Beatdom

Created by Kirsty Bisset and David Wills Edited by David Wills Published by City of Recovery Press

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We are again a beaten generation, suffering amid unrivalled prosperity… Lost in ignorance in a time of education… Confused and controlled and taught too many things… Tamed by a world of passivity and acceptance, obscured by pretensions and the illusion of revolution… We are tired of the benefits wrought by the Beats and the generations and movements they inspired… Ours is a generation looking to the past, like theirs, but lost in the present and uncaring for the future, I suppose, like them… Beatdom examines the Beat Generation in depth, but looks at the world around us through eyes created by our predecessors, and exploits the talents of people learning from the artists of the past, struggling to survive in a world of apathy… Beatdom is indulgence and sorrow combined and confused and seeking clarity and union and that sense of community that’s garnered by something as simple as a label… Beatdom is in good company, downtrodden all, and fighting for the preservation of the past and the highlighting of the failures and injustices of the present, though sceptical of even contemplating the future…

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Beatdom 1 Beatdom Issue Six

April 2010 Created by Kirsty Bisset and David Wills Edited by David Wills Published by City of Recovery Press

www.beatdom.com www.cityofrecovery.com

ISBN: 978-1-4457-4279-3

2 Beatdom Contents

Regulars 4 Letter from the Editor 56 Poetry

Essays 6 Walking with the Barefoot Beat 9 Finding Alene 17 The Beats on the Road 30 Literature and the Art of Self-Realisation 40 Lest we Forget 64 In Tangier

Interviews 67 Scroobius Pip

Reviews 35 A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

Fiction/ Art/ Memoirs 11 Sisters 32 On the Road Changed my Life... 36 Domino Diaries: Havana Zoo 42 LSD 25000 48 Transylvanian Tale 52 The Crooked Path Toward Salvation 62 Postcard from Allen Ginsberg

Beatdom 3 Dear All,

The idea for Beatdom’s travel themed sixth issue first bigger and closer. appeared about a year ago. I had been travelling a lot Our writers and artists come from all around the and trying my hand at travel writing. Everywhere I world, sharing their perspectives on the Beats and went I read a few travel guides first, and everywhere travel. Our essays and artwork have been written, I went I found the place was completely unexpected. created and inspired across America and the United The guides may have had all the right names, times Kingdom, as well as in South Korea, Cuba, France, and prices, but they didn’t have the soul of the Namibia and Romania. place. Even the photos often failed to capture what a We even have a previously unseen postcard from destination was actually like. Allen Ginsberg… But every now and then I’d go somewhere and it would feel familiar. I went to Big Sur and remember Issue Six is not just a travel issue. We are incredibly passages of Kerouac’s classic, and in San Francisco I honoured to present to the world an essay about Alene found myself recalling the great poets and musicians Lee, written by her daughter, Christina Diamente. who’d described it. Christina read Steven O’Sullivan’s essay about her It occurred to me that the best kind of travel writing mother in Issue Four and felt the Beatdom was the doesn’t concern itself with facts and figures. It comes right publication to finally reveal the truth about from the experiences and the spirit of travel. The best the woman most know as Mardou Fox from Jack travel writers tell you what they felt, and I believe Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. that gives a far greater picture of a location than any Christina has also collected some examples of her traditional approach that you might find in a Lonely mother’s unpublished writings, and has written short Planet Guide, or in a pamphlet you pick up at the explanations of each one. But perhaps of greatest airport. interest to Beat readers is “Sisters,” a short memoir I began thinking about starting a travel magazine, written by Alene Lee, whose writing has never before featuring only the best travel writing. I wanted my been published. writers to take their inspiration from Kerouac and As always we’re proud to present a piece of frantic Whitman and to write from the heart. The magazine prose by our art director Edaurdo Jones, and poetry was going to be called Beatdom Travel. by one of the world’s finest living poets, Kyle Chase. After a while I realized a single issue of Beatdom Both these authors have books pending release by could achieve the same goal. Perhaps it could even City of Recovery Press. take subjects like music and war and politics and After this, we’ll tackle the subject of music in do the same. That way, the readers and writers of Beatdom #7, and continue taking subjects and Beatdom could explore the world around them exploring them through a Beat vision. As a preview together, and contemplate its significance in relation to the music-themed issue, we have an interview to the Beat Generation. with British hip-hop star Scroobius Pip, who has a And so we have this, the first themed issue of new book out this month. Beatdom. Inside you’ll find articles about travel in the modern world, and in the world of the Beats. You’ll Yours on the road find essays about their influences and the influence David S. Wills they’ve had upon the world. Editor You’ll see many of the same names in this issue: Edaurdo Jones, Kyle Chase, Steven O’Sullivan, Isaac Bonan… and many new ones: Michael Hendrick, Wayne Mullins…. The Beatdom family is growing

4 Beatdom David S Wills – Founder and editor of Beatdom Brin Friesen - A handsome author from Cuba. magazine, Mr. Wills lives in Asia and teaches for Quickly becoming a Beatdom regular with his a living. He writes for various publications, and boxing-inspired short prose. runs a bookstore. Christina Cole - Poet and Beat enthusiast, who Edaurdo Jones - Writer, Art Editor... The Voice owns a rare copy of Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island. of the Doomed. Beatdom’s regular storyteller of the warped, derranged kind... A fan favourite and Kyle Chase - Beatdom’s resident poet, whose all-round Gonzo motherfucker... forthcoming book will be published by City of Recovery Press. Steven O’Sullivan – Staff writer and deputy editor. Sean Tierney - Poet.

Josh Chase - Poet and Associated Press Arlene Mandell - Poet. correspondant. From Minneapolis, Minn. J. Dean Randall - Poet with an interest in hobo Isaac Bonan - Illustrator from France. Responsible culture. for Issue Five’s Ginsberg cover. Brian Eckert - Traveller, writer, photographer. Andres Salaaf - Brilliant illustrator, who created the cover for this issue. Ed Higgins - Poet and back-to-the-land farmer from Oregon. Christina Diamente - The daughter of Alene Lee came to Beatdom to help break the silence With special thanks to: around her mother’s life. Dave Moore - Kerouac expert and friend of Alene Lee - Was never published in her lifetime, Beatdom. but now has her memoirs in Beatdom. A fantastic writer who the world will soon know more about. Beatdom Magazine www.beatdom.com Harry Burrus - A poet and Beat enthusiast, wrote a review of Beats in India. Cover Illustration courtesy of Andres Salaaf

Mister Reusch - Illustrator, known for his Publisher: Mauling Press/ City of Recovery collaborations with Edaurdo Jones. Press www.cityofrecovery.com Michael Hendrick - Beat enthusiast, who met Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Editor: David S. Wills [email protected] Cila Warncke - Writer and traveller. Regulars: Steven O’Sullivan, Eduardo Jones, Wayne Mulliins - Writer from the UK. Kyle Chase

Omar Zingaro Bhatia - A celebrated artist, poet, All letters, questions, submissions etc., to edi- musician from Scotland. [email protected]

Beatdom 5 Walking with the

byBarefoot Christina Diamente Beat

No girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual requested a Do Not Resuscitate order, it was clear suffering that a fulfillment of this last request would have And so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as to be accomplished in a literary manner, since a an angel wandering in hell literal fulfillment of that wish would have been And the hell the self-same streets I’d roamed in impossible. watching, watching for someone just like her Nineteen years after her death, I can finally say that Mardou was my mother. Her real name was Alene The Subterraneans, p.50 Lee (ne Arlene Garris), a 5’2” African and Native American, and an American-bred beauty. She was Jack Kerouac wrote the lines above about the main so renowned for her beauty that men throughout character in his book The Subterraneans—Mardou New York City (particularly in the Village and in Fox. Mardou Fox was Jack Kerouac’s lost love in little Italy, where she was a living legend courtesy the novel, and in Kerouac’s real life Mardou was of The Subterraneans) pursued her well into her perhaps the only woman ever to walk away from 40s. However, Alene was more than beautiful. She him before he was done with her. Mardou was, until was, quite simply, one of the most brilliant of all the recently, the only literary persona whose true identity Beats that Kerouac knew in his days in the coffee had not been revealed by any of his major or early shops and bars of 1950s New York City. Lucien biographers, or by any literary historians of that Carr, one of Kerouac’s closest friends and a literary period. The real Mardou had remained anonymous, collaborator (whose persona he used frequently and was therefore one of the few ‘best kept secrets’ in his novels-- Sam in The Subterraneans) said of Kerouac’s books. The omission of Mardou’s real Alene, “When I was given an IQ test, I scored 155, identity and her subsequent role in the literary but I consider Alene to be smarter than I am. She is history of that time, has left gaps in that history the most intelligent woman I know.” Allen Ginsberg, that are both revelatory and parallel to the views of also a close friend of both Kerouac and Carr, said Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, and Corso on blacks and in a 1997 interview at the loft of Virginia Admiral, women. This absence of her presence is, in fact, “Alene was a peer, and we [Kerouac, Burroughs, partially a direct result of Mardou’s impact on the and Carr] considered her an equal.” biographers and their books. No biographer would Alene, however, because of her determination to reveal her true identity, because, in her lifetime, she remain unnamed as the real-life Mardou and perhaps fiercely (and legally) demanded anonymity. as a result of her sometimes-hostile relations with the However, Mardou, on her deathbed, spoke these Kerouac biographers, came to be depicted by those last words to me* and Maryanne Nowack (a now same biographers as a somewhat peripheral character deceased New York City artist): “I want you to do in Kerouac’s life and in the Beat Generation. In one whatever you can to help keep me alive.” These photographic history of the era Alene is insultingly words, which one could construe as a simple wish described as a “groupie” admirer of Kerouac’s. to remain alive by any means possible, came during Nothing could have been further from the truth, nor the predicted end-stage of a fast-growth terminal a more devastating description to Alene, for she was lung cancer, which Mardou had fought for the a fiercely independent woman, who had never even previous year and a half. The words became, for me, been a Beat fan, much less an ardent fan. Another a directive to reinstate the speaker into the official writer, who contributed to the concept of Alene as literary history of that time. “less than” the men of the time, was Anne Charters, Since Mardou knew that she was dying and had who referred to Alene throughout her biography of

6 Beatdom Kerouac as simply “the black girl.” This description her and Lucien Carr (with whom she was living had infuriated Alene, since she considered it to throughout the years from 1962-1973). Both Gifford be a racist devaluation of herself as a person, and and Lee, who wrote Jack’s Book, and Gerald Nicosia, a reduction of herself as a human being to a sex had to sign elaborate agreements which kept Alene and race. Alene said years later that she felt it was anonymous and which protected, to the degree Charters’ way of paying her back for her having possible, Lucien Carr, who was understandably less demanded anonymity in her Kerouac biography. than happy about the constant rehashing of his 1944 As the first biographer Alene worked with, or to be murder of David Kammarer. more accurate the first that she refused to cooperate Carr, in a 1992 phone interview, had actually with, Charters suffered the wrath of a woman who requested that this work about Alene Lee not be was trying to both conceal her identity (because of written, admonishing me with his feeling that Alene painful experiences she had as a result of Kerouac’s “would not like it.” He subsequently cut off all book about her) and who was also trying to protect the communications with me refusing to speak to me or great love of her life—Lucien Carr (who had many cooperate in any way. It was, in fact, a respectful memories he was unwilling to reveal or discuss like consideration of that admonition that delayed the his conviction for murdering a homosexual friend). continuance and completion of this work for over Alene had never worked with a biographer before 10 years. and to her it seemed inappropriate to discuss her love Alene had loved Lucien Carr up to her death and and sex life with a stranger—particularly since the she had insisted throughout the whole 11 years of her biography subject—Kerouac—was dead. She didn’t relationship with Carr that he was to be considered feel it was honorable to reveal ‘truths’ about the dead and treated by me as a ‘father figure.’ Despite the sense Kerouac or about the then alive Lucien. Exposing her of an imperative to tell Alene’s story before all of the own and others’ private lives and subjecting them live sources disappeared, the need to respect Lucien to pain, was not something she was willing to do. Carr’s request weighed so heavily that only after Unfortunately, Alene would pay a steep price for her ten years of wandering in the academic wilderness, reluctance to speak in her interviews with Kerouac and as many years of therapeutic purgings, and biographer Ann Charters. She had to endure years the study of African American and female writers, of pain from being portrayed erroneously as a black and a consideration of the feminist writings about girl groupie who hung out with junkies. women who never became writers—who were lost While subsequent biographers Barry Gifford, forever in time by history, only after the weight of Lawrence Lee, and Gerald Nicosia were able to considering all of these perspectives – could I decide find a compromise pathway for Alene to express to go forward with a history of Alene. To disobey her views and experiences on Kerouac and the time one’s ‘father’ is not a step taken lightly, particularly of the Beats, Charters virtually eliminated her as a when the price you will pay is the complete and total persona and as a figure of that time, potentially as loss of that father’s consideration, if not love. a response to Alene’s demand for anonymity. Alene In light of such an active disapproval by Lucien viewed Charters’ characterizations as deliberate Carr (who had been involved with Lee up to one attempts to dehumanize and humiliate her--creating month prior to her cancer diagnosis in 1989) and an unsympathetic portrayal of her in the process. in view of a previous strongly stated desire for Biographers Gifford and Lee, who gave Alene the anonymity by Alene herself, the reader may wonder pseudonym “Irene May,” fared somewhat better, in why then I reveal ‘Mardou’s’ identity, her thoughts, Alene’s estimation, since they did not interpret or and her involvement with Kerouac, Burroughs, and ‘spin’ her words in keeping with the aural tradition Carr? Is there big money in it? Will it arouse the of direct quotes that they used in the book. Author interest of tabloids? Is it a vendetta and attempt to Gerald Nicosia, in his biography Memory Babe, cast Alene in a “Mommy Dearest” light or Carr in referred to her simply as “’Mardou,’ and he printed a classic spoiled rich boy goes bad black hat? No. his interviews with her almost verbatim, to Alene’s It is quite simply an attempt to put Alene back into satisfaction. the literary history of that time and to enhance the It was Alene’s negative experience with the beat history that Kerouac himself had attempted to biographer Charters that led her to demand strict tell—to chronicle the times, and at least one more of confidentiality and anonymity agreements with all of the lively characters that lived in those times. the subsequent Kerouac biographers that interviewed Alene was a part of the beat history, who, though

Beatdom 7 she never claimed to be a great writer like Kerouac, race barriers that were being torn down by black civil deserves at least her footnote* in the literary rights activists in meaningful ways. They listened to records, if not more. In the spirit of Joyce Glassman black poet LeRoi Jones, now Amiri Baraka, and to Johnson’s Minor Characters, this is the attempt to black jazz musicians like Elvin Jones, and they slept fill in a blank spot that others have happily allowed with the occasional black woman, but they never had to remain blank. serious long term involvements or friendships with To put it bluntly, an intellectual black and indigenous them. Kerouac, in particular, never intellectually woman actually existed and was formative in the collaborated with female or black writers, though he creation of at least one of the works of what some may was an avid admirer of black bebop, jive, and jazz call a great American writer. Kerouac was not well music. His relationships with women and minorities known for his collegial or intellectual relations with (infrequent) were mostly sexual. Women, blacks, women and minorities and his depiction of Alene, and Native Americans were ancillary to the ‘great while it honored her intelligence, mostly portrayed myths’ about himself and his friends that Kerouac felt Alene through his lens—that of a male sexual he was destined to write. They were as unimportant appetite. Not only Kerouac but Carr, Ginsberg, and to Kerouac as they have traditionally been to the Burroughs were men focused in large part on their literary academy and the annals of the Great Dead own talents and worth, not the talents of what they White Men. called their “old ladies,” or whatever women they But a black and Native American woman named were then ‘involved’ with. The ‘old ladies’ were Alene Lee did exist during that same time and place generally expected to “keep their mouth[s] shut” and in the 1950s and 60s. She did influence Kerouac, to exude an ornamental aesthetic of beauty with which Carr, and Ginsberg. She did write. And, finally, it the men/writers could clothe themselves in public. may be said, she did die still in love with at least one A remarkable comment that Kerouac made to Allen of these men (Carr), and in friendship with another Ginsberg exemplifies Jack’s deepest feelings about (Ginsberg—who was with her when she died at women. Kerouac said, “I only fuck girls and I learn Lenox Hill Hospital in 1991). Without her person from men.” (Barry Miles, p 131) Largely touted as a being reinserted into the Beat Generation, what is at cultural rebel, Kerouac was in fact a member of an stake is the commodification of that history, a portrait exclusive clique with distinctively male privilege. with no black or indigenous females in the picture. One of this group was author William Burroughs – Without Alene’s perspective, Kerouac and Ginsberg the eldest of the literary trio, an heir to the Burroughs remain more heroically palatable and more mythic fortune, and a Harvard graduate. Another, Lucien literary figures than they actually were. Ignoring Carr, a privileged trust fund child and Columbia her perspective and writings or leaving them buried University student was the first of the three to comes at the cost of ignoring certain harms that formulate the idea of a ‘new vision’ literature that Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr and others inflicted on inspired Kerouac. Carr was a Rockefeller relative, and the lesser known members of their beat generation. both he and Burroughs were the life-long recipients Ignoring her also comes at the cost of deleting one of trust funds and economic security. Burroughs, of the few recorded recollections of the beats as men from the ivy walled towers of Harvard and Carr, and artists written by a black and native American Kerouac, and Ginsberg from the prestigious halls woman of that period. of Columbia University — these three were a male This African and Native American woman lived, literary and social clique that accepted women as bit breathed, loved, lost, learned, interacted with, players but not as minds to be reckoned with. Kerouac fought with, and wrote about Jack Kerouac and other and Ginsberg, though from working and middle ‘beats’ of that time as well. This is the beginning of class white families, ultimately became powerful an attempt to place that woman—Alene—back into literary and cultural icons (often credited with or the historical texts. It is the attempt to shed light on blamed for, depending on perspective, the onset of another perspective about Kerouac and his peers. It is the 60s hippie rejections of middle class mores and the attempt to give voice to Alene Lee’s feelings and cultural status quo). And while both helped spawn thoughts about having been immortalized as Mardou the ‘revolutionary’ cultural conversion to ‘free sex’ in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. And finally, it is and drug use as norms for the theoretical seeking of the attempt of a daughter to fulfill her promise to a alternate/creative mind states in the 1950s and 60s, dying woman to help keep her alive. neither Kerouac or Ginsberg crossed the cultural

