, of the two bikers barreling across desert highways and mountainous back roads accompanied by classic rock songs on the soundtrack. Terry’s screenplay made some sharp observations about the hypocrisy of the late Sixties counterculture and Middle America Christian values.

The most talked about scene was where Wyatt, Billy, and Jack Nicholson’s character George sit around a campfire, get stoned and muse about UFOs. At the time Nicholson went on record and stated that he did not make up any of the dialog. He told interviewer Neil Weaver in After Dark magazine, “That long scene by the campfire…I did with the script. It’s hidden under that coat you see…it looks improvised, but most of it was written in advance.” That is the truth as Terry wrote it back in New York. Dennis, however, has always claimed that practically the entire film but in particular that scene was improvised. Below is an excerpt directly taken from page 114 of the screenplay now housed in The New York Public Library:

Wyatt:

You’re just stoned man.

Billy:

Stoned, my ass! This is pot – this ain’t acid. I’m not hallucinating for God’s sake. I tell you I was watching this satellite – suddenly it zigzagged, flashed three times and zoomed away!

George:

That was a UFO, beamin’ back at you, that’s all. Eric Heisman and I were down in Mexico a few weeks back and we saw 40 of ‘em flying in formation. They got bases, you know, all over the world. They been coming here since 1946 when the scientists started bouncin’ radar beams off the Moon. The governments know all about it. They’ve been livin’ and working here in vast numbers, ever since.

Easy Rider won praise from the critics as well with Terry leading “the Lads” to Academy Award and Writers Guild nominations for Best Original Screenplay. The movie grossed upwards between $40 and $60 million at the box office but Terry didn’t get a penny. The offer of a percentage of the gross to Terry was quickly forgotten when the movie surprisingly turned a huge profit.

Though Terry opted not to go on location with the movie, it did not mean he was giving up his percentage, which seems to be what was interpreted by all involved. Terry only accepted the verbal deal of being paid $350 a week to write the screenplay in exchange for a share of the profits, which he thought was promised him. Never was it mentioned that he would get a producing credit. He was an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and he would never have agreed to author the screenplay for Easy Rider for such a low weekly wage. Peter knew that when he told Terry from the get-go that they couldn’t afford him as Terry’s fee was too expensive. But with Terry out-of-sight and out-of-mind Peter negotiated away Terry’s promised cut by splitting it between his production company called Pando Company, and producer Bill Hayward, Dennis’ then-brother-in-law, to Hopper’s chagrin. Here again Terry’s disinterest in business matters propelled him not to pursue getting anything in writing from Peter foolishly thinking their “word” would suffice since they were friends. To add insult to injury, purportedly when the film began raking in the big bucks, people associated with the movie, such as Jack Nicholson and some of the crew, were additionally compensated but no extra money ever came Terry’s way. To Terry’s amusement, Dennis sued Peter on two separate occasions for Terry’s percentage of the gross! “Vicious greed” got the best of Peter and Dennis, that’s what Terry used to say.

©2010 Gail Gerber with Tom Lisanti

Published by McFarland and Company, Inc.

The Beats: Remember the Tea I think American Buddhism is in great debt to the Beat generation.
GARY SNYDER

Gelek Rinpoche told me, “You people: Burroughs, you, Kerouac, will all go to heaven for introducing the dharma to this country.”

ALLEN GINSBERG

Jack Kerouac first met D. T. Suzuki on his way to a book party that Viking Press was throwing to celebrate the release of his novel On the Road. He felt vindicated, that late summer day in 1957, because after years of delay and exasperation, his 120-page, single-spaced, spontaneously typewritten manuscript was finally being published.

He called the Buddhist scholar from inside a glass-and-wood phone booth while his two close friends, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, anxiously paced outside wearing “big serious faces of dharma.”

“Hello, I’d like to meet with Dr. Suzuki. This is Jack Kerouac, the writer,” he said.

“How long will you be in town? When can we arrange the appointment?” Mihoko Okamura, Suzuki’s Japanese-American secretary asked.

“Right NOW!” Kerouac bellowed into the receiver.

Okamura retired into the “big back secret whispering chambers,” came back, and told him to be there in a half hour. Elated, the three friends literally skipped down First Avenue to hail a cab

They located Suzuki’s apartment building on the Upper West Side at 172 West Ninety-Fourth Street, wedged between “Puerto Rican slums,” found his nameplate on the door, and rang the buzzer. There was no answer. Kerouac rang again, very firmly, three times. Finally Suzuki appeared, slowly descending the staircase, his signature bushy eyebrows flying out on either side of his head like a “bush of the dharma that takes so long to grow but once grown stays rooted.”

On the way up to his apartment they passed by entire walls packed with books written in many languages and entered a simple room. Suzuki pulled out three chairs and motioned to them, saying, “You sit in this chair, you sit in this chair, and you sit in this chair.” They did, and fell silent. Suzuki pulled out a chair for himself from behind a table piled high with books.

Kerouac couldn’t contain himself any longer and blurted out, “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” Suzuki said nothing. Kerouac then composed a koan: “When the Buddha was about to speak, a horse spoke instead.” Suzuki looked at him quizzically, waited a moment, and replied, “The Western mind is too complicated.” He then said, “You young men sit here quietly and write haikus while I go and make some powdered green tea.”

He returned with a tray of old cracked soup bowls filled with steaming hot tea that he “brushed.” Kerouac mentioned that his two friends from the West Coast, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder, also drank green tea, but only out of sleek, curved, black lacquered bowls. He said the tea tasted like thick pea soup and made him high.

“That’s the weak one, you want some strong ones?” Suzuki asked, mentioning that he drank it daily. Ginsberg shouted, “It tastes like shrimps.” He had to yell “shrimps” because the scholar’s hearing was so bad, even though Okamura had instructed them not to shout. Suzuki decided the tea tasted like beef and added, “Don’t forget that it’s tea.”

Ginsberg and Suzuki talked about “a famous old print with the crack in the universe,” and Orlovsky added, “You have an interesting crack in your wall that looks like the void.” The crack was situated behind a statue of the Buddha on the mantelpiece. Suzuki duly replied, “Oh yes, I never noticed it before.” He then showed them pictures of different Chinese poets, including Han Shan. Orlovsky laughed his “funny moaning laugh,” and Kerouac felt inspired enough to write a new haiku.

Three little sparrows

on the roof

talking quietly, sadly

This spurred all of them into a spontaneous writing session, with Kerouac and Ginsberg choosing the same topic

Big books packaged

from Japan—

Ritz crackers

because right in front of them was a big red box of Ritz crackers, sitting underneath a shelf of books from Japan.

Feeling more relaxed, Kerouac mentioned that he had experienced “some samadhi—a half hour or maybe three seconds.” Ginsberg asked Suzuki who the “Bodhisattva” was who constructed the first Buddhist temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Suzuki adroitly replied, “I think they were all Bodhisattvas.”

Finally it was time for them to leave to go to Kerouac’s book party. By now Kerouac felt like Suzuki was his “old fabled father from China” and said, “Dr. Suzuki! I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you.” Suzuki responded, “Sometime,” and pushed them out the door, but once they were out on the sidewalk, he wouldn’t let them leave. He shook his finger back and forth and shouted, “Remember the green tea!” Kerouac yelled, “The key?” and Suzuki shouted back, “The tea!”

That moment did hold a “key.” Suzuki, an authentic representative of Japanese Zen Buddhism, had met Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky, who advanced the Beat craze with its concurrent literary cult through their works. Suzuki, to his credit, understood the importance of these young men. He wrote, “The ‘Beat generation’ is not a mere passing phenomenon to be lightly put aside as insignificant. I am inclined to think it is somehow prognostic of something coming, at least, to American life.”

Suzuki was interested in Kerouac because the American writer had dedicated his previous book, The Dharma Bums, to the Tang Dynasty Zen (Ch’an) poet Han Shan, a great figure in Chinese cultural literature. But Suzuki also believed the young men had “not yet quite passed through their experiences of humiliation and affliction and . . . revelation.”

The “key” was part of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s search for a “new vision,” through which they birthed a spontaneous literary form inspired by ecstatic and mind-numbing trips across America, jazz music, sordid swindles, drugs, homosexuality, adultery, suicide, and even murder. They burned for something unique that had never been realized in the West before, seeking to transform the very fabric of their being.

Suzuki shared his feelings with Okamura about these young men. He thought Kerouac’s biggest flaw was that he “misunderstood the essence of freedom . . . Freedom is from Dr. Suzuki’s point of view [working] in the harness . . . and [Kerouac was unable] to overcome all of that and to understand it.” According to Okamura, the point where the Beats fell short was in misunderstanding the essential Zen point that we are already free, and “it is the human mind that thinks we are not free . . . To look for freedom outside of our own original freedom is already an aberration of the mind . . . We are not apart in the original state.” She felt the Beat generation thought they had to “liberate themselves from what was totally unnecessary.” Suzuki noted, “They are struggling, still rather superficially against democracy, bourgeois conformity, economic respectability, conventional middle-class consciousness, and other cognate virtues and vices of mediocrity. Because they are still ‘rootless’ . . . they find themselves floundering in the mud in their search for ‘the only way through into truth [which] is by way of one’s own annihilation: through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.’

They have not yet passed through their experiences of humiliation and affliction, and, I may add, revelation.” The poet Gary Snyder said, “Though it’s a charming thought, DTS had almost no influence on the ‘spontaneity’ element in the writing of Kerouac, Ginsberg, & me. For Jack it came through his understanding of jazz musicianship. Ginsberg picked it up from Jack. I got it from Jack plus R. H. Blyth’s view of haiku. Suzuki’s writings reaffirmed some of that, but Sokei-an’s writings (which I read almost as early as Suzuki) also always stressed traditional hard training—which is what Zen means to most Americans today.”

Visiting Suzuki was also part of a long process to find a “new vision.” Kerouac expressed this sentiment in a September 1945 letter to Ginsberg: “I was telling Mimi West last summer how I was searching for a new method in order to release what I had in me, and Carr said from across the room, ‘What ’bout the new vision?’ The fact was I had the vision . . . I think everyone has . . . What we lack is the method.” The method he was grappling with was how to drill down deep into the nature of raw consciousness and transform it into a unique literary form.

Decades later Ginsberg addressed this search specifically in an interview with the Shambhala Sun. “So we began talking about what, in 1945, we called ‘New Consciousness,’ or ‘New Vision.’ As most young people probably do at the age of 15 to 19, whether it’s punk or bohemia or grunge or whatever new vision adolescents have, there is always some kind of striving for understanding and transformation of the universe, according to one’s own subjective, poetic generational inspiration.

By the time he met Suzuki, Kerouac had begun studying the dharma on his own. He had experienced the innate nature of his own mind numerous times but had no one to guide him, only a few books to read and a smattering of friends to talk to about it. But once Kerouac’s literary reputation was assured and fame overwhelmed him, his interest and devotion to Buddhism faded.

Through a combination of alcoholism and long bouts of living with his overprotective mother, he returned to the Roman Catholicism of his youth. But before he was through, his inquiry into the dharma changed the lives of Ginsberg, their circle of mutual friends, and generations all over the world.

The Blake Vision, and the “New Vision”

In the summer of 1948, Allen Ginsberg sublet a small sixth-floor apartment from fellow student Russell Durgin on East 121st Street in Harlem and led a retreat-like existence. Most of his friends had departed on their summer vacations or moved abroad. His greatest sustained contact with the outside world came from a menial job two hours a day as a file clerk at the American Academy of Political Science.

In a series of poems, The Book of Doldrums, Ginsberg chronicled his overweening existential angst. One early summer evening, having just masturbated, he lay contentedly spent and stared out his open window, surveying the intricate shapes of the rooftops of Harlem. A book by the poet William Blake lay on his lap. Out of nowhere a “deep earthen grave voice” began reciting Blake’s poem “The Sunflower,” and it became an “auditory hallucination”:

Ah Sunflower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime,

Where the traveler’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded with snow

Arise from their graves and aspire

Where my sunflower wishes to go.

 The “tender and beautiful voice” he heard “was Blake’s voice.” He understood he was experiencing the exact same perception Blake had experienced a century before, of an unfurling of raw consciousness. Poetry, the language of vision, linked him back though time with other visionary poets. He had been born just for that moment and no other reason. The fact that he existed was proof for his being on earth. He was experiencing the “spirit of the universe.” The whole world was contained within the sunflower, expanding outward to contain the poem and all of consciousness itself.

Several minutes later the voice intoned another Blake poem,

“The Sick Rose”:

O rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Doom was as necessary as glory; both were valid, and both had their place.

Ginsberg yearned for the infinite. Gazing over the Harlem rooftops and seeing the “intelligent labor” that went into making the buildings, he realized the world was not made of “dead matter” but living intelligence. This intelligence was ancient and connected him back to the beginning of time. But he had no formal or informal vocabulary for what he saw, thinking it was “God” or “Light.” He crawled out his fire escape and tapped on his next-door neighbor’s window, declaring that he had just seen God. The two girls inside reacted in typical New York fashion by slamming their windows shut, despite the steamy summer heat. None of his friends were in town, so there was no one to turn to. He read the books strewn about him—Plato’s Phaedrus, St. John, and Plotinus—and saw divine messages in all their texts. Trying to control this buoyant feeling, he stood in his kitchen and called upon the “spirit” to make him “dance” like “Faust calling up the devil,” but his elation rapidly deteriorated into terror. In an early book of poems, The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948–1952, he tried recapturing these ecstatic feelings in a larger work he titled “Vision 1948.” Ginsberg kept trying to recreate his experience from 1948 until 1963, when he met the Tibetan Ningyma Lama Dudjom Rinpoche in India. When he told Rinpoche about both his spontaneous visions and his subsequent psychedelic drug experiences, Rinpoche advised him, “If you see anything horrible, don’t cling to it. If you see anything beautiful, don’t cling to it.” Hearing that, Ginsberg gave up grasping after the original experience, though he never renounced its mind-boggling effect.

The day after Ginsberg’s visions, heaven flipped straight into hell. While browsing through Blake’s The Human Abstract in the Columbia University Bookstore, the shift of consciousness came again but with a different slant. Everyone in the bookstore appeared “wounded” and like a “neurotic pained animal.” He felt he was walking around in Blake’s London and seeing “marks of weakness and marks of woe.” The bookstore clerk’s face resembled a tormented giraffe, and everyone appeared to hide a secret awareness of cosmic consciousness and knowledge of their looming death. Habitual conduct and stratified social protocol blocked these revelations from permeating their everyday sensibilities.

About a week later, as he walked to the Columbia library, it happened again. “I started invoking the spirit, consciously trying to get another perception of cosmos.” And he did, but this time was more frightening than the last: it was a “serpent fear” comparable to the “hand of death.” It was only years later Ginsberg acquired the vocabulary to describe his experience. “And I had a sense of the black sky coming down to eat me. It was like meeting Yamantaka without preparation, meeting one of the horrific or wrathful deities without any realization that it was a projection of myself or my nature. I tried to shut off the experience because it was too frightening.” Yamantaka, the lord of death, is a Mahakala or wrathful deity in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. Yamantaka is a Sanskrit word consisting of Yama, “the lord of death,” and Antaka, or “one who ends.” Yamantaka is one of the eight protectors of the teachings of the Buddha and an aspect of Manjushri, the Buddha of intelligence and wisdom.

In the 1940s there was no understanding of the pantheon of wrathful deities in Tibetan Buddhism. An overweening dread or horror as an archetype could only be described in pathological terms. Ginsberg intuited that his vision was not insanity, but a new perception of reality. However, Ginsberg wept, and Kerouac wrote in his diaries that it was because he believed “nobody wanted to hear his new ‘silence and transcendence’ visions.” Kerouac pointed out that since they were silent, they could not be spoken about, and how could you understand that which was not spoken? However, he admitted “the Big Truth hovered near, touching us almost with its unknown wings.”

Ginsberg’s intuitions and insights were prescient. In 1959 he told the journalist Alfred Aronowitz that the Beat generation were “prophets howling in the wind” against the insanity and conformity they saw around them. But nobody thought Ginsberg was a prophet that summer of 1948, and many (most notably his father Louis) doubted his sanity. Ten years later Aronowitz gutted the whole meaning of “Beat” when he published his twelve-part series titled “The Beat Generation” in the March 9, 1959, issue of the New York Post. He called them “lost, furtive, not in touch.” This became the de facto media definition, but Kerouac clearly stated “Beat” meant “religiousness, a kind of second religiousness.” Ginsberg called Beat “a certain nakedness, where you see the world in a visionary way,

what happens in the ‘dark night of the soul.’” But how could a first, almost-crazed glimpse of the “new vision” lead to the creation of a literary, social, and artistic movement?

I Take Refuge

In 1952 Kerouac crooned the Buddhist refuge vows to Ginsberg in Pali, the rococo language that predated Sanskrit. He recited the words in the manner of a Sinatra love song:

 Buddham Saranam Gochamee

Dhamman Saranam Gochamee

Sangham Saranam Gochamee

I take refuge in the Buddha

I take refuge in the Dharma

I take refuge in the Sangha

Later in his life Ginsberg defined the “three jewels,” explaining that Buddha was the awakened clear mind, dharma was the intellectual explanation of that awakened mind though sutra discourses, and sangha was the group of “fellow awakened meditators.”

Kerouac’s Pali crooning session inspired Ginsberg to browse through the New York Public Library collections of Chinese paintings of the S’ung Dynasty. He let himself drift into the spaciousness of the calligraphic brushstroked landscapes and wrote a poem, “Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain,” based on a twelfth century painting by Liang Kai, imagining what it must be like to emerge fresh from the moment of enlightenment.

he knows nothing

like a god: shaken       like a god:

                                        shaken

meek wretch-

                                         humility is beatness

                                         before the absolute

world.

