The Cool School (41 page)

“What’s that?—Brain waves are 32 or under and can’t be heard? Well speed them up, God damn it—And instead of one junky concentrate me a thousand—Let there be Lexington and call a nice Jew in to run it—”

Doctor Wilhelm Reich has isolated and concentrated a unit that he calls “the orgone”—Orgones, according to W. Reich, are the units of life—They have been photographed and the color is blue—So junk sops up the orgones and that’s why they need all these young junkies—They have more orgones and give higher yield of the blue concentrate on which Martin and his boys can nod out a thousand years—Martin is stealing
your orgones
—You going to stand still for this shit?

Ed Sanders was a bridge between the Beats and the sixties rock and roll generation. A classical scholar, in 1962 he founded
Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts
and in 1964 he started a band, the Fugs, with Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver. They released their first album,
The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views,
and
General Dissatisfaction,
in 1965, the same year Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, a center of the alternative universe that was the East Village. The Peace Eye was raided by police in 1966 and Sanders was charged with obscenity. In 1976 he published the manifesto
Investigative Poetry,
a title that defines a polymathic career that includes books on the Manson family trial, Allen Ginsberg, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. This is an excerpt from Sanders’s hilarious and educational memoir
Tales of Beatnik Glory.

T
HE
TAN
FOG
of particulate dooky lay low ’tween the high clouds and the barren skyline cenotaphs of New York City. Within the closure of lower Manhattan, in tenement slums of the poor, a poetry reading was held in late September of 1961 at The House of Nothingness on Tompkins Square North. It was an open reading—one where any and all were allowed to read their works.

In warm weather the readings were held out back in the court where there was a beautiful rectangular garden of raked white sand with a triad of small boulders bunched in the sand at one end. The garden was molded after a similar garden in a Zen temple in Kyoto.

There were seven humans—three women, four men, who were walking through the streets after the reading toward an apartment at 704 East 5th Street just off Avenue C. Each of them had read
their poetry. That is, when they arrived at Nothingness, each had approached the person running the readings and had placed his/her name on the reading list. There were twenty-three readers that September night, divided into three approximately one-hour sets. Readers were requested to limit themselves to ten minutes each but occasionally someone droned through a 115-quatrain translation of the Pyramid Texts of King Unas so that after, say, fifteen minutes, people began to shift impatiently at their tables. In all truth the majority of those attending had come clutching spring-binders of their own verse to read and viewed time-hogs with disapproval.

Of the seven walking through the midnight East Side, three were editors of their own poetry magazines. They knew each other’s work intimately and discussed it whenever they met, which was just about every day. Their life was the world of poetry and poetry publications and the recounting of the anecdotes of poet-life. They lifted a common nose of disdain upon the rest of the world, especially television and newspapers with their ceaseless spew of right-wing death.

In spite of the horror, terror and vileness of the
res publica
—the ennui, the mental spasms that sent them down plateaus of nothingness constrained to watch the blobs convulse and mull and melt—in spite of it, they met that fall after the readings to listen to poetry records, and, while lyrics softly babbled from the speaker, did lie down toward the Galaxy to pluck the vast lyre of grass-grope. For no right-wing government can prevent the sneers and derision of the people smoking pot in private.

Compared with the bunch-punches of the psychedelic years to come, it was tenderly innocent—but it was thought to comprise an historical first, the premiere instance in Western Civilization of such activities.

They specialized in Caedmon/Spoken Arts records—committing skin-clings to the best minds of three generations, including Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and even T.S. Eliot, although it is to be admitted that Eliot reading
Murder in the Cathedral
made it
somewhat difficult to keep up the stoked fires of fornication. (A complete list of poets, to whose verse were held the parties, is appended.)

It was actress Siobhan McKenna’s reading of Irish poetry that the group played again and again in their fuckings. God, it turned them on. They exhausted their love-surge listening to Siobhan McKenna. They talked about writing her a letter inviting her to attend one of their midnight specials the next time she should visit New York. They were especially excited to find out that McKenna had performed as Lady Macbeth in Gaelic at a theatre in Galway.

“Let’s find out if she had made a recording of the play in Gaelic!” someone exclaimed, bright-eyed with eagerness.