8 Beatdom byFinding Christina Diamente Alene

There is of course no definitive way of knowing a stress or great unhappiness. Always haunted by her woman who has been dead for almost two decades. childhood, Alene seemed always to be attempting Knowing and understanding her in life was equally to survive that past, which constantly threatened to complicated. Nineteen years after her death, Alene catch up to her. Alene had been told by her mother lives only now in Kerouac’s book The Subterraneans, that their “people died young” and she always in the fading memories of the few people, still alive, believed that she would as well. For Alene, the proof who knew her, and in the faded, disintegrating letters of this was in the actual deaths of her mother before and journal entries she left behind. Excerpts from a age fifty and two of her sisters before sixty. Alene woman, who never stopped writing but who never believed that she too would die at an early age. So, submitted any of her writings for publication, are as she began to unravel the details of her childhood what remain. in Staten Island, it was always with the sense of one who felt she was recording the events of the ongoing procession towards death from her childhood on. 2:00 am, May 28, Memorial Day The narrative was always about what was lost and about the pain of living. 1965 Throughout her life she struggled with an How clear everything is just undiagnosed mental illness that sometimes before waking. The inner voice manifested itself in delusions, sometimes in manic bridging the abyss told me this episodes punctuated by fierce pacing, and sometimes morning: ‘Alene, you said you were in catatonic and almost schizophrenic fugues. In going to wait until you were past between these states and sometimes through them forty, just like Conrad, before Alene wrote, sometimes remembering the past and you began to write. Write. You sometimes struggling to make it through the present. Often she wrote about writing. In the following have as much chance of making excerpt, Alene wrote about her writing process on several hundred dollars, or even a a trip that she took back to her childhood home in thousand, if you do what you want Staten Island. She was trying to recapture the Staten to do. Why do you feel so guilty? Island community of her youth in the 1930s. Time is runnin’ out. Take hold of life before it is too late.’ I found a room on a narrow street But I’m such a coward. I near the docks, with a family that know it is not a question of writing, had recently emigrated from it is a question of beginning to do Jamaica. How strange to be here, what you want to do: not doing the original ‘Quarantine’ section ‘your thing’ but taking your best of America. Every journey to the hold on existence. island seemed to lead me further back in time, to some original Although Alene did make a serious effort to write immigrant’s landing place . . . or a consistently from that point on, she never wrote in what she or Grove Press editor Fred Jordan place of detention. considered to be a commercially viable form. Stories I dreamed of these streets of were started but never finished. Outlines were written long ago, filled with crowds, colorful but never fleshed out. Mostly she wrote journal costumes of many lands, waiting to entries when she was angry or troubled, in times of gain entrance to America.

Beatdom 9 My whole life has been one Staten Island. Snug Harbor, the long waiting to gain entrance. I was old men and the animals and lover’s a first generation northerner, but lane. Miss Mary, who stabbed that had never occurred to me, and killed a couple of people and until a couple of years ago. I had no who was only exiled from Staten memory of any other place. North Island as punishment. My friend, Carolina was a place where my Veronica, who was shot, and her mother, Mamie, was left parentless husband who only served one when she was nine years old. It was year in jail. And that nasty old a place not of fond memories. Nor sea captain with his fat blowsy, was Washington DC, where I was purpled-legged, false eyelashed born. My mother had never spoken yet extremely beautiful ex-showgirl of these places in any manner that wife, who went once a week to the left more than a scent of them. store for liquor. And who still lives I would like to write about there and goes to the A&P once New York, about Staten Island a month. He has long since died. in the 30s and 40s... and the She set the house on fire—the wilderness that once existed there. roof is gone but she still lives there The Dutch Huguenot section like a queen. And, most of all, I want where we used to fish and wander. to tell the story of my sisters.” The people on Ely Street. The Lorillard snuff my mother used to Alene did finally write about her sisters in a short story, recovered here, with all of her sister’s real indulge in. The longshoremen and names. In the autobiographical story, Alene recalls the fighting and the screaming. her formative childhood experiences in Staten Island The Irish I knew, with their of the 1930s. Alene dedicated the story to her mother children with long curls. The and sisters of whom she said, organ grinder man and the monkey who picked your lucky number for I see even today, walking along a nickel. The large mansions and 14th Street, or in Harlem, the dissimilarity of the homes on on a subway stair, reflected in the island--Italian white stucco expressions of dejection, fear, homes, and grapevines across bitterness, sometimes secret from ramshackle broken down exultation, the faces of Maimie, tenements. And Polish sullenness, Catherine, Ressie, Ethel, and and the West Indians who were myself and know them well. For the first blacks to own their homes, they are truly the faces of my and the hatred between them and mother and my sisters and I feel the southern Negroes. The pier their secret hurts as my own. I feel where one could fish before it for you but I just can’t reach you. became a Naval base. And long This is my attempt. rides down Holland Blvd., where they finally removed the orange lights after 30 years, because they said it caused accidents. The steep hills... there are very few flat straight roads in 10 Beatdom Sisters by Alene Lee

Catherine was sick. They were going to put her in a plants & flowers, a pretty blonde girl tripping down hospital. The doctor thought electric shock would be the stairs. How could you not love those beautiful advisable. Alene recoiled. The third one. The last of things? her sisters. The most vibrant, the one who danced “Hey man, stop doing that, look—here comes like a LaChaise woman, the one who had loved the Catherine!” most... why must they kill the ones who really live? The boys used to love to watch her walk with She remembered way back. Alene and Catherine quick vibrant grace down the uneven sidewalks. had both belonged to the band. The Memorial Day Like a prancing filly. A leg swinging, stepping up, Parade, with the bands from all over Staten Island head high and, as a boy said, parading past. Alene and her friends would sit high “Watch it go down, man!” on the banks of one of Staten Island’s many hills. She was the pride of self in being, that pleased by She never knew whether she enjoyed playing most existing. or sitting high on the grassy mound of sidewalk I carried these untold things, which I had not looking down on the glorious array of clashing thought about in years, across the bright sunshined colors & instruments in the sun. And then, their waters on the ferry, past the Statute of Liberty. The band, pounding out wild exciting drum beats like ferry docked on the Staten Island side and I walked war itself covering with blood the battlefield of life. up the winding hill towards the home which had The melodies were so wild and strong that the pale once been the only home I ever knew. I passed faces seemed ashen under the tumultuous riot of strict the old schoolhouse with its 4 clocks, impossibly hammering beat that pressed itself out enveloping squatting on the highest hill. Yet despite the stops at and deadening all other sounds and attained a what should have been historic streets and corners threatening ascendancy. And there was Catherine, in of my life, I could not feel that things were really her maroon & cream uniform, twirling the baton, an very different from what I had known and imagined inspiration to the trumpet, drum and fife. She lifted them to be. each beautiful muscular leg into the air. Someone But God, it’s something to have a home where the whispered admiringly, “An African Queen!” Her odyssey of your soul can be bound, even though clear black skin sparkling, giving off light & vibrant you may end up defeated by pickles in a wooden color, so dark you could swim and dream. barrel run by a man who liked little colored girls. And your mother hiding from bill collectors, leaving The pure joy, the feeling of what you are, pulsating Catherine and yourself at the door with the strength like heart beats, the suppressed pride breaking out— of “we don’t know nothin.” it more than made up for the cold winter mornings, We stole peaches, Catherine climbing the highest waking up with wind soaring through the brown and being the stealthiest. We picked berries from the shackles into your spine. Waking up to a cold stove, hills. Memories of Catherine playing hide-and-seek chopping wood in the backyard and looking at the and leaving me in a dark wooded garden. Suddenly majestic hills that seemed to form the round earth I heard the splatter of glass, and Catherine sauntered itself. To me, those hills were the boundaries of the into sight, “What happened?” “Oh, nothin.” And world. No matter in which direction you looked they as we walked to the sidewalk a man, “You little seemed to curve round enclosing you. bastards!” After a surprised startled moment of The sun of band time and the sun of hot summer immobility, looking first behind at a huge dark mornings in the box rooms, sweating and the smell figure, and in front at a quickly disappearing pair of of burning paper, which you had set to the iron fleet feet, we gathered our wits and broke into a run. bed last night, because it is the only way to kill the And I was the one caught and walloped. bedbugs. The sorrow of mornings, looking out the But that was later. Very much later. Before that windows at beautiful stucco & brick houses on the there was the organ grinder man, a funny little man hills surrounded with bushes & carefully tended with a hunched back, an old Sicilian, with a parrot he

Beatdom 11 loved. Every week he would come by and Catherine the biggest longest waviest braids that I’d ever seen, and I would dash out of the house, no matter what all the way down her back. I don’t exactly remember threats pursued us, rushing towards the faint sounds when I knew I was jealous as I could be. which neared as we raced, “bettcha I beat you” to the And she had pretty fat legs, too! “Now I ain’t organ, which I would stand by transfixed watching got no black wavy hair.” And she was lighter. No the old man’s gnarled, sun and aged brown hands matter what Negroes say about “I’m just as good as move and create a world they seemed to share anybody” I knew they was favored. And it wouldn’t together with the organ. be easy on me having her there. I had always thought Catherine loved the parrot. The old man would let I was the best thing around... and it wasn’t easy to the bird perch on her wrist and she would coo and he see that maybe I wasn’t. I had never really looked at would give them each a fortune. We followed him myself critically before and this was the beginning for as many blocks as we could after ducking around of it. our own house singing with him, as people came I was as skinny as I could be without falling out of their homes and bought their numbers from for want of something to hold me up. I was a real the bird. A parrot, an old man, and two little black tomboy and I used to fight all the time. And I used girls. One in tattered cotton dress, with a naturally to win most of those fights, till one day a big hefty regal stance and a long leg usually poised in front, red-haired gal from Georgia came and hit me and as though it would begin to run when the signal was won a fight outside the school. She didn’t hurt me, given. but she sure did have me pinned against the wall Catherine had been born on a farm. Afterwards and I couldn’t get out from under... and I sure was our father ran off leaving our mother Maimie in the embarrassed, since I realized I couldn’t go round midst of the depression without food and money. He fighting anymore, and that was hard, too. And now- came back one day with another woman and he took -Catherine. Catherine. He was taken to the hospital several years Course, I thought for the longest time that I loved later and after a couple of months he was declared her madly and was proud of her cause I couldn’t “shell-shocked.” So then Catherine had to come to take admitting otherwise. But I would dream all day Staten Island to the bare little cold-water flat to live long, sad things that’d make me cry out loud, even in with our mother and us younger sisters, whom she school, about my sisters and mamma. How Catherine hardly remembered as babies. took ill and died, or lost a leg, or how her face got Mamma never bothered to tell us we had another burned and how people would take pity on me when sister. But there she was, one day, when I came home they saw how bad I felt about all this tragedy, and from somebody’s house, standing flat in front of my they’d say what a good sister I was. I must’ve killed, face, looking at us and the small rooms. “This is your burned, and mutilated Catherine at least once a day... next oldest sister. She’s ten,” and that’s all mamma besides funerals and tragedies I had going for my said. Ethel embraced her wholeheartedly. mamma. Catherine was clearly not happy to be there. She Before Catherine came and before I lost the big looked around the cold water flat, the center of which fight, I played mischievous pranks on any adult who was the kitchen, like it was a prison. But Ethel’s seemed easy to prey upon. I once sent an old woman friendliness touched her. I was distant and resentful. rushing up three flights of stairs in the adjoining And things got worse when I was no longer the oldest apartment to her house after knocking on her door whom Ethel had to mind. “Now Ethel has mamma frantically and with mock hysteria screaming, and Catherine and she doesn’t need me any longer,” “Miss Sadie needs a kettle of hot water right away. I thought. And Catherine Ethel obeyed, which she Something terrible has happened. Hurry.” It was not had never done with me. necessary for me to witness the ensuing surprise and But Catherine was my sister... and my mother anger in person. I rolled on the grass with laughter said she’d come to live with us... and she had just behind the tree on the hill across the street. Of come off her Daddy’s farm. And she was as big and course, I was always punished properly and harshly healthy as a cow, too. And neither of us knew what for these pranks. But beatings did not leave much of to say or do. an impression on me. Big, light-complexioned, with a heart shaped face Only Ethel, the youngest of the Garris sisters, had and fine thin eyebrows (not like mine which were always lived with our mother. And, they had that bushy and came straight across my eyes), and two of closeness that develops with the youngest child... an

12 Beatdom understanding. She was born understanding mamma right in the summer. Although I knew that a good part and she knew she was some strange kind of comfort of the Island went swimming, fishing, and dancing, to mamma. Not like a responsibility, but something these activities were few and far in between in my of her heart. She was our mother’s pet, loved with life. mixed tenderness, protectiveness, and resentment. With the arrival of my sister Catherine, the death She was not pretty like the three of us older sisters. of my foster mother, Miss Janie, and approaching Bird-like with darting eyes and a small sharp face puberty, my dreams took a mournful cast. I began and rather longish nose, brown enough so that even reading a great deal. I had never belonged to any she was aware of the difference in skin color between group, I had no friends, my family was my enemy, herself and us. But mamma was dark like her. And and the neighbors with their incessant fighting during her great strength was in our mamma, who she knew the summer nights made morning light become loved her. shame. Our oldest sister, Ressie, was grown and had long I began to withdraw from the intimacy and ago left the island after graduation. With memories of familiarity of neighbors, and became more conscious breadlines and starving, she married in Washington of the world around me. I began comparing. And, D.C. After a year or two in the civil service she and I always came out second best. I envied everyone. her husband had gone into the ‘numbers’ business. Even the ‘everyone’ that I didn’t want to be. My Ressie visited us when Ethel and I were very little. sister Ethel, I envied for her nonchalance and her She seemed always to be in two positions. Either ability to make light of everything and take the best in bed, smoking, with long curved nails hanging or she could get from life, my sister Catherine, for her sitting in front of the coal fire smoking with a cup beaus and friends and dances, in spite of the poverty of coffee. Smoking and drinking coffee, that’s what of the: ‘not-the-right-dress,’ ‘the hem isn’t straight,’ I learned from Ressie. Maimie had been very proud ‘no handbag to match my shoes,’ and ‘my hair needs of her oldest daughter. She would observe Ressie doin.’ as closely as she could, anticipating the drama that I don’t know exactly when I stopped liking my would seem to follow in the wake of such stunning sisters, in particular Ethel. But I started thinking clothes, beautifully coifed hair and beautiful hands. that we weren’t really sisters. I can invent some real Later, Ressie sent clothing home, expensive clothing, definite reasons why I didn’t like Ethel. First, she but what was the sense of a $60 suit with no shoes to was younger than me. When she was little Mamma put on, and no blouse to wear under? made me drag her around with me. She was ugly, There was always something missing. Something she was dark, and she was noisy. And, she was we didn’t have the very next morning—shoes, money treacherous. But she was smart too and she knew for a school book or to go to the cleaners, but none what I was feeling and probably knew why. She was of that really mattered until later, when we were old a thief and she’d lie right in front of your face and enough to know. Catherine took a housekeeping even if you caught her doing something she’d tell job at nine years old to have money for school and you it wasn’t so and not crack even a bit. I’d know clothes and shoes. She was fiercely protective of she had the better of me and as a result I would have Ethel, as she would be of a crippled bird. to show her I was both older and bigger than she by Our mother worked two jobs, one early in the cracking her on the head a little. And that only made morning and the other in the afternoon to early me madder ‘cause I had to do it. evening, yet barely would ends meet. Always hiding But Ethel was a wiser and more quick-witted child from bill collectors because of some small thing, than I. And I knew it. I viewed her with a hate mixed a radio or a chair gotten on the installment plan, a with envy and a sort of respect for Ethel’s vibrant knock at the door, and Catherine at the door, “My swift body and quick mind. The way she always mother isn’t home.” “When will she be home?” “I seemed to sink but for a moment and then would don’t know. She is visiting a sick friend.” “Well, we’ll be buoyed up and full of irrepressible gaiety and have to take back the...” “Well you can’t, my mother curiosity. I hated her without knowing how much I isn’t home and I don’t owe anything,” slamming really hated myself. the door. That was the home motto, “Don’t let them One of the places I would take her to was a nice in.” clean playground in a different neighborhood. One I dreaded summertime. After the anticipation of day we went to the playground and sang together. freedom when school ended, nothing ever seemed I suddenly realized that all those people were white

