The Cool School (18 page)

“
Oh, Sweet Swingin’ Flowers of the Field!
”

And they answered,
“Oh, Great Singular Non-Stop Singular Sound Of Beauty
!”

And he said, “
Stomp Upon the Terra!
” And they
HIT IT!!!!!

And he said, “
Straighten your Miracle, The Body!
” And the Body
WENT UP!!

“
Lift Your Glorious Arms to Heaven!
” and he said, “Higher!” And they went
Higher!!

And he said, “
Lift Your Love Eyes To The Skies!
” And they
Did!!
And he said, “
Widen Your Eyes and Look HARDER!
” And they
Did!!

And the Naz say, “
DIG INFINITE!!!
” And they
DUG IT!!

And When they did, WHAMMMMM!! Just then a Great flash of Lightin’ and a Roll of Thunder
HIT
the Scene! And the Cats looked down and in one hand was a Great bit of swingin, juicy stuffed Smoked Fish, and in the other a big thick gone loaf of that honey tastin’ ever-lovin’, good, groovey Home-lovin’ made Bread! Why, these poo’ Cats
FLIPPED!!!

The Naz Never Did Nothin’ Simple.

When He Laid It,
HE LAID IT!!

1952;
Hiparama of the Classics
, 1960

Born Clarence Beeks in Oakdale, Tennessee, King Pleasure moved to New York City where he was a part of the bebop scene, first as a fan, then as a performer. He became popular for covering “Moody’s Mood for Love,” a vocalese performance by singer Eddie Jefferson based on James Moody’s saxophone solo on “I’m in the Mood for Love.” “Parker’s Mood” followed in 1954, with lyrics to Charlie Parker’s sax solo on his 1948 recording. The words seem prophetic, as Parker died the next year and the graffiti BIRD LIVES soon became prevalent in Greenwich Village and other hip enclaves.

Come with me

If you want to go to Kansas City.

I’m feeling lowdown and blue,

My heart’s full of sorrow.

Don’t hardly know what to do,

Where will I be tomorrow?

Going to Kansas City,

Wanna go too?

No, you can’t make it with me.

Going to Kansas City,

Sorry that I can’t take you.

When you see me coming

Raise your window high.

When you see me leaving, baby,

Hang your head and cry.

I’m afraid there’s nothing in this cream, this dreamy town

A honky tonky monkey woman can do.

She’d only bring herself down.

So long everybody,

The time has come

And I must leave you

So if I don’t ever see your smiling face again

Make a promise you’ll remember

Like a Christmas day in December

That I told you all through thick and thin

On up until the end

Parker’s been your friend.

Don’t hang your head

When you see those six pretty horses pulling me.

Put a twenty dollar silver piece on my watch-chain

Look at the smile on my face

And sing a little song

To let the world know I’m really free.

Don’t cry for me

’Cause I’m going to Kansas City.

Come with me

If you want to go to Kansas City.

1954

A Brooklynite and granddaughter of an Italian anarchist, Diane di Prima became a Beat poet as a teenager. Her first book,
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,
was published when she was twenty-four She edited
The Floating Bear,
a newsletter of the new writing, with LeRoi Jones, andfounded the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre. After an interval at Timothy Leary’s psychedelic commune at Millbrook, New York, she relocated to San Francisco where she has been active ever since, working with the Diggers in the late sixties, studying Buddhism, helpingfound the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, publishing the poem-cycle
Loba
and the autobiography
Recollections of My Life as a Woman,
and working as a photographer and visual artist. This selection from di Prima’s
Memoirs of a Beatnik
(1969) describes a time when there was a genuine underground and an alternative consciousness, and evokes an epiphany of generational shift—one of those turning points that often get lost in the shuffle of official history.

M
EANWHILE
,
in the outside world everything was changing faster and more than we realized. We thought we were doing the same things we’d always done because the changes happened in slow motion, but happen they did, and when we looked out the window again we were someplace else.

