The Pumpkin Eater
Inside My Brother's Bar, there's a framed letter from Denver's Neal Cassady to his benefactor, Justin W. Brierly, who interested him to the Columbia University crowd in New York, which included writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who went on to memorialize Cassady in such classics as "On The Road" and "Howl." Now Neal's is among the faces of local notables outside the Denver Center For the Performing Arts, despite the fact that he spent most of his childhood in a flophouse on Larimer Street and prior to his involvement with the Beats, was notable in Denver as a car thief and womanizer.
Denver is a cardinal city of the Beat Generation, and the nearness of Naropa in Boulder, and its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, continues to provide an excellent oppoertunity for young Denver writers to commune with their forebears. One such is Peter Orlovsky (or "Simon Darlovsky" in Kerouac-speak), who I saw give a reading in a coffeehouse on 17th years ago.
I made up phrases like "the golden left hook" ( meaning unexpected sudden tricky endings) and "momentum" (meaning magnetic flow) to sum up qualities I felt were essential to very good writing. But I was no expert. My friend Jenny Smith went to Naropa, and she invited Peter Orlovsky to feature at one of my readings. I had already been screamed at by Ginsberg for crashing a Naropa class, and in highschool had believed myself the reincarnation of Jack Kerouac. What next?
There was a host of Gothic junkies there, flimsy, pallid things in black taffeta. Before the reading started, I heard Orlovsky berating one girl from that crowd in a booming, big hoarse voice, "You're not thinking. . . FAR AHEAD! You're thinking from your EYE to the HOLE IN YOUR ARM!" He told her she should move to Boulder.
I was watching him very closely. I kept waiting for the golden left hook. He had this aggravated, red stress-spot in the middle of his forehead from his Third Eye trying to come out all his life. One of those fatguys you sometimes see in restaurants with special fatguy pants on, and it makes you feel guilty somehow, or ungrateful. His pants were hiked up ridiculously way-too-high up almost to the top of his belly. He wore yellow paisley braces and a fat tie, moving around the room in these slow, gruesome bounces.
Orlovsky's head was shaved. He kept going up to people and introducing himself in his loud voice and leaning over tables, extending his hand. Before reading any poetry, he gave a long, disconnected preamble delivered very passionately in a hoarse voice, arm waving onstage, linking the Mafia, Hitler, cocaine addiction, the Civil War, and Newt Gingrich in an incomprehensible tirade of self-betrayal. I thought it was the best part: he was crazy, and he was tired of pretending. It was brave.
He told us about the evils of cocaine-addiction, and a story of how Hitler used to shoot up cocaine, then line up women on the floor, and shit on their breasts and heart, and make them lick his asshole, "And THAT's why a POWER-HUNGRY PERSON . . . should NEVER be allowed . . . to SHOOT COCAINE!" I kept waiting for the golden left hook, but it was all one big golden left hook, and there was nothing to wait for.
When I left, Peter Orlovsky was leaning on the little fence outside writing somebody an autograph. I was being shown something about momentum.