Beatdom 13 and I perceived what we were in those people’s we lived in. That house was so very brown and beat. minds. No one—not one other kid—was colored. All I have never seen a house so beat. I would try to their parents were there with them. And we, Ethel avoid being seen entering it during the day. If it and I, were little “colored” girls who couldn’t make were absolutely necessary to do so while anyone fools of ourselves because we didn’t count in the first was passing by, I would pretend that I was visiting place, and that’s what “we” did—sing and dance. someone, stopping to stare upwards and peer at the Little colored boys and girls singing and dancing for number on the door, as though I had no idea where white people. Nothing else. Just little niggers. I was. And suddenly I didn’t want to be a ‘nigger’ and I’d been raised by my foster mother, Miss Janie, I never sang or danced there again. And whenever since I was a little baby... and, like a sing-song I saw Ethel dancing for anyone, like that grocery recital, parts of that childhood would come to store man, who sold pickles in a barrel, with his fat me from mamma and from Miss Janie, the few belly and cigar, sitting outside the store, throwing remaining times I saw her-- ‘How Miss Janie took pennies at her, I could have strangled Ethel. But the care of me’... ‘how she loved me’... ‘would I like her words for the problem hadn’t formed in my brain to adopt me?’... ‘how’d I like to stay with them for yet and I didn’t know how to name the difference good?’ and therefore I couldn’t explain to Ethel. I would It ain’t good to give a child that many choices... and tell her, “They’re laughing at us.” And Ethel would sometimes I wanted to be adopted and sometimes I look up and say “They’re supposed to laugh and didn’t... and sometimes I wanted my mamma and enjoy dancin’.” And I would hate Ethel because she sometimes I wished she wasn’t my mamma and reminded me of how I had looked at it too. And, didn’t take me back. Ethel could really dance and she did not care how My foster parents had raised me in a clean, orderly she looked to others. She did what she enjoyed and apartment. We had a garden, chickens, and a way she did it without fear. Ethel was my living past, in of life that made it possible, to this day, for me the face of a new hate of self that I wanted to forget, to remember almost every detail of daily living. pretend never existed. Saturday’s I polished the furniture. After school, I When Catherine started babysitting, my mother went to the store. After supper, I washed the dishes. tried to get me to do the same. But I loathed the idea And in the summer, I was allowed to play for a of working for a family as my mother had done all her couple of hours. The kitchen table was round and life as a domestic. It seemed like worse than suicide made of mahogany. The kitchen clock hung on the to me. Any suggestion of my mother’s made her all wall above the refrigerator. The coal stove, which the more an enemy. I could see no reason why she was later converted to oil, was large enough for a didn’t manage to provide me with all that I needed, restaurant. The wine sat behind the stove. King, Miss including a home. I hated her for the way we lived. Janie’s husband, made his own wine. Paul, their son, She would nag me, cajole me, beat me, trying to get slept in the sun-parlor. When I was smaller, I slept me to clean the house or put my clothes in order. She with him. The dining room was almost too small would accuse me of lack of pride and I would only to hold the large dining table with at least ten legs tighten up and harden my feelings, redoubling my and the six knobbed chairs I polished every week. determination to do none of those things. She would The living room, which faced the street, was wide scream, “Do you think I’m your slave?” and I would with a player piano, and a couch with a red-jacketed wish she was. huntsman and hound dog above it. I slept there. I I was determined to “wallow in filth” (as my mother lived with them until I was six and a half years old. sarcastically reiterated) before I would lift one finger And at about the same age Catherine was when she to make right a condition I felt I should never have returned to us, before she got left at mamma’s door, been in. I was too afraid of the consequences of any I went back to Miss Janie’s for a short time. action on my part. Any compromise with the life While at Miss Janie’s, I was sick a good deal. I had we were leading, anything done to make it pleasant, most of my childhood illnesses there. I remember seemed to me would lead to destruction through the them pleasantly. I was waited on hand and foot. I acceptance of that life. was given castor oil, orange juice, ice cream, and I would sit on the curb in front of someone else’s treated solicitously. house, that was pleasanter, and stare at the red- When I was taken back by my mother and I caught bricked road. I began to hate the ramshackle house a month long illness, I was cured of being ill for

14 Beatdom good. My mother accomplished this by making it through a child’s ears, was so absorbing. unpleasant. Whether I made it more difficult for her And ol’ man Johnson, the number’s runner with than I would have for Miss Janie, I don’t know, but his numbers slips and book, a quiet ole man with I do know that after calling her five times within the his daughter Francis and her hunched back. And the hour her voice began to take on a sharp edge and I Smith girls, three tall, skinny girls and their men knew she wished she could slap me. I would brood who would show up at 205 after midnight, in cars. and feel put upon. Up until recently, I have always Miss Ethel out on the streets on Saturday nights considered my mother cruel, unfeeling, and hateful, with ice picks and knives, cursing and fighting, and though I am past twenty-one, I have harbored ill but who never seemed to get hurt but was always feelings towards her as a result of her nagging, and hurtin’ somebody. And me getting’ out of the police supposed ill-treatment of me. However, she did cure car after freckle-faced Ray took us walking all over me of any desire to be ill and physically dependent. Staten Island we got lost. And on the first floor, as We lived on York Avenue and we girls went to you went in the door, Miss Minnie (who mamma School 17, on the hill. Our house was the ugliest and was real good friends with) and her daughter Ethel. I most beat up on the street (and in all of New Brighton, used to try to figure out what they were friends about for that matter). That house was rain washed brown, cause mamma wasn’t friendly... didn’t think much with withered worn splitting wood and rusting nails of anybody. Downstairs, underneath us, Mr. Hicks from head to foot. But the view from the hallway and his girlfriend, Lucille, stayed. Mr. Hicks was a was beautiful. You could see the island as round, tall, slender, wavy-haired brown skinned man—an with trees and an occasional house. I loved that hall image of konked-hair aspiration. He was real nice window. It gave me a feeling of majesty, surveying to Ethel. He was her hero. Mr. Hicks always had my imagined kingdom, to escape the sorrow within. girlfriends and card games. When he wasn’t beating Six families lived in that old building. Three Lucille, there were card games all night long. Men apartments on each side, one on each of the three and women would come and leave all night and floors. And, in the backyard, down a little back- all day long, drinking King Kong beer, and even alley hill, there were six different scraggly vegetable whiskey. And sometimes they would play cards for patches. And though it wasn’t the country, everyone days. grew vegetables—and don’t you think they were And sometimes Mamma went down and played growin’ em for fun, like some folks do, it was so cards, and of course we found ten thousand different they could eat during the summer, till winter when things to ask her, til she would get mad at us. I didn’t there were lean salt-porked times again. like to see Mamma down there playing cards, and she All of the six families weren’t all families to each knew it. It made me look like I didn’t want to look. other either. We were family of sorts, cause we had to And there were a lot of rough women there too, and be, my mother and I, Ethel and Catherine. We lived she was my mamma. Some of those women came to on the top floor on the school side of the building our house at times and I didn’t like them either. They (every morning five minutes later than I ought to talked rough and acted rough. Then Mamma would have—I looked out the window at the red school drink too much and I would come down and ask house with its big clocks, 4 of them, with different her something and she would kiss me in front of all times on each, to see I was late again). those people... saying nice things she never thought Life was eventful at 205 York. I not only thought to say in the dim cold morning or the afternoons so but so did the other inhabitants, the neighbors, when I came home from school. How could I be and the police. There was Miss Sadie, running down anything if she was going to be like that? Kissin’ me the middle of York Avenue with a hatchet, tryin’ to and showin’ me off in front of all those people... and kill her old man. And she had religion too, the fire in front of men I had to run from when I met them of religious fervor and conviction. And there was in the dark hallways... and her kiss mixed heavy Mrs. Perry and her beer in the sink and in the icebox with the smell of beer and wine and snuff to cap it and the card games. And the iceman comin’ and the off! And her with such a pretty soft sensitive brown woodman comin’--a bushel of wood for 25cents and face with high pronounced cheekbones, black hair the coal and a big black dusty bag of coal in the coal parted in the middle like a placid Indian... grabbin’ bin and the cellar full of ashes, white grey ashes and at my hair and tryin’ to show them the streak of red little half-burned coals. The steady tingle of coal hair right in the middle... why’d she always do that? pouring into the bin. That sound of that tingling coal, Not giving it the credit from a father and creating

Beatdom 15 doubt in me about that because I didn’t know where well. I couldn’t be a big fighter... cause there was it came from either... and didn’t know why she did it always somebody bigger... I couldn’t be the prettiest or what it meant. because not only were there all those movie stars Winters at 205 York were without insulation. In but because of Catherine. I thought, “I gotta do the winter it was cold. I started making the fire in something, be something that nobody can take away the stove in the morning for fun when I was seven from me.” And I pondered, and thought, and I read. years old, and I made it so good that mamma stopped And I read many a day and months, and thought... getting up til it was warm and before I knowed it and one morning I woke up and knew that I could was something I had to do. get something and be something that I didn’t have My sisters and I didn’t love each other none, but to ask anyone for and nobody could take away from in the winter with cold air seeping through the wood me. I could feel harder, think harder and take riches slats at night, we’d begin to like each other more. from the world that they couldn’t stop me from All three of us shared a bed and we’d snuggle up having cause most people didn’t know they were under one another and play writing games on each there for the taking. And nobody could stop me from other’s backs. And we’d get up under one another having them as long as I didn’t let them know what like puppies ‘til Mamma came and then we were all it was I wanted. And that became mine, my dream. strangers again, fighting and hating. And being black didn’t matter, cause schools, the In the summer it was hot and the smell of burning principal, nobody could take from you what they paper, used to burn out bedbugs, would permeate the didn’t know existed. And all I had to do was guard house. Summer mornings I would cautiously awake it, and believe in it and it would be mine some day. while everyone was still sleeping, surveying the bed for blood spots and bedbug stragglers. I would feel triumphant. The very fact that it was morning and I Now, I was walking back to that ramshackle house to was there and they weren’t was a victory of sorts. see if I could stop our mother from putting Catherine Out of sight out of mind. I would go back to sleep in for electric shock. I would try to save my older with relief. The day had not yet come cause dreamin sister. I wondered, as I walked, how I grew so far apart wasn’t done with ‘til Mamma called us, warningly from everyone on the island? It was easy to know. I and finally. had stopped being a part of anything all those years My mamma was somethin’ else. She was always ago. When I became absolutely determined to shake complaining either about what we didn’t do, me free of my family, I would latch onto other people and my sisters, or about what we didn’t have. When or be taken up by others for short periods of time. It she was drinking she’d promise me a nice house... would be with other girls I liked, or girls whose lives always talkin’ about that house we were gonna I liked. I always followed people for some quality. have... and how nice we was goin’ to live in it... I was never sure whether they possessed it or if I and every time me believing it... settin’ me thinking endowed them with it. What it came down to was about that house all the time... and mostly looking that they seemed free. They were not like me, they through the windows of other people’s houses, all were not like my family. over the island... and wishing I was in them... warm And now, I was coming back home and I thought and good inside... with us sittin’ down at a dining I should feel glad to know that all I was and felt room table and eatin’ and invitin’ friends in to visit and desired and been and been thought of by others awhile. In reality, we never invited friends to 205 would be admired. But the world I was walking back York ‘cause Mamma would sit there and act evil into had not changed with time. Only the buildings and say real unpleasant things to us while they were had gotten more ragged and worn or torn down, there and downright nasty things about them when but mamma, Ressie, Ethel, and Catherine were all they’d gone after a strained half-hour or so. still stuck in the time and place they never moved But then that’s a longer story... my mamma... she from. Almost the same as when I had left them years knew how to create dissatisfaction, alright. I guess before. I would enter their world and try, try to pluck she kind of hated us all ‘cause she couldn’t give us out my sister Catherine, and try not to fall back into anything we ought to have and we were always there that time warp where I became little skinny, lonely to remind her of it. defiant unheard child again. After Catherine’s arrival I had to start thinking about what I could do that nobody else could do real

16 Beatdom The Beats On the Road Travel and the Beat Generation by David S. Wills

More so than any other literary movement, the personal adventures. Beats have influenced the world of travel and have helped shape our perceptions of the world around us. From obvious influences on hitch-hiking to more Jack Kerouac serious questions relating to the environment, Beat Generation literature and history has played a major Hitch hiked a thousand miles and brought role influencing people over the past fifty years. you wine. We often look to Jack Kerouac as the great JK, Book of Haikus backpacker, whose On the Road is credited with sending thousands of readers literally on the road… Kerouac is the logical starting point for an essay but he certainly wasn’t the perpetual traveller many about the Beat Generation and travel. On the Road is think, and the other members of the Beat Generation undoubtedly the most famous Beat text, and concerned - whom are less well known for their journeys – – as the title suggests – travelling. The book detailed travelled far more. Kerouac’s journeys across North America, and It is strange that when one thinks about the Beat inspired subsequent generations of readers, writers Generation one invariably thinks of New York or and artists to take to the road for spiritual (or non- San Francisco, because between there lay thousands spiritual) journeys of their own. of miles that they all travelled, and beyond them lay Interestingly, Kerouac was not always fond of a near infinite abyss that many sought to explore. hitchhiking, although he has had a huge impact upon But these were mere catchments for the meeting of hitchhikers. He didn’t really do as much travelling minds; where the young writers and artists of their as people seem to think, either. Kerouac grew up day met and exchanged knowledge – knowledge that in Lowell, Massachusetts and stayed there until he lead them on the road, and was informed by their own

Beatdom 17 Above: Map of Ker- ouac’s cross-country trips Left: Kerouac photo by Tom Palumbo Right: Kerouac house in Orlando, Florida, where he wrote The Dharma Bums.

went to Horace Mann Prep School in New York at beginning, and was most notably explored in the works seventeen years old. A year later he went to Columbia of Emerson and Thoreau. Kerouac also believed that University on a football scholarship, but broke his leg it was important, saying in Lonesome Traveler: and eventually signed up for the merchant marines during World War II. He sailed on the S.S. Dorchester No man should go through life without to Greenland. once experiencing healthy, even bored At twenty-five, Kerouac took his first cross-country solitude in the wilderness, finding himself road trip, and a year later he took his first trip with depending solely on himself and thereby Neal Cassady. These journeys took Kerouac from one learning his true and hidden strength. end of America to another, and eventually found their way into the American road classic, On the Road. But mostly it was the idea of non-conformity that appealed to people fifty years ago, and which has On the Road is one book that has changed America. inspired readers ever since. Kerouac’s call to “mad” Whether you’ve read it or not, it has had some impact people came at a time when people needed to rebel, upon your life. Kerouac’s masterpiece has inspired and his wild kicks on the roads of America were a people ever since, and is still as relevant as ever. wake-up call for millions. The idea of rebelling then “The road is life,” is one oft-quoted phrase from On became tied to that of travelling – of gaining freedom the Road. It is one that resonates in American society – and independence through running away and exploring a country of immigrants, whose classics include Mark the world, and to hell with society’s expectations. Twain, Jack London, Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan. Kerouac explained in The Dharma Bums: The road has always meant something to America; their histories are irrevocably linked. Colleges [are] nothing but grooming The idea of the wilderness and self-reliance has schools for the middleclass non-identity been entangled in American literary history since the which usually finds its perfect expression on