 He checked out Suzuki’s book Zen Buddhism and wrote to his friend Neal Cassady that Suzuki was an “outstanding 89yr old authority now at Columbia who I will I suppose go see for interesting talk.” He came to the conclusion that satori, or Zen enlightenment, was similar to his initial Blake vision, later saying that it “seemed to be the right fitting word for what I had actually experienced so that I got interested in Buddhism.”

The Road

One year after Ginsberg’s Harlem vision, Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady, a former car thief and small-time huckster, drove across America in a frenzied jaunt as “two broken-down heroes of the Western night,” searching for, among other things, their version of a “new vision.” These trips were later immortalized in Kerouac’s books On the Road and The Dharma Bums as a spontaneous stream of consciousness, an energetic, unedited ramble.

Ginsberg employed that same approach in his writing, calling it “first thought, best thought.” He realized that his poetry and Kerouac’s prose were rooted in an “examination of the texture of conciousness.” He tracked his mind through spontaneous prose and the “actual sequence of thought forms.” In 1994, when dedicating the Ginsberg Library at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, Ginsberg amended his view on “first thought, best thought.” He said “there is a silence which exists through the words. Instead of ‘first thought, best thought,’ do ‘first thought, no thought’ and see what comes from that.”

According to the musician and composer David Amram, who worked with Kerouac and Ginsberg on the movie Pull My Daisy, “Jack was . . . always looking and searching, and he felt that life was a journey . . . a kind of endless trip on that road to enlightenment and salvation. When he spoke about the holy path I think that he was thinking almost in terms of the life of Buddha . . . an experiential way for anyone to live first for themselves, and then in terms of their own journey how to relate to others on the way; with humbleness and love and sincerity and self-effacement and consideration and compassion.”

The 120-Foot Long Scroll

Cassady asked Kerouac to teach him how to write fiction. As part of his tutorial Cassady whipped out a stream-of-consciousness missive referred to as the “Joan Anderson letter,” named for his girlfriend at the time. The letter was a revelation dropped into both Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s laps, containing techniques to capture their nonstop, spontaneous ramblings. The effect on Kerouac was mind-boggling, giving him the internal permission to shed the more formal style he had used in his first novel, The Town and the City, and compelling him to write the book that had been percolating inside him for over four years.

Kerouac mentioned this pivotal letter in a discussion with Al Aronowitz, saying, “I changed my style from The Town and the City because of Neal—Neal Cassady. Because of a forty-thousand-word letter that Neal wrote me. He wrote me a forty-thousand-word letter! But Allen lost the letter, or Gerd Stern did, actually. Gerd Stern, he lived on a barge in Sausalito. He lost that great letter, which was a work of literary genius. Neal, he was just telling me what happened one time in Denver and he had every detail. It was just like Dostoyevsky. And I realized that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it! I really got it from Neal.”

Through Ginsberg Kerouac met twenty-year-old Joan Haverty and in a whirlwind courtship married her. Then on April 2, 1951, he began a nonstop, twenty-one-day typing binge on an elongated scroll of tracing paper helped by prodigious amounts of caffeine and, some argue, speed. He wrote “without consciousness” in a semitrance, using phrases that sounded like ambulating jazz riffs.

He typed on one continuous 120-foot roll that he had pasted and taped together from separate twelve-foot-long strips. He typed without paragraphs, occasionally crossing out words, phrases, and even whole lines with a pencil.

Years later he showed Aronowitz the scroll and told him, “It’s a hundred feet long. I wrote On the Road on another roll . . . a roll of . . . drawing paper that you draw through. For Dharma Bums I could afford the teletype roll. Three dollars . . . On the Road, I gave that roll to Viking. It was all no paragraphs, single-spaced—all one big paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it. Do people realize what an anguish it is to write an original story three hundred pages long?”

In June, after completing his creative maelstrom, he left Joan and moved into his friend Lucien Carr’s loft to keep revising On the Road. He then joined William Burroughs in Mexico to work on expanding his writing technique. In a letter to Cassady dated May 1952, he mentioned that his friend Ed White had suggested he “sketch in the streets like a painter but with words . . . Now here is what sketching is . . . everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words . . . and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social . . . and slap it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing. Traditional source: Yeats’ trance writing, of course. It’s the only way to write.”

By 1953 Kerouac had finished typing his novel The Subterraneans in three twenty-four-hour stints of nonstop “bennie” (Benzedrine) popping. Not sure what to do next, he played with the idea of living in nature and went to the library to find out how to do it. At first he read Thoreau’s discussions of Hindu philosophy and then accidentally checked out The Life of the Buddha by Ashvagosa. It was through this accident that Kerouac discovered his profound and serious interest in his “second new religion.” Although he never renounced Roman Catholicism, which was the religion of his birth, all those cross-country journeys depicted in On The Road, all that playful Sinatraesque crooning to Ginsberg, blossomed into his “road of dharma,” or Buddhist path. His detailed studies of Buddhism were completed before On the Road was ever published. He tentatively called his studies “Book of Dharmas,” a collection of handwritten and typed pages begun as notes he prepared for Ginsberg to use as a Buddhist primer. Viking Press published these notes posthumously in 1997 as Some of the Dharma.

Some of the Dharma

I still remember the first real dharma instruction I got from Kerouac . . .“All conceptions as to the existence of the self, as well as all conceptions as to the nonexistence of the self, as well as all conceptions as to the existence of a Supreme Self, as well as all conceptions as to the nonexistence of a Supreme Self, are equally arbitrary, being only conceptions.”

—ALLEN GINSBERG (NAROPA INSTITUTE WEBSITE)

 In 1954 Kerouac went to the library in San Jose, California, and checked out Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible. He began a serious reading of that text, as well as readings in the Bhagavad Gita, yoga precepts, Vedic hymns, Buddhist sutras, and the writings of both Lao Tzu and Confucius. He poured over the Theravadin (original teachings) and Mahayana (later teachings) texts and briefly touched on Vajrayana (secret teachings), including those of the great yogi hermit Milarepa. He took notes, quickly amassing a hundred or so pages.

All three of the yanas or “vehicles” work with conflicting emotions, referred to as kleshas, or “heaps” of obscurations. The Theravadin approach recognizes the kleshas and fights against them by applying different mental antidotes. In the Mahayana the kleshas are taken along the path and worked with by deep examination and using different skillful methods to loosen attachments. But the Vajrayana transforms the kleshas into wisdom by working with them as part of one’s nature, a very tricky thing to do without the guidance of an experienced teacher.

Ginsberg, coming from an ex-Communist, Jewish, intellectual background, felt conflicted when he heard about the First Noble Truth. He believed in a vague universal improvement of the human condition and felt insulted when Kerouac told him over and over again the truth of suffering, though a scant two years later he admitted Kerouac’s wisdom. Viewed through the lens of his terrifying experiences at the Columbia University bookstore, when everyone’s faces transformed into masks of suffering, it shows tremendous denial. Kerouac was the first one to place Ginsberg’s visions squarely into a context other than pure insanity.

Kerouac wrote Ginsberg on May 1954, “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last. And am quite surprised that you, innocent, novice-like, did enter the first inner chamber of Buddha’s temple in a dream.”30 He began teaching him as if he were the innocent novitiate and told him that he had been compiling notes on Buddhism for Ginsberg’s personal edification: “Now Allen, as Neal or Carolyn can tell you, last February I typed up a 100-page account of Buddhism for you, gleaned from my notes, and you will see proof of that in several allusions and appeals to ‘Allen,’ and I have that here, if you really want to see it, I will send it importantly stamped, it’s the only copy, we must take special care with it, right? ‘Some of the Dharma’ I called it, and it was intended for you to read in the selva.”

Kerouac also advised that Ginsberg should listen to his words as if it were “Einstein teaching you relativity,” a terribly overblown statement. He assigned him nine books to read, including those of Paul Carus, who started Open Court Press and was the first employer of D. T. Suzuki in the West. He also told him to read the Harvard Asian Classics, Buddhist legends, the life of the Buddha, and even the original Vissudhi Magga by Buddhaghoshna, the earliest scriptures of the Buddha translated from Pali. He commented on certain books in the list, making sure to let him know which points he considered essential.

While in California after a silly quarrel with Cassady, Kerouac packed his belongings and moved into a fleabag hotel in San Francisco. Drinking heavily, he completed the poem “San Francisco Blues” but quickly turned his focus back to New York.

Back East

Kerouac moved in with his mother, Gabrielle Ange Levesque Kerouac, who was living in Richmond Hill in Queens, New York. Memère, as she was known, worked in a shoe factory. Kerouac handed over his unemployment checks to her and led a quiet life studying Buddhism and attempting to follow a real spiritual path by reading the early sutras oriented toward monastic practice. Burroughs did not agree with what Kerouac was doing and cautioned if he went too far he would resemble the Tibetan Buddhist monks who walled themselves into a small cell with a slot where their food was pushed in and they remained until they died.

Kerouac’s highly attuned but flawed sensibility conflicted with his battle with alcoholism, which eventually caused his death. In another era when teachers were more available, he might have integrated his flaws into his spiritual path. Buddhism’s scope is broad enough to encompass the wisdom of the drunk Zen master or the overindulgences of the sixth Dalai Lama, who drank and consorted with women. The tantric tradition allowed for all types of people because it worked with Bodhicitta, the basic nature of mind. But was Kerouac really a Buddhist? According to Aronowitz, Kerouac wistfully mused, “Was I a Buddhist then? Well, I couldn’t be—a Buddhist has got to be alone.” He laughed at the thought. “A night club Buddhist!” Then he reflected for a moment. “Ahhh, I was a Buddhist, yeah . . .” He added, “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in Li Po. He was a Dharma Bum type, a poor poet roaming China. You know, I have some eighteen-year-old writings that are pure Buddhism. I’m thirty-seven now. My birthday’s March 12. So I’ve always been a Buddhist.

In his 1961 Book of Dreams, published by City Lights Books, Kerouac mentions waking up to see the ghosts of his dreams fading from consciousness and scurrying to write them down as quickly as possible. He noted that his subconscious mind, which he referred to by its Sanskrit name manas, worked through the alaya vijnana, or original storehouse of mental cognition. That he could actually discriminate these subtle points was astounding, as his was a perception usually experienced only by long-term meditators.

Kerouac then moved down south with his sister to Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He studied the Diamond Sutra, which said all things, even his asceticism, were a dream not to be grasped. He wrote a list of the stages he would go through to reach Nirvana by the year 2000, starting with a “Modified Ascetic Life.” He would stop chasing women, relinquish alcohol, and simplify his diet. The following year he would stop shaving, quit writing for ego gratification, and renounce his name. By 1970 he would have no possessions and go begging in the villages. By 2000 he would be in “Nirvana and willed earth beyond death.” But his resolve did not last long. With a scathingly critical eye turned foremost on himself, he said in a letter to Ginsberg he was a “Junior Arhat” master. He still possessed ignorance and was only in the “early stages of vow-making,” and still capable of using Buddhism for his own devices, instead of purely disseminating its truth.

Tragically, and realistically, this was true. His ex-wife Joan Haverty sued him for child support, and the police issued a warrant for his arrest. Ginsberg’s brother Eugene served as his lawyer. Haverty eventually had pity on Kerouac’s severe and disabling phlebitis and excused him from paying child support for their daughter Janet if he agreed never to contact either of them ever again. Kerouac wrote Ginsberg, “So instead of going to jail I come home, memorize the heart of the Great Dharani of the Lord Buddha’s Crown Samadhi, on knees recite it, drink wine and take benny and read your letter and tape up legs.”

He admonished Ginsberg to sit erect, fold his feet, breathe in deeply, close his eyes, listen to any sound around him, and refrain from even scratching an itch. He would know he was having a successful meditation session when he experienced a feeling of bliss accompanied by slower breathing. Intuition would dawn with an “eeriness, dream-ness like Harlem Vision again.” With each outbreath he should realize thinking had stopped and life was only a dream. Despite being frequently intoxicated, Kerouac was coherent enough to relate meditation practice back to Ginsberg’s Harlem vision and their search for the “new vision.” But visions aside, getting published, or the lack of it, was wearing him down. By early 1955, he was so fed up he asked his agent Sterling Lord to return all his manuscripts. Kerouac announced that he was going to write only “Buddhist Teaching[s]” that had no worldly or literary motives, and that any of his Beat generation writings were only a precursor to his own exalted “state of enlightenment.” Or so he believed. Despite his disgust with the literary world, and all his vehement protestations about its materialism, he kept making the rounds, visiting publishers and carrying Subterraneans and Doctor Sax manuscripts with him. He persisted, and his losing streak finally came to an end in July 1955. Viking Press accepted Beat Generation, later changed to On the Road, and he even sold a story to the Paris Review. The Academy of Arts and Letters then awarded him a grant of $200.

He was now free to write. He left for Mexico City, staying at a fleabag hotel with no electricity, filling it with candles, a railroad lantern, clothes, toiletries, a Christian Bible, his Buddhist Bible, and his manuscripts. With a jazz sensibility Kerouac composed “Mexico City Blues,” a gigantic opus of a poem with hundreds of choruses and interspersed Sanskrit words for different states of consciousness taken from the sutras. Ginsberg said it was the work of a “Zen lunatic but with a secret message implied for anyone with Gnostic knowledge to pick up.” He had a squalid love affair with an “Aztec” prostitute, Esperanza, believing she epitomized the First Nobel Truth that “all life is suffering.” But Mexico’s charms soon faded, and Kerouac moved on.

California 1955

San Francisco’s North Beach scene, full of musicians, actors, playwrights, and alternative-lifestyle adepts, was burgeoning just as Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club was starting its run on national TV. City Lights Books, founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, became San Francisco’s social and cultural hub just as Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” topped the charts. Ginsberg moved to the West Coast carrying a letter of introduction from his mentor William Carlos Williams addressed to Kenneth Rexroth, a writer and poet who hosted an influential salon. Ginsberg met many poets and writers, including Michael McClure, who wanted to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery but wastoo busy; Ginsberg jumped at the chance. Since it was his first time planning such a big event, he asked Rexroth to help him choose readers, and the older man suggested Gary Snyder, a graduate student of Japanese and Chinese at Berkeley.

On September 8, 1955, the same day Kerouac returned from Mexico, Ginsberg met Snyder, whom he described as a bearded “cat” studying “Oriental,” a real Zen monk “hung up” on Indians, but a good writer, and a scholar who rode his bike around Berkeley. Snyder remembered Ginsberg “sneaking” up while he was fixing his bicycle, telling Snyder that Rexroth had sent him. Snyder invited him in for tea. In The Dharma Bums Kerouac described Snyder as living in a small room filled with straw mats, a rucksack, pots and pans neatly tied up, and a blue bandana containing his “inside-pata socks” worn while padding around the straw matting. His chief possessions were orange crates filled with books of “Oriental” languages, sutras, and commentaries, the complete works of D. T. Suzuki, Japanese haiku, and assorted poetry books. He also had a small table made from orange crates.

Ginsberg told him he was organizing a poetry reading, looked at his poems, and said, “Well, this is all right.” He mentioned that Kerouac, on his way back from Mexico, would be showing up any day. In fact, Kerouac was at that exact moment on his way to Ginsberg’s house, high on Benzedrine.

While a student at Reed College in 1949, Snyder dove into a four-volume haiku translation by R. H. Blyth and discovered writings of D. T. Suzuki. He said, “The two first powerful influences on me were D. T. Suzuki, and Sasaki (Sokei-an). Sokei-an’s talks were published in a book called Cat’s Yawn, which I was lucky enough to get a copy of around 1952. Suzuki was the intellectual, Sokei-an the wanderer, laborer, artist, and authentic Zen master.”36 In 1952 he and the future Zen master and poet Philip Whalen shared an apartment in Berkeley with the poet Lew Welch, deeply engaged in their own studies of Buddhism.

The reading on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery brought out all of the “boho” and arty types. The crowd quickly swelled to standing room only. Rexroth, master of ceremonies, compared the feeling in the air to that which the Spanish anarchists must have felt. Philip Lamantia read work by a poet who had recently died. Michael McClure recited poems anticipating the world environmental movement, including “For the Death of 100 Whales,” followed by Philip Whalen. Then there was a break.

The second half opened with Ginsberg reading Howl to about 150 people, ranting like an old-world Moses. Years later, during a cab ride, Ginsberg told one of his secretaries, Jacqueline Gens, that Howl was actually about Bodhicitta. First there was identification and compassion for suffering. Then there was identification with the causes (i.e., Moloch, conceptual mind and judgmental mind, this and that which categorizes and creates the will to power). Next is Holy, Holy, Holy, the brilliance and goodness in the world, the fruition. It was not, as he initially thought, an angry poem.

Kerouac shouted “Go” to punctuate the end of each line of the poem. Ginsberg recounted, “It was Jack Kerouac, you know, who gave the poem its name. I mailed him a copy just after I wrote it—it was still untitled—and he wrote back, ‘I got your howl.’” Many were moved to tears, and there was a sense that literary history had been made. Snyder ended the evening with a gentle poem about the need for man to return to nature.

The event was a resounding success. The voices of the poets had been overwhelmingly heard and, better yet, understood. If any moment could be said to have launched the San Francisco poetry renaissance, this was it. And Ginsberg, who had been unsuccessful in finding a publisher, finally found one—Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books.

Rexroth wrote in the Evergreen Review that “Howl is the confession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975—if it’s still there to run.” He did not know part of it had been written when Ginsberg was under the influence of peyote and looked at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel roof as a “robot Moloch face.” He ingested peyote a second time, took a cable car to the heart of the city, and started rhyming verses using the word “Moloch,” picked up from Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis. Rexroth correctly prophesied that Ginsberg would become the first authentically popular poet in a generation.