We had run through a variety of aesthetic games: little magazines for which we couldn’t raise any bread, theatre projects in gigantic lofts which never materialized, a visit by me and Susan to Ezra Pound, who wanted us single-handed to change the nature of the programming on nationwide television. Leslie choreographed and produced his first dance recital; Pete’s fantasy paintings became eight feet wide
and gloomier; I put together
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,
my first book of poems, and Pete and Leslie solemnly assured me that it could not be published because no one would understand a word of the street slang. Don wasn’t accepted at Actor’s Studio and made a movie instead. Most of his friends
were
accepted and stopped coming to see us. Miles Davis moved away from Tenth Avenue; we no longer ran into him at three in the afternoon hailing a taxi in his dark glasses, looking as if he had just gotten up.

We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.

The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.

Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene as yet. The affluent post-Korean-war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.

As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the city—who knew what we knew: who raced about
in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc., but our isolation was total and impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of the “sellout”) and to keep our cool: a hard, clean edge and definition in the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us—“media mush.” We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for love, and shut out the rest of the world.

T
HEN
ONE
evening—it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together—the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, “I think this might interest you.” I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”

I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening. The phrase “breaking ground” kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us—all few hundreds of us—simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.

The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too. It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were—and now, suddenly, about to speak out. For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends—and even those friends claiming it “couldn’t be published”—waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.

We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read
Howl
together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.

M
EANWHILE
THE
changes started going down around us thicker and heavier than ever—so that even we couldn’t help noticing them. The first thing I noticed, and it gave me quite a jolt, was that the pad was going away, was quite used up. Nothing in particular happened, but it just began to have that air about it, that feeling when you unlocked the door and walked in, of a place that hadn’t been lived in for some time, where the air had not been stirred. Places do that, I’ve noticed. They turn round without warning, turn in on themselves, and suddenly it’s like living in a morgue, or a refrigerator; the vital impulse that made a hearth, a living center of some sort, has changed directions like an ocean current, and that particular island is no longer in
its path. You can tell because even in the height of summer there’s a chill in the air, a something that gets into your bones.

The rats were part of it. They had moved in,
en masse,
from the demolished building next door, and they scampered and played about the kitchen at night, making quite a racket. They came in through a hole under the kitchen sink, and we covered it again and again with pieces of tin, till finally there was nothing left to nail the tin to but more tin, and I gave up. But it did often give me a deep shudder as of awe to awaken in the morning and find that a whole loaf of bread in its plastic bag had been carried halfway across the room, or to find, half an inch long, the neat little claw prints of one of my furry roommates in the congealed fat of yesterday’s roast.

O’Reilley had already split with our scene more or less completely. Occasionally she did stop down for a night or two, like gingerly putting one toe into some rather scummy water, and then withdrew to the safety and order of her new East Side flat. Don, having completed his movie, decided to take himself seriously and set out for Hollywood. And Pete fell ill, as I have since learned that he does every three or four years: fell seriously, heavily ill with pneumonia and had to be shipped home to Kew Garden Hills in a taxi at his father’s expense while his fever raged. The disease itself abated rather quickly, but the weakness remained, and Pete stayed in the comparative luxury of his family’s house, eating minute steaks and resting.

It may have been our large rat population that drove Leslie out into the world, but I think it was simply growing pains: he suddenly felt old enough to have a pad of his own, and he set out to get one. He found a loft on Prince Street in a part of the Village that had just opened up. The loft was the top floor of three. They were open to each other at staircase and hall, and they all shared one john. Previous tenants had installed a bathtub and hot water heater on the second floor and Leslie’s present downstairs neighbor had just added a small washbasin which also served for everyone’s dishes. Leslie had a two-burner hotplate on top of a small, rickety office frig, and a table with three wobbly chairs. All the water came from downstairs and was
carted up in gallon wine jugs. It was dumped out the window when one didn’t feel like making the trip down to the second-floor john. No one worried about sprinkler systems, exits, or other such regulations; living in lofts was illegal, and everyone who could afford it did it.

The light and space in Leslie’s place was lovely: huge front room like a big barn, green plants everywhere. White curtains that were probably just sheets let in the play of light. Almost equally large back room faced north on paved courtyard and endless possibilities of rooftops. And kitchen off to one side. It was the most luxurious (and most expensive) apartment that any of us had attempted yet. It cost eighty dollars a month and we all admired Leslie for braving such a rent.