18 Beatdom the outskirts of the campus in rows of well- Utah and Nevada. In the book he describes every to-do houses with lawns and television sets town he visits and every ride he took in travelling in each living room with everybody looking across America. at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of In 1957 Kerouac travelled to Tangier, Morocco, with the world go prowling in the wilderness. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. He didn’t enjoy his time there, but helped Burroughs with the concept In both Japhy Ryder and Dean Moriarty Kerouac and title of what would later become Naked Lunch. portrayed an attractive outsider that stood against This journey was recorded in Desolation Angels – everything society demanded. He presented romantic which also details his musings on life as he wanders depictions of these footloose individuals that etched across North America and Europe. The chapter titles in the consciousness of his readers a desire to be that in this book include: “Passing Through Mexico,” free soul. “Passing Through New York,” “Passing Through Japhy Ryder was based on Zen poet Gary Snyder, Tangiers, France and London” and “Passing Through whom Kerouac met in San Francisco, after travelling America Again.” across America with a backpack full of manuscripts. Later, suffering from his inability to deal with fame His Buddhist wisdom inspired Kerouac to attempt and his disappointment at not being taken seriously communing with nature, as depicted in The Dharma by critics (as they viewed the Beats as a mere fad), Bums. Kerouac attempted to heal himself by escaping to Big Perhaps his Book of Sketches is a better example Sur, as described in the novel of the same name. of Kerouac’s travel-writing. He details a nearly three After Big Sur, Kerouac returned to his mother in thousand mile hitch-hiking journey from 1952, as he Long Island and didn’t stray far from her for the travelled from North Carolina to California, by way of rest of his life. They moved together first to Lowell, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and then to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Beatdom 19 20 Beatdom stay with Ginsberg. After Ginsberg reject his advances, Burroughs travelled to Rome to see Alan Ansen, and then to Tangier, Morocco, to meet Paul Bowles. William S. Burroughs Over the next few years Burroughs stayed in Tangiers, working on something that would eventually become Naked Lunch. He was visited by Ginsberg (Illustration by Isaac Bonan) and Kerouac in 1957, and they helped him with his writing. Burroughs doesn’t exactly strike the same image In 1959, when looking for a publisher for Naked in the minds of travellers as Kerouac, but certainly Lunch, Burroughs went to Paris to meet Ginsberg travelled more than the author of On the Road. His and talk to Olympia Press. Amid surrounding legal books are hardly odes to nature or travel, but in his problems, the novel was published. In the months life Burroughs moved frequently, and saw much of before and after the book’s publication, Burroughs the world. stayed with Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs went to Orlovsky in the “Beat Hotel.” Ginsberg composed school in New Mexico, and then studied at Harvard. some of “Kaddish” there, while Corso composed With a healthy allowance from his parents, Burroughs “Bomb.” travelled frequently from New After Paris, Burroughs spent York to Boston, and travelled six years in London, where he around Europe after studying in originally travelled for treatment Vienna. He returned and enlisted in for his heroin addiction. He returned the army, but was soon discharged to the US several times - including and moved to Chicago, where he to cover the 1968 Democratic met Lucian Carr. Convention in Chicago - before Carr took Burroughs to New moving to New York in 1974. York, where he met Allen Ginsberg He took a teaching position and and Jack Kerouac. Whilst in New moved into the “Bunker,” a rent- York he and Joan Vollmer Adams controlled former YMCA gym. had a child. The family soon moved Burroughs travelled around to Texas, and then New Orleans. America from time to time, before Some of this was described in On moving to Lawrence, Kansas, the Road. where he spent his final years. After being arrested on account of incriminating letters between him and Ginsberg, Burroughs was Clearly Burroughs possessed more of an instinct to forced to flee to Mexico, where he famously shot and travel the world than Kerouac. However, his writing killed his wife in a game of William Tell. rarely glorifies the act of travelling, unlike his friend, In January 1953 Burroughs travelled to South who celebrated the road. America, maintaining a constant stream of In an unpublished essay that can be found in the New correspondence with Allen Ginsberg that would later York Public Library’s Berg Collection, Burroughs become The Yage Letters. “Yage” was the name of a writes, drug with supposed telekinetic properties for which Burroughs was searching. As a young child I wanted to be a writer In Lima, Peru, he typed up his travel notes and then because writers were rich and famous. They returned to Mexico, where he sent the final instalment lounged around Singapore and Rangoon of his journey to Ginsberg. This later became the smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk ending of Queer. suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and In 2007, Ohio State University Press published they penetrated forbidden swamps with a Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of faithful native boy and lived in the native William S. Burroughs. The book details Burroughs’ quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and journey through Ecuador, Columbia and Peru, and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. ... gives insight into his personal troubles. When Burroughs’ legal problems made it impossible This isn’t exactly the sort of image that invokes for him to live in the cities of his choice he moved to pleasant thoughts for most readers, but it shows that Palm Springs with his parents, and then New York to

Beatdom 21 Burroughs considered Allen Ginsberg and exotic locations and Peter Orlovsky at global travel as extremely Frankfurt Airport, 1978. important. He set these Both photos by Ludwig things as a goal for himself, Allen Ginsberg Urning even from a young age. In his work one could argue Burroughs was more From the Allen Ginsberg Trust: interested in the notion of time-travel than of terrestrial journeying. From actual references to time-travel to Ginsberg might have been an American the cut-up techniques that carried readers across space by birth, but through his extensive travel and time, Burroughs seemed very interested in having he developed a global consciousness that everything in a constant state of flux. greatly affected his writings and viewpoint. In his essay, “Civilian Defence,” from the collection, He spent extended periods of time in The Adding Machine, Burroughs argues for space Mexico, South America, Europe and India. travel as the future of mankind. He seems to be He visited every continent in the world and suggesting that to change is to survive, that we need every state in the United States and some to move to develop. of his finest work came about as a result of these travels. Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present Ginsberg spent his tumultuous youth in Paterson, biologic state any more than a tadpole is New Jersey, before moving to Columbia University designed to remain a tadpole. and meeting Kerouac and Burroughs. He met Neal Cassady there and took trips across America – to

22 Beatdom Denver and San Francisco. In 1947 he sailed to Dakar, tried yage for the first time. Senegal, and wrote “Dakar Doldrums.” In 1961 Ginsberg and Orlovsky sailed on the SS Ginsberg returned to New York and attempted to America for Europe. They looked for Burroughs in “go straight,” but moved to San Francisco and became Paris. From Paris he travelled through Greece to Israel, heavily involved in its poetry scene. In 1951 he took a meeting Orlovsky, who’d taken a different route. trip to Mexico to meet Burroughs, but Burroughs had Together, Ginsberg and Orlovsky travelled down to already left for Ecuador. In 1953 Ginsberg returned to East Africa, attending a rally in Nairobi. From Africa explore ancient ruins and experiment with drugs, and they travelled to India, first to Bombay and then Delhi, in 1956 he visited Kerouac in Mexico City. where they met Gary Snyder and Joanne Kryger. In 1955 he read “Howl” at the Six Gallery and Ginsberg and Snyder travelled throughout India for became a Beat Generation icon. When Howl and fifteen months, consulting as many wise men as they Other Poems was published, City Lights Bookstore could find. was charged with publishing indecent literature, and After India, Ginsberg travelled on his own through the trial helped made Ginsberg a celebrity. Bangkok, Saigon and Cambodia, and then spent five During the trial Ginsberg moved to Paris with his weeks in Japan with Snyder and Kryger. He wrote partner, Peter Orlovsky. From there they travelled to “The Change” on a train from Kyoto to Tokyo. Tangier to help Burroughs compose Naked Lunch. In 1965 Ginsberg travelled to Cuba through Mexico, They returned through Spain to stay in the “Beat but was kicked out of the country for allegedly calling Hotel” and help Burroughs sell the book to Olympia Raul Castro “gay” and Che Guevara “cute.” The Press. In a Parisian café, Ginsberg began writing authorities put him on a flight to Czechoslovakia. In “Kaddish.” Prague Ginsberg discovered his work had become In 1960 Ginsberg travelled to Chile with Lawrence very popular and used his royalties there to travel Ferlinghetti for a communist literary conference. He to Moscow. He travelled back through Warsaw and travelled through Bolivia to Lima, Peru, where he Auschwitz.

Beatdom 23 Back in Prague Ginsberg was elected “King of May” to represent America in the 12th World Congress of by the students of the city, and spent the following Poets. few days “running around with groups of students, Continuing to travel right up until 1994, Ginsberg acting in a spontaneous, improvised manner - making went to France in ’91 and ’92, and then toured Europe love.” in ’93. His four month tour took him around most of Eventually he was put on a flight to London after Europe, including a ten day teaching job with Anne the authorities found his notebook – containing Waldman. graphically sexual poems and politically charged After selling his personal letters to Stanford statements. In London he partied with Bob Dylan and University, Ginsberg bought a loft in New York, the Beatles, and organised a big poetry reading. where he largely remained until his death in 1997. On his return to the US Ginsberg learned that his previously deactivated FBI file has been updated with the warning, “these persons are reported to be engaged in smuggling narcotics.” This was not helpful to someone as passionate about travel as Allen Ginsberg, and for two years he travelled around the US. Gregory Corso In 1967 he flew to Italy and was arrested for “use of certain words” in his poetry. He then travelled back to London and on to Wales, before returning to Italy to The only member of the Beat Generation to have meet Ezra Pound. actually been born in Greenwich Village was Gregory In1971 a plane ticket to India and West Bengal was Corso. He was the youngest of the Beats, and had an anonymously donated, and Ginsberg travelled to the extremely tough childhood, growing up on the streets flood and famine ravaged area. of New York without a mother and did time in both Back in America, Ginsberg was always travelling the Tombs and Clinton Correctional Facility. – seeking wisdom and change. He moved around He met Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in New York and the country, participating in demonstrations and was soon introduced to the rest of the Beats. In 1954 rallies. He trained with Buddhists, founded the Jack he moved to Boston and educated himself. His first Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, book of poetry was released with the help of Harvard in Boulder, Colorado, and toured with Bob Dylan’s students. Rolling Thunder Review. Corso worked various jobs across America, and Ginsberg toured Europe again in 1979 – visiting stayed for a while in San Francisco, performing with Cambridge, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Paris, Genoa, Kerouac and becoming a well known member of the Rome and Tubingen, among other places. He was Beats. accompanied by Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky. Between 1957 and 1958 Corso lived in In the early eighties Ginsberg settled in Boulder, to Paris, where he wrote many of the poems play a more active role at Naropa, following a series that would make up Gasoline, which was Next page: of problems that had troubled the school. During this published by City Lights. In October of Corso’s time he travelled to Nicaragua to work with other poets 1958 he went to Rome to visit Percy grave, in on stopping American interference in the politics of Byssthe Shelley’s tomb. He travelled Rome, by other nations. (He returned to Nicaragua for a poetry briefly to Tangier to meet Ginsberg and Giovanni festival in 1986.) Orlovsky, and brought them back to Dell’Orto He spent eight weeks in China following a 1984 Paris to live in the Beat Hotel. In 1961 he poetry conference with Gary Snyder, and in 1985 briefly visited Greece. In February 1963 travelled in the USSR for another poetry conference. he travelled to London. In August and September of 1986 he travelled throughout Eastern Europe – performing in Budapest, It seems that Corso came to consider Europe his Warsaw, Belgrade and Skopje. In January of 1988 he home, in spite of having been born in New York. His travelled to Israel to help bring peace to the Middle travels there inspired him, and he spent many years East. Later that year he returned to Japan to help living in Paris. During a return to New York he said: protest nuclear weapons and airport developments. “It dawns upon me that my maturing years were had After twenty five years, Ginsberg was re-crowned in Europe – and lo, Europe seems my home and [New King of May upon his return to Prague in 1990. A York], a strange land.” few months later he travelled to Seoul, South Korea,

24 Beatdom Beatdom 25 not only a hero of the Beats, but of many during the following psychedelic era. It could be said that Cassady lived and died on the Neal Cassady road. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised by his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado. He was a criminal from an early age, always in trouble with the law. He was frequently arrested for car theft, and Neal is, of course, the very soul of the voyage known as an exhilarating driver. into pure, abstract meaningless motion. He After meeting Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready City, Kerouac and Cassady travelled across America to sacrifice family, friends, even his very and into Mexico. Kerouac was inspired by Cassady’s car itself to the necessity of moving from life and his letter-writing style, whilst the latter sought one place to another. advice about novel-writing from Kerouac, who’d William Burroughs, on Neal Cassady already published The Town and the City, a novel featuring a far more conventional style of writing than His name may not be as famous as that of Kerouac, that for which Kerouac later became known. but Cassady is well known to any Beat enthusiast. He Both the subject and style of On the Road owe their was portrayed as Dean Moriarty in On the Road: the existence to Neal Cassady. His impact upon Kerouac man Sal Paradise followed on his cross-country trips. cannot be understated. Whilst he may remain most well known for inspiring Cassady settled with his wife, Carolyn, in San Jose, Kerouac, Cassady influenced many people to enjoy and worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He kept their lives, and to break free of convention. John in touch with the rest of the Beats, although they all Clellon Holmes talked about him in Go, Ginsberg drifted apart philosophically. referenced him in “Howl” and Hunter S. Thompson In the sixties Kerouac withdrew into alcoholism mentioned him (unnamed) in Hell’s Angels. He was and what seems like an early onset of middle-age,

26 Beatdom whilst Cassady took to the road again with Ken Kesey collection, one of my playmates was a and the Merry Pranksters. In a bus called “Furthur” Japanese boy whose father was a farmer, Cassady took the wheel and drove the Pranksters we all knew that the Indians were racially across America. It was a trip well documented in Tom related to the East Asians and that they Wolf’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. had got there via Alaska... There [was]... a Cassady travelled to Mexico many times, and in constant sense of exchange. 1968 he died on a railroad track, attempting to walk fifteen miles to the next town. Shortly before his death After years of studying Asian culture and teaching he told a friend, “Twenty years of fast living – there’s himself to meditate, Snyder was offered a scholarship just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. to study in Japan. His application for a passport was Don’t do what I have done.” initially turned down after the State Department announced there had been allegations he was a In his short life, Neal Cassady travelled back and communist. (This was shortly after the 1955 Six forth across North America. His wild antics, footloose Gallery Reading, at which Snyder read “A Berry life and driving skills inspired many who met him to Feast.”) follow him where he went. He was immortalised in Snyder studied and travelled in Japan, and art and literature, and continues to be an inspiration eventually became a disciple of Miura Isshu. He today in sending people on the road. mastered Japanese, worked on translations, learned about forestry and formally became a Buddhist. His return to North America in 1958 took him through the Persian Gulf, Turkey and various Pacific Islands, whilst he worked as a crewman on an oil freighter. Gary Snyder Snyder returned to Japan in 1959 with Joanne Kyger, whom he married in February 1960. Over the next thirteen years he travelled back and forth between Lawrence Ferlinghetti commented that if Allen Japan and America, occasionally living as a monk, Ginsberg was the Walt Whitman of the Beat although without formally becoming a priest. Generation, then Gary Snyder was its Henry David As mentioned in the “Allen Ginsberg” section of Thoreau. Through his rugged individualism and Zen this essay, Snyder and Ginsberg travelled together peacefulness the young poet made quite an impact throughout India, seeking advice from holy men. upon his contemporaries, introducing the culture of Between 1967 and 1968 Snyder spent time living Asia to the West Coast poetry scene. with “the Tribe” on a small island in the East China Snyder was both interested in the teachings of Asian Sea, practicing back-to-the-land living. Shortly after, culture and the tough landscape of North America, and Snyder moved back to America and settled with his his relationship with both is most famously recounted second wife – Masa Uehara – in the Sierra Nevada in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. mountains, in Northern California. He maintained Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder a strong interest in back-to-the-land living after quickly learned the importance of place. He spoke of returning. a Salishan man who “knew better than anyone else I had ever met where I was.” The mountains and forests Gary Snyder’s poetry often reflects his relationship of his part of the world were dangerous and beautiful with the natural world. Throughout his life he worked places, and respect and awareness of them were key close to the land, and in his poems we see intimate to his development. Knowing himself inside and out portraits of the world around him. Issues of forestry was essential for Snyder’s growth and survival. and geomorphology are frequently addressed in his From a young age Snyder was fascinated with Asia. poems, as well as in his essays and interviews. He grew up on the West Coast of the United States, In 1974 Snyder’s Turtle Island won the Pulitzer revelling in the diversity of the cities. Prize for poetry. “Turtle Island” is a Native American name for the North American continent, and Snyder The geographical significance of East Asia believed that by referring to it as such, it was possible to the West coast was palpable, as I was to change contemporary perceptions of the land to a growing up. Seattle had a Chinatown, the more holistic, balanced viewpoint. Seattle Art Museum had a big East Asian Mountains and Rivers Without End was published

Beatdom 27 Above: Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights, San Franccisco, by voxtheory

Right: In front of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, 1981, by Jon Hammond Below: Michael McClure by Gloria Graham

28 Beatdom in 1996, and celebrates the inhabitation of certain Ballroom, San Francisco’s Human Be-in, Airlift places on our planet. Africa, Yale University, the Smithsonian, and the Today there is an incredible volume of work Library of Congress. He even read to an audience of concerning the poetry of Gary Snyder, and it largely lions at San Francisco Zoo. He has read all around the divides its focus between his interest in Asian culture world, including Rome, Paris, Tokyo, London and in and the environment. It is pretty much agreed, a Mexico City bull ring. however, that the natural world and a strong sense of His travels have carried him around North America, community have pervaded his works throughout his South America, Africa and much of Asia. entire career.