There was no theory behind the group-gropes—unless the theory of the heated bottom. “Who loves himself loves me who love myself”—the bard sang; and that was the gropers’ theory. They didn’t discuss it really—but fell down regardless into the furrows of the avoidance of coma. If anyone asked, “Why do you think we do this?”—someone carried the hookah-tip over to the person or toppled them onto the mattress with a grope-tackle.

Some were hesitant, waxing bold later. Others the reverse. It was like that Ezra Pound poem,
E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sépulchre,
Part IV, only as applied to phonographic fornication. Ava, for instance, wrote long-line poems of religious nature and wore extremely demure attire, but once the police lock was poked into place, became a torrid participant. Brash-mouthed Bill however, who was a veritable Tourette’s disease of obscene expletives, became almost unparticipatingly shy, although he was eager to hop around the mattresses with an ancient box camera. For the most part, the seven relaxed into a common soul and grew to know each others’ bodies and desires and energies to a labyrinthine degree.

When the sex-hungry poets arrived at the pad: Ava, Bill, Rosebud, Nelson, Rick, Trudy, and a human named Obtak who considered himself to be the reincarnation of Shelley, they drank a round of yohimbine-bark tea that Rick had made during the day after a
street-scrounge for mirrors. Right away they stacked the poetry records atop the turntable. Rick had a gentle thing about mirrors and that afternoon he’d collected as many as he could find in the Bowery area from thrown-away dressers. He hauled up five cracked, pitiful specimens which he lined around the mattresses. That was his chief thrill, to watch others reflected fucking in mirrors, at the same time listening, say, to Edith Sitwell, while Ava massaged his pornic area with a banana skin.

There was a small offset press in the back room on which Ava printed a monthly verse-paper. Ava and Obtak had to work awhile in the room fixing the inking mechanism which had become maladjusted so that only the left side of the page was being printed. When it was fixed, they fell fucking beneath the machine on a blue air mattress, unable to wait for the poesy. Someone in the bedroom put on an e. e. cummings/Luciano Berio composition. After a few minutes, Ava and Obtak came out of the press room, Ava laughing, “I guess it’s time to go to bed.” She leaned against the bathtub and whipped off her blue velour pullover, dropped her jeans skirt, flaming over to turn on the water. She took a bath with the assistance of Nelson, and then appeared at the mattress, dabbing at her hair-ends with a towel.

There were two mattresses side by side, one double-sized, one single. Before anything they smoked a lot of grass, via the toilet roll dope blow. They took the cardboard inner cylinder and Rick punched a small hole into the top of it, inserting a thick burning bomber in the aperture. At both ends mouths were positioned. One end sucked his/her lungs full of dope. Then, on signal, he/she blew the lungful through the tube into the sucking mouth-lungs of the other, in a fast whoosh. Then it was off to the zone.

There were variations of this, for instance when Bill inserted his cock through the roll when there was a lit roach burning perpendicularly and several of them took a toke.

For serious bedside smoking, however, there was a five-tube hookah made out of a jug from an office water cooler. The toke-tubes
were long lengths of rubber lab tubing wrapped in velvet ribbons. The carved burl was kept packed with grass and throughout the festivities anyone could lean over from the mattress and snerk.

They started with an arpeggio of e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, and a flash of
Howl.
Then it was the McKenna hour. Siobhan McKenna’s voice, soft, full, beautiful, triggered off a cross-mattress grope spasm that turned the arms and legs of the lovers into a quick frenzy of motion like a dropped fistful of jackstraws. When she read Yeats’s
The Stolen Child
, with the chorus in Gaelic, three suffered orgasm immediately. “Siobhan! Siobhan!”—Bill moaned, as he was engaged in E3- with Obtak, Ava, Rick, and Nelson. E3- was a term used by them to denote concomitant double-handed beatoff plus fellatio by Ava, with simultaneous impletion of Ava from the back.