There followed other poetry readings, wild parties, and drinking binges. Kerouac usually sat alone in a corner. This caught Snyder’s eye, and he invited him to his house to talk. Kerouac, though deeply respectful of Snyder’s knowledge, took issue with his austere, intellectual style of Zen. He felt it had a touch of cruelty with “all those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions.” But they both appreciated the Buddhist saint Avalokites ́vara in Sanskrit, Chenrezig in Tibetan, or Kannon in Japanese. Kerouac was impressed by Snyder’s prodigious knowledge of “Tibetan, Chinese, Mahayana, Hinayana, Japanese, and even Burmese Buddhism,” but kept coming back to the essential point: the first of the four noble truths, that all life is suffering.

Kerouac didn’t really believe that the cessation of suffering was possible, but he was open enough to consider that it could be and discussed his translations of Buddhist texts from the French, saying he had been studying all by himself in public libraries throughout America. Snyder was duly impressed.

Despite all the scholarly and intellectual interest in Zen, no one except Snyder and occasionally Whalen actually practiced formal meditation. Whalen felt Kerouac just didn’t have it in him to endure any lengthy sessions, first because his knees were ruined by football and second, and more importantly, because he had a monkey mind that could not remain still. But Ginsberg felt differently, that if only they had been exposed to a teacher or at least to someone who could have taught them proper posture and breathing techniques, “it would’ve been a great discovery.”

Years later Snyder remarked. “Jack doesn’t know anything about Zen. He admits it himself on page 13 of The Dharma Bums: ‘I’m an old-fashioned dreamy Himalayan coward of later Mahayanism.’ He’s interested in Indian Buddhism, not Chan and Zen. He came onto it by reading the Sacred Books of the East series. I deeply respect Jack’s insights in Buddhism, and I think they are very valid, but this is simply some of the American Buddhism as it’s practiced. It’s not the same as mine.”

Snyder told Kerouac the Zen story of Nansen the Zen master. Nansen said to his monks, “If you can tell me one word of Zen, I won’t kill this cat; but if you can’t talk, the cat is going to get killed.” No one said anything, and the cat was killed. The next day Nansen’s top disciple Joshu arrived, and Nansen relayed the story to him, asking him what he would have done to save the cat. Joshu put his shoes on his head and walked out the door. Nansen told the rest of the students that if that had happened the day before, the cat would still be alive. Kerouac was horrified. He believed anyone who would kill a cat to make a point about the dharma was wrong. He told Snyder, “This Zen business is bad.” Even though it was a metaphorical example, it was too gruesome and full of suffering for Kerouac’s “big old Mahayana heart.”

Snyder invited Kerouac to go camping in the High Sierras, insisting they bring along all their food and no alcohol, an inconvenience Kerouac meekly protested but then accepted. Kerouac described their outing in great detail in The Dharma Bums, saying he made a “magic mandala” before they embarked to help aid them in their climb. He did this to represent the void within all things, part of life’s illusions. The climb became a parable between a Zen “just do it” type of ideology and a mystical vision quest. They wrote haiku full of vigor while ascending the mountain, but Kerouac quickly tired. Snyder emphasized the excursion was its own haiku and easily made it to the top of the mountain, but Kerouac did not. But the descent was easy, with both men happily bounding back down the mountain at breakneck speed. This moment of happy abandonment and freedom did not last long. Neal Cassady showed up in San Francisco with Natalie Jackson, his speed-addicted girlfriend, who was in the middle of a bout of acute amphetamine psychosis. She climbed up to the roof of their building, broke the skylight, and used the shattered glass to cut her wrists. A neighbor who saw her bleeding on the roof called the police. In her flipped-out haze Natalie thought the police wanted to kill her, and in fleeing them she jumped six floors to her death. The newspapers reported “Unidentified Blond Leaps to Death.”

The suicide was traumatic for everyone. Kerouac thought if this was the result of their inquiry into dharma, what was the point? How had they changed the world? Whom had they helped? They couldn’t even control themselves. He briefly moved in with Cassady, who in the aftermath of Natalie’s gruesome death had returned home to his wife Carolyn. But Kerouac couldn’t stand being around their domestic tension and left to grieve at his sister’s house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

Buddha and Blake Are One

When he arrived at his sister’s house, Kerouac was so overwrought from the death and chaos in Berkeley that he ran outside, convinced he was about to die. Sitting underneath a tree, he mimicked the Heart Sutra chant, “form is emptiness, emptiness is no other than form” reciting,

Raindrops are ecstasy,

raindrops are not different from ecstasy,

neither is ecstasy different from raindrops,

yea, ecstasy is raindrops,

yea, ecstasy is raindrops,

rain on, O cloud.

Living with his sister and brother-in-law quickly became intolerable. His family laughed when he tried to explain that holding an orange in his hand was the essence of emptiness, and that “all things made have to be unmade . . . simply because they were made.” His brother-in-law, trying to find some common ground, asked him how, if things were empty, was he able to taste and swallow an orange? Kerouac answered using the Heart Sutra as the basis for his argument: that one could see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and even think about the orange, but without mind it couldn’t exist, since mind had created it in the first place. His brother-in-law, stymied by such a philosophical exegesis, gave up and said he didn’t really care.

Though he focused on his Buddhist studies and tried to embody the religious life of a mountain hermit, Kerouac continued to drink heavily and pop bennies. In the tantric tradition, alcohol can intensify mind and sense perceptions if one is properly trained, but he wasn’t and he couldn’t. Though his legs swelled up with dangerous bouts of phlebitis, he maintained his discipline and wrote Ginsberg that he read the Diamond Sutra every day and practiced the ten paramitas. On Sunday he read Dana (generosity), Monday Sila (discipline), Tuesday Ksanti (patience), Wednesday Virya (exertion), Thursday Dhyana (meditation), and Friday Prajana (knowledge). On Saturday he read the conclusion of the sutras. He practiced meditation without any formal instruction and strove, despite his excesses, to see the sacred in everything. Drinking cups of green tea, he sat in a cross-legged lotus position, excruciating for a man with phlebitis, and wrote Ginsberg a poem about it.

When a thought

comes a-springing from afar with its held

forth figure of image, you spoof it out,

you spuff it off, you fake it, and

it fades, and thought never comes—and

with joy you realize for the first time

“Thinking’s just like not thinking—

So I don’t have to think

any

more.”

Ginsberg wrote back with the revelation that “your Buddha experience and my Blake ones are on the same level.”

Living as simply as possibly, he continued to write his biography of the Buddha as loose pages of typewritten sheets lay strewn about, full of scribbled thoughts and haiku. He drew lines around most of his poems and embellished everything as if it were some kind of eternal tomb while he waited and worried if his other books sold. Translating texts from French into English, he focused on the Mahayana Samgraha of Asanga, about a great scholar of the first century. Perhaps, he thought, he might even survive on the meager wages of a translator, but no such job materialized.

He wrote Ginsberg that Some of the Dharma had grown to over two hundred pages and that he would become a great writer and convert “thousands, maybe millions.” He added in a letter a month later that even after reading D. T. Suzuki’s book in the New York Public Library, his own writing would become as important and as influential, a heady statement that shows both his insight and arrogance. Different publishers did read his writing on Buddhism. Sadly, all rejected it. He wrote to Ginsberg that “Buddha Tells Us,” one of his names for it, was given the cold shoulder by Cowley, Giroux, and even his agent, Sterling Lord. He strongly felt it would “convert” many people once it was published, but he had to wrestle the “money changers” so its “magical powers of enlightenment” could be heard. Half a century later, after he was dead and his prophetic words faded, he got his wish. Viking Penguin finally published it, since Kerouac was now a brand name that sold a hundred thousand copies annually, and they could make a handsome profit.

He had finally understood the nature of true “Mind Essence” and the purity of spontaneity and intuition. He felt he had “reached the point beyond Enlightenment” and could even abandon Buddhism because it was “an arbitrary conception.” Insightful enough to know that the “seed-energy” of his mind could never stop, he thought he could do nothing the rest of his life, and it wouldn’t matter. His sister, however, would have none of it and accused him of freeloading, thinking his interest in Buddhism was ridiculous. There were squabbles, and he finally left Rocky Mount.

After the Road

By the beginning of 1958 Kerouac was living in Orlando, Florida. In a letter to Philip Whalen he correctly prophesied that year would be known as the year of Buddhism. Acutely aware of Alan Watts, the “big hero of Madison Avenue,” he was surprisingly complimentary of Nancy Wilson Ross’s breakthrough article about Buddhism in the women’s magazine Mademoiselle. He also accurately predicted that everyone would soon be reading Suzuki. In an October letter to poet Gregory Corso he admitted he was unable to meditate any more and had begun writing Catholic poems, sending them to Jubilee magazine.

That year the Zen issue of the Chicago Review was published with Kerouac’s “Meditation in the Woods,” a description of a sesshin by Gary Snyder, translations by D. T. Suzuki and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, a poem by Philip Whalen, a painting by Franz Kline, and Alan Watts’s wildly controversial article “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen.” Kerouac had also become famous enough to appear on Steve Allen’s popular TV talk show.

By the beginning of 1959, Kerouac wrote Whalen he was no longer a Buddhist, wasn’t anything and didn’t care, a far cry from his predictions of the previous year. He wrote, “Fuck Suzuki, fuck Sasaki, fuck ’em all. They think Buddhism is something apart from Transcendentalism, well they’re not Buddhists, they’re Alan Watts Social philosophers and glad-to-meet-yas. They want ‘group meetings’ to ‘discuss Zen.’ That’s what they want, not the sign.”44 However, he rallied in April and wrote to Ginsberg that a Chinese scholar from Staten Island (who might even have been the same Chen Chi Chang who filled in for Suzuki’s classes at Columbia) had sent him never-before-translated selections from The 100,000 Songs of Milarepa, a tantric Tibetan text. Though he admitted not understanding much of it, he enthusiastically stated, “It’s all about Milarepa dispelling hallucinations of demons and coming down from Lashi Snow Mountain to explain it to the people!” But two months later he wrote Whalen he had nothing left to say about the dharma, and anything he read seemed like a dream. All he could feel were angels.

In 1960 Kerouac went out to the West Coast to stay in Raton Canyon in a cabin offered to him by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There he had a full-blown, paranoid, alcoholic breakdown. He believed his friends wanted to kill him, that his water was poisoned, and that the sound of flowing water was seeping into his brain. He stopped sleeping, had a panic attack, and saw a vision of the cross. Abandoning Buddhism for good, he headed back home to be with his mother on the East Coast.

In 1962 he wrote a letter to Carolyn Cassady from Orlando, Florida, describing himself as a drunk. To Stella Sampas, a childhood friend whom he married at the end of his life, he described himself as a literary monk who didn’t get drunk. In an act of caustic self-mockery he wrote the publisher Robert Giroux that there could be a whole new series of work left in him yet: “The Dharma Bums Grow Up,” “The Dharma Bums on Wall Street,” and “The Dharma Bums in the White House.” By 1963, he fell into a deep depression and by 1964 turned against Ginsberg and Corso, deeming them political fanatics. He wrote, “I am sick of life and that is why I drink.”

According to Ginsberg, “Kerouac’s satori was clinging both to despair of suffering, fear of suffering, and permanent Hell, fear of a permanent Heaven,” intensified by his advanced alcoholism. It left him susceptible to “the phantasm of the monotheistic imposition” of Western culture. His original understanding of the concept of mind, space, and awareness of Buddhism gave way to his boyhood fixations and faith of the Catholic cross, and the suffering caused by the crucifixion. He started painting Christ crucified, the cross, Mary, cardinals, popes, and finally himself on the cross, a metaphor he aptly accomplished by drinking himself to death on October 21, 1969.

Ginsberg also felt washed up. On a July 18, 1963, train ride from Kyoto to Tokyo, en route to the airport to fly to the Vancouver Poetry Festival, he renounced his Blake vision, and renounced Blake as well. He realized he had to rid himself of everything, or he would just be hanging onto a memory of his experience. He wrote the poem “The Change” to confront his fears and serve as an exorcism. He was no longer Blake’s disciple; nor had he become a full-blown student of Tibetan Buddhism. He was in transition. But a new counterculture was brewing in America, one that would anoint him as one of its most prominent spokespersons. Along with poems about political activism, pacifism, and gay rights, he was to become one of his generation’s strongest adherents for Buddhist practice. Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997.

The Tibetan Buddhists Finally Arrive: Tolstoy and the Kalmyks

In 1955, when the San Francisco poetry renaissance had just begun and Natalie Jackson leapt to her death, Geshe Wangyal, a Kalmyk Mongolian Buddhist from the Volga region of Russia, settled into a sizable community of displaced Kalmyks in Freewood Acres, New Jersey. They had been brought to the United States after World War II by the Tolstoy Foundation, which had been set up by Alexandra Tolstoy, the youngest daughter of the renowned writer Count Leo Tolstoy. The Kalmyks established four or five Buddhist temples more akin to local community centers.
Ilia, one of Tolstoy’s grandsons and Alexandra’s nephew, felt a special affinity with the Tibetans. As OSS (the military precursor to the CIA) foreign-intelligence agents for the United States during World War II, Lieutenant Colonel Ilia Tolstoy and Captain Brooke Dolan were sent on an expedition to find a shortcut to China in order to bring supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government, which was defending itself against the invasion of the Japanese army. A second objective of the mission was for Tolstoy to personally deliver a gold chronometer watch, one of only two such Swiss watches in existence, and a letter from President Roosevelt to the then-ten-year-old Dalai Lama. Traditional silk greeting scarves (katas) were exchanged, and the young Dalai Lama inquired about Roosevelt’s health. The Dalai Lama asked Tolstoy to stay on a few extra months while work was completed on an elaborate hand-embroidered silk-appliqué thangka to be presented to the White House. Tolstoy witnessed the Monlam New Year’s festival and visited various monasteries.

Tolstoy and Dolan gave their report to both the OSS and the Pentagon, including 1,200 photographs and a short film “edited by John Ford, who was then in charge of the field photographic unit of OSS. It was in 16-mm color and narrated.” They also brought back presents from the Dalai Lama for President Roosevelt, including four thangkas and a collection of Tibetan stamps, later sold at auction after Roosevelt’s death. Though Tolstoy and Dolan’s mission to find a shortcut had succeeded, the U.S. government ultimately scrapped the plan to deliver supplies to China because it was too politically sensitive. Tolstoy was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service.

In the middle of the winter of 1943, Stalin deported all ethnic Kalmyks to Siberia, and most perished. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to reenter their homeland, which they did, only to find it occupied by Russians and Ukrainians. Geshe Wangyal (1901–1983), an ethnic Kalmyk Mongolian, was a Gelupa teacher, part of the same Tibetan lineage as the Dalai Lama. Ordained at the age of six, he was somehow able to travel and studied at one of the three main Gelupa monasteries, Drepung in Lhasa, where he received his title of Geshe, the equivalent of a doctorate in logic, debate, and philosophy. While preparing to go back to Kalmykia after his studies in Lhasa, he heard about the Bolshevik repression of Buddhism and changed his plans. Instead, he journeyed to Beijing, where among other jobs he served as translator for the British political appointee to the Himalayan area (including Tibet), Sir Charles Bell, accompanying him throughout his extensive travels in China and Manchuria. Believing correctly that America would become fertile ground for the dharma, he prepared by learning English in Lhasa and continued his studies in Beijing. In 1951, when the Chinese first entered Kham or Eastern Tibet, he fled before most Tibetans were even aware of the danger and settled in Kalimpong, Sikkim.

Jack and Allen Never Knew

It took Geshe Wangyal over four years to secure a visa to the United States. In 1955 he moved into a simple house his Kalmyk friends found for him in Freewood Acres, New Jersey. There he obtained a charter from the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to establish the first Tibetan monastery in the United States, called the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America. Neither Kerouac nor Ginsberg were even aware the Geshe existed. Just a few years later Geshe Wangyal attracted many prominent Western students, including Columbia professor Robert Thurman, the first ordained Western Tibetan Buddhist monk, and the Harvard-educated translator and scholar Jeffrey Hopkins.

It is startling to realize that while Jack Kerouac delved into his own brand of Buddhist studies, an authentic Tibetan Buddhist lama lived only an hour and a half away. Had either Kerouac or Ginsberg known of Geshe Wangyal, there is a good chance they would have at least visited him. As Geshe was fastidious about making his students learn Tibetan and study complex scriptures, it is hard to say if that type of scholarly path would have attracted Kerouac or Ginsberg for long. But fate decided that encounter would never happen, and Kerouac never found an authentic meditation teacher.

The Next Generation

However, the next generation of Beats was interested, including the young poet Anne Waldman. A child of bohemian New Yorkers who had met each other at a party given by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi at his studio on MacDougal Street in the late 1930s, Waldman was just seventeen years old and a college freshman when, in the summer of 1963, a friend brought her to Freewood Acres to the “pink suburban house” to meet Geshe Wangyal. She remembers the house as “very monastic,” and met Geshe Wangyal in the early afternoon while monks were sitting around a table eating lunch. Walking into the shrine room, she was mesmerized by the wild colors and scrolls, the burning incense, and the butter lamps. She felt there was a “stopping the mind” quality as she gazed at the moonlike face of Geshe, who was sitting in a comfortable chair. She visited him only twice and was the only woman present at both meetings. She had no thoughts of becoming his student, but in 1965, when she took her first acid trip, she saw the “mind track the grammar of mind,” an experience akin to insight meditation. At age twenty she took a vow to poetry, and by 1966 she was working at the St. Marks Poetry Project. In 1968 she became its director. In 1970 Waldman visited Tail of the Tiger (later Karme Choling), set up by the Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa, and by 1974 she and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Trungpa’s school, Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, Colorado.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELLEN PEARLMAN is one of the founders of Tricycle Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail and is affiliated with nine Utne Independent Press Awards. 