Bob Kaufman Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Kaufman was one of thirteen children, and at age Ferlinghetti claimed to have been a bohemian from thirteen he ran away from the chaos of his New another era, rather than a Beat. Indeed, he isn’t often Orleans home. He joined the Merchant Marine and viewed in the same light. He was the publisher of the spent twenty years travelling the world. It is said that Beats, more than a Beat Generation writer, and he in this time he circled the globe nine times. lived a more stable life. While Ginsberg, Kerouac and He met Jack Kerouac and travelled to San Francisco co. were on the road, gaining inspiration and living to become a part of the poetry renaissance. He rarely their footloose lives, Ferlinghetti was mostly settled wrote his poems down, preferring to read them aloud in San Francisco. in coffee shops. He travelled a little – going to Japan during World Kaufman was always more popular in France than War II and studying in Paris after attending Columbia in America, and consequently the bulk of his papers University. He lived in France between 1947 and can be found in the Sorbonne, Paris. Today his written 1951. work is hard to find. Politics and social justice were always important to Ferlinghetti, and he was active with Ginsberg in protesting and demonstrating for change. He read poetry across America, Europe and Latin America, and much of the inspiration for his work came from his travels through France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Mexico, Chile and Nicaragua. Harold Norse His poems are often political and social, but also Norse was born in Brooklyn and attended New York celebrate the natural world. University. After graduating in 1951 Norse spent the next fifteen years travelling around Europe and North Africa. Between 1954 and 1959 he lived and wrote in Italy. He worked on translations and used street hustlers to Michael McClure decode the local dialects. In 1960 Norse moved into the Beat Hotel in Paris, McClure has never been renowned for his travelling with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory or travel writing, but rather for his depictions of nature Corso. Whilst in Paris he wrote the experimental cut- and animal consciousness. His poems are organised up novel Beat Hotel. organically in line with his appreciation of the purity of Like many of the Beats, Norse travelled to Tangier nature. They carry the listener (as McClure’s delivery after reading the work of Paul Bowles. He returned to of his poems is fantastic, and often accompanied by America in 1968 to live in Los Angeles, befriending music) to totally different place. Charles Bukowski, before spending the rest of his life He first read his poetry aloud at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. in San Francisco, and has since read at the Fillmore

Beatdom 29 Dislocation Literature and the art of self-realisation by Cila Warncke

Cila Warncke is a writer and traveller. She says, “Ordinary travel writing is not up my street. My guides to America are Fitzgerald, Didion, Thompson, Steinbeck and Salinger; Bob Dylan, Elvis and Muddy Waters.”

To arrive where you are to make a living.” I first read those words on a bus To get where you are not rolling through the high plains outside Mexico City You must go by the way wherein there is no ecstasy and they echoed in my head as we plunged south, …In order to arrive at what you are not through the impoverished streets of Acapulco to the You must go through the way in which you are not wild beaches of Guerrero. It struck me that in all my And what you do not know years of work and education no-one ever suggested Is the only thing you know it is important to think about how to live. If I wanted And what you own any wisdom on that front I would have to find it on Is what you don’t own my own. And where you are Is where you are not. Inspiration is rare because twenty-first century America is obsessed with security. Running away to – T.S. Elliot find yourself is disreputable. The joy of movement, of self-propulsion, is viewed with suspicion because it is antithetical to stability. If even a fraction of the dreamers shrugged off the encumbrance of property, life insurance and steady jobs the social order would I was lucky. By the time I discovered that personal collapse. So we’re allowed Easy Rider and On the autonomy is one of those American tropes that gets Road, while being subtly shackled by 401(k) plans full lip-service but absolutely no practical respect and 10 days per year paid vacation. (see also: “all men are created equal” and separation of church and state), I’d read The Grapes of Wrath Daily life is full of opportunities to behave in and it was too late. Already, tires on asphalt were familiar ways. The trick is to avoid doing so. This singing and orange trees bloomed somewhere. There means taking a hard look at what convention has to was also a dark undercurrent in Steinbeck’s prose, offer, and refusing it. “This is why I left the States the murmured caution I might not survive the trip or, when I was 22,” rock icon Chrissie Hynde once reaching an end, find what I was seeking. remarked. “I saw that I was going to be trapped into buying a car so I could get to work so I could pay The mythic American journey is a quest for self- for my car.” Like all artists, she understands the vital realisation, a conscious effort to shake off the ties of importance of action, of embracing uncertainty. Such convention and to seek truth through action. Henry choices are fraught with insecurity; with the promise David Thoreau showed the way when he went to of bittersweet, intoxicating thrills. Walden Pond to “suck the marrow out of life.” Note: it is okay to gather moss as you invent yourself. “Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on Movement, per se, is not the point. To actively choose the street,” Bob Dylan hymns in Like a Rolling a mode of being is what matters. Hunter S. Thompson Stone, “And now you’re gonna have to get used to put this as beautifully as I’ve seen, advising his kid it.” Getting used to it is hard. If it wasn’t everyone brother: “Don’t think in terms of goals, think in would do it. Death and desperation drive the Joads; terms of how you want to live. Then figure out how in Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly runs from

30 Beatdom the wilderness to the glass canyons of New York City The Californians wanted many to the jungles of South America, never quite catching things, accumulation, social success, up to her dreams. Their journeys are tragic, not amusement, luxury, and a curious triumphal, yet the dream remains – wistful, stubborn banking security, the new barbarians – of California sunsets and the glint of diamonds. wanted only two things – land and Travelling your own road requires a fervent belief in food…. Whereas the wants of the the infinite possibilities of freedom, but catastrophe Californians were nebulous and and failure are always among the possibilities. undefined, the wants of the Okies were beside the roads. Vincent Van Gogh, who is unjustly dismissed as an ear-hacking auteur, wrote luminous, philosophical Land and food are buried deep in the heart of letters pondering his struggles to live with artistic every personal saga. Even rolling stones need a integrity in a material world. “I think that most resting place. (Kerouac first uses “beat” in the sense people who know me consider me a failure, and… it of beat-up, worn out, kicked around. Only later did really might be so, if some things do not change for it become a badge of honour.) Truth is, unhitching the better,” he wrote on his thirtieth birthday. “When yourself from the comfortable yolk of everydayness I think it might be so, I feel it so vividly that it quite is difficult business. It is an act of necessity, depresses me… but one doesn’t expect out of life what desperation even, undertaken by those who refuse to one has already learned that it cannot give.” What live half-lives. If you heed Thoreau’s injunction to life, faced square on, cannot give is any assurance of “step to the music [you hear], however measured or a happy ending. There is powerful literary testimony far away,” you are liable to find yourself lost, cold, to the fact that courage is no guarantor of success. broke, alienated, adrift. Getting to California means crossing the cross the Great Divide. Like as not, Martha Gellhorn, novelist and war-correspondent your only encouragement along the way will be the extraordinaire, knew this better than most. I’ve books at the bottom of your rucksack. And faith the dragged her superb memoir, Travels with Myself destination will prove worthy of the journey. & Another, across two continents as much for the spine-stiffening effect of her brusque prose as for her mordantly funny stories of ‘horror journeys.’ Inspirations “Moaning is unseemly,” she concludes. “Get to work. Work is the best cure for despair.” Capote, Truman Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Contrary to popular belief, work matters to the Dylan, Bob ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ from Highway wanderers. There is nothing lazy about going in search 61 Revisited of experience. Hunter Thompson scraped, rowed and rolled across the Americas not because he didn’t want Eliot, T.S. ‘East Coker’ from Four Quartets to work but because he wanted meaningful work. The tragedy of The Great Gatsby is that the idle rich Gellhorn, Martha Travels with Myself & Another flourish at the expense of hungry, intelligent young men who cannot find honest labour. Hell, even Dean Kerouac, Jack On The Road Moriarty, “the most fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world,” pays for his adventure with stints of Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath “working without pause eight hours a night.” Thompson, Hunter S. The Saga of a Desperate America trivialises the industry and vitality Southern Gentleman of people who carve their own paths because it needs well-rooted consumers to prop up its web of Thoreau, Henry David Walden shopping malls, real estate brokers and HMOs. And because it is afraid of being called to account for Van Gogh, Vincent The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh broken promises about life, liberty and the pursuit of (ed. Mark Roskill) happiness. In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck offers a deadly accurate diagnosis of establishment dread:

Beatdom 31 On the Road changed my life…. Photo and words by Wayne Mullins

One of the most common quotes you will hear from trashy horror novels for fun, it came as something of fans of Jack Kerouac is how reading his seminal a shock to discover that the printed word could be so novel On the Road changed their lives. I have come personal, beautiful and meaningful. Though I didn’t to the conclusion that sadly this isn’t actually true. I fully understand it at the time, something had been myself went through the same emotional rollercoaster identified inside of me. I then came to fully realise that after reading this book, but many years on I have my quiet social awkwardness and misplaced feelings figured out that sadly it hasn’t really changed my life towards myself and society, a feeling that I wanted to a great deal (if at all), but that I just really, really liked do my own thing and be damned with conventional his book. Below you will find a short essay on my culture were by no means unique. I had discovered, related life experiences and how I tried to emulate the thanks to this cartoon, that these feelings had been adventures within the book and become more “beat” experienced by people just like me 50 years earlier after reading Kerouac for the first time. and that they had even gone through the trouble of writing books about it. As so often happens in my life my introduction to something important and life changing, in this case Always wanting to see the world, and in particular Kerouac and the Beat movement, occurred purely by America, I had managed to experience a brief flurry the most random of occurrences. In 2004 I had grown of adventure in my nineteenth year, when a student fond of an American animated series called “Home work programme had allowed me to travel and work Movies.” The series revolved around a young boy in America on a Summer camp for Jewish children named Brandon and his friends as they write, direct in the Pennsylvania mountains. Though ultimately a and star in their own home movies, while interacting false dawn in my new and exciting life of travelling with a number of memorable and off-beat characters. the world and having adventures like a Welsh Sal In one episode, the main character Brandon decides Paradise, it did give me a taste of what was possible, to run away from home and “Live on the road, just even if the highlight of my trip to the USA was lasting like Jack Kerouac.” This throw away line that would just one weekend in Manhattan before flying home. barely register with most viewers started to play on Though brief, I started to believe that it was possible to my mind and as a fairly young (24 years old) man have the kind of life I had only read about and it none with little experience of American literature; I had no the less provided me with some frame of reference for idea who this Kerouac fellow was or why Brandon the future I wished to experience. would want to emulate him. After returning to the UK, I took a menial and A short trip to Amazon provided me with my first soul destroying job as an office administrator for taste of the Beat visage. Glowing references and the Health Service, with the sole intention of saving “classic” status were thrown about like confetti enough money in order to plan my next trip abroad. and littered many of the books on offer, but one in Around this time, however, I also started an illicit and particular seemed to stand out from the crowd in its secret affair with a femme-fatal-like, slightly older referential glory. That book of course was On the work colleague. I justified this to myself as a worthy Road. Devouring the book chapter after chapter, the and fun escape from the brain sapping monotony story of a young man seemingly looking for answers that everyday life in a modern office offers. Eager to from other people in a society that he didn’t quit fit impress and deepen our emotional bond I offered to in struck a chord within me. Having grown up either lend her the book that had come to mean so much being made to read “serious” books in school or to me. She eventually returned it some months later

32 Beatdom upon my repeated request and when quizzed as to in her sad, trapped despair or ripping my clothes off what was her favourite part of the book, she crushed with her sweet, angel voiced fury. me by replying “Ohhh, all of it.” Needless to say, the book was unread and any further connection I was Undeterred I vowed to continue my Beat studies hoping to make with this woman would have to be and continue with my original plan to travel and apply purely physical and have nothing to do with something myself to fully understanding the messages they taught. as unpopular and time consuming as intellectual However, I was having trouble putting into practice attachment. what I had learned as I had always been a fairly quiet and shy person, but unlike Kerouac I had neither the I’d love to say that my main source of joy in life constitution or liking for alcohol which helped him was riding the pussy express all the way to fun-town, deal with the same problem. There is a part of my but I find that as I get older, people who have a brain brain that I can never turn off, no matter how drunk I capacity that limits them to banal soap operas are of get and that was that I was never comfortable trying no use to me. I am no longer willing to put up with to be a person that I was not. I always have a damned know nothing idiots and empty headed hot-mouths, voice inside my head letting me know in no uncertain both of which Wales has too many off. Not being able terms that I’m faking it and the glazed, dopey and to make a deeper connection with this woman over a slouched appearance alcohol gives me makes me look movement and rich as the Beats and with something like a dizzy school boy after his first hit of vodka. as personal to me as On the Road, eventually lead us to go our separate ways. Also, she was married, which The years slowly ticked by as my plans to travel somewhat complicated things. gathered dust amongst the haze of car payments, work commitments and my own procrastinating nature. But I will always remember my beautiful blonde Salvation was to come however when a kindred spirit and sexy office-lover; a woman who I will always came into my life through work, a man by the name of remember (rightly or wrongly) as someone who was Neil. Being single, fun and most importantly the same always five minutes away from either hitting the bottle age as myself, it was an ice cold shower of a wakeup

Beatdom 33 call when I realised that there was a universe beyond the open my own business. middle-aged, sagging, dog-eared, dried up, miserable excuse for a women that seem to populate offices Over a year has since passed and it brings us pretty everywhere. The connection with Kerouac once again much up to the present at the time of writing. Having came to the fore as I soon found that Neil embodied stayed in intermittent contact with Neil during this the spirit and soul of Dean Moriarty, a friend that I had time, it was with great excitement that I received an been unconsciously looking for (at least in my mind) email from him letting me know that he was planning since I first readOn the Road all those years ago. Neil on travelling across North America. I felt that this was typified the complete embodiment of how to live life the right time to make another change in my life and without regret. He was tall, good looking, insanely the thought of a real life On the Road adventure with confident and the women loved him, everything I felt my surrogate Cassady was too good an opportunity to was denied to me, either through reality or my own pass me by. The dreams from my youth of travelling warped view of self. To my surprise, he was also a and exploring life dusted themselves off and I good person and an even better friend. enthusiastically wrote back asking what he thought of the possibility of road-tripping with me around the Away from the attention of the dog-eared humpties, USA. Sadly, his reply was not what I had hoped. we spent countless hours talking about love, life, our hopes and dreams and our plans for the future. Somewhat tired from the constant travelling over Though easy to dismiss as hedonistic in nature and the last 18 months, Neil had decided to spend the loud and brash, Neil possessed a keen intellect and majority of his time when in the USA entrenched in warm personality as he continually pushed me to the music scene in Nashville. Not planning on making expand my comfort zone and to explore life. To say we any further road-trips in the immediate future, he none were complete opposites would be a fair assumption. the less offered me a small crumb of possibility with While I was quiet and somewhat introverted, he a bitter-sweet “maybe, who knows?” final sentence. delighted in shouting expletives at the top of his lungs Approaching 32 year of age and with the possibility in the middle of the street, always happy to be the of making my long wished for road trip looking ever centre of attention. With Neil in attendance it was a slimmer by the day, I lay awake at nights, well in satisfying feeling knowing that I was finally starting the small hours, staring at the ceiling and running to experience some of the counter culture and wild through all the possible adventures and trips in my living that I had read so much about, though be it imagination. from the safety of a Friday night out on the town in deepest, darkest South Wales. One night we are hitting the Jazz clubs of Manhattan, the next we are crossing the great deserts of Utah in While I continued into my slow slide towards 30 an open top Cadillac, then maybe a stop off in San with very little hope or salvation in sight and my Francisco so we can take in the spiritual home of plans of travelling now almost forgotten in the midst the Beats. But all the while I am reminded that even of time, Neil had dreams and goals of his own that he though my dreams of travelling may never now come wanted to achieve. He wanted to travel, he wanted to true, the truth in the fantasy that I had learned from experience life and he wanted to have fun. Quitting Kerouac and On the Road is that they have indeed his job in the company in which we both worked changed my life. for and leaving his rock band behind (yes, he was even in a rock band), Neil set out for Australia and They have taught me that my own mind can provide South America on his journey of self-discovery and me with a life that I can live a hundred times in the adventure. Though tentative gestures of an invitation space of a few hours while just lying in bed, while I were made to come with him to Australia early on wait for the lesser dreams to come. in his planning, I felt I had to decline the offer at the time as I saw it as Neil’s path, a path which he should be allowed to walk alone for a while. Besides, I had my own path to walk at this point and decided to take a big risk by quitting my job after nearly 8 years and

