When I Was Cool Read Online Free

started,” he said. A week later I found out when Gerde’s had an open-mike night, and we snuck out of school and took the Long Island Rail Road to Gerde’s. You never know who might be in the audience.
    Fred said I should get up and read one of my poems. I said no, that it was his night, but I had stuffed a few poems in my pocket, just in case.
    There we were, sitting backstage at Gerde’s. Fred was tuning up, I was muttering my poems to myself, just in case. Suddenly Fred’s father stood there, backstage. He had a murderous look in his eye. I’m sure he was angry about having to drive back into New York City after coming home to Merrick and figuring out where we were. He made Fred put away his guitar and leave with him.
    Mr. Mollin drove home with Fred in the front seat. I sat in the back. We couldn’t look at each other. Fred looked like he was going to cry. I felt like we had been caught stealing rabbits or something. I leaned over and whispered in his ear. I wanted him to know we would be back and that he was a great songwriter. I hated his father. I thought he was cruel. Fred, who usually talkedback to his parents in a way that inspired awe in us, didn’t say a word. (It was always amazing to us how Fred would tell his parents to go fuck themselves, and they didn’t punish him for it.) Maybe Fred never got over the humiliation of being dragged out of Gerde’s by his father, because at sixteen Fred left school to become a musician. His parents told him he was making a mistake, that music was a nasty business for him to be getting into. He told them they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Then he made them buy him an electric guitar. They did. He became even more of a god to us than before. Ten years later, Leonard Cohen came to Fred’s wedding.
    My other friend was Neal. He wore a cape and smoked a pipe. He read Marianne Moore and wrote poetry and took pictures of his girlfriends naked. He was sixteen. But even Fred and Neal were surprised that my parents had let me go to the Jack Kerouac School.
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    I had been accepted as a “summer apprentice,” so there we were, Seymour and I, flying to the Denver, Colorado, airport in the late spring of 1976.
    Allen and Peter were supposed to meet us—the manufacturer’s rep and his son, the might-be-first graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But when we arrived, Allen and Peter hadn’t shown up. My father said under his breath, “This is a great beginning,” but he rented us a car and we drove the sixty miles to Boulder, climbing in elevation the closer we got.
    â€œYou can’t expect Allen Ginsberg to greet every student at the airport,” I said, secretly relieved. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know I was the only poetry student, so far, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. As the mountains of Boulder loomed in the distance, I looked over at my father and felt a sudden surge of loneliness, and I was grateful that Seymour had come with me. I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye.
    We moved my few belongings into a small, semifurnishedstudent apartment on Broadway (making me more than a little homesick for New York City). It would prove an ideal location, however, as Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky’s apartment was in the same complex: a three-story, slightly down-at-heels apartment complex with outdoor walkways that made it look like a prison compound. It’s where many of Naropa’s students stayed.
    I said goodbye to my father, fiercely biting back tears, and he drove back to the Denver airport alone, dressed, as usual, in dark jacket and trousers suitable for funerals.
    When I met Ginsberg, his beard was missing. My first meeting with Allen Ginsberg and his beard was gone! It was by that beard—that magnificent untidy brisket that appeared in Fred McDarrah’s photograph of Allen wearing an Uncle Sam