The Cool School (46 page)

Ta-Taaaa

I
DID
have a lover at that time. He was studying acting. I was studying painting. He would talk to me like two artists talking together.

He was also really tender. I had had an abortion three months before and I was basically scared about making love. I also had the Texas-Baptist blues riding hard on me . . . down the drain . . . seventeen and used up . . . etc.

It wasn’t the idea of getting pregnant again that scared me, though that was certainly there. It was more like feeling raw and misused in my spirit and my body, and he helped me over that. It was a real piece of luck for me that somebody that decent and good-hearted happened along just then.

He used to make toasted cheese sandwiches with apple jelly spread on the top for us to eat in bed, talking.

Anyway, sometime along in there I started knowing the vocabulary and hearing the repetitions and one night at two in the morning some type, in the self-righteous tones we all know to our sorrow, said “You’ve got to qualify your terms,” and I started crying and couldn’t stop.

For a month or so I couldn’t stand groups of people but then I gradually regained my perspective.

You know the brainwash goes that loss of innocence is a one-timer
and thereafter you’re left sadder and wiser. But in my experience it’s cyclical; the place like the San Andreas Fault where your life makes a necessary dimensional shift. And it’s not such a loss, more often it’s a trade.

And the pain of it is the least interesting thing about it.

Frenchy and Cuban Pete and Other Stories
, 1977

Richard Brautigan was famed as the poet laureate of the hippies, and he looked the part, but Brautigan was not a hippie, he was an anomaly. After a traumatic childhood in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan briefly found his footing in high school but at the age of twenty, apparently motivated by hunger, he invited arrest by throwing a rock through a police station window. He was subsequently hospitalized and subjected to electroshocks which seemed to stimulate his muse. After his release Brautigan became a street poet in San Francisco and published his unique works in underground papers. When his
Trout Fishing in America
was published in 1967 it sold over four million copies. Brautigan published ten works of fiction and as many poetry collections during his life, but his success brought him little peace except for the comparative serenity he found on his travels in Japan. He suffered bouts of depression and was a heavy drinker. Living alone in Bolinas, California, he committed suicide at the age of forty-nine.

W
HEN
I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as the result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn’t because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn’t even money to buy him a truss. So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.

One morning in August I went over to his house. He was still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet in his life.

“Did you bring the nickel you promised?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s here in my pocket.”

“Good.”

He hopped out of bed and he was already dressed. He had told me once that he never took off his clothes when he went to bed.

“Why bother?” he had said. “You’re only going to get up, anyway. Be prepared for it. You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.”

He went into the kitchen, stepping around the littlest children, whose wet diapers were in various stages of anarchy. He made his breakfast: a slice of homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We left the house with him still eating the sandwich. The store was three blocks away, on the other side of a field covered with heavy yellow grass. There were many pheasants in the field. Fat with summer they barely flew away when we came up to them.

“Hello,” said the grocer. He was bald with a red birthmark on his head. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. He automatically reached for a package of grape Kool-Aid and put it on the counter.

“Five cents.”

“He’s got it,” my friend said.

I reached into my pocket and gave the nickel to the grocer. He nodded and the old red car wobbled back and forth on the road as if the driver were having an epileptic seizure.

We left.

My friend led the way across the field. One of the pheasants didn’t even bother to fly. He ran across the field in front of us like a feathered pig.

When we got back to my friend’s house the ceremony began. To him the making of Kool-Aid was a romance and a ceremony. It had to be performed in an exact manner and with dignity.

First he got a gallon jar and we went around to the side of the house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.

He opened the Kool-Aid and dumped it into the jar. Putting the
jar under the spigot, he turned the water on. The water spit, splashed and guzzled out of the spigot.

He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious Kool-Aid spill out onto the ground. When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination. Then he screwed the lid tightly onto the top of the jar and gave it a good shake.

The first part of the ceremony was over.

Like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the first part of the ceremony well.

His mother came around the side of the house and said in a voice filled with sand and string, “When are you going to do the dishes? . . . Huh?”

“Soon,” he said.

“Well, you better,” she said.

When she left, it was as if she had never been there at all. The second part of the ceremony began with him carrying the jar very carefully to an abandoned chicken house in the back. “The dishes can wait,” he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.

He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars. He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling a drop. He screwed their caps on tightly and was now ready for a day’s drinking.

You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

Trout Fishing in America
, 1967

The prime mover of Pop Art, Andy Warhol had ambitions that extended in every direction. He was a filmmaker, a magazine publisher, a creator of advertising, an actor, a model, theater producer, manager of the Velvet Underground, and TV host. When Barney Rosset of Grove Press suggested he write a novel he accepted the challenge and undertook to use a tape recorder to follow one of his superstars, Ondine, for twenty-four hours. (In the end the book added on three further sessions, so that the text covers a period from August 1965 to May 1967.) Four stenographers transcribed the tapes with varying degrees of accuracy and these transcripts, complete with multiple errors, were published unedited except for some random rearrangements introduced by Warhol and the changing of almost all names. Among the characters in this episode from
a: a novel
are D (Drella or Andy Warhol), and O (Ondine or Robert Olivo), RR (Rotten Rita or Kenneth Rapp), and SPF (Sugar Plum Fairy or Joe Campbell), a triumvirate of amphetamine-fueled opera freaks who frequented the Silver Factory. The essence of hipsterism is argot and in these conversations we hear an unusually exotic blend of hip talk, speedfreak lingo and the slang of the gay underground.