34 Beatdom A Blue Hand, The Beats in India by . DeborahReview by Harry Baker Burrus

Baker’s choices are interesting in that she calls this for writing The Beats in India but spends more time with Corso a collection than with Gary Snyder. Corso never made it to India, of poetry or despite years of discussing the trip, while Snyder and a novel. She Joanne Kyger spent time there with Ginsberg. Baker a p p e a r s presents Joanne Kyger in a rather unfavorable light. in a few letters of Tibetan mysticism and Buddhism, Vaishnavites, some minor Hindu gods and goddesses, are broached as Ginsberg characters pursues a guru and hoping to receive instruction from (that most one. Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s time in Calcutta and have never Benares receives a fair amount of attention, but it is heard of) the Indian political and poetic scene with its various and yet players that fills a large portion of the book and B a k e r unless one is interested in the different deities of the introduces her as a colorful thread that weaves through subcontinent it can be tedious. this story, yet, her story goes nowhere because no one knows what happened to her. Given the numerous Indian poets presented, I felt it was more the essence of what being Beat was that What interests me the most about this book is the allowed them to be so prominent and, yet, we do structure. The syntax. It is a fractured narrative that learn something about early 1960s Indian politics and meanders back and forth through time, beginning well poetics. into Ginsberg’s Indian journey, and unfolds largely through flashbacks. We also have flash forwards, However, it is the persona of Hope Savage that things that happen years later – in many ways this is looms large in this story. Like Allen, she, too, is on a a collage. quest, searching for something elusive and undefined and more than likely unobtainable. Not surprisingly, Ginsberg’s Indian Journals contains more detail about his time in Indian than does Blue Hope Savage is younger than this group, born Hand. Baker uses many of AG’s entries as springboards around 1938. She is presented as being intelligent, to energize her account. Interestingly, Savage’s name good-looking, inquisitive, and dissatisfied with her barely surfaces in Indian Journals. Clearly, Baker surroundings – wherever she is. She travels the world was more attracted to the character of Hope Savage searching for that unnamable something, something than Ginsberg was. she can’t find in the United States or wherever she happens to be. She must move on. Corso says he’s in No doubt, Hope Savage was an unusual person love with her – she helps him out a lot with material and I wanted to hear more about her, see a number things (via money she gets from her family) – yet, of photographs, but I felt I was being teased by Corso marries someone else. Hope doesn’t have Baker. Baker presents this multileveled personality, romantic feelings for Corso. She does encounter but why? Just to add mystery? Baker really couldn’t Ginberg in briefly in India. go anywhere with Savage since so little is known about her. Perhaps it was just to show there was an Deborah Baker took dead aim to weave Hope enigmatic female out there who had her own quest Savage into this story. I wager the majority of Beat and was wrapped in the Beat shroud. aficionados have never heard of her. She’s not known

Beatdom 35 I saw a little girl get bit by a dog this afternoon She might not even remember why she’d never in Central Park. I watched her from a stone bench pet a dog again. beside the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner) crowd The Esquina Caliente finally cheered her up of men arguing baseball just down the street from enough that she smiled and jammed her head against the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goya- her mom’s shoulder. The men went back to baseball nightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand. and the mom carried her child home. She went off like a car alarm but it was the way she I closed up my notebook and followed the little screamed that made the old men give up baseball and rush over to console her. In 30 years it is girl and mom to Calle Neptuno where they caught the solitary bonafide miracle I have witnessed. a cab and I decided to walk over to the mother of a You’ll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot friend who sells guarapo (sugarcane juice) out of Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling her garage near the Malecón. from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing I wondered if maybe that girl would pet a dog his way down onto their heads—there wouldn’t again. be a flinch— “We’re talking béisbol here coño.” I wondered why some of us are flexible on that point where others are hardened against something Sweet bait on fearful hooks. That girl I mean. Or for keeps. what was at stake. Boy the face she made. It was a strange day. She’d never touch a dog again. I’d gone to the park after boxing with some of You’ll find a clock in a Vegas casino long before the national team kids in their run down gym in you find a veterinarian in Havana. old Havana. The gym at Kid Chocolate was being

36 Beatdom used for a weight lifting competition.

The gym, Rafael Trejo, is located near a famous neighborhood called San Isidro. The biggest funeral in Cuban history was for a resident of this neighborhood, Alberto Yarini Ponce de León, who was a politician a street corner and noticed a sweaty, filthy, beaten up but more famously a pimp. Women from all over old man crawling on the ground like a crab across Havana would converge on the path he took each the intersection. All he had on was a loincloth. Out morning to get his coffee at the Cafe El Louvre. He of perhaps 400 people walking on the sidewalk, and seduced the most beautiful woman in Cuba and her the 15 taxis, 10 bicycle taxis, forty cars on the road, I lover, a French gigolo named Luis Lotot, challenged had the only pair of eyes staring. I appeared to be the the Cuban for her love and ended up murdering him only person unaccepting and remotely concerned of in revenge. this man’s role in the universe. Keep in mind there I’d started a laughing fit at the gym that day because aren’t all that many traffic lights or stop signs in I’d mentioned I wanted to meet Felix Savon, the Havana and yet I’ve never ridden a local taxi going three time Olympic Heavyweight gold medalist. under 45 miles an hour through a street as busy as Most the coaches at Trejo are either Olympic gold Times Square. In New York they have arguments medalists themselves or have coached Olympic with their horns, in Havana they have opera. As gold medalists either on the national team or the he progressed to the center of the intersection, still Olympic team. Everybody knows everybody in in the middle of the street with the cars patiently Havana anyway. I wasn’t aware that a not-too- waiting for him to pass, I noticed there was a rope closely-guarded state secret was that Felix Savon attached to his ankle tied to something that remained was a homosexual. off stage behind a lamppost. I reached into my breast pocket and took out a cigarette waiting with “Sure you can meet him! We’ve already talked to him my match until I saw what in the baker’s fuck he about you. He’d like to meet you in the Presidential was dragging. Then I saw the edge of the rock and suite at the Nacional this evening. He’ll bring his with some more heaving and Sisyphean anguish, medals to show you but he won’t wear them around the full bulk of its size: a truck’s tire. his neck.” I lit that cigarette and zigzagged a few streets till The Cubans have a saying you’re reminded of on I got to that garage where my friend Lesvanne was a daily basis, reinforced with good and bad material: jamming sugar cane into a grinder while his mother “Life is a joke to be taken very seriously.” dumped a pail of guarapo into carafes full of ice While I was grinning to myself about this, I got to and poured one of those into the cups of waiting

Beatdom 37 construction workers on their break. After the first you taking your shoes off before entering into their sip you have to wipe the chilled foam off your lips. lives. Self-consciousness isn’t really part of the Lesvanne had just come back from Miami. equation. Lesvanne has a little more fun with it. He Lesvanne used to sleep with American tourists taunts you with his enjoyment. for gifts provided they weren’t from California. He “How was Miami?” was a man of principle. “Let’s walk. I’ll show you the pictures.” The first time I met him he showed me his worn “First I have a question.” digital camera. He showed me a few photos of his “Dime.” common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the “Two questions.” American tourist female “friends” he’d made. “Dime.” I’d asked him if his American “friends” presented “Felix Savon?” any kind of problem with his “wife” and he asked He smiled. “What about him?” why it should? “Maricon?” “Obviously. Proximo pregunda (Next question).” “On my way over here there was a guy in the middle of the street dragging a fucking boulder. Nobody was evening looking at him.” Big smile. “Why was he doing this?” “Religious thing. For 3 days he drags the stone across Havana.” “Down the middle of the street?” “Yes.” “3 days?” “What can you say? Colorful people in my city. Let’s go.” We walked from Old Havana into Centro Habana.

From Centro Habana past the University into Vedado. “Would you like to see a video of my wife?” he He showed me photos from his visit to Miami. asked. While he tried to show me the pictures he was I said sure. stopped in the street dozens of times. People from All I could make out was underwater blurs of their homes invited us for coffee. Kids egged him color undulating in curious ways. on to play pelota. Store keepers shook his hands. “What am I looking at here?” Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about “That’s her gallbladder. Isn’t she beautiful?” his mother. He kept embracing people over and Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried why he would film his wife on the operating table to show me a photograph people came over to look having her gallbladder removed. and ask questions about his trip. “Because I love all of her, man. Inside and out. I Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of all the want to know all of her.” stuff Lesvanne saw in Miami that he was determined Lesvanne also looks and dresses a helluva lot like to own once he moved to America and got busy Sinbad which makes his principles and wisdom making a success of himself: hummers, houses, especially surreal to contend with. pools, jewelry, women, bars, boats. Lesvanne had Emotionally, I’ve never met a Cuban who required one favorite outfit he wore nearly every day that he

38 Beatdom washed every night. It was blindingly bright. “Okay, so you’re loaded but maybe you’re also I didn’t say anything until he’d finished showing afraid of losing everything all the time. Your afraid all the pictures. your wife is gonna take you for half. You have to I’d lost count of how many people he’d kissed live in a gated community because you’re afraid of and hugged hello on our walk. It threw me because everyone. You have no sense of community or even after breaking up a couple times with long term give a fuck about your neighbor. Your kids don’t relationships I went months before I realized that respect you and just want money to buy shit to I was having no human physical contact. How did distract themselves from being bored all the time. that happen? All the old people you know are in old folks homes We found a bench in a quiet park and I noticed a because nobody wants to deal with them. You can’t statue of John Lennon on another bench down the be friends with any kids because everyone will think path from us. you’re a pedophile. You can’t can’t hug any guys because they’re afraid you’re gay orthey’re gay “Castro put that statue here because he banned the or everyone is gay. You can’t really touch anybody Beatles in Cuba. He was embarrassed about it later without second guessing it.” so he put this here to apologize.” “If I couldn’t touch anyone I’d die, man. I’d die. “So you want all this shit once you’re settled in This country is a fucking cage. Cuba is a zoo.” Miami?” I asked him. “Of course I do. I’ve never had anything here. I’d Brin Friesen is the author of Sic, published in 2009 like to work for these things.” by And/Or Press. You can read his short stories at “Castro should have you fucking shot.” www.thenervousbreakdown.com “It’s true.” “Okay. You get all that shit—hummer, house, pool, hot wife, jewelry, yacht. That whole photo album of other people’s stuff becomes your stuff. You’re Photos: Header: Brian Snelson; Sub-header: loaded. Then you’re happier than here?” Agencia Brasil; Opposite: Brin Friesen; Below: “Why not?” Gildemax

Beatdom 39 Lest We Forget -In Memoriam of HST- by Steven O’Sullivan

It might behoove us all to take one ordinary, grey Impulse suitcase: check. Samsonite suitcase, stuff it full, clamp the fucker shut, climb into our little aluminum shitboxes and barrel Of course, if you’re not the loneliest of bastards (or down the pavement towards unknown lands. simply, an idealist), then surely you’ll have yourself a traveling companion of some sort. Hop onto I-10 West out of Houston and don’t look back. Preferably at night, around 12:30, when you Thus, let me introduce, coming along on our binge, can go screaming off into the blackness with enough the Good Dr.: Mr. Hunter Thompson. neighbors still up to hear you go and turn to their wives in bed watching Cheers re-runs and wonder aloud just If Hunter’s along for the ride we’re going to have to what the hell kind of banshee moved in next door. make a few last minute changes.

The skyline’ll be burning bright and you watch it Quick now, dawn and debauchery wait for no man! fade in the rear view. That slick silhouette will always guide you back home. First and foremost, we’re going to go trade in the aluminum shitbox for some real driving power: A How to pack a last second suitcase: pearlescent white Pontiac ballbuster. Gritty American muscle and a bottle of Jack Daniels coming out the 1) No more than one extra pair of pants from the exhaust. Heave, ho! ones currently on your body. 2) A thoroughly random assortment of shirts You can barrel down I-10 in one of those mothers (preferably with lots of buttons to be worn loosely and lay waste behind you. This ain’t dustin’ crops, and with abandon) so as to appear in public with just boy. You’re up with the big dogs now. the right touch of mismatched eccentricity to keep the hounds off you. Hotel lobbies are the gauntlet of the Additionally, while the ink is drying on the ballbuster, hospitality industry. Hunter’ll be loading the trunk with two double-barrel 3) People always talk about taking cameras on shotguns and a bag of golf clubs. With plenty of shells trips. Personally, I don’t know what the fuck to do and balls to boot. with them. Take pictures? 4) Toothbrush. For scraping the death off your Soon as the ink’s dry we slide in and peel out of the tongue in the morning. dealership, nicking the curb on our way out. I’m no 5) A coat or jacket of some kind. Never forget pock-marked Englishman, but even I could give you that wherever you go and wherever you are, it’s cold a drawing of the madness soon to ensue. out there. 6) A formidable roll of cash. Destination: Ace Hotel, Palm Springs. 7) DO NOT take all the dog-eared copies of books by your favorite authors (i.e. ones discussed in We trade shifts and bitch the whole way arguing about this magazine). Leave that shit at home. We’re getting who’s to buy the first round of drinks at the hotel, out, remember? but we manage to pick up enough steam on the home 8) Notebook or typewriter. Laptops cause stretch to pull into Palm Springs with plenty of sun on problems but if push comes to shove. . . tomato, our backs. tomahto. Rules 9&10 are only of so-so importance and are As we pull up in front of the Ace, Hunter clambers purely for impulsive situations and involve a small out readjusting his green dealer’s visor and clutching bottle of sambuca, a bag of coffee beans, and a dozen his leather carry-all to his chest, cigarette hanging out plastic straws. of his mouth. I toss the keys to an unassuming dwarf (valet?) and hope for the best.

40 Beatdom Inside, the lobby’s almost completely empty. We’re definitely not in at peak season and it’s mid-week on Hunter takes off his windbreaker and I kick my top of that. I should have known by the dwarf that shoes (no socks) off. I flip the key card around in my times were slim. Surely we’re dead in the water. hand and Hunter stares at the young beauties walking by. The ice is melting in our glasses as the sunlight But look we’re not here to re-live the goddamn begins to fade. We haven’t even seen the room yet. Kentucky Derby. XXX Shit, what are we here for? The author would like to note that, while this piece is Where’s the bar? primarily for entertainment purposes, it is not without its underlying merits. After acquiring, via a couple messy John Hancock’s, some gold-plated Willy Wonka pass key, we make for The Ace Hotel Palm Springs is a real hotel. Ace the Amigo Room. The Ace Hotel Palm Springs is in Hotel is a boutique chain founded in Seattle by Alex a mid-century modern building that housed a Howard Calderwood right before the turn of the century. The Johnson back in the 50s, and the Amigo Room was hotels cater to a younger, bohemian crowd for a retro- the name of the bar at that time as well. Some things campy feel. Now, more than ten years later, there are never change. For the best. chains in Portland, Palm Springs, and New York as well as the original Seattle location. The chain is The bar is about as crowded as the lobby and we notable for its highly affordable rates and flexible take a few seats near the end as inconspicuously as we rooming options as well as more aesthetic touches can. But what with a fucking green visor and all... such as the vinyl record players found in most rooms.

The bartender is young, but classy. Probably hipper Essentially, if you’re in the mood for an old school, than I’ll ever be, but he knows his stuff I’m sure. A classy kind of hotel to hide out in and craft your latest down jive motherfucker. travelogue masterpiece (ala Fear and Loathing), consider giving the guys at Ace a shot. Then send the I order two Singapore Slings with beer and mescal finished manuscript to the editors here atBeatdom . chasers. The slings are sweet and go down fast along with the mescal. We nurse the beers and order some Furthermore, this article exists because we at Anniversario on the rocks. A good rum like that will Beatdom do not want our readers to think that we last you a while. Venezuelan women, however, are have neglected Thompson’s important influence on another matter. travel and travel writing in any way. Thompson’s braggadaccio and guts n vitriol approach to life on Hunter gets into an argument with the bartender the road is inspiring and refreshing. Particularly over smoking inside, but eventually I convince him when it occurs in the nicest Vegas hotel. to retreat poolside with me as smoking is allowed out there, as well as drinking. Most references in this piece, from the drinks ordered at the bar to the white Pontiac ballbuster, are specific You don’t just go ordering a madman like Hunter details drawn from different articles Thompson to please, very kindly put out his cigarette. Oh well, composed over the years. One such goldmine would be not the bartender’s fault. Hunter’s been dead for five “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” years now. And finally, as a nod to the recent passing of Hunter’s We’re at a table under a bright green umbrella 5th Death Anniversary, the mention of shotguns and poolside. The pool, like the rest of the hotel and golf clubs is a nod to Thompson’s final article for ESPN grounds, is a step back into a retro era. It even seems titled “ShotGun Golf With Bill Murray.” Available to like the blonde bombshells are skimped out not in read online, the article and sport described therein the latest runway fashions, but in Rita Hayworth’s are classic Thompson: hazy-eyed, utterly mad, but beachwear. Either way, a 20 year old girl getting a sun dead serious between the eyes. tan is a 20 year old girl getting a sun tan regardless of the attire. Mahalo.

Beatdom 41 42 Beatdom Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain

Where to begin? That always seems to be the hardest part. I shall let my mind travel across my travels and begin where it chooses to rest. Past my childhood fantasies of Huckleberry Finning it down the Mississippi on a raft with Tom Sawyer. Beyond hitch-hiking On The Road to California and the rising peaks of Big Sur. Over the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, over flowing with Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I stare Through The Looking Glass at myself jotting down notes in my Rum Diary, on the shores of Treasure Island, as I watch The Old Man And The Sea. Perhaps the beginning is 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea or on an Animal Farm I visited back in 1984. The beginning is always a Catch 22.

