When I Was Cool Read Online Free Page A

hat—that I had irritated my uncles, upset my parents, and made a name for myself at John F. Kennedy High School. And now it was gone.
    On my first official day at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, I was told to go to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment and introduce myself to him. He was wearing a T-shirt with Naropa’s logo on it: an image of the karmic wheel. It looked to me like the wheel of a great ship, the kind of wheel you’d tie yourself to during a storm at sea, like the sea captain had on the ship Dracula used to cross the ocean from Transylvania to Carfax Abbey. All these thoughts swam through my brain as I crossed the threshold, my heart racing, to meet my hero—the author of Howl, Bob Dylan’s mentor, Jack Kerouac’s champion and best pal.
    The first summer of Naropa, all the poets, writers, and musicians lived in the Varsity Apartments, down the hill from the University of Colorado, where I was staying. Dancers sunned themselves on the catwalk terraces in front of the apartments. Most of the doors were open. I always hated sandals, so I was dressed in shiny black Beatle boots and a short-sleeved madras shirt on my first day at the Kerouac School. At least I was dressed.
    Allen was sitting in his living room at a round glass table fit for all meals. My appointment was for lunch. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, white socks, and his shoes were off. He had wire-rimmed glasses that looked silver. His eyes were red. He kept his hair long, though he had already lost a lot of it. I wondered how anyone could think of him now as Sasquatch, a great hairy mess, a brunette Whitman. With his long hair pulled back and his shaved face, he looked more like the manager of the Stage Delicatessen in New York. (I would go there with my friend Roger Lemay one night in the early 1970s after Allen, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso had all read together at Columbia University. I remember I had the Danny Thomas.)
    I was so nervous to be sitting at Allen Ginsberg’s table that dust came out of my mouth. It felt as if someone with a shovel was turning ashes over in my stomach. And then Orlovsky came through the front door, carrying two bags of groceries.
    Peter looked like childhood drawings I had seen of Hercules. He had a long gray ponytail and a chest that looked like it was full of brine and pickles. He also wore shorts and sandals. Where was his chariot? So this was Allen’s lover. His literary wife. I had heard that Allen first fell in love with Peter in a painting. That is, a painting of Peter that Allen had seen in Robert LaVigne’s apartment in San Francisco. Peter’s fate was sealed when Allen first clapped eyes on him in that painting, and before long they were pledging their life’s love to each other late one night in a twenty-four-hour cafeteria. Much later in the summer, I asked Peter about that night. He was drunk, and happy, stepping into a hot tub with a girl. He said he could remember only the coffee and the macaroni and cheese. He said that he and Allen held hands over their dinners. Someone nearby thought they were saying grace. It cracked them up.
    Peter put the groceries on the counter. Allen introduced me as a young poet, here to help him. This was what I had come to Naropa for: to become Allen’s apprentice. (I remember going to a Young People’s Concert, given by Leonard Bernstein. He was introducing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” He said, “Being an apprentice to a sorcerer, how exciting that would be, but leaving the sorcerer to go out on your own, that would be tricky!” Leave it to Leonard Bernstein to scare children at a Young People’s Concert.) I wasgoing to be Allen’s apprentice, I was going to learn to become a poet, to become great, which really meant he was going to teach me to live an epic kind of life. I was nineteen years old.
    Peter, in a voice that would always remind me of Lenny in Of Mice and Men,