D
OUGIE
—What are you gonna do with this? O—We’re gonna write a novel. It’s a novel. It’s being transcribed by three girls.
D
OUGIE
—What is it all about? O—Me! (Rita laughing like a face in the fun house) O—Look at The Duchess; the next one you won’t believe. (
music is drowning the voices
) RR—Oh me, oh me, oh mye, corpuscles (?) both of you come over here. Good. I just wanted to know one, oh I shouldn’t ask you anyway. Ondine, may I just ask one question. Is it cool to uh, to take out, to take our drugs and shoot and everything in front ofthetaxi-driver? O—Certainly. RR—Oh
how wonderful. O—Certainly. RR—Does he mind? O—He better not. I’m gonna go in and do the test now. Come with me, come come with me; this is an official arrest. Oh, Rotten, Rotter uh. The Mayor and myself both are, we we think your spirit is marvelous. This is a rather unusual group to stumble into. Can we see something that will prove to us that you’re not RR—The police. O—the police? Or J.F.K. is disguise or something. Do you have, I’ll take your word if you say that that’s all we have to take, but we’re going to take drugs here and rather vilently. (
laughing
)
D
OUGIE
or SPF—Are you gonna tie up? O—No, I’m not gonna tie up, but I don’t like zane business, but we’re going to give ourselves pokes. So-called. I’m sorry, don’t let this cut. Keep it under your hats, darling. RR— Innoculations please. Stretch that out. Innoculations. O—And if you witness these things your promise not to, it doesn’t offend you does it? SPF—He’s getting terse. O—You don’t have a two, may I see your radio, I mean your wristwatch? May I see it? RR—Now he not only has us, but he’s got us on tape which we don’t stand a chance. You and your big mouth; you just put us up for six years. You cocksucker. O—He’s calling Officer Joe Bolton. RR—I fired him. He’s okay. O—I think you’re all right. All right Rotten? I’ll take you on face value, but don’t get upset if one of us,
D
OUGIE
—Face? O—I, no, no no, not just face alone. Faith. They have trouble understanding. But they’re new. Oh well, all right. You’re not going to arrest these two innocent children are you? B—What’s wrong with those two? O—Dorso is, this is a murderous Negress. Now watch out for her. SPF—She’s an Indian. O—She’s not an Indian. Sugar! Sugar! Go in there and fuck them up. Don’t let them get upset. SPF—I’m not letting them. O—You two are, by the time we come in there with pokes you have to be ready for them. (
Finale
—
applause
) D— Oh Ondine, where are you? Ondine? (
music
) (
Ondine talking
) Oh Ondine, pleeese. O—Let me try it. D—Oh I no no, but you hold it. Huh? O—Listen Rotten, I know it’s awful to ask you to hold the, would you? Cause Drella’s been holding it for so long and he’s just, he shouldn’t have to. That’s not the needle. That’s the vitamin B 12.

D
OUGIE
—My attitudes towards narcotics SPF—Narcotics!? O—

These are not narcotics.

SPF—These are not narcotics.

O—Do you call vitamin B 12 a narcotic? But keep this next to your mouth when you speak. Rita, are you all right in there?

Dougie
—Avenue D.

SPF—Isn’t that funny. I was on 6th street and Avenue C.

O—Suddenly a tear came to my eye thinking of my first experience on the lower east side.

D—Really?

O—Oh he does so; he looks like Brooklyn too.

SPF—No no.

O—Oh he looks like a New York boy.

SPF—Do you know the last couple of nights what we were up to?

O—Dear, you were in the midst of a festival night. We were down, they were beating drums and singing about Pan American Day. That’s how the lower east side, but the lower east side was, Brooklyn was different too. I mean. What do you think of us? Is’nt it wonderful to find such freedom in the midst of New York City? Did you think that Wagner would permit such nonsense. It’s really that Rita is our Mayor. Do you see that silence? Isn’t she a gorgeous creature. Isn’t she divine. You’d never know that she was so foul.

D—Isn’t Billy 24?

O—Billy’s twenty-f-, no he’s 27.

D—Oh he is?

O—I don’t know. Billy, aren’t you 27? How old are you? Oh. He’s 25.

DD—Tea bag?

O—She thinks you said tea bag.

B or RR—Yeah!

O—May I say one thing From what you said you have a tolerant attitude.

RR—. . . get some chicken and turkey sandwiches; that’s a wonderful idea.

O—No, you said; yes, that’s a delightful idea. Dodo, would you hold
this for me for a second? And with God’s help I will put it away. What do you feel about me? Isn’t there a twinge somewhere? I doubt—How do you feel about homosexuality Is it permissable?

Dougie
—I think if it’s one’s prerogative to be homosexual, fine, but everybody does not have to share his beliefs.

O—Don’t you see Venus being contacted (
A succulent inverted sigh
.) Look at this, a hand-maiden, a gorgeous Indian maiden. I hate them; I live next dor to them.

Dougie
—Is a drug that’s supposed to give you a charge.

SPF—Yeah.

Dougie
—Um, I think it’s something that one becomes addicted to. I think it’s something that one has very little control over after a certain period of time.

SPF—Yeah, well that’s not altogether true though, because I mean lots of people are addicted to a lot of things they have no control over. In fact, they don’t even try y’know?

Dougie
—Like smoking?

SPF—Oh well like eating chocolate pudding every night.