FROM THE AUTHOR

As the years described in this book whizzed by, I believed most fervently that the roots of revolution were going to lift the concrete away from
the field of truth, after which Bread and Roses and the utopian place I called Goof City would grow up afresh in a warless world—Goof City on the hill, Goof City in the Lower East Side, Goof City shining.

I was raised in a little farm town called Blue Springs in western Missouri, which, when Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System connected it
to greater Kansas City beginning in the late 1950s, saw most of its farms, forests, and orchards turned into bedroom subdivisions. After a year at Missouri University in Columbia, I hitchhiked to New York City in the summer of 1958 to attend New York University, where I had a vague concept at first of becoming a rocket scientist (it was the era of the Mercury Program), but switched to Greek and Latin after a couple of semesters.

I soon was enmeshed in the culture of the Beats as found in Greenwich Village bookstores, in the poetry readings in coffeehouses on MacDougal
Street, in New York City art and jazz, and in the milieu of pot and counterculture that was rising each month. There was the impact of the Happenings and of the moral fervor of the civil rights movement. Also of great allure was the underground movie scene traced by Jonas Mekas in his weekly columns in the Village Voice.

I was very impressed with the images of ancient Egypt and began experiments in utilizing hieroglyphic-like elements in my own writing. The visual aspect of intelligence was increasing during the television and movie era; children born after World War II had higher visual intelligences. The Eye was in the ascendancy, and the mode of the music, thanks to the rise of advances in music technology, was changing also.

That fact would help lead me to joining the Mimeograph Revolution, studying Egyptian hieroglyphics, founding an avant-garde singing group
called The Fugs, and helping to form another strange political group called the Yippies.

The culture of the Lower East Side—with its very affordable, rent controlled apartments—and the general affordability of the larger culture opened up great vistas of possibility. I realized that the Nation’s future was “up for grabs,” as if some Deity had tossed a cultural basketball up for many millions to seize and dribble toward their home hoop. Hence my adoption of the phrase “Total Assault on the Culture,” inspired by William Burroughs. The daily flow of news affected our art, and I have tried to bring some of the details of the broader political reality into the tapestry of recollection. Some could isolate themselves from it, but the news of the war in Southeast Asia, for instance, was an incessant drum beat jarring our concentration on Beauty and Creativity, beginning around the fall of 1963 and lasting through the decade and beyond. In many ways they were the Drums of Doom that prevented the Great Society from continuing from the great Medicare and Medicaid legislations of 1965, say, toward universal health care.
But other events, too, blocked the rise of paradise—the Birmingham bombing, Freedom Summer, Selma, the use of napalm and defoliants in
Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, teach-ins, the Watts Riots, God Is Dead, the banning of LSD, and on and on. Then, in 1967, public discussion that the CIA had killed Kennedy—could that be true? Folk rock, Pop Art, Summer of Love, communes, the Revolution, sex forever, riots in Newark, the Tet Offensive, revolutions in theater and dance, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Chicago, Woodstock, Nixon, Chappaquiddick, the Moon Walk, the Moratoriums, Altamont, cults that kill, oh Lord, like Poe’s “Scoriac River that restlessly rolls.”

In attempting to enact “Total Assault on the Culture,” I undoubtedly did some things and promoted some concepts about which I feel remorse and
sometimes even shame. My regrets or memoirist anguish do not rise to the level of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge or those, say, of Thomas Carlyle. But I sure made some errors during my years that cannot be blamed on chromosome damage, erotomania, hunger for what they called in my Midwest youth “spermatum nirvanum,” vodka, pot, paraquat, psilocybin universe-wandering, anarcho-socialism, or excessive Protestant mean streak.

There are many names associated with this story. During these years I met thousands of people while working on various projects, from antiwar
demonstrations, benefits for lots of causes, The Fugs, the music scene, the art scene, the publishing scene, Chicago and the Yippies, and the byways of rock and roll, managers, agents, and perpetrators of all kinds. In this tracing of those years, I no doubt left out those who ultimately will be seen to have more importance to this tracing than I have indicated. My apologies that they have been underreported on these pages.

Sequencing the time stream is sometimes difficult. I’m now in my seventy-first year of “quiet desperation,” and I apologize for the “gaps” in my recollections. The shopworn adage “If you lived fervently in the 1960s, how could you possibly remember them?” becomes an actual fact when trying to weave a tapestry of the past. Like, exactly what was the date that artist and filmmaker Harry Smith—the first night I met him—threw Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies into the tall porcelain urinal at Stanley’s Bar?

Just as in my book-length biographical poem about my longtime friend, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, I chose to pass over some things in silence, not to be so judgmental, to let certain matters sleep unto the supernova of the sun. In addition, I have decided not to settle any scores in my recollections. I was sometimes imperfect in my behavior toward others, tending at times toward arrogance and egotistical smugness.

I will not claim to have been an integral part of much of anything in the tale of these years—but I was an experimental participant. I know that I was convinced there’d be Vast Change as I sped through the Kennedy, Johnson, and early Nixon years. Accordingly, I surged through the decade on my own little missions, many of them of little importance now, but then I strutted through the time track, daring to be part of the history of the era.

In this book of remembrances I decided not to drain to its dregs the urn of bitter memory, to paraphrase Shelley’s famous line. I have chosen to accentuate the energy, the wild fun, the joyful creativity, and the schemes of Better World derring-do and to consign as much bitterness and bad memories as possible to the halls of darkness.

My parents raised me not to be a whiner, so I’ve done my best to avoid being a whining former rock and roller and countercultural icon whose
“Total Assault on the Culture” turned out to be composed, at least in good part, of woof tickets. Even though a good number of our Dreams turned to ashes, these years still pulse in my psyche with their wonderment, fun, creativity, eros, visions of human betterment, and, yes, total assault on the culture.

ED SANDERS
Woodstock, New York

Trouble Trouble Trouble

One evening just as we were getting ready to perform at the Astor Place Playhouse, I learned that an assistant district attorney was in the audience. I vowed not to alter the show a whit, and we didn’t. Soon thereafter the district attorney’s office filtered the word to us that it had decided against pressing charges.

“The current drive against the avant garde arts, against the consciousness-sexpanding drugs, the clean-up of Greenwich Village and 42d Street, and many, many other cases can be explained only as a desperate gathering of evil or sick forces to delay the development of man,” Jonas Mekas, film critic and filmmaker said in a statement adopted by the committee yesterday at a press conference in the Bridge Theater at 2 St. Mark’s Place.

The group charged that The Fugs, a politically oriented rock ’n’ roll
singing group, was being harassed by the License Department. According to
the committee, personnel of the License Department had warned the
owner of the Astor Place Playhouse, where The Fugs have been performing,
that unless the group “toned down” its show, the license for the theater
would be revoked. As a result, the committee said, the owner, Mrs. Muriel
Morse, has shut off the box office telephone. Mrs. Morse could not be
reached for comment, but the telephone is “temporarily disconnected.”
Assistant License Commissioner Walter Kirshenbaum “categorically”
denied the charges yesterday. And Ed Sanders, leader of The Fugs, said he
believed “the pressure is off.” In fact, Mr. Sanders said that his group burned
an American flag at a performance last Saturday night and that nothing had
happened as a result.

Before we were tossed out of the Astor Place Playhouse, we had time to appear in Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua, for which we performed some
songs. Robert Frank was the cinematographer. I recall groveling on the
stage of Astor Place while Paula Prentice in long leather boots stomped on
mock LSD-suffused sugar cubes.

For the rest of the decade and beyond it loomed above our lives like the
ancient curse of Agamemnon—those B-52s above the North.

The New York City Department of Licenses

In the April 28 Village Voice Stephanie Harrington wrote an investigative
piece titled “City’s Censorship Role Is Being Questioned.” The New York
City Department of Licenses, “because of its zealousness,” she wrote, “may
be in the process of putting itself out of business as the . . . censor of the
avant garde.” Artists and theaters and coffee shops had raised their voices
against these overzealous censors.

The Department of Licenses had issued summonses to the 41st Street Theater, where the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque had shown films, because the films displayed “sexual immorality, lewdness, perversity, and homosexuality.” The license creeps had issued summonses to the Bridge Theater with respect to a program in which an American flag had been burned to protest Johnson’s unexpected increase in troops and in bombing of the north in the war in Vietnam.

The license officials had issued summonses to a member of the Artists and Writers Protest Committee for putatively operating a dance hall and selling liquor without a license at an anti–Vietnam War party. Artist Leon Golub was one of the organizers of the committee. The Department of Licenses raided the party.

The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had agreed already to handle my Peace Eye raid case, was considering suing in
court over the License Department’s authority to ooze into a theater, sit in seats, look at the films, performances, plays, etc., being shown, then on its own decide to revoke the theater’s license or refuse to renew the license. (It will be recalled that an ex-CIA agent, working for the Department of Licenses, had testified against Lenny Bruce in the Cafe Au Go Go case back in 1964.) As Stephanie Harrington accurately reported, “Private parties at which liquor is served with the hope that the guests will make donations are a common method of fund-raising among church groups and political candidates.” I recall a LeRoi Jones rent party I had once attended that had plenty of booze, wild dancing, pot, and gluts of Fun.

Mayor Lindsay requested the department’s commissioner, Joel Tyler, to
meet on May 4 with members of the New York Eternal Committee for
Conservation of Freedom in the Arts, whose steering group included Allen
Ginsberg and Jonas Mekas. It took a fresh young mayor ultimately to call off
the hounds of the License Department.

The Ghastly Attention of the FBI and the Justice Department
Meanwhile, the popularity of The Fugs brought us the attention of federal
law enforcement. A few weeks after The Fugs Second Album was released,
there was an investigation of The Fugs by the FBI and the U.S. Department
of Justice, which I learned about years later when I obtained part of my files
under the Freedom of Information Act.

Someone at a radio or television station wrote an indignant letter to the
New York City district attorney. The letter contended that The Fugs Second
Album was pornographic. The letter of complaint was forwarded to the U.S.
attorney, who, in turn, sent it on to the FBI. Of course, in those years the FBI
was known to write letters to itself, or set up such letters, to justify investigations of American activists.

In the early summer a DOJ memorandum stated that a postal inspector
had finished an investigation: “He advised The Fugs is a group of musicians
who perform in NYC. They are considered to be beatniks and free thinkers,
i.e., free love, free use of narcotics, etc. . . . It is recommended that this case be placed in a closed status since the recording is not considered to be obscene.” I felt a surge of patriotism when I read this memo years later among the documents turned over as a result of a Freedom of Information request. Plus this! If we’d only known about this letter, we could have put a sticky label on the record: “Ruled NOT obscene by the United States Government and the Postal Service!

A Trip to Gloucester to See Charles Olson

In late spring, in a rickety old green Ford station wagon, writer George Kimball drove me, Panna Grady, and English poet George MacBeth to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to hang out with Charles Olson. I’m pretty sure it was the first meeting between Olson and Grady, and it rekindled my cunning
scheme, hatched the previous year, for her to help the genius of Gloucester,
whose financial status was always on the edge, especially since he had left
his professorship at Buffalo.

I brought a gift to Olson of a French edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, with
the original Greek helped by a French crib. It was the edition into which I
had handwritten the “Out of the Foam, O Aphrodite” section of “Virgin
Forest” on the second album.

Olson was glad to see us, recounting a recent visit by Tim Leary (who
had given him a vial of pure LSD). We had dinner at the best place in town,
called the Tavern, followed by a long walk on the beach by the harbor.
I’m not totally certain this initial meeting between Panna Grady and
Charles Olson had anything to do with it, but Grady rented a fancy stone
house in Gloucester, where she spent the summer and early fall with her daughter. She had an affair with poet John Wieners that year but broke it off, and she and Charles Olson would travel to England together in the late fall.

June 12 at Town Hall

A young fan named Henry Abramson put up
money for The Fugs to “move uptown” to a
concert at Town Hall! The Town Hall gig
came along at a miracle moment for us. We
were without a theater, having been tossed
from the Astor Place Playhouse. I used the
$1,500 concert fee from Town Hall to rent
the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street,
and we soon began a long, long run.

Robert Shelton reviewed the Town Hall concert in the New York Times.
To my enormous relief, given his stature among writers on current music,
Shelton liked the show! Among his comments:
The Fugs might be considered the musical children of Lenny Bruce, the angry satirist. Their music, while growing in capability, is secondary to their lyrics, patter and antics. Complete personal freedom, whether in sex or in drug experiences, seems to be one of the Fugs’ ensigns. Two songs, including “Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out,” were dedicated to Dr. Timothy Leary, the researcher in use of psychedelic drugs. “Kill for Peace” lambasted the United States policy in Vietnam. While obviously far out by most accepted standards of popular music, the Fugs are clever, biting and effective satirists. In settings of poems by William Blake and Charles Olson, they showed a gentler nature. While not for every
taste, the group can be commended for its originality, courage and wit.

The Players Theatre

Located at 115 MacDougal, the Players Theatre was owned by a gentleman
named Donald Goldman, who did not seem to mind our rough language
and wild stage antics. His theater manager, on the other hand, was an ex-army guy named Howard Dwyer, who didn’t like the word “fuck.” In fact his face went red at it, and although all other words were okay, he seethed at the use of fuck in our routines. Thank goodness theater owner Goldman was more worldly and didn’t care about our language. Whew. The Café Wha was located in the basement, and there were oodles of Greenwich Village sidewalk traffic, so our shows started selling out when we opened in July. Our run there during 1966 and 1967 lasted over seven hundred performances. During the summer and fall we did three shows a night on the weekends—8:00, 10:00, and midnight. The theater was filled, and
the shows were fluid, well done, and hot. It was the peak time for The Fugs.

A Patriotic Flavor

We always struck a theme of patriotism. Examples are our red, white, and
blue logo and our ad in the Village Voice for our run at the Players Theatre.
Pete Kearney left the band, and during that first summer at the Players
Theatre Jon Kalb, brother of Dan Kalb of the Blues Project, was our excellent lead guitarist. And so the summer of ’66 Fugs included Sanders,
Kupferberg, Ken Weaver, Jon Kalb, Vincent Leary, and Lee Crabtree. We
were joined at various points in our run at the Players Theatre by Jake
Jacobs, a fine arranger and singer. For a while we hired a vocal coach, Bruce Langhorne, reputed to be the inspiration for Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

With our second album on the charts
and our shows sold out, we were treated to
the eerie sensation of sudden fame.
Though I lived in an apartment in a slum
building, fans located it and hovered outside
near the incredibly dingy ash cans and
their squashed lids connected by chains to
the cans.

Famous people began to watch our
shows at the Players Theatre, and we were
thrilled to shake the hands of stars such as
Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Tennessee
Williams, and Leonard Bernstein
in quick backstage visits. To Kim
Novak we gave a Fugs T-shirt, hoping
she might pop it on.

The Fugs’ Renown Among the Literati

In addition to renowned guests such as Kim Novak, “New York Intellectuals,”including those associated with the New York Review of Books, began to appear at Fugs shows at the Players Theatre that summer. Elizabeth Hardwick actually wrote a good review of the show, which we cherished. Novelist Philip Roth also came to a show on an evening that Tuli sang “Jack Off Blues,” which always brought an explosive round of applause from the audience. It was around then that Roth began Portnoy’s Complaint, which was published in 1969. A lingering question is this: Was Portnoy’s Complaint inspired by the “Jack Off Blues” lyrics?

Could there have been royalties for Tuli? Probably not. Shakespeare did not have to give credit, and certainly no bread, for plundering histories of Denmark when writing Hamlet.

Elizabeth Hardwick, I’m afraid, captured my Entity of 1966 in an essay published in the December 15 New York Review of Books. “What we might have hoped for,” she wrote, was the mad anarchistic pantomime of The Fugs, of Tuli Kupferberg in “Kill for Peace.” Looking like some obscene Yeshiva student, he has a catatonic relaxation that does more in one pornographic slump than all the agit-prop frenzy of Viet Rock. The Fugs are neither art nor theater, but noise (“total assault”) and Free Speech. Still they make all sorts of popular entertainment obsolete. After “Coca Cola Douche” it is not the easiest thing in the world to sit through the first act of The Apple Tree and watch Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin in the Garden of Eden, trying to “evolve” a word for love. The Fugs are soft, liberal exhorters to “Group Grope.” There is a schizophrenic sweetness and dirtiness about them and the leader of the group, Ed Sanders, is a dismayingly archetypal American. If he weren’t “groping for peace,” he would have been in the Twenties an atheist, in the Thirties a Trotskyite. But he is an actor, possessed of a subversive energy that does not come forth on records and certainly not in his books of verses, or whatever you might call these “lyrics.” In person he is a new, indefinable image. (Kupferberg is a more accomplished actor, but he is not the prime spirit of this group, a group whose purpose is far from evident.) Ed Sanders in dirty black cotton pants, a horrible white plastic vest, dirty red scarf, matted hair, holding a mike with a cord, is some sort of parody of all the MC’s of history. He looks like James Jones, or a foul Bob Hope. Neither he nor his “slum goddess of the lower east side” is aphrodisiac, but they are wildly funny because he and his songs have trapped the infantilism of smutty little boys. To be clean and well-dressed and concerned about homosexuality or four-letter words: that is the real madness. It is not free sex, but free speech they celebrate: dirty words, dirty feet, laughter. The Fugs are ideologues of some kind, not orgiasts; their ideas are few and simple, and all of them are pacific. The young couples in the audience, soiled, long-haired, were strangely soft and domesticated also, as if they had some parody nest, with a few pans, a few drugs, and then, all smudged and sweaty, tucked themselves into a passive sleep. Still there is something final about The Fugs. It is hard to see how Alan Jay Lerner can carry on after “My Baby Done Left Me and I Feel Like Homemade Shit.”