Traveling seems to have been the one thing I wanted to do since birth. “Anywhere but here” has been my life motto. Some of my travels were spur of the moment, like the time I rode my bicycle twenty miles to my grandparents house to avoid my mother’s wrath for flunking English at nine years old, or fifteen years later when I found myself hastily packing up a backpack full of dirty clothes in order to flee the state, before I heard the splintering screams of my front door’s death song as Johnny Law came storm trooping through it. No matter what the circumstance the road is always whispering sweet nothings in my ears. Telling me lies about greener pastures and streets paved in gold.

My only explanation is there must be a mighty river of Gypsy blood coursing through my veins. My eyes have witnessed 33 frosts, thaws, and falls across the entire United States. Along with the inside of five different states cell walls along the way. Regrets, I have none. The memories of my past are tattooed on my soul, friendly reminders of my twisted journey down life’s path

Many of these memories are hazy as I saw them through the bottom of a bottle, from the end of a pipe, cross-eyed down a rolled up, bloody hundred dollar bill, or blasted into my veins 40 units at a time with a soul killing cannon. So, what I remember of them may not be the way others remember them. But some form of the truth is always there. As I’ve said before, truth is all in the eyes of the beholder. Take my hand and tango into the past with me… Let’s watch the world pass us by from the windows of planes, trains, automobiles, and the fart- filled cushions of the hound.

Beatdom 43 Some days I look back at my travels, and wonder how Within minutes of my offering I’m at the airport lugging I’m still here in one piece. Why am I not listening to the my overstuffed suitcase into the bowels of the beast. sounds of earthworm tails slithering across my coffin’s Somehow I’ve lost one of the wheels. I’m stumbling nails? Why haven’t I been locked away in a cage or the through the madhouse dragging the lopsided beast thorozine hotel for the rest of my days? Many a person behind me, like some sort of wounded elephant. Every close to me ponders these same questions. Perhaps, it just three steps or so the broken side of my case catches the wasn’t in the cards for me. Fate is a fickle beast. rug. The case twists violently behind me. I nearly fall several times wrestling with this sack of booze, sex, March 18th marks the anniversary of the day I was spit and God knows what soaked clothing. I feel a thousand out of my mother into this cruel world, sopping wet, glaring eyes burning through me. When I arrive at the covered in blood and guts, kicking and screaming. One ticket desk I find a sea of angry souls corralled into the year this day brought a special present: a surprise spur gates of commuter hell. “Damn you! Damn you! Damn of the moment trip to Las Vegas. I refuse to write about you!” I silently scream inside of my aching head. Vegas. Someone else has already written of the seething madness that is Vegas. It is his, and his alone. Any tale I I take my place at the end of this wretched line, behind could write would only be viewed as some dime-a-line an octogenarian couple, fresh off of a gambling-away- hack’s attempt to duplicate it. Instead, I’ll write about my their-life-savings-to-the-sugary-clean-sounds-of-that- flight home from Vegas. sweet-Mormon-boy-Donny-Osmond bender, and a group of Korean tourists, speaking angrily at the tops of *** their voices. Moments pass like eons. I have small talk with the elderly couple. They are dragging bags large as 5:30 AM. The alarm clock on my nightstand is a freight buffalo behind them. “You bastards are never going to let train running through my spinning head. My tongue is this go smoothly are you!?” My angry inner voice shouts coated with the taste of stale Scotch. I’m wondering where to the Gods. I smile, and offer my elderly comrades help the hobo - who obviously took a shit in my mouth - has with their luggage. Thirty-eight minutes later I’m at the gone to. I stagger to the bathroom to scrub this foulness ticket agent. from my mouth. My bladder is swollen. I opt to relieve the pressure from it first. I look down into the toilet and A small plump woman - with the smiling eyes of a see a spunk filled condom swirling around in the bowl. A person ready to lose all control, then happily stab my steady blast of deep yellow, toxin filled urine causes it to eyes from their sockets with the ball point pen she keeps almost dance around in the water. I shake the last sticky behind her ear, if I so much as think of making her day any drops of semen-laced urine from my prick, and then flush harder - greets me. The usual rigmarole is played out and this final reminder of the call girl with the tattooed Mons- she asks me for my ID. I remove my wallet, and pull my pubis down into the sewers. Good riddance. ID out. I suddenly notice the small Mylar bag containing the leftover five hits of the fluff I had, is stuck to the back of it. “FUCK!” is the only word blasting through my What had I been thinking? Oh, yes-- all my companions skull at maximum decibels. I grasp my ID between my had left on a trip to California earlier in the week. I had thumb and middle finger. Then in one smooth motion, I been left to fend for myself, drunk and alone, with a head slide the bag into the palm of my hand, like Chris Angel full of speed. I begin cringing at the thought of having performing street magic on the strip, and pray my hands my cock flossed with a dry Q-tip by some intern with a are quicker than those smiling eyes. thick Middle Eastern accent, in some clinic filled with the shamed faces of the burnt. Perhaps I’d take a quick She hands me the ticket. I eagerly smile and walk shower to wash the filth of Sin City off of me before briskly away towards the gates as she suspiciously eye shoving my belongings into my suitcase and calling a fucks my broken case of unmentionables. Sirens of cab. I had enough time to spare. paranoia are screaming through my head like nuclear winter is upon me. Twenty minutes later I’m in the back of a cab heading towards the airport. My brain is throbbing against the Had she seen it? “Jesus, are you there?” No! Now is not roof of my skull. I begin cursing the Gods of shit- lord- the time to ask for help. Not that I’m deeply religious, fuck- luck for allowing me access to the previous night’s but I find only talking to God when you’re in desperate carnival of sex, drugs, and debauchery. “Just get me on need of help is just wrong. Old smiley eyes had probably this flight, with no delays, I promise, I’ll never ever do already called the Gestapo on me. I feel the Mylar bag this again.” I offer this as penance to the Gods as I cross begin to float in the ocean of clammy sweat filling my my fingers behind my back. palm. I spy a row of one armed bandits trying to lure fish into their nets to squeeze any remaining pennies, or winnings from their pockets. I dart down the aisle and sit

44 Beatdom at a machine next to some land-whale, hoping her mass would somehow shield me from the eye in the sky. There “ Them I-talians are a strange bunch.” was only one thing to do: eat the fluff. I muster up an Academy Award-worthy fake cough, cover my mouth “Yeah, a bunch of grape stomping savages if you ask with my snack-filled palm and suck the bag into my me.” mouth. This causes Tex to erupt with a thundering laugh from Ha! Now there was no evidence. I couldn’t have risked deep in his beer barrel. taking any chances trying to dispose of it in any other way. I made my way to the security screening line. I “Shit boy, I like your style. Name’s Billy Joe Butler, observe the procession of shoe-less, belt-less wonders, but you can call me Tex, everybody calls me Tex.” stuffing their pocket contents and carry-ons into plastic tubs before shoving them into the open jaws of the How’d I guess? X-Ray machine. My eyes find amusement in the sneering grimaces of seasoned air travelers every time some rookie “ Pleased to meet you, my name’s Jones.” hasn’t removed all the metals from their pockets, or was beyond the TSA’s liquid limit. These greenhorns only “Well Jonesy, What brings you to viva Laaas Vegas? slow down the progress of the salty air dogs to the gates, Broads, booze, gamblin?” and the silent hatred of these kindergarteners is evident in their snarling eyes. Let the mind fucking begin.

I’m three people back from the mouth of the beast when “Well I’m really not supposed to say, but you seem like the paranoia really starts seizing me in its razor sharp a decent American, I think I can trust you.” claws. My thoughts race to visions of a gang of TSA goons tackling me, and dragging me off to some interrogation “Sure as shit you can trust me.” room away from the eyes of decent Americans, where then a large man would force an unloving gloved hand “Well I work for the NSA.” into my terrified rectum, and probe me without even the common decency of a reach around, while his partner, “Really, dealing with terrorists and them sand the grandson of a Nazi war criminal who escaped to the niggers?” States hooks a car battery up to my testicles in order to force confessions about anything they want out of me. “Yes sir. You see we had intelligence that one of bin I try to go to my happy place, as I walk into the beast’s Laden’s head honchos was here in Vegas trying to buy up mouth. white women for his harem.”

I manage to look as calm as a duck on the water as I “You gotta be shitting me! Them A-rabs is in Vegas stroll through and quickly snatch up the contents of my buying up white women?” tub. Five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight steps, nine steps, and finally ten steps away the fear washes off me. I “They sure are.” don’t dare to look back; this would only arouse suspicion. I then make my way quicker than it takes for two fleas “Well, did ya catch em?” to fuck into an airport bar, to bask in my victory, and drown the lingering remnants of paranoia in the bottom “Bet your ass I did Tex! Nobody gets away from of a glass of the sweet brown nectar of the Gods. Jones.”

I take an empty seat at the bar between a beer barrel “Well what happened?” bellied Texan wearing a world champion sized gold belt buckle, and a pencil pusher, who’s eagerly crack berry- “He was holed up in the Presidential suite over at the ing his time away. I order my glass of Johnny Walker on Bellagio.” the rocks with three olives. This arises curiosity in Tex. “ Shit, I was at the Bellagio all week!” “Well shit fire son’a bitch boy, I say, I aint neva seen a man put olives in his scotch before.” “Well, you should thank your lucky stars they have sound proof suites, he made some awful noise.” “ No? It’s an old Italian tradition.” “What do ya mean.” It’s not, I just love mind fucking people when I travel.

Beatdom 45 “Well, Tex I needed to get some information out of acid has me wrapped tightly in its tentacles. The ostrich him.” is now pushing a cart down the aisle towards me. I’m frozen in fear, wondering if the economy is really that “How’d you do that? Chinese water torture?” bad, that the airlines have actually took to training large flightless birds to work as stewardesses. Soon the ostrich “No, we don’t use that any more, but you’d be surprised is upon me, squawking about what I’d like to drink. My the information you can get out of man when you got his mind scrambles for an answer and before I can even think nuts hooked up to a car battery, and a white hot pair of I blurt out “Burger Buns?” vice grips clamping down on his asshole.” The ostrich snaps her head back and the Trekie and the “Shit, I bet boy! You’re a goddamn American hero house wife’s eyes snap to me. Jonsey! Bartender, get Jonsey another drink on me!” “Excuse me sir, what was that?” “ Now Tex, I trusted you as a God fearing American with this information. If this were to get out we’d both be You fool what the hell are you thinking? Surely she’ll getting worse than the vice grip treatment.” have the Sky Marshalls on you in no time!” My finger nail grip on reality screams, trying to shake me back into “Don’t worry, Jonsey I won’t say a word.” the reality of the situation.

“You’re a good man Tex.” “A cola and some rum.”

With this I sucked down my drink and headed to the The ostrich cocks her head, smiles and gets me my gate, leaving old Tex smiling, knowing people like me drink. That was a close one. I slam the drink down in a were keeping this great country’s white women safe from single gulp. I then decide that looking out the window hostile foreigners. will probably be my best bet to avoid any eye contact or conversation. I approach the gate just in time to hear my flight will be boarding shortly. I send my praises to the Gods of I’ve stared up at the clouds from the Earth on LSD shit-lord-fuck-luck for getting me here with no delays. countless times, but never had I stared from 25,000 feet I take my place in the line of ants entering the mouth down through the clouds at the Earth in this state of of the mound. I’m starting to feel my cheeks pull back mind. My breath was taken from my lungs as I looked into a Cheshire sneer, my joints are starting to feel a down upon God’s brush strokes. Perfect blends of green strange electric tingle, the acid is beginning to creep up and blue. Deep canyons and crevices from his fingertips on me. I’m greeted at the gates of the sky vessel by a tall molding her form. From here I could see the Earth truly sky waitress who resembles an ostrich. I mosey down is a living being. I could make out her veins sucking the the aisle and find my seat in row twelve, seat A. It’s a life giving water from the soil in deep darkening spider window seat, thank you Jesus! I clamber into my seat and webs across the landscape. Rivers cutting through her in sit back. I watch the line of boarding passengers slither winding wild paths. I watch the soil rise and breath. I through the aisle towards me. I might as well be on a was captivated. Never in all my years have I seen such game show, the grand prize: whoever will be my travel beauty. I now knew there was a God. From here I could companion. “Come on big tittied blondey, big titties, see why he loved her so much. It is beyond any words. I big titties, no fatties, no fatties, big titties, big titties, no spent the rest of the flight with my face pinned inside of fatties and stop!” I get neither. A slim man who looks that window. like he just left a Star Trek convention takes the middle seat, and a middle-aged house wife rests her wide denim Hours passed like seconds and soon I heard the covered ass in the aisle. captain’s voice snapping me back to reality. We were about to begin our descent into Dayton. I watched the Soon the ostrich and a very effeminate sandy brown earth slowly grow below me and come into focus. Tom haired gentleman named Chip are giving us our bend- Petty was right: coming down is the hardest thing. The over-and-kiss-your-ass-good-bye-in-case-of-an- plane touched down smoothly and soon the ants were emergency speech. Then I hear the rumbling scream of again filing out of the shuttle and into the world. I walked 50,000 horses, as the sky chariot blasts down the runway off that plane forever changed and humbled by my God’s and into the sky. My head snaps back into my seat and I eye view of the world… watch as the earth becomes an alien planet beneath us as we ascend into the heavens.

By the time we’ve reached our cruising altitude the

46 Beatdom Beatdom 47 48 Beatdom Winter in the Eastern Bloc, it’s about 9pm, the night a list on it, a list of destinations. As I scanned my sky outside is blacker than hell. We are just about to eye down the paper I saw the words ‘Cluj-Napoca, cross the border by train between Hungary and the Romania, (Transylvania)’. My mind recoiled at the north of Romania; this is the frontier land before we thought that Transylvania was even a real place. I reach Transylvania. thought it was from the archives of fiction. I had to The train slowly grinds to a halt and a couple of find out for myself. brutish looking Magyar border guards approach us Cut to the train station in Cluj-Napoca. We enter and bark the singular word “passport” in our faces. into what I can only surmise is the waiting room. It is We oblige and hand over our British documents thick with cigarette smoke and foreign language. We and the transaction passes without further incident. walk through instinctually and emerge into the street. An American Jew named Brian who had become a A gaggle of taxi drivers sharing stories raucously travelling companion of ours is not so lucky; he is met gesticulate and laugh. We stand blinking. 30 seconds with deep suspicion. Apparently the Hungarians don’t later we hear the crack of a whip and some hollering like the Yanks very much, something about too many and through the smog from right to left pass a horse Hungarian immigrants arriving in the United States. and cart carrying around seven passengers being They look him up and down with a vague sense of pursued by a pack of rabid looking dogs. I turn to ritualistic tradition and with unnecessary theatrics my travelling partner, hand him back his passport. “It looks like the dark The train begins to crawl into the darkness once ages.” He nods grimly. again. An hour later my head is out the window and Within two minutes I am dragging on a cigarette, watching the bluish of arriving we are gray smoke swirl away into the night-lands as we in a taxi speeding pass them. Something feels different, something towards an unknown in the air. Through the murk of the landscape I get neighbourhood with the sense that something is towering over us. As the an address written on tobacco exits my system and my airways clear up a a match box. We also little, it suddenly occurs to me what the difference is have a phone number. - it’s the atmosphere, the air is mountainous; we are The driver tells us in in the Carpathians. I know from what little I’d read broken English that the back in Scotland that our destination is somewhere address doesn’t exist. in the middle of three vast ranges which are within He proves himself to these mountains. Some time later I fall asleep. Can’t be a really nice guy by remember what I dreamt. phoning our ‘contact’ Suddenly I am jolted awake by my travelling on his mobile and not partner, “We’re here” he shouts. Sleepily, I respond, abandoning us until “Where?” “Cluj-Napoca!” I grab my backpack and he knows we are ready to be abandoned. Eventually my guitar case and jump onto the concrete of the we find the international student halls and we wave dimly lit platform. Cold air smacks me in the face like goodbye to our driver. We walk through the door and a son of a bitch. are met once again by an authoritative looking man You know now how we arrived, for clarity’s sake demanding our passports. He has been expecting us I will go back in the narrative and explain why we evidently but just wants to make sure we are who we were there in the first place. The two of us were art say we are. Once he is satisfied we are shown to our students at the time and in our 3rd year of study we rooms, or rather room. The distance between our beds were given the opportunity to escape on what is was no more that a metre. We were going to get to known as an Erasmus Scholarship. In the office the know each other pretty well. ‘coordinator’ handed me a slip of paper which had I have not yet told you about my travelling buddy