There were numerous combinations but usually they paired and trio’d off by the end of the records. Ava and Nelson slept together. They always seemed to pair off and indeed, of them all, were the only ones to live together. Ava pushed her slight frame against him. Soon she was atop and seesaw bumping. She was able to come that way, rocking, rubbing forward, sliding into the happiness. Next to the frenzying Ava/Nelson, Rick and Rosebud lay side by side, Rick bringing her to a moaning cliff-leap by means of an extraordinary device fashioned from a furry pipe cleaner.

Obtak and Trudy, she side, he at her back, eyes shut tight, making it on the single mattress. Trudy was able to lift her leg and move it back and forth across the partner’s chest during conjunction.

As for Bill, he usually fell asleep after a single act of love culminating in a long warbling scream they called the “yohimbine yodel.” Bill had read a poem that night at The House of Nothingness titled
Homage to the Buttock.
Later on, Bill and Ava were seeing how hard they could whack themselves together and the pops filled the air from the pubic cymbals. Perhaps thinking of his poem, Ava whisper-urged him to climb upon, nay, to impinge himself within, her buttocks. He became confused and soon had to stop, thinking she had bidden
buttockal pain upon herself because of his poem—for verily there are few who trod the paths of Mt. Bulgar.

He continued to think so except that he gradually learned that she genuinely was an adept of buttockery. Forever he remembered her lying topless upon her stomach on the sleeping bag on the air mattress in blue tights and Rick pushed his hand upon her behind and into the inward-curving, rotating the muscles circularly. “Don’t stop, don’t stop”—she whispered. “That arouses me more than anything all night.”

Bill and Trudy loved Dylan Thomas, especially when he read
Fern Hill
. It drove them crazy. That night they played it over and over, seven times, until Bill was constrained to utter his famed yohimbine yodel after which he was soon asleep.

Hours oozed. They talked. They smoked. They wrote. They ate. Some departed. Some slept. Some kissed till dawn. And the gatherings went on each Monday for ten weeks before their Galaxy spiraled into dissolution. One went one way, one another.

During the ensuing decade, the seven ran into each other occasionally—at Orly Airport, in domes of meditation Colorado mountains, and so forth. “Remember those nights of Siobhan McKenna?”

“I sure do.”

And always the friendship. bloomed. to renew again. the pleasures. of former. commingling.

Recorded poets grope-list:

1. Yeats (Siobhan McKenna reading)
   
2. e. e. cummings
   
3. Ezra Pound
   
4. T. S. Eliot
   
5. Dylan Thomas
   
6. Edith Sitwell
   
7. A. Ginsberg
   
8. Marianne Moore
   
9. W. C. Williams
   
10. Delmore Schwartz
    
11. Arthur Rimbaud (Germaine Bree reading)
    
12. E. A. Poe
    
13. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
    
14. Edna St. Vincent Millay
    
15. W. H. Auden.
    

Tales of Beatnik Glory
, 1975; expanded edition, 1990

A descendant of the jukebox tycoon, Rudy Wurlitzer began writing while a young merchant seaman. After stints at Columbia and in the U.S. Army, he became Robert Graves’s secretary in Majorca, absorbing Graves’s lessons in the craft of writing. His first novel
(Nog
) and first screenplay (for Jim McBride’s
Glen and Randa)
both date from 1969. Later screenplays include
Two-Lane Blacktop
(Monte Hellman),
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(Sam Peckinpah),
Walker
(Alex Cox),
Candy Mountain
(Robert Frank), and
Little Buddha
(Bernardo Bertolucci). His novels—after
Nog
came
Flats, Quake, Slow Fade,
and
The Drop Edge of
Yonder—found a fiercely appreciative readership. Thomas Pynchon said
of Nog:
“The novel of bullshit is dead.”

Y
ESTERDAY
AFTERNOON
a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufactured, when that girl stooped for sea shells. There was something about her large breasts under her faded blue tee shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs in their rolled-up white jeans, her thin ankles—it was her feet, actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant. It was that thin-boned brittle movement with her feet that did it, that touched some spot that I had forgotten to smother. The way those thin feet remained planted, yet shifting slightly in the sand as she bent down quickly for a clamshell
, sent my heart thumping, my mouth dry, no exaggeration, there was something gay and insane about that tiny gesture because it had nothing to do with her.