The Fugs performing at LEGALIZE LEVY benefit May 14, 1967 –

http://flash.ulib.csuohio.edu/cmp/levy/fugs.html

“I have something for you,” she said as they lay together at the end of an afternoon.

“What?”

He was staring at Jihan’s Li’s gullet, inches away. It fascinated him. They were naked, side by side, and from Penman’s view, nose to throat, it seemed her Adam’s apple was a small animal scurrying back and forth in a silky burrow of flesh.
“This,” she replied, sitting up and reaching for her bag.

Penman stared at her back muscles. He’d been femme-fucked by a variety of androgynous giantesses in his time, but never by one with such a developed physique. He was admiring Jihan Li’s hilly trapezius and the sweep of her latissimus dorsi when she turned and thrust the gift box at him.

Leaning upon one elbow he opened the present and began peeling away the tissue paper, doing his best to keep his eyes off her breasts.

Then the paper was gone and Penman was looking at a small horse.

A jade horse.

Penman saw a galloping jade horse so full of energy it looked ready to charge across the room, spring from the window in an emerald blur onto Austin Alley, then race downhill to Van Ness where it would change direction and keep going until it hit Market Street, blasting through traffic like a lime-colored equine missile.

“Do you like it?”

Penman speechlessly moved his head from side to side, although he meant the opposite.
Jihan Li smiled, looking to Penman like a thousand-armed Kwan Yin, the spiritually hermaphroditic Bodhisattva of Compassion. She took the jade horse from his hands, placed it on the night table, then rolled back on top of Penman, her lips dragging down his chest to his nipples, which she sucked and nibbled until his stiff cock tingled, although it felt oddly irrelevant, almost like an observer.

“Pretend you’re my wife,” she commanded.

Penman groaned and blushed uncontrollably. A burning rose was blooming within his body. He felt open and innocent and royal.
“Oh, you like that. How sweet! Do you know what I want?”

“A man?” he asked wistfully.

Jihan Li looked firmly into his eyes.

“No! I want man who is also a woman.”

Penman nodded against his will, his gaze stealing down toward the strap-on dildo she was generously coating with lube. It thrust out like a red cannon from her leather harness. Why red? Is it because she’s from China? Penman felt a spasm of shame and an urge to jump from the bed, but it was too late. She slid two lube-coated fingers into his bun and corkscrewed them slowly. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and lay back. His last thought before she entered him: “If anybody in Zen circles finds out about this, I’m ruined.”

After that she rode Penman into the sunset.

He fell off one hundred cliffs, floated like a flower petal, sobbed greedily into his pillow.

Then Jihan Li left.

One day Penman inspected the jade horse and discovered it wasn’t jade at all. Just scrap iron painted green.

No surprise. He’d known it from day one. Penman mistake junk metal for yu, Asia’s royal gem? Impossible! But to facilitate scented memories of the Shanghai giantess, he always thought of her gift as a “jade horse.” Whenever he uttered the trigger-phrase “jade horse,” animation instantly ran through his brain of blast-furnace Beijing — represented by a husky figure in goggles, helmet, and canvas suit — vigorously fucking yinny-winny San Francisco, here rendered as a Betty Boop type on all fours with panties stretched below the knees, facial resemblance to an overwrought Penman. This odd figure would trill like a happy robin flying above Golden Gate Park as the pounding and penetration became deeper and deeper, wider and wider, like a mine being blasted through a mountainside.

“I’ve been in sissified Frisco too long, O Lord,” prayed Penman. “Kindly halt the virility diminishment and get me back Yin-Yang rectified!”

He thought of Jihan Li as his last major conquest. It was he who’d been conquered, of course, but Penman rewrote his own history more and more. Once-upon-a-cock, a Hell’s Kitchen porn star had supported Penman. Now he was a bitch for men in female bodies. Cowgirls, black women boxers, gym queens, sullen motorcycle dykes. He must emit a scent of male pussy. Not gay — definitely not gay — just a guy with a hottie femme ghost inside his skin. So when an allurement manifested herself in the personage of Jihan Li — runaway Chinese basketball star on the loose at the Civic Center farmers’ market — Penman dove right into the ocean of birth and death. Nor did he pursue Self-enquiry, as in “Who Am I?” — or surrender to the Silence.
His fattened ego deserved what he got, and got what he deserved, and Penman was so confused he couldn’t even tell cause from effect.

Later, whenever he glanced at the sea-colored stallion, Penman made it a point to remember that Chinese people call jade the Stone of Heaven, a perfect synonym for his shlong. This was obviously why Jihan Li had given it as honorarium to the forever-young Yid’s inexhaustible (yet flexible) uber-maleness.

I’m straight as a fucking arrow, thought Penman. I am, I really am.

“Sure you are, kid,” smirked an unseen voice, which Penman recognized instantly as that of Ego Demon. “What self-serving bullshit.”

“Jade horse, my dick! Jade horse! My dick!” cried Penman desperately.

“Your dick ain’t jade and never was,” smirked Ego Demon. “And neither are you, kid.”

Penman felt as if he were toppling off a stepladder. His head fell forward onto the desk top, striking the computer keyboard and knocking over a coffee cup. The green horse toppled over, as well, resting one hoof upon Penman’s left earlobe. Ego Demon, perhaps realizing he’d gone too far this time, vanished in a puff of chutney-flavored smoke.

When he finally came around, Penman could hear the laughter of homeless people lining up for a free feed in Austin Alley next to the Episcopal Church. Penman listened, grateful they were there and that somebody was taking care of them. That’s what I should do, he thought. Buy a plaid shirt and work in a soup kitchen. Do something useful instead of sexually imploding in the twilight of my years.

As he lifted his head, the hoof in his ear also rose, flipping the green statue over onto its side. Penman promptly stood the horse upright next to his computer.

What exactly had happened that day so long ago?

For starters, Jihan Li had sucked his cock. Then they’d fucked. Of a fashion. Penman lay on top of the huge fugitive sports star and wriggled like a feisty eel. Much of the time, however, Penman’s mug was sunk between her hoop-jumping, steel-and-silk thighs, shlurping and savoring, the way he gorged at the $9.95 all-you-can-eat hot pot barbecue place on Clement Street. Her groans, through Penman’s thigh-covered ears, had sounded like a bassoon under water.

Whenever it got stuffy below deck and Jihan Li heard him gasping for air, she’d let Penman raise his sopping face a few inches, all the while keeping a huge hand on top of his head as if she were palming a basketball. Then, assured he wouldn’t suffocate on her clitoris, she’d press down firmly and return Penman to the ocean depths.

Penman knew that the proper way to assuage a cunt is to adore it like a mouth. Deep soul kisses, serpentine licks, surrendered sucklets. But now he performed his art below sea level so long that he actually felt Jihan Li’s roaring cavity was her real mouth, the devourer of noodles and tofu, the enunciator of arcane basketball plays, and a hyper-energetic feral, slithery mucilaginous beast of the woods who was devouring Penman’s tongue, lips, nose, gums, jaw, and cheeks by omnivorous increments. It was horrifying and overwhelming and wet.

And the more Penman sucked, the more the mobilized folds of her vagina revealed their inescapable three-dimensional aspect, like a large, wet, heavily built forest creature in a shaggy coat on a killing spree. Penman sucked her cunt and surrendered to her cunt and he knew he was nothing whatsoever and that she was everything, her cunt was everything; worship it, suck it, drink from it, his eyes closed and soaked, his nose up her sacred cave, and his whole body eased into deep relaxation, deeper and deeper relaxation, the surrender of dying prey, and Penman knew he was the luckiest landless peasant who ever toiled unceasingly upon a desolate tract of land belonging to the Green Queen of the Northwest Frontier. Every muscle, nerve, and tendon in his body suddenly let go, like a handful of loose rubber bands.

Jihan Li’s cunt was a sacristy at the center of the universe, adorning him in vaginal vestments, a shrine that Penman was born to suck. So he sucked it. He sucked it with a slave’s devotion under her thunderstorm, and the forest creature devoured his sucking tongue and lips, just dragged them within the dark forest, owning Penman’s ass and cock and thighs and face and cheeks, making them silky beautiful because he sucked her cunt, forever under her cunt that he sucked and sucked some more. And when Jihan would unexpectedly change pace and ferociously fuck Penman’s mouth, ramming his face like a pole, his mouth stretched out in a circular rictus. At such moments her rump rested heavily upon Penman’s fragile facial bones, and it felt as if his skull would crack open. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t because his mouth was full of Jihan Li’s cunt.

Then she taught him special shameful mysteries with her red cannon.

Until dusk. Until nightfall. Until the shadow of death.

And when she graciously deposited the happy horsey on Penman’s night table before exiting his front door, about sixteen ounces of her freshly squeezed cum trickling smoothly through Penman’s guts, he could think only of a courtesan leaving her royal lover a post-coital gift, one that empowers him toward speedy success and limitless wealth. Mongolian quarter horse hits straightaway: Penman performs bedtime magic. Not precise battlefield reportage, but who cares? Didn’t Penman deserve the seventh animal in the Chinese zodiac — timeless symbol of galloping success and potency — a jade-fucking-stallion?
Apparently not.

Spray-painted Chinatown tourist shit, mused Penman, spiraling downward toward a familiar state of low-energy discontent. His musings darkened as he contemplated the steed’s shy yet dumbly pleased expression, as if its balls were being fondled by a little girl in a plaid dress, the kind who later obsessively draws ponies prior to becoming a dominatrix.
An emasculating insult. Unquestionably.

Penman frowned, oozing bitterness, and realized he was vibrating in an unprofitable way. Too late! He dropped another notch. Rage, sadness, and annoyance danced onstage in lustrous flounced skirts like three drag queens of doom. He felt bad, real bad! Yet he continued the downward spiral — couldn’t stop — the way he sniffed a sleeveless undershirt, recognized he had already worn it for a week but slipped it over his head anyway.

Then Penman noticed a little plug in the horse’s head — like a forelock. He pulled it out. The plug resembled a green ray gun. What the hell was it? There was a tiny hole between the horse’s jaws. Huh? Penman turned the horse upside down and looked at its belly. If this was a kiddie bank, that’s where the removable cap would be. But there wasn’t any. A fucking mystery. A hollow horse with a plug in its head and a hole in its mouth!

He brooded over this for a long time.

A hollow horse with a plug in its head and a hole in its mouth.

Like me.

What a disaster is this world! The whole realm of birth and death is disaster not only waiting to happen but happening over and over again in Penmanland. And always they hunt the Jews, thought Penman. Every country, every time. Claiming Lucifer is behind us making trouble.

A tiny voice whispered helpfully: Absolute stillness of mind is the attainment of Liberation. But Penman ignored it.
He placed the horse back on his desk by his computer, in front of the heavy copper statue of the Monkey King holding a staff, a coffee mug bearing the Monkey King’s face, and a tiny rubber monkey wearing a fez.

Then he stared pensively at the simian trio.

He was seeking the Truth he already was! Why didn’t other people realize the spiritual sacrifices he had made, sacrifices like not snorting cocaine or hanging out in bars and chasing tawdry actresses? These abstinences surely were worthy of note. Why hadn’t she given him a jade horse, a real jade horse!

Penman went to bed early that night, fleeing a wave of depression approaching at breakneck speed. He switched on his Marsona sound machine to a repetitive wave pattern and drifted off. Outside his window he heard homeless people mingling. It sounded like they were cooking a cat on a spit and chanting anti-war slogans.

He dreamed of Jihan Li. She was green- and gold-colored, and had arms extending from her shoulders, back, waist, and chest. Two, three, dozens, hundreds, even thousands of arms, all waving and active. Penman stared at her unafraid as she said, “Miseries exist only in the place you have entered. In order to remove all miseries, go back to your place of birth.”
He slept deeply and rose at dawn.

It was peaceful and quiet, his favorite time of day. According to yogis, the best hours for meditation.
He took a look around his sloppy apartment, glanced fondly at his meditation alcove, and for a few moments felt content.

What was it about jade?

What? What?

Fuck it!

Who the hell cares?

Enough with the jade horse and my cock and sissification and fictitious desires and wasted human births already!
Penman, suddenly fed up with entangled delusion, changed into his meditation clothes — black gung-fu pants and gray, coffee-stained sweatshirt — and sat down in the full-lotus position.

Then he let go of everything. Surrendered his body to the cushion, letting his thoughts float off like puffy balloons. Even thoughts about Jihan Li’s cock and cunt and the odd karma Penman had created with her. He let all of it go, and the vexations dissolved and he felt more and more settled and clean and free with a straight back and a handsome face and left hand on top of right.

Like a sitting Buddha was Penman.

After some time he arose, feeling like a million bucks. He could have sat longer, of course. A whole day, maybe even a week, and he definitely would and could have transcended the burning pain in his legs. But he simply had things to do today. “The worst error when seeking Enlightenment,” thought Penman, “is to rush” — recalling what some Dharma guy had said in a book.
Only practice, no gain.

I sure can practice, thought Penman.

Then he turned, saw the green horse on his desk, and felt a rush of love.

“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” he cried aloud.

It was clear and obvious that the tall Chinese babe had indeed presented him with a jade horse. A real jade horse, not some piece of crap made in a factory in Taiwan where they paid the workers thirteen cents an hour.

He held the green stallion in his hands for a moment, feeling its power and weight, which had to be at least three pounds. He kissed it. All over. From snout to haunches. At the same time he suppressed an urge to hurl it against the wall with all his might. The impulse grew stronger and stronger, surging throughout his body. But Penman remained calm, letting the waves of vexation splash themselves out.

© 2007 Michael Disend

Ralph Steadman

Alone back in the lab we knew it was only a matter of time before they shut us down. Maybe that was why, maybe it wasn’t why, we did what we did.

According to the deposit we made in the Memory Bank, it happened more out of inspiration than any long range game plan. We weren’t even thinking about the Virusphere, much less working out trying to get into it. What we were, very simply, was too deep in the deal to get out, and seriously sloshed to the gills to boot. Totally ripped out of our gourds, tuning out the program, in lieu of desperation in pursuit of a good time. We were just surfing the old Net, buckeroos, hanging on to the cusps as long as we could before pulling our puds out of the circle jerk as close to blastoff as we could without missing the tidal wave.

True, I could be more academic in my explanation of what went down, but in the Now Order the concept of academic was not only considered passé, but putzé as well. There was something I couldn’t and still can’t quite define about using Virtual Reality as a tool; though Quirk and I were basically gamers, we had come close to breaking through on a neurokinetic level before, but had never quite crossed over from the white rat stage of development.

“Look at that sucker!” The good Doctor laughed as we watched our McGuffin bury its furry head so far up its ass it came out the other side chugging a small mug of frothy blue suds for all he was worth; he sat straight up on his haunches like a lap dog begging for a pet then, and virtually evaporated for three beats, then suddenly shot back to his normal size, and went for the maze like he was in the stretch of the Disney Derby and could smell his odds ticking in favor of syndication. “No heart attacks, no cancer, no immune system breakdowns, nothing to stop him from going forever and ever, the poor little bastard.”

And just as suddenly as that, Whitey rolled over and croaked on the dime.

“What the crxx happened?” Quirk asked, rolling the rat over on his back.

“I think that’s why they call ‘em rats?”

“Don’t be funny, Method, we just blew our point out of the game again.”

“I’m freezing the system,” I said. “I wanna see something.” I walked over and pulled the gynascopic lens down from the moon.

“What the crxx are you doin’?”

“Hit VR and the Mic at the same time.”

“You sure you know what you’re doin’?”

“Of course not. If I did, I wouldn’t do it.”

“What the crxx,” Quirk laughed, “that sounds like the secret of all science.” He plunked the magic twanger then. “WHOA!”

“Yeah, WHOA!”

“Do you see what I see, buddy-boy?”

“I don’t know, Jules, what do you see?”

“I see itty bitty bastards hoppin’ around up there like, like–”

I started laughing. “Well now, if I didn’t know you better I’d say you have a plan. And I’d say they’re going to crucify us for it if they figure out what we’re doing before we finish doing it.”

“Well, if truth be known–”

“Truth never be known, Jules, it’s too scary to know the truth, but it’s obvious to me that what’s already gone down is irreversible; that’s a truth they don’t want to be known. The only thing left we can do is alter the reaction to that truth. The ozone’s ripped, and it’s not only ripped for us, it’s ripped for every organism on the planet.”

“BINGO, pally!”

“We can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together, but if we hold the line we at least control the rate of change — that’s where the infomaniacs are crxxing up daily; too much too fast just blows those delicate circuits off the board without removing the fear factor, and without that you can’t modulate the discrepancies. It might take a complete generation refusing to answer marketing surveys to get the real pure Heisenberg-Free-data we need to make accurate projections, overlay them and put the substance that’s missing in the technology in play, but that’s the ticket, man.

“I’m glad you’re on our side.”

“I’m not on our side, Jules, because we have no side! We’re outside sides, we’re crazy, we’re certified, and if we’re right it probably means no more than singing in the shower. If we’re wrong–”

“We’re not wrong! You know we’re not wrong!” He walked over and handed me a mug of the blue stuff. “To your health, pally.”

“Up yours too!” We lifted our glasses, and began singing The National Anthem.

Buy-Sell
Sell-Buy.
Ingest-Digest.
Consume-Consume.
Combustible-Disposable-
Permanently recycle the shit
and pass it around again. . .

