When I Was Cool Read Online Free Page B

asked me if I wanted any tea.
    â€œI just bought Swiss Kriss if you need it,” he said, in those flat tones that made me think—if just for a minute—of brain damage. “Keeps you regular. I told that to Bill. He hasn’t moved his bowels since he got here.”
    â€œIt’s the smack,” Allen said to me, with a tiny giggle. “After fifty years, heroin’s given Bill impacted bowels.” The author of The Nova Express had trouble moving down the line. Peter didn’t wait for me to answer. He simply brought over a pot of tea for us, served on a tray with a peacock painted on it. He put his hands together and bowed. It suddenly dawned on me: Peter Orlovsky was Allen Ginsberg’s geisha.
    Allen must have thought I was scrutinizing him—I was just in awe to be in his presence—so he apologized for his mouth being tilted to one side, as if he’d had a stroke.
    â€œI was on an airplane,” he told me, “and I was taking two different kinds of medicine. They interfered with each other and when I went into the bathroom on the plane, I saw that my mouth was crooked. The doctor says it will go away eventually. I hate the way it looks. It’s hard to kiss.” (I remembered that Kaddish and Other Poems had been dedicated to Peter Orlovsky, “in Paradise,” it read, and, “Taste my mouth in your ear.”)
    Peter was still puttering around the kitchen, putting the groceries away. He had a big belly. The rest of him was quite lean. Allen began to explain the work to me, what he required of his apprentices, when Peter threw his long mane of gray hair back like a wet horse and gathered it together into an elastic holder. Until then, I had only seen girls do that in school or on the bus. I always thought it was beautiful. I didn’t know what to think about Peter’s doing it. Allen stopped to look also. I looked at him admiring Peter. I think he was still in love with him then. They didn’t speak muchwhen I was there. I’m sure Peter was staying out of our way, simply being polite, because “Allen was working.” But they also reminded me of my parents, their silences, the way they sometimes became annoyed with each other.
    When I thought about it, it seemed fitting that I was spending the summer of the bicentennial—our nation’s two hundredth birthday—with the man who had told America to “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” in his poem “America.” Allen Ginsberg was the father of my country. Throughout my youth, I always saw a different kind of Mount Rushmore—Ginsberg’s bearded head was there, and Jack Kerouac’s, whose handsome profile already looked carved out of rock. Gregory Corso, the shaggy-haired poet-thief, the François Villon of the Lower East Side, looked out on the clouds where Teddy Roosevelt was for everybody else, and William Burroughs’s death’s-head rictus formed the narrow slope at the end of my Mount Rushmore. I loved poetry and especially Rimbaud, or at least the idea of Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French poet who had written all his masterpieces by the age of seventeen and renounced poetry to run guns out of Africa, who had to have one of his legs amputated, who spent the rest of his short life being cared for by his sister, playing the guitar and making up songs under a Belgian, Magritte-blue sky.
    So when Allen, between sips of steaming tea, asked me what I knew about Arthur Rimbaud, I had an answer.
    â€œThe derangement of the senses?” I said, aware only that the phrase appeared in Rimbaud’s poetry. If only I could’ve said it in French, I thought. That would have been très cool.
    â€œRimbaud is in the pantheon,” Allen said. “There are others. Mayakovsky.” ( Knew it, I thought, and said a silent prayer of thanks.) “Breton and Tristan Tzara.”
    â€œSammi Rosenstock,” I said.
    â€œWho’s Sammi