Beatdom 49 and new roommate. His name is Kern, which comes from the Scottish Gaelic and means ‘The Dark One.’ He was a very jovial character, although he was always confused. His mind had difficulties in processing, names, dates, language and places which at first I found rather in the middle of nowhere and sat down at the village’s irritating. I did not understand. He is to this day the only bar/shop. It soon became clear that the owner single most indecisive person I have ever known, but also had a business of driving people up into the this was part of his charm. I will say one thing, he mountains. He closed up his shop up and we filled up was fucking brilliant at poker because he had no idea the two minibuses. himself that he was bluffing. You could never tell. We moved through the countryside and started Over the next week or so all of the students had climbing up through the hills. The hills became pretty much arrived. There were 2 Spaniards, 4 Poles, mountains and the road became ice. It was as if the a Slovenian, 2 Lithuanians, a Hungarian, a German road itself became a frozen river. The vehicle began guy, a Mexican, 2 French, a Belgian girl, 2 Czechs, a Colombian, a Serbian and of course us 2 Scots. We were quite a mixed bag. Our first venture out of the city as a group was quite extraordinary. I will tell you the tale. A few Romanians that we became acquainted with invited us to join them on a trip to a place known as ‘Retezat.’ To this day I still have no idea where it is. All I know is that we got there by two trains and one minibus. Around 20 of us piled into the train compartment and we sped away. The Romanians successfully managed to bribe both ticket collectors on both trains and the whole two hour journey came to about $5. We eventually alighted, after changing once, at some tiny village

50 Beatdom to slide around and the passengers became visibly nervous. The bus that I was in was mainly full of boys, the other contained the girls. We reached a bridge that spanned a terrifying chasm. It was made of concrete and looked ridiculously flimsy. As the minibus crawled across we received a call, the bus behind was having severe issues with traction; it couldn’t go on. We were instructed to get out and walk from here on; the girls were getting our bus. I walked very cautiously, placing one foot softly in front of the other. I felt like I was walking a tightrope, a ten foot wide tightrope made of concrete. The 1 foot high railing either side was twisted and broken in places and I was shitting myself. When we made it to the other side we discovered a row of graves, some even bearing the same second name. The driver with the girls pulled up, smiled and made a gesture which confirmed my suspicions. These poor bastards had plummeted the 400 feet or so to their deaths, probably in very similar weather. We walked up and up for what seemed like miles until the bus came back down to retrieve us. We arrived at the first of three lodges and were treated with a thoroughly underwhelming meal of mashed potatoes, sauerkraut and tinned hot dogs. There was no road after this, only a path leading up through the eerie looking pine forests. We arrived at the second of the lodges, the one at which we would be staying. They were mountain cabins made of logs and had no electricity or running water. The wood for the stove was frozen solid and it took great effort to get warm. The temperature outside was probably about -3. After some snacking and chat we all settled down for the night double- bunking for warmth. I thought I heard the howling were some huge boulders that were presumably swept of wolves somewhere up the valley but dismissed it down by ancient ice which I climbed up onto. From as paranoia. here I could look down the valley and past miles and By morning spirits had hit rock bottom, the Spaniards miles of snow and dark pine forest. Mist was creeping had never before experienced snow and refused up the valley, soon to engulf us. I suddenly realised absolutely to get out of bed. We left them to their how silent this land was. There was not a sound to be misery and climbed up the valley. The snow became heard. I thought back and realised that I handy even thicker and at some points was close to a metre deep. seen a bird up here. There were no airplanes, we were On we went. far from any flight path, no telephone masts, nothing. It rd We reached the 3 lodge at around 10 in the morning was the most profound silence I had ever experienced just as the sun was rising. This was the timberline. We and it gave me an almost inexplicable feeling. I don’t were at about 1200m. The sun cast an orange glow as think there is a word for it. I lit up a cigarette and it rose over the vast mountain cliffs to our left which inhaled the smoke mixed with mountain’s air. I’ll be blazed on our right. After a real struggle we reached searching for that silence for the rest of my life. the 2000m sign-post which was on the edge of a frozen lake, completely covered in snow and invisible The artwork featured here was all created in to those who didn’t know of its existence. Romania, by Omar Zingaro Bhatia. Some of the group went on to see a glacier which was Learn more about the artist at his blog: www. further up but I remained where I was, alone. There zingaromar.blogspot.com

Beatdom 51 52 Beatdom The Crooked Path Towards Salvation Words and photos by Brian Eckert

I pull into the parking lot of the Motel 6 at 3 am. I’d imagined I’ve been driving for 18 hours straight, most of them for myself was supplemented by heavy doses of caffeine and THC. gone. The combination of fatigue, a waning buzz and hours In particular, spent in wistful rumination leave me in a strange one memory from my first reading stands out so emotional state. The best way to describe it is I feel clearly that I often suspect it’s embellished. I’d been as if I don’t exist. It’s like one of those out of body entranced by Kerouac from the opening page, but the experience scenes in a movie where the spirit floats following line served to stir something in particular above the bed and looks down with detachment at its inside of me: “What is the feeling when you’re driving earthly form. I see me sitting in my black sedan on a away from people, and they recede on the plain till you drab, cracked slab of concrete in Davenport, Iowa, in see their specks dispersing? –it’s the too huge world the center of a vast plain. vaulting us, and it’s good bye. But we lean forward to My view of the journey here is less clear. The nearly the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” 1200 miles I traveled from New Hampshire passed After reading this I set the book down on the bed in a string of flashing white lines and gradually next to me. The mid-afternoon sun was blaring flattening landscape that didn’t seem to have a through the bay window at my back. My journal lay definitive beginning or end. Images of the drive are on the bedside table with a pen stuck in the pages as burned into my head: a fine mist settling over the tops a marker. I lay back in bed with my eyes shut and my of the green hills of Pennsylvania, farmhouses and arms folded underneath my head. A feeling of calm huge, long irrigation machines, an abandoned factory washed over me. in some small, sad town whose name I’ve forgotten, I’ve often thought back on this episode, knowing it a child’s face in an adjacent vehicle whose piercing to be seminal in my life, but never completely sure gaze momentarily captivated me as I blazed past him why. With the passage of time I’m now able to discern on the highway. just what happened in that moment: I realized, for All I have of the immense distance I just covered are the first time, that I wanted to be an artist; nay, that a few random snapshots and even those don’t seem I was an artist and I needed to start acting like one. real. Nothing seems real. Any sense of purpose I had Pulling myself out of the hole I was in required living upon setting out is lost. The only thing I’m sure of is a spontaneous and creative life. A man who does not that this is Jack Kerouac’s fault. do what he was born to do is bound to toil in misery.

*** ***

I first read On The Road in August of 2005. Right “Sir? May I help you?” from the first paragraph, in which Kerouac states he The voice comes from behind the reception desk, was getting over, “…my awful feeling that everything produced by one of those blond, round, low-income was dead” and “…I’d always dreamed of going west, American women whose age is nearly impossible to seeing the country, always vaguely planning and determine. never specifically taking off,” he was speaking to me. “Sir, breakfast doesn’t’ start til’ 8 a.m. Like Kerouac, I won’t bother going into much detail I’ve been standing in the dining area, idly handling about what led to my particular depression except that a miniature box of cereal. I haven’t spoken in nearly it was the perfect storm of being rejected from the law a day and when I reply, “Yes, of course,” it sounds schools I’d applied to, dumped by my girlfriend, laid like I’m shouting at her. I see fear in her eyes, the off from work and having to move back in with my perception of danger at this swarthy out-of-stater parents. Within the span of a few weeks the entire life gripping Frosted Flakes, yelling at her from across

Beatdom 53 the lobby. was a wasted movement. I was stuck in the middle of I set the processed, enriched corn product down and nowhere spinning my wheels. I began experimenting stride cautiously to the desk. The clerk hides behind with drugs and alcohol in the 10th grade. While not one of those tight-lipped smiles that only narrowly satisfying on any sustained, deep level, getting high masks discomfort. and wasted temporarily alleviated my boredom with “I need a room…one suitable for sleeping.” I try to life. They met, in a crude way, my desire for a different discern if I’m still yelling. perspective. She smiles awkwardly. “Is it just you tonight, sir?” I entered university hoping that I would find my Sensing that my New England accent is frightening niche as my studies became more focused. Instead, her, I merely nod. I got more off track with each successive semester. I “Sir, it’s $39.99 per night.” knew that the end game of my collective four years I grunt, reach for my wallet and remember it’s in the was a career. I was racking up tens of thousands of car. I point to the parking lot and turn out my pockets, dollars of debt for a piece of paper that said I was hoping she’ll understand. As I step outside I take qualified to do this or that. The unspoken mandate was inventory of the out-of-state plates. On the interstate that I get a job right away to pay back my loans. It was cars pass east and west, motoring to some destination, essentially a sophisticated form of debt-bondage. setting a course towards the satiation of some need, all The pressure was mounting to choose a direction. of us sharing Davenport at 3 a.m…never to know each All around me, people were getting more and more other, never to know the outcome of even a chance certain of what they wanted while I became less sure. meeting…all ghosts, floating across the phantasmal My reaction to having no vision of my own was to plains, acting on the perception that something must increasingly define myself in opposition to the goals be done to gain peace, that we’re somehow doing the of others and mainstream society. A man who knows right thing. himself only through what he is not is in fact nothing. This is how it was for me the first 24 years of life. I *** was a nothing man, taking stands against what I didn’t want or found egregious, but never knowing what I The major epiphanies of one’s life tend to feel like they actually desired for myself. happen all in one instant even though they are usually There was nobody who seemed to share my the end result of things that have been gathering, plight. Even among my friends who understood fecundating in the mind for days…weeks…months… me best there was a definite divide. All of them, in years… one way or another, were on a path to somewhere. I For as long as I can remember, I always felt was wallowing in indecision, a starving beast in the different. There is no simple or concise way to explain wilderness, feeling more alone and crazy with each this. The feeling manifested itself most noticeably at passing day. In an attempt to quell my growing angst the perception that everybody was taking life more I decided to just pick something and go with it. I got a seriously than I was. I found myself attracted to full-time job, a girlfriend and began preparing for the anything that was cracked or a bit off kilter. Only the law school entrance exam. strange was of any interest to me. I was vaguely aware that I wanted something else out of life but I had no *** idea what it was or how to get it. Like most kids I went along doing what I was The hotel room has the same crass, homogenous expected to. This mostly meant doing well in school. attempt at charm as the lobby – a bland sterility that Even when I was very young, though, I had no interest always struck me as uniquely American.It has likely in my studies. It dawned on me early on that being a been cleaned by another tick-like woman. The sheets good student merely required rearranging information have no doubt absorbed the semen of a traveling in a way that was pleasing to my teachers. This didn’t water-filtration salesman on his way to Wichita. I cause me to suffer in school. If anything, I became choose the bed with a slightly skewed angle of the a better student. I was a cold-blooded killer who television, thinking it’s less likely he wanked here. dispatched of assignments with a slightly disdainful It’s nearly 3:30. I’m on the brink of dead-tired and indifference. It was all a game and winning meant lucid- a point where it’s either sleep or smoke dope figuring out the rules and following them. The real and navigate the doldrums of near-dawn Iowan basic problem was that there was nothing I cared to win. cable. The latter strikes me as so depressing that By high school I had the feeling that everything I did slumber becomes the easy choice.

54 Beatdom As I drift off to sleep flashes of the kids song, in my life. He showed me a way out of my dilemma, “..merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream…” that salvation was possible. He was a New England float through my head, sung hauntingly by children boy, just like me, who had barreled headlong into the who don’t grasp the truth of what they’re saying, west, navigating by his own moral lodestar, creating who may not until, years later, they find themselves crazy, beautiful art in the process. I never wanted in the midst of an enormous field, potentially lying to be the next Jack Kerouac. What I was looking to in another man’s semen, knowing how they got there become was a truer version of myself. Dear ol’ Jack only theoretically. just pointed me in the right direction.

*** ***

When the future I’d banked on came crashing down I open my eyes to brilliant sunlight reflecting off of around me it felt like I had lost everything. In reality, ubiquitous whites, tans and beiges. I prop myself up the placebo plans I’d made had never been mine in on one elbow and as the hotel rooms comes into focus the first place. The things I’d decided to do were I recall the mad dash across a third of the country merely a reaction to being lost. Stripped of them, I which led me here. The neurosis of last night is gone. had a chance to start over. In its place is a feeling of calm determination that I I started to write every day in my journal, something am one step closer to something worth pursuing. I hadn’t done since high school. At first the words The scene is reminiscent of one from On The Road were cathartic, a way to release my inner turmoil. But when Sal awakens in an Iowa hotel and for a brief as I pressed forward with them I began to uncover spell doesn’t know who he is. The difference is that I, pieces of myself that had been so cracked and fleeting perhaps for the first time, have a sure sense of who I I was never able to pull them together. In particular, I am. The sun rising over the plains hearkens not just a revisited an idea of going out west that I’d entertained new day in the middle of America, but the dawn of my since beginning university. The move was vague, new life. To borrow Kerouac’s terminology, never has both in terms of geography and purpose, but that was “the East of my youth” felt further away or “the West the beauty of it. For sixteen years I had been pumped of my future” closer. I experience a fleeting encounter through the educational system where, generally, my with “IT.” It is a sacred taste, finally, of “something choices had been dictated to me. What I wanted was else.” to do something completely of my own volition. I shower, gather my things, dig in at the complimentary In that time I also made a point to catch up on all breakfast and get back on the interstate. Driving the books I’d long been meaning to read. They were across the plains I think of Sal and Dean searching mainly a distraction from myself; none of them for kicks. Surely they traveled this same highway at excited me in more than a superficial way. That is, some point, burning towards that “next crazy venture until I picked up On The Road. beneath the skies.” I find myself wondering more than Really, what I found in that book was sympathy. once “What would Jack do?” But more often, and Sal Paradise was going through what I was. more importantly, I think: “What am I going to do?” Kerouac’s prose expressed the angst of a young man wanting something out of life that wasn’t offered by conventional wisdom. His protagonist’s search for *** “IT” mirrored my long standing desire for “something else.” Brian J. Eckert is a native of New Hampshire. “The straight line will take you only to death,” says He attended The University of New Hampshire, Sal at one point in the book. In response to this ethos graduating in 2004 with a degree in political science. he and Dean Moriarty set off back and forth across Since then he’s lived in Denver, Seoul and Pretoria the country in search of “kicks” which are a series and traveled to many points in-between. A camera of movements and deflections. All the while “IT” and notebook are never far from his side. remains elusive and ill-defined, knowable only by He writes a blog at http://thebohemianexperiment. experience. Through all of their starts and stops Sal com. The Bohemian Experiment combines elements and Dean follow an internal compass, circling in upon of a blog with other forms of self-expression including “IT,” that visceral state of awareness that will unite essays, stories, poetry, photography and, occasionally, and give purpose to their divergent experiences. social deviance. Jack Kerouac was the corroborating voice I never had

Beatdom 55 Ed Higgins For Allen who howled through just about everybody’s idea of amounts of husbandry the real weirdo poet he could pour down to muck up or stimulate given enough time and eventually under his oracular irritation dynamo words who yacketyacked screaming warnings like a jugged who kept growing on us scolding about us all the jeremiah anarchist illuminated while or smiling jesus almighty antichrist and zen sometimes even when he didn’t we still master debater balled thought you cool ol’ queer and bald too talking self-conscious all about Jew anyway contemplating prophecy and bold rhythm and meter apocalyptic celebration who to remove our contaminated sex, soup, poetry, who bared his comparably Walt-wide soul in Eisenhower and all later incautious combustible latter lonelinesses, or commitments to the mixtures across the tops of our jazz-jived horror of sodding sad war brains inducing Cool and chanting himself into harsh melancholy his tempo of Madman Blake dooming the reminderings whole beautiful universe who for all transient suffering sang kaddish and who had more odd jobs than the American dream praise of hazards to humans still has nightmares to ride and all sexy life here including gnarled trees herd on or we’d then ever heard four fucking and the torsos of boys letter words for or other fruited delicacies such as life itself as repeatedly whenever he’d get into our who died obeying all the laws about death and the pubic beards with his fire poet’s still ownership who made fine old fun as if he could not be of the universe he loved with all the litany of responsible for the effects of our praise–– psychiatric misbehaviors he was beating up who is now on his way to that countdown to eternity, on or poking holes into howling. to reach roots to better check on what best

56 Beatdom Poetry

A collection of Beat-themed, counterculture-inspired poetry from around the world

Kyle Chase Slumland Heroics

Part I she’s lived in the slums of Chicago, I have seen the slums of cities Atlanta, all across America – Minneapolis, from Vegas’ “Crack Alley” to the and despite her faults – and she does have some – Uptown heroin markets of Minneapolis. I can’t think of anyone more American than she.

These slums & urban ghettos Or Dan – better known as Old Man Dan – These black and white working class a book smart man stomping grounds, I’m convinced: born into a family where They book smarts weren’t the right smarts – a are culture in which the Einsteins and Hawkings WE. were the ones who best knew how And I know: to survive! They are That is real America. America! Part II These are the places where Americans live, where American dreams are crushed, and where Annie and Old Man Dan Black Market Carnegies and Project-produced are my true American heroes, Rockefellers as is the 80-year-old department store thrive! worker (I think he’s from Detroit), And do what they do; they keep real America who risks his limbs to pack garbage rolling. into a monstrous and terrifying GREEN MACHINE! A very good friend of mine, Annie, This man does his job just to keep health care

Beatdom 57 for himself and his wife. I have many heroes, and they all live in Slumland It’s sad, but it’s true, and I love him for it. Urban projects, Section 8 houses