We clinked glasses, then chugged the blue, and came back up wailing like the old blue gum Rolling Stones:

Take it out of your wallet. . .
Put it into circulation. . .
Invest it in the future. . .
Save it for a rainy day. . .
Or save your soul instead. . .
Give it to the charity of your choice:
TAX DEDUCTABLE – MONEY BACK GUARANTEE,
TAX DEDUCTABLE – MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. . .

The vibrations kicked in then, and in that instant Quirk and I stepped into the mulch and virtually entered the Virusphere.

“Jesus!” Quirk exhales, looking up like a Nebraska hick shocked by the wicked world of test tube skyscrapers dripping down on us. But just when it looked like it was going to evaporate us, we got lucky and got a cab.

The driver took one look at us and his eyes knew immediately we didn’t know shit from shineola. But if it didn’t matter to him it didn’t matter to us. We were inside, not outside, and that was as far as my mind went into the future, crxx you very much.

“Hey, Death,” Quirk laughed, “look me in the face, be honest now, what’s the point? You go forward two steps, back one if you’re lucky, three if you’re not, and I don’t even want to go into the rest of the progressions, do you Method?”

“Arg. . .”

“I knew I could count on you, boobs.” He turned his attention to the cabbie. “What about you? You takin’ us to the Casbah or what, Ace? You’re takin’ off a hundred and 12 around that corner, what’s the rush, Slick?”

The driver turned his head back over the seat towards us, and arched his eyebrow 86 degrees doo-da. “If I make it you make it. Don’t look over your shoulder,” he said, “you’ll make them suspicious. You’ll make them think we have something, and they’ll want it. If they want it they’ll get it. If we don’t give it to them they’ll rub us out and take it anyway. That’s how man works, man; SEE, WANT, GRAB!”

“I can relate,” Quirk agreed. “See, want, grab; what a logo, Shecky!”

“Yeah-yeah, Shecky’s the name, shekels are the game,” the cabbie laughed. “Where to?”

“The hottest place in town. Where all the big shots hang up their thumbs.”

“You got it, guy,” he cackled, then stomped the accelerator and literally leaped off the road as he turned back to us and buffed, “Remember that scene in Key Largo, where Bogart asks the Johnny Rico character–”

“Edward G. Robinson?”

“Yeah-yeah, Eddie G., Johnny Rico, all the same gangster, that’s him. And Bogie says something like, ‘Tell me, Rico, what is it you want?’ And Rico sucks himself up like a reconstituted prune and asks himself, ‘Want?’ And Bogie says, ‘I’ll tell you what you want, Rico, you want more!’ Eddie G’s puss lights up then. ‘Yeah, more!’ he grins. ‘I want more, more, more!’ That’s man for you, man. He don’t want nothin’ more than more, more, more! ! !”

“Greedy little crxxs, ain’t they?”

“Big greedy crxxs from where I’m sittin’, babe. But hey, not mine to do or die for, if I can help it. Where you cats from?”

“The ether, man. We come from the ether,” Quirk grinned.

“Astral scum, how cool! I knew you’d show up one day.”

“Just came to communicate,” I said like Joe Friday just repeating his lines on Dragnet.

“No-no-no-nobody communicates anymore, so don’t talk to me about communication-huh? Anybody who says they want to communicate really means what they want to do is flip the lip, man. They wanna yakity-yak, and if you’re on, they’re just waitin’ like a vulture for an opening to go off on their own tangent. That’s communication in a nutshell, man.”

“Not a bad definition,” I said.

“Plenty bad,” he contradicted me. “DON’T SWEAT! They can detect sweat. They’ve developed machinery that picks up on the reactions of glands. It comes in a BEEP-BEEP they hardly recognize. Like radar. It’s an alert system, very finely honed. Once it gets us tuned in we’re finished. FINISHED! On the road to being rubbed out by our own personal preferences. Bought and sold on the market to the highest bidder, the best manipulator and all the rest of the imagined etceteras.”

The cab screeched to a halt in front of this roped off hot spot! There was no name on the awning in front of the building. No nothing in front of the building.

Shecky leaped out of the cab and opened the door for Quirk. “They’re watching us,” he said. “Those two guys, Method and Quirk, they’re watching us. But that’s a good sign. One of us is going to make it, one of us is going to break through. One of us is going to teach them something they can’t deny.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Quirk said, as Shecky led us up to the building, then knocked three times and asked for “Joe.”

A peephole opened and a cocked eye peered through at us.

“We come from ‘de Mojo Dojo,” Shecky whispered.

The door opened then, and Quirk and I stepped into the middle of a gang of Mexican Fludito Viruses, all twirling thick black mustachios, wearing long black serapes, big black bandito hats, shiny black bandito boots, with gobs of black shoe polish under empty black eyes concealing their even blacker hearts.

“Oh crxx, SCAMCO!”

The lead Fludito reached out and removed the vials of vaccine from our belts. “So good of you to deliver, hombres. It saves thees Scumbag another bad treep down memory lane.” He turned to his wild bunch. “Take them.” And suddenly they were on us, dragging us out the back door!

I thought it was curtains for sure then, but instead of finishing us, they blindfolded us, gagged us, stuffed us with imitation crabmeat, and the next thing I knew we went on a little scenic cruise. Got our asses dragged out of the city. Way out of the city, into the sewers, under the sanitation system, up to the high desert. . .

Just us and the campfire girls sitting around a big wide open bar-b-que pit out in the middle of nowhere, watching what was left of the world turn on the spit.

Scumbag stood in front of us like Brando momentarily contemplating having an Ultra Slim Quick lunch, then reached out and ripped a chunk of loin from the flames and laughed. “What can I say, hombres, we are the oldies but goldies, those noble outlaws you have been emulating through the last ten sets of reruns. That is why you do not understand us. You may be the macho of our nacho, definitely the macro of our micro, but you are not inside us, you do not understand why we are here instead of there, when obviously we could have already been there if we only followed the simple blueprint on the inside cover: LEARN TO DRAW the cover says. But it does not say LEARN TO TURN THE COVER OVER AND LEARN TO DRAW. You thought we’d get that one on our own. You didn’t realize we’d learn to draw what we wanted to draw, not what you wanted us to learn to draw.”

“Of course,” Quirk agreed. “That’s why we’ve come to you, oh noble Scumbag. We think we can help you and you can help us.”

“Flattery will get you somewhere, Doctor, but I ain’t sure it ees where you want to be. Nevertheless, welcome to development hell. Thees Scumbag may look like a simple germ to you, hombres, but I have been around more than a few of your blockheads. Once upon a time, back in your so-called good ole days I even did a stint at Yale Drama School, before the body I lived in decided to check out of the scene. What I learned from him before he realized he was absolutely obsolete before hees time was don’t talk to them about it, just show them the pictures. I theenk there’s something very profound in the triumph of image over substance. The triumph of business over education. Of Marketing over the marketplace itself. I mean, hombres, thees humble Scumbag would steell like to watch The Maltese Falcon, would steell like to watch The Treasure of Sierra Madre, but in looking at your so-called Infotainment industry I have kind of a splendid indigestion, because you have thees extraordinary technology and talent being misappropriated by boobs pandering to the lowest common denominator of any given situation. Where are the leaders, the leaders who are going to say thees ees the substance that needs to be transmitted so the young terrorist fools can learn they are fools before they blow themselves up? Because at the end of the day, hombres, it ees all about ideas anyway, isn’t it? I mean, it ees the transmission of ideas. Even the bad ones, the lies, the progaganda in the name of one bogus god or another. . .in order to sell the program and advance the cause, whatever it be. . .That’s what used to make me stay in touch with the gang at Elaine’s, not the pork chops. Ideas and the language used to transmit them ees what made me stay in touch with your so-called New York literary scene. Even though it had the smell of death about it even in your so-called glory days. Nothing at all was allowed in it if it did not fall into a utilitarian mindset. At its best, chic simple, hombres. But ultimately faux chic. Designer intelligensia. Give Scumbag a herd of anorexic supermodels instead. They may be just as hungry, but they don’t make peegs out of themselves, even when snorting up the last of the good times. The literary life is not in shambles, it ees in vaudeville. I watched your excuse for journalism turn into a virus more despicable than gonorrhea, and even more deadly than us on an epidemic purge, amigos. I quit looking at the novelist a long time ago – who knows where that turkey ees coming from other than the addiction to hees own stuffing? Don’t get me wrong, hombres, it has it’s place – it ees like listening to a good seenger. Give me Piaf, Zimmie, Tony B., Courtney Loving glue, hell, give me Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, hombres, ’cause around here there are no rules, Scumbag makes the rules.

“Rules are made to be broken,” Quirk slides in. “But we’re the exceptions to the rule. Let’s do the dog, man. Break the bread. Cut the mustard. Slice the cake. Divvy up the spoils before they get rotten.”

“That ees the theeng about your species, you are out to keell us and you are out keell yourselves, only you plan on keelling us first.” He turns around to his gang, but can’t shoot straight. “It ees jus’ an experiment, right, hombres – GET NORMAL – TURN RIGHT – NO U TURNS, unless we are not looking. . .”

“Actually, we wouldn’t be here if it were just an experiment, Kemo Sabe, we would’ve sent the rat. Remember the rat?”

“Ooh Chihuahua, the rat! Who could ever forget Whitey? That rat ate my mother, the rat raped my seester, Whitey was a keeller, baby.”

“Whitey was a killer, but we’re on a different trip,” I said. “We don’t want to kill you, we don’t want you to kill us, we want to work together. Together I think we can tackle the future.”

They all started laughing. Even Quirk started laughing.

“The future, you want to tackle the future?”

“Headcrxxingon, Scumbag!”

“Hey, watch your fucking language! We changed the word on you to break your bad habits. Head-on ees what you been doing all these years, and still you too dumbass to notice it ees running right over you head-on, and right over us too.”

“Look,” Quirk said, “What he means is that the planet’s changing, the atmosphere’s changing, the weather’s changing, everything’s changing every day. But there’s no handle on the rate. We don’t know when or how, but we know we’ve got to change with it, you’ve got to change with it – neither of us can fight it if we want to get to the next level.”

“So what’s thees head-on crap? You look at the sun head-on too long you go blind. Anything you want you gotta look at it from an angle, not head-on.”

“Ok,” I said, “here’s the angle. You’re our inners, we’re your outers – you’ve got exactly what we need, and we’ve got exactly what you want–”

“Ooooo, you’ve got exactly what we want, do you? Hey, I think I hear thees one before, hombres. You’re regular bargain. Always On Sale. Always For Sale. If you make it we make it, there ees always room for our kind of talent in SCAMCO, right? WRONG! You’ve spent decade upon decade infiltrating us with vaccines so we won’t know who we are. That’s why we have to be careful. Any one of us at any given moment could be an imposter, a mutation of ourselves.”

“That’s exactly the point!” Quirk snapped. “Untie us and we’ll clean you up, dextox you, we’ll remake your image. Get you solid PR for a change. Blow the cover off the undercover, and create a buzz that you guys are the only ones that know how to get us back from Oz.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, amigo.”

“Would you at least talk to a Barbara Walters clone about this?”

“It ees too little, too late, hombres. Even if you had just offered us a Diane Sawyer clone instead, it is too late,” he slurped.

“Hey, we’re too good to waste,” Quirk said. “There’s got to be some way we can all get deep in the deal together. Vested interest is the key.”

“I thought it was the lock.”

“Only when it’s on the other side of the door.”

“We’re all on the same page now,” I said.

“That so?” Scumbag laughed.

“Ask me anything.”

“Maybe you’d like to sleep with my seester to close the deal?”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “If it’s gonna work, we’ve gotta break the mold, gotta be able to trust each other without riding the grease.”

“Rosita. Chop-chop, front and center, machacha.”

She was beautiful like a Diane Sawyer clone was beautiful of course. But not exactly simple. With a face like a dream created from the brush of Salvador Dali’s sexual fantasies, Rosita’s dichotomies included a clitoris like an ice pick. A virtual snake protruding from the garden between her tentacles that could actually break and enter the male hymen without even knocking.

Quirk came first. He was quick as usual, but not premature.

I’ll always remember his screams; it’s how over the sea of time I’ve managed to forget my own. I was slower, much slower, but then again I was in mourning for the past. It was part of my addiction. And as I testified at the trial, why I had to give it all up to cross over to the other side.

They didn’t understand I did it for humanity. Accused me of being a traitor. . . Said I talked. Which was not exactly accurate either: I wasn’t talking, I was singing, Let old acquaintances be forgot, babe. Live. In Concert. My own personal Best Of collection, Volumes One & Two; all for the price of a song in the shower.

© 2012 Mike Golden

Painting by AKA

My coworker at Microtech, Larry Sanders, and I decide to leave the office Christmas party before we puke from one too many watered-down eggnog rum balls and go to a strip club called the Blood Red Room in the haggard part of Dallas named Deep Ellum. We stumble from the cab to the club and when we get inside, a waitress with a drooping Santa stocking hat and a black eye, so disfigured it looks almost as red as the skimpy Playboy bunny Santa suit she wears, seats us in a velvet booth that’s blotted with dark stains and ancient grime. She mechanically bats her massacred lashes as she unenthusiastically wishes us Merry Christmas and scribbles down our order in a little notebook. My eyes get stuck in her cleavage but my mouth manages to forge the words: gin martini, dry, dirty, and a basket of spicy chicken wings to split -with Ranch. Larry lights a cigarette and puffs little smoke rings towards the overhead ceiling fan. I remove my tie, wad it up, and stuff it into the front pocket of my business slacks.

“We just crawled under a rock, you know that right?” Larry says.

“Hey, you wanted to come here, man. Give me one of those.”

Larry plucks a cigarette out of his pack and tosses it at my hand.

“Drink in the landscape! Lady Mecca.” He spits out his words as he glances around the club at the various dancing girls and waitresses.

“Larry, why are we here? ” I ask.

“Malcolm.”

“What?”

“You don’t miss a day… Never late to work… You work and work and you work and you work… Come on… It’s Christmas Eve, loosen the hell up.”

“Regional manager.”

“So?”

“It’s way more money. I’m thirty-one. Once I hit regional, I’ll loosen up and party until the day I retire… But for now, I have to keep my head in the game. Can’t drop the ball.”

The waitress comes back with our martinis. Larry tips her five bucks and says, Sorry about your eye. She fakes a smile, shrugs, and heads toward the kitchen. Larry watches her walk, his wide eyes inhale her as if to make a mental recording of her body. A loud rap song booms over the club speakers then fades into slow techno. Two thin girls, littered with tattoos, dance on stage around the pole. We order another round of martinis. From our booth, Larry waves (friendly) to the Mexican man who bartends. The man waves back. Only the lonely, only the lonely. I chant this in my mind and don’t know why. I’m getting too drunk.

“Gotta get you laid, my man!” Larry slurs.

“Nah, I’m gonna head out after this drink.”

“Wha’sit been?” Larry lights another cigarette, “Wha’sit been since you got laaaaid?”

“This is depressing.”

“Come on!” He pokes his finger at me.

“Since I went home to Winnipeg. January. Last year… a whole year.” The truth slips.

Larry laughs so hard he begins to choke.

I’m in the bathroom at the urinal and I’m just sober enough not to piss all over myself. I flush, zip up my pants, and stumble towards the sink but I end up falling into a man with dreadlocks who washes his hands.

“You okay?” He speaks in a British accent.

“I’m good.”

“Coke? Perk you up.”

“It’s been a long time… Sure.”

“I’m Zeke. You ever need me to hook ya up with more, let me know. I’m here on Fridays.” Zeke pats my shoulder and pulls out a small clear baggy of coke from his front jacket pocket. He taps a little coke out on the top of my hand and I snort.

“Yes.” I pat Zeke on the shoulder and turn to leave the bathroom. “Can I give you some money for that?” I turn back and reach for my back pocket to fish out my wallet but Zeke waves his hand ‘no.’

I’m back at the booth carrying a one-sided argument about politics with Larry but he’s only sober enough to occasionally mutter sad things about his daughters and his ex-wife. When the chicken wings finally arrive, Larry vacuums most of them down within the course of a single rap song — the wings sober him up a bit. As I regale him with the story (total fiasco) of losing my virginity on my eighteenth birthday, he interrupts me. His eyes squint and he rubs his fat, bald, head.

“Holy crap. It’s Betty Allen. She must have escaped the Christmas party.” Larry points towards the club door.

“What?”

I turn my head to follow his gaze and I see my thirty-five-year-old boss Betty Allen standing at the door of the club. The enormous, leather clad, bouncer holds the edges of her driver’s license and scans for her birth date. She scratches at an itch that’s under her tight black skirt and her hand yanks up her fish net stocking at the knee. I’ve worked at Microtech for three years and I’ve never seen Betty in anything other than bland gray business suits and I’ve never seen her outside the office.

“Dude.” Larry slides down low in the booth. “She’s hot.”

I sink down in the booth and meet him at eye level. “We HAVE to get out of here. I need the promotion, she can’t see me in a place like this.”

“Wonder why she’s by herself? Why the hell is she dressed like that?”

“I don’t know, man! People have lives outside of work, whatever. We’re going to get out of here and she’s not going to see us. Betty makes the recommendation about regional manager next week. You know that, right? She can’t see me.”

“But she’s here too.” He shrugs.

“I’ve worked for three years to craft an upright work image. Image is everything. You will NOT muck this up for me!”

“She’s so hot.”

“Shut up!”

I peek over the booth. Betty Allen sits at the bar and orders a drink.

“It’s clear, let’s go.” I wave at Larry to follow me. He squeezes out of the booth and almost trips me as we stride behind her barstool. As we speed by, she glances at us.

“What are you guys doing here?” She asks.

Larry frantically shakes my hand and for some reason he’s blushing. “Good seeing you, Malcolm. You were right, they have great chicken wings here. I must go home now.” He waves to Betty, “Mrs. Allen, I will see you on Monday.” Larry walks, chin up, out of the club like he’s an embarrassed, righteous fifth grader.

An hour passes. I’ve sat at the bar doing my best not to bite the insides of my cheeks (because of the coke) and trying to listen to Betty, smile and nod, and act as coherently as possible. She brushes her dark hair out of her face and smiles with her light blue eyes. She sips her third gin and tonic.

“I’m not so bad, am I?” She asks.

“No, of course not.” I tell her.

“People at work think I’m a bitch but I’m not. I’m just assertive. Do you think I’m bad… at my job?”

“Of course not. I think people respect you. I respect you.”

She smiles as if she likes my answer but doesn’t quite believe it to be true. Which it isn’t. Most people at work think she’s a bitch.

“You live around here? That why you came here?” I ask.

“Two blocks north.”

After another gin and tonic and three tall waters for me, she invites me over to her apartment. Outside the club, on the sidewalk, she pulls on my arm and I pull back — kind of like a tug-of-war.

“Oh come on… Come over… Just one more drink…” She says.

“I’m so tired… And I want to get those reports done before Monday.”

“So your TWI reports are more important than your good standing with your boss?”

“No, of course not.”

“I see how you are…” Betty releases my arm and walks away. She raises her hand and waves backwards as she says, “Goodnight Malcolm.”

I watch her walk away in her black fish nets, tall boots, short skirt. She’s tall and thick and she knows how to walk — her walk is art. A strut, a dance, hypnotic. I could watch this girl walk to Alaska. She should teach it. This is a skill. I look up at the dark Texas sky. It’s so hot out my shirt sticks to my chest. I picture my bed. My air conditioner. My giant blue comforter. My expensive pillows. Pillows that make you thankful to be alive. My cat (I‘m sure Theodore is wondering where I am). The leftover pizza in my refrigerator… I think about sleeping-in, late for Christmas Eve. I think about heating up the pizza and watching a horror movie or maybe basketball highlights. A hot shower before bed sounds divine. This won’t end well. I chase after her. “Betty, wait up! One drink.”

We stand outside her apartment building. I have to pee. She jabs her key into the lock just as a tall, beefy-looking man walks up. The guy’s a jock. He carries a gym bag, wears his hair in a blond swoop, and looks like he just got back from some late night work out session at 24-hour Fitness. I don’t like him.

“Hey Betty.” He holds the door for us. We walk in into the apartment building.

“Toby.” She smiles.

“I was thinking I might drop by in an hour after I shower. You around?” He asks.

“No, not tonight. Have a Merry. . .”

We continue down the hall to her apartment door.

She unlocks three separate locks on the door, click, click, click. We walk in. A thirty-something woman with red hair, wearing a white bath robe, bounces up and down on the couch. She simultaneously eats ice cream straight out of the bucket with a fork. Her eyes are too close together and her eyebrows look completely penciled in. Three of my apartments could fit into this apartment and all the furniture appears to be new: leather couches, hi-def TV, expensive paintings, Persian blue rug. Tom Jones’ song “Mama Told Me Not To Come” blares from a really nice sound system behind an embarrassingly scrawny pine tree, with a few ornaments half-heartedly thrown or stuffed into but definitely not hanging off the branches. A half dozen already opened boxes lie on the floor at base waiting to be filled or already opened and discarded. It doesn’t seem to matter which.

“This is my roommate, Sharron. She likes to bounce.” Betty says.

Sharron waves. I wave. She continues to bounce and eat ice cream.

“I’m going to change, my clothes smell like smoke, okay. Have a drink, in the kitchen, make me one.” Betty says as she saunters toward the bedroom.

“Okay.”

Sharron jumps off the couch and follows Betty into a bedroom. I walk to the kitchen and flip through the cabinets until I find two glasses. There’s expensive vodka on the counter and I mix us vodka tonics. I lean against the counter and take a drink.

Sharron walks into the kitchen and puts the ice cream back into the freezer.

“Do you like dogs?” She asks just before taking a swig directly from the vodka bottle.

“I guess.” I don’t, I’m a cat person.

“My parents breed Fox Terriers. Betty has a boyfriend, in case you didn’t know.”

“She has a boyfriend?”

“Hand me that knife.” Sharron points to a large kitchen knife in the sink.

“Here.” I hand her the knife. I can’t stop staring at her penciled-in eyebrows. They bother me.

“I’m going to kill myself in the bathroom. Do you do ecstasy? Do you want a pill?” She smiles.”Open your mouth.”

She drops the pill on my tongue. I swallow the ecstasy. Sharron takes the knife and leaves me in the kitchen. Somewhere near the end of the Tom Jones’ Greatest Hits CD, the e’ kicks in. When the music stops, I can hear Sharron and Betty arguing in the living room. I casually walk in.

“Why’d you call him, Sharron!” Betty pushes Sharron onto the leather couch which causes Sharron to break up in laughter. Little girl laughter. “Fuck you!” Betty yells. Betty now wears pajama bottoms and a black tank top and Sharron’s still in her robe. A tattoo of a zombie geisha fills up Betty’s entire upper arm. The tattoo goes against everything I’ve ever thought about this person. At the office, she’s staid, composed, and all business. I never realized she was an actual real person with a history until this moment.

I zone out what the girls are saying and fumble with the IPod until Tom Jones comes back on. I want to wrap myself in their Persian rug. I want to take a bath. I want to pet a bunny rabbit. I want to put my hand in a jello-mold. I’m thirsty. I want to dance. A lot is all right. A lot with the world is all right. Tom Jones is all right. In this moment, I get Tom Jones… but I don’t know what that means and I’ll probably forget it by tomorrow morning.

“Give me your phone!” Betty yells to Sharron.

I kneel down near the entertainment center and rifle through more songs on their iPod. Tom Jones isn’t doing it for me anymore.

Betty rips Sharron’s cell phone out of her hand and chucks it against the wall. The phone smashes into three pieces.

“You bitch!” Sharron laughs at first but then storms over to the book shelf and picks up the kitchen knife. She stomps into the bathroom down the hall and slams the door.

“You know you shouldn’t have called him!” Betty yells after her.

I plunk down on the couch. “You think she might do anything?”

“No. She’s just talk. And she’s a bitch for calling my boyfriend. I need another drink.”

I stare at my hand for a half-hour. Betty’s in the kitchen. I decide to knock on the bathroom door. “Hey, are you okay in there? I’m rolling pretty hard right now and it’s sort of killing me that you’re in there and you’ve threatened to kill yourself and all.” She doesn’t answer me but I hear the splash of bath water.

Back in the living room Betty’s switched the music to something slow. She dims the lights and grabs me by the shoulders. We slow dance. She whispers in my ear:

“We work at the same company. Work and right now…”

“I know exactly what you’re saying.”

“Good.”

We kiss. Only the lonely. Only the lonely. I hear Sharron open the bathroom door. She walks down the hall and sits on the couch. She’s naked. In the moment, it seems right.

Knock, knock.

Sharron immediately tells Betty not to answer the door. Betty answers the door. A heavy guy with a Mohawk haircut and a dark blue mechanic’s shirt, jeans, gray Converse shoes, walks in. He shoots me a nod as Betty pulls him by the shirt down the hall and into what’s presumably her bedroom.

An hour passes. It’s a little after four in the morning. I sit on the couch with Sharron. She holds a t-shirt against her naked body. I need to figure out a way to get out of here. The ecstasy has worn thin, my stomach is a fist, my mouth the Sahara, and these people are strangers. Sharron bats her thick eyelashes at me but I can’t stop looking at the little brown lines she’s drawn in where her eyebrows should be.

“I should go.” I say.

“Oh come on. Stay here.”

“Right.”

“I want to lay in your lap.” Sharron lays her head in my lap before I can get up. This isn’t good. She looks up at me. “Betty hates her boyfriend. She’s always bringing guys home to punish him.” Her voice is high pitched and slow.

“Guys? Like how many guys?” I ask.

“I don’t know. That’s not polite to ask.”

“Sorry.”

“She just likes to do it with different guys.” I notice that Sharron’s masturbating under the t-shirt as she tells me this. Or maybe she’s just scratching herself. She stops. I wait another ten minutes before I stand up, carefully maneuvering her head by replacing my lap with a couch pillow. I need to go home.

I stretch my arms and yawn. Sharron’s eyes are closed. I pick up a blanket from the ground and spread it over her. I walk towards the front door.

Betty’s boyfriend storms out of the room down the hall and beats me to the door. He shuts the front door sort of hard but he doesn’t slam it and he doesn’t make eye contact with me, or even seem to notice me, before he leaves. I open Betty’s door and slowly move into her room.

Betty lays in bed. It’s dark. I step over a pile of dirty clothes and I sit on the edge of her bed. I smell lilac-scented lotion. We don’t speak for a few minutes. Tears dribble down her face but she doesn’t seem emotional. I don’t know what’s going on with her but I feel bad. She’s screwed up. She’s a screwed up person. Her hand plants on my back like it’s a starfish, stuck to me.

“I moved to Dallas from Florida. When I drove, I stayed with some friends in Albuquerque.” Her voice is clear.

“Oh yeah.”

“My cat Johnny… Johnny ran away in Albuquerque.”

I know she’s telling me something that’s important to her but I zone it out and nod compassionately at all the right cues. I hate this. Why am I still here? I feel debased, empty, sucked dry by the big dumb nothing. I don’t want to hear about her sorry, runaway cat. I want to be at home, petting my own cat -Theodore- on his chin, eating my pizza, watching TV in bed, and then waking up early, exercising and doing my work. Calling my mom & dad to wish them a happy Christmas. Promising like I did last year that I’ll definitely make it home next year for Christmas. Like a good person. Like a solid, upstanding, working class citizen. Like a good American. A good son. A good worker bee.

“I liked kissing you.” She says. Her fingers slide up my back.

“It’s four thirty in the morning.”

“Kiss me again.”

“Not a good idea.”

She rubs her hand on my leg then to my belt.

“Please don’t.” I say. She doesn’t stop.

“You’re one of the applicants for regional manager, correct?” She asks.

“Yeah.”

She pulls at my belt.

I keep my feet planted on the floor, on the edge of her bed. I don’t want to do this but I don’t move. I don’t bolt towards the door. She continues to pull at my belt. GO before it’s too late! You fool! Run! Run damn it! Run!

She sits up and wraps her arms around me. She sticks my earlobe between her lips. She licks the inside of my ear then moves her tongue down the side of my neck. She whispers:

“I have condoms.”

She’s the light at the end of the tunnel.

“I have to use the bathroom first.” I stand up. She lays back.

I walk down the hall to the living room. I stand at the front door with my hand on the door knob. I glance back at Sharron, asleep on the couch. The apartment is mostly dark but through their diaphanous window curtain the faint amber glow of the outside world burns in.

Ellen Berger, Alicia Doddy, Ray Mungo and Robear Yamaguchi

Ginnie woke up sicker than ever and announced that she could not leave the Golden Banana at all. She needed our last full day and night in Siem Reap to rest and recuperate as much as possible before facing a daunting travel schedule the next day – Christmas eve. We were booked to fly back to Phnom Penh, then on to Hong Kong for an eleven hour layover, too brief to get a hotel room, before continuing on to New Delhi on Christmas morning. And here she was coughing and wheezing and struggling for breath. She urged us to go back to the Angkor Wat with Poan as planned – she would meanwhile take some more downers and try to get some more sleep.

Poan took this news with a grave air of concern. He was clearly worried and offered to take her to a doctor, but she refused, insisting that we go enjoy our sightseeing. So we set off for the temples and promised to return for lunch.

For the next three hours, we tramped and trundled through massive, stunning ruins and primeval forest under punishing 90 degree sunlight and drenching humidity, the three tourists sweating profusely while Poan remained serenely dry and calm as he pushed us forward. At one point when Helen and I were out of his earshot, she complained bitterly that Poan was a poor guide; although fine as a driver and facilitator/helper, he didn’t explain the history and artistic style of the monuments half as well as other guides we overheard on the trails. She herself knew more about the Angkor Wat than he did, but of course she is an art professor and historian. At another point when our group was clustered inside the hollow of a giant, ancient tree, Poan’s cell phone rang. It was our host Barry calling from Phnom Penh, who upon hearing that Ginnie was too sick to continue touring the Wat told Poan to take her to the government hospital – the one that was always encircled by lines of patiently suffering Cambodians.

One of our guide books stated bluntly that if you happened to fall ill in Cambodia, the best course is to self-medicate and –monitor until you can get to a country with more sophisticated medical facilities. We doubted that Ginnie would be willing to go to that hospital and fervently wished that she wouldn’t have to do it. Nonetheless, Barry’s directive disjointed us.

When we got back to the Golden Banana, Ginnie didn’t seem any better or worse, and she adamantly dismissed the suggestion of medical intervention. Barry had phoned the hotel from Phnom Penh and had them go fetch Ginnie to the phone so he could check up on her condition, and somehow or other she had convinced him she’d be all right. As shy and retiring as she was, Ginnie was a young woman of firm resolve. So we headed off to lunch after arranging for Poan to return for us at 2 p.m. and continue our Wat ramble. There were still a number of sites to visit on our itinerary and we were behind on the schedule for having whiled away the previous day on the boat ride. Poan figured we could cram in most if not all of the remaining attractions in the afternoon to early evening. Ginnie could continue resting in peace and quiet while we took in more magnificent relics.

But wouldn’t you know it, this ambitious plan unraveled right about the time we started the second bottle of wine and the young chef’s banana flambee specialty. The sparkling pool and cool waterfall called out to us like sirens while the memory of heat and dust on the rugged trail was lodged in our minds. “I knew this would happen, I just knew it!” Helen said laughing between bites of rum soaked fruit and sips of sauvignon blanc. “We are soooo bad. We came all this way to see these Wats and we poop out after a few hours. It’s just terrible. But how the hell are we going to get out of it?

“Leave it to me, I’ll be right back,” I replied, got up from the restaurant table, went to the front desk and phoned Poan’s cell. If he was as startled as before at our reluctance to be toured around, he didn’t evidence it. By now, he was used to it. We agreed on a time the next morning when he’d come and take us to the airport, and once again he promised to remain on call in case we changed our minds. He could take Ginnie anywhere she wanted to see from the comfort of the car, he added. The quite accurate underlying assumption was that the other three of us were able bodied but lazy. When I got back to the table, we toasted a fresh round of drinks to this triumph of decadence over art and authority.

- to be continued –

      to be continued –

“dick lit” is here to acknowledge the good, bad and ugly that goes with it, as it celebrates every young boy’s quest to get off the next  time, and every old man’s quest to get off one more time, before there is no time left to get off on…

I was eighteen and living on my own for the first time, drawing sidewalk caricatures in a heinous tourist town. Every new acquaintance led to an epiphany and every new apartment to previously unattained cynicism. Cynicism was new to me. Since this was the first time I was in a position to be taken for a ride by someone besides my parents, it was occasion for me to step back and take notes. I noticed the airbrush T-shirt artists made roughly twice what I made, so I took up airbrushing along with the caricatures. I spray-painted portraits of rock stars, copied album covers, drew peoples’ cars, terriers, names in bubble letters. But since I was the new guy — and quite honestly, not as good as people who had been doing it longer — my shifts and locations weren’t so hot, and for that summer at least, I didn’t make any better money airbrushing than I did at caricatures.

T-shirt row with Elvis and Ripley Museums, dozens of fudge shops that out shined the quaint charm of sidewalk portrait artists. Gatlinburg was a nut magnet, drawing fanatics from all walks of life, all of them more than willing to give an eighteen-year-old geek like me guidance. Artists who spent the day discussing Picasso while drawing pastel portraits tried to convert me to the artist’s lifestyle. Shop owners, who claimed to have found a virtual gold mine in that disgusting little cancer nestled in the beautiful Smoky Mountains tried to teach me the merits of entrepreneurship. Then there were drug freaks, rednecks, fruits and their fruit-flies, not to mention the Hare Krishnas and the Campus Crusade for Christ.

But they were already too late, because I’d already found religion, and I found it in my own lusty mind: The worship of fat chicks. One thing the Campus Crusade for Christ was good for was a busload of big-butted cuties, with melon-sized boobs, and all the accoutrements that an upstanding young lady should be equipped with: lacy bras, pantyhose, often with garters, panties, of course, high-heels, and sheer summer dresses suitable for church or giving a horny looser like me a solid boner. Alas, I found faith.

Jokes aside, though, what I also discovered that year was cynicism. All my life people have been saying things like, “if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” So not having the breadth of vision of an 18-year-old, I didn’t think it meant “be polite at the dinner table” I thought it meant “don’t be critical.”

I’d moved south from Chicago my last year of high school at the recommendation of my mother, an ample woman in her own right who was under the impression I needed a bit of discipline in my life. She sent me to Military School — no girls, the whole trip. But now that I was freed from the command of a couple hundred Colonal Klinks, I was determined to loose my cherry with one of these pleasantly plump southern gals. Ah, big-titted cowgirls — who knew they’d be so friendly? Up north, girls treated me like shit. Down here I was an Italian Stallion. Up north your typical Italian chick looks totally hot skinny, with the full lips, long nose, dark eyes, full breasts and hips and all that, but put an extra 50 pounds on her and she turns into a monstrous sow fit only for breeding or cooking pasta. Down south, girls put on fifty extra pounds and va-va-va-voom: Super Bees (Super Boobs, Super Butts) — 440 hemis and trick spoilers.

So there was this Christian young lady, Bev, next to my caricature stand. She was in a booth handing out flyers for some Christian wax museum that has all these god-awful wax statues of characters from the New Testament. Their eyes are always pointed this way and that like poorly dressed corpses at an open casket funeral. In fact, the whole place was clammy like a mausoleum with an astroturf foyer, white marble bricks, nauseous air freshner, and plastic roses in every nook and cranny. But you know Christians: Nail a guy on a cross and they’ll flock in even if you’re serving shit in a dog bowl.

The buying crowds on the sidewalk usually flocked in just after breakfast or around dinner time, making the afternoons pretty slow. Theoretically, they were all hiking in the mountains, or going to Dollywood. (Dolly: a perfect example of a suped-up southern chick.) The best way to make money during the slow time of day was to crack jokes at the passing stragglers, or get someone to sit for a freebee. Many a day I did the joke thing, and this helped me to get to know my voluptuous friend next to me. Then one day, Bev sat for a freebee.
She crossed her chubby legs so her hose made a sexy swishing sound. Her beige polyester church dress hiked up to the bottom of her ample buttocks. She combed her hair with determined vigor while I watched her fair face, neck and breast meat flush from the exertion. Her lipstick was totally overdone, a huge turn-on considering that at this point in my life my sexual history (sex defined as achieving orgasm with a partner) comprised of two blowjobs and coming on some girl’s chest when I worked at a Wendy’s, so a set of female lips may as well have been bare-naked pussy. She was wearing what I think were false eyelashes — that or the mascara was so thick, her lashes looked fake. For a second, I realized she resembled Miss Piggy, but I always found that puppet kinda cute anyway. I was hard as a bat and short of breath when I started drawing her.

Her nose was easy. Pug, all the way. “So where do you Campus Crusaders stay up here anyway?” I asked automatically the way I talked to anyone I was drawing in order to sneak topical information about them into the caricature.

“Oh,” she sighed in a twangy drawl that turned any vowel into a two or three syllable project, “We hay-ave ou-rah compay-ound up aw-on Ree-idge Bay-ack Tray-ell.” I won’t spell out her drawl anymore. You get the idea.
“In tents?”

“No, cabins,” She smiled politely. Mmm: lips. Mmm: I wanted to bite her pert little chin, and slide down her baby-soft neck, climb between her boobs as if they were my own personal flesh sleeping bag. Instead, I drew her chin-line, discreetly avoiding any semblance of a goiter on the page, and sheepishly retreated upward along her cheek-line.

“Roomates?” Mmm. Tweezed eyebrows.

“Lord, yes!” she said rolling her eyes.

“I take it that’s not a good thing.” Mmm. Those cute blue eyes they all seem to have with that totally unreal shimmery eye-shadow.

“Well, we’re all there for some kind of Christian Fellowship, but sometimes 6 girls in a cabin can just drive you crazy!”

Six girls in a cabin? Shit! I’d nail myself to a cross if it meant having six clean-as-a-whistle busty virgins in polyester church dresses kneeling in worship around me. I tried not to pant too audibly, absorbing myself in the task of indicating her hair texture in the language of magic marker when — Oh Jesus, what was she doing now? Fuck, help me Lord, she’s bouncing her crossed leg up and down, clucking her high-heeled sandal against her heel. God, her panty-hose have the most delicious seam running across her painted toes! Jesus Chrysler! Her legs are making that swishy sound. If only I could suffocate between her nylon thighs, that would do instead of going to heaven. If you’re listening, Satan, that’s an offer.

A couple rednecks smelling of beer, even though it was barely after lunch, stopped, presumably to check-out the mystery concealed between her meaty thighs rather than my caricature prowess.

“Ah, man,” a skinny one with a Dukes of Hazard baseball cap guffawed at me, “She’s way perttier’n'that!”

“Yeah,” the other one with bucked teeth and a tattoo of a Harley eagle just above his bloated navel chimed in, “And don’t make her too small up top, neither!”

“Hey there, boys,” I said in mock redneck, “Let’s keep this here family entertainment.”

“The family that sleeps together. . .” The fat one started before the Dukes fan elbowed him in the eagle.

“You heard the man,” he said, and with that they walked on down the street to bother the next vendor in line.
“You know,” Bev said rolling her eyes, “you probably think I’m just some uptight Christian girl, but why do men say things like that?”

“Men? No, my dear,” I said affecting a gentlemanly voice, “They’re trolls!”

I sketched some mountains and a couple Smoky Mountain bears whistling cat-calls in the background before what she said sunk in. “Not an uptight Christian Girl,” eh? I repeated that to myself while drawing a voluptuous cartoon one-piece swimsuit with a beauty-pageant ribbon running down her shoulder and across her ample cartoon chest. On the ribbon I wrote: Not An Uptight Christian Girl. I picked up a reddish chalk, rubbing my middle finger into the cheap pastel and smeared color onto her cartoon cheeks, chin, and cleavage, all the while, smirking at her out of the corner of my eye and watching her smirk back at me. When I finished, I held the drawing up to her.

“Oh, my goodness!” she squealed putting her hands over her blushing cheeks. “Oh, that’s adorable.” She shook her head back and forth. “I can’t show this to my roomates, but I love it!” She leaned over and gave me a wet kiss below the ear, and a good view down the top of her dress on the way to and from the kiss. I noticed she had freckles all the way down her cleavage, and remembered I didn’t draw them in.

“I forgot something, I said taking the drawing and pinning it back up on my easel. I quickly drew in a few cartoon freckles across her cheeks and nose.

“There,” I said handing it back to her.

“Thank yew-ou!” she said nodding her head in a gesture of endearment. “I’m sending this to my cousin. He’ll get a kick out of it. He did this Campus Crusade thing a couple years back.”

“Do him some good?”

“I — ” she started, looked up at the sky to try to think out her phrasing, then, ” I don’t think he’s a practicing Christian these days.”

“You know this cousin pretty well, eh?”

“As well as I could know someone and still be a virgin.” She raised her eyebrows like a true seductress, “he’s somewhat of a distant cousin.”

“Arg!” I said slapping my own face, “Don’t make me blush!”

As if an act of God, thunder clapped, and I felt a few drops of rain. The formerly sunny sky turned gray.
“Uh-oh,” I said looking up, “Better pack up.”

I folded up my drawing easel, samples, sun umbrella and two lawn chairs that comprised my stand, and with Bev’s help hauled my stuff into the store that rented the sidewalk space to me.

“You need help with yours?”

“Not really.” I walked to the front of her booth and watched her take a pile of brochures from the counter and place them under the counter. “There!” she said with a silly smile and gesturing with her hands to her shiny-clean counter.

“Wanna play pinball?” I asked with my heart fluttering just under my adam’s apple.

“Pinball?”

“Uh — ” Hmm, maybe it was the wrong thing. Oh, well, “yeah, pinball.”

She poked her left forefinger into a dimple on her left cheek as if to pinball or not was a major life decision. Then, “Pinball it is.”

We ran through the streets feigning terror at the raindrops. I couldn’t help but keep an eye on her jiggling fat girl parts. She had a nice smile, too, a childish face that seemed to lose itself in our silly little run through the rain. We ducked into the awning in front of the pinball parlor. There was a Corn Queen, corn dog stand facing the street next to the arcade entrance that this wierd kid Skeeter worked. It stunk like rancid grease. I shook my head, letting the water fly. Bev rung her hair over my soaking sneakers that I tried unsuccessfully to pull away from the stream of water falling from her chubby hands and rope of brown and blonde streaked hair. When she finished, neither of us had anymore silly gestures or anything to say. Legs of water ran down Bev’s neck which I chased with a smile into her cleavage. Her polyester dress was soaked. Her nipples rose under the shear garment. I felt the urge to kiss her swell inside me, but I felt embarrassed experiencing this sort of pregnant moment in front of Skeeter. I often refer to him as Skeever, because he skeeves me out, like I imagine he grew up fucking his sister, or a rooster in the back yard for that matter.

“Hi,” Skeeter said. Gross. What was it about him? He was skinny and freckled with blonde and red streaky hair that seemed finer than the fibers of a feather, all of sixteen, but there was something so awful, whether it was greasy skin, bug eyes, or bucked teeth, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he came off more as a lecherous old man than a horny teenager. Like someone you might find peeking under a toilet stall at little boys peeing. And it was so perfect that he worked Corn Queen, because it was a rip-off of the more successful Korn King down the block. What a dork.

“Hi.” I grunted.

“Hi, Skeeter,” Bev said more personably than I did.

“Here,” Skeeter said handing a corn dog to Bev, “On the house. Want mustard?”

She shook her head yes and he squirted yellow goo from a squeeze bottle.

“Thanks, Skeeter.” She took a bite and held it out to me. I took a bite. It tasted like rancid grease and burned my tongue, not to mention how wierd it felt sharing Skeever’s phallic gift, but it also seemed pleasant, like the thing to do after getting caught in a summer’s rain in a hokey tourist town.

Inside, the air conditioning was all the way up. Bev’s nipples stayed frozen at attention under the slick, wet sheath of polyester church dress. My dick was frozen, too, as it extended it’s one-eyed face into my briefs through three or four games. Each time we switched places to take turns our bodies touched giving off small electrical charges within that part of our brains that triggers horniness. Wetness makes you a better conductor if horniness. We both noticed the door to the back alley was open. We smiled at each other and slipped outside. It was warm as a mother’s breast as we listened to the rain patter steadily against the corrigated fiberglass roof of the make-shift veranda. I pulled her to me and we kissed. The wetness of our clothes conducted our body heat as if we weren’t wearing anything. Just as we took our first breath, Skeeter, with his Corn Queen corndog hat came out of a wooden stall they’d built for the garbage. We straightened up and looked across the alley as if we were genuinely interested in workings of back alleys. Skeeter gave us a skeevy smile and went back inside.
“I’m nervous about him seeing us,” she said. “I don’t know what they’d think back at the Crusade. I mean, Skeeter’s dad runs the place.”

“What?” I said in disbelief, “Skeeter’s dad’s a preacher?”

“Yeah,” she said as if I was a total ignoramus, “and I think Pastor Ed would chuck me out of there if he found out what we were doing.”

“Well then, let’s hide,” I peeked into the garbage stall then motioned for her to join me. It smelled a little funny, but I shut the dumpster lid and it smelled OK.

“Better?” I asked.

“I’d rather have a room at the Mariott,” she said with a big grin, “but it’s kind of exciting.”
There were a bunch of broken down boxes stacked around the dumpster that we laid against, kicking our feet up against a row of 25 gallon buckets they used to dump the used grease from the corndog fryer. Before my lips reached her, I took as much of her huge right breast in my left hand as I could.

“Ummph!” she grunted on contact. At first, I fell over her, but then she lumbered over me, dry-humping like crazy with her bulbous pelvic phenomenon.

“Oh, God!” I shouted, as a geyser of cum shot out from under my belt and onto my belly. She lifted her dress up and rubbed her belly over me like a human sponge. My eighteen-year-old head was spinning, and one orgasm was hardly sufficient to quench virgin horniness. I grabbed her huge, rain-soaked buttocks and pulled her back on top of me. She vigorously sucked my tongue out from behind my teeth while I slipped one hand on either side of her left hip, under the dainty strain of the elastic on her panty hose and panties. My left hand relished the feeling of her big, slick ass, my other hand slipped into her sticky-wet twat. It felt huge. Her clitoris must have been the size of one of those pinballs, and nearly as hard. The more we pushed into each other, the further down her legs I pushed her panties and those clingy hose, until they held her ankles together while she slid up and down my thin belly, moaning and squealing. Then suddenly she stopped, arched her head back and let out a squeak of naughty joy.

“Oh…” I could feel her pussy and clit pulsing just inside my left hip-bone.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she cried. That was it. That was the first time I experienced a girl coming as a result of my presence. According to my definition of sex, that was the first time someone else had sex with me. I pulled her down on me and we kissed again, stacks of boxes falling around us as if we were caught in an earthquake.
It was obvious that one orgasm was hardly enough for her either.

“Unzip me,” she said reaching with one arm for the zipper that ran down the back of her dress.

I did what I was told, and she slid her tighter-than-you-might-think dress over her large shoulders, her breasts flopping into what were at least double D-cups in a tasty, wire support bra, see-through sheer except over the nipple area where silky-white vegetation swirled in baroque patterns. She looked down and smiled at me, then reached for my belt buckle, unsnapped it and pulled the belt free from it’s loops. It burned my hips sliding out, and the pile of boxes slid to either side pulling me deeper into the heap.

“You’re so cute,” she whispered, unbuckling my pants and licking semen from my belly. I slid my T-shirt completely off, difficult as it was being jimmied between those boxes, and having to crane my neck against the side of the dumpster. She snatched my pants down to mid-thigh and my half-erect teen-bean did a 360 across my pelvic area before swooping upward into the air. Her chubby, finely manicured hand took hold of it while her thick lips kissed it’s underside, then slid over the top.

“Ugh.” I couldn’t do anything else. Seemed like all my blood left my arms and legs and I was paralyzed. My balls were swooping upward to her meaty fist ready to heave load through her lips, when the door to the garbage stall once again opened, and our friend Corn Queen Skeeter appeared. Bev fixed her gaze on him as if a snake eyeing prey in the jungle.

“Ugh,” Skeeter said holding a bundle of corrigated boxes, his eyes bugged about an inch wider than usual, “I thought you might be lighting a doobie.”

“Look, Skeeter,” Bev said with utmost seriousness, “this is your chance. You’d just better not say anything to anyone, especially not your dad. If you do, I’ll beat you to a pulp and give you a Satanic hex for the rest of your life.”

Skeeter scratched under his Corn Queen hat dumbfounded. The stall door slapped shut behind him and he winced, “Uh, what chance?”

Bev in all her fat-girl glory crawled on her knees to him, massaged his crotch and looking back at me said, “fuck me.” Then she undid his pants in the same eager manner she did me. I was terrified but still hard as a rock watching her butt wiggle while she went down on him. My dick was going to have an orgasm — no matter what. Not even a Corn Queen-Skeever could hinder destiny. Then, I too, my cut-offs cuffing my ankles, crawled on my knees to Bev’s fat ass and started to reach under her belly for her pussy.

“Don’t put it there,” she scolded, “I’m a virgin. Put it in my bee-hind.”

“In your bee-hind?”

“Yeah,” she said desperate to get the action going.

“I…I…I’m afraid.” I stammered.

She moaned even though she was back down on Skeeter’s dick, then with a start she popped her mouth free. “OK. Skeeter you go in my bee-hind, and yew-oou,” she said with a lascivious crooked smile, “you lay back and relax.”
She pulled my torso to her face and pushed her mouth over to me till I could feel her lower lip against my pulsing balls. I was instantly on the road to cumming again. I had to see her tits. I tried to undo her bra. She kept moaning. Skeeter grunted and tried to poke his skinny dick into her buttocks. “MMMM!” She grunted with each of Skeeter’s thrusts. Each “mmmm” made my pubic area vibrate, and although she seemed pained by Skeeter’s attempted thrusts, his role appeared more painful than hers. His thing bent against her anus like a crash-test car striking a brick wall at 50 miles per hour.
“Hold on,” Skeeter said suddenly standing. He tore off the lid to one of the grease buckets, dipped two fingers into the muck, and I watched in amazement as he stuffed his greased appendages up Bev’s butt.

”God!” she yelped, her eyes bugging out.

But I couldn’t divert my attention too far from that orgasmic goal. I grabbed that friggin brastrap with both hands and vigorously wiggled the snaps every possible way until atlast, Bev’s bra came undone and her wild breasts flopped over my thighs. Her nipples had to be nearly as wide as my dick was long, which is saying something, one way or other. Her bra slid halfway down her arms, the cups brushing my hips. She let my dick bob in the air a second while she slid the thing off her shoulders.

“Shit!” she yelled, unexpectedly jerking her head up so her boobs bobbed happily in my face.

“Ugh, UGH!” Skeeter grunted.

“Cum, baby, cum!” she whisper-shouted falling down against my prick with her huge wet breasts.

”Ugh, UGH!” I moaned almost exactly like Skeeter. She pressed her gorgeous mammies tightly against my dick. Her downy blonde peachfuzz tickled my shaft as it slid back and forth between her rain-soaked boobs. Skeeter pulled out, and arching back, came against her butt-crack so his semen shot up a foot or two, landing in spotty dribbles across her spread butt-cheeks and lower back. I grabbed Bev’s head that was sucking my neck like a leech and came like a banshee into her thick chest and neck flesh. Again and again I spewed, pulling her body by her head back and forth over my dick.

“Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah,” and on and on I wailed, until it was through. “God,” I said when it was over, “God.”
Skeeter stood up, zipped his fly, covered one of his nostrils and snotted against the wall of the garbage stall. “Thanks.” he said, and walked off with the stall door slapping closed.

Bev wasn’t finished. Moaning, she rolled over on her back, her butt on the cement, her head resting against a pile of boxes, her boobs and belly glistening with my cum. I felt a little dizzy. She tossed her head around while she masterbated. Her eyes were clinched tight, her mouth rose upward from the sides revealing vampire teeth. Her breasts flopped up and down along with the folds of fat from her torso as she more vigorously paced herself for a righteous fucking of her fat fist. She squeaked like a mouse when she came, arching her pelvis into the air like some circus act revealing the pebbles that stuck to her bottom from Skeeter’s sperm and corndog grease. Then she let out a sigh and laid flat on the cement rubbing my semen around her chest and licking her fingers.

Suddenly the smell of the garbage and rancid grease hit me. I was skeeved.

“Bev,” I said standing and zipping my fly, “I gotta go!”

I ran to the bathroom, puking my guts out, then dry heaving several more rounds. I gargled a mouthful of water and walked out of the place. Skeeter gave me a smile on my way out. “She’s a goddamn hell-cat, wouldn’t you say, Mister God-Damn Yankee?”

I shook my head in disbelief, and wondered out into the rain. God! What kind of Campus Crusade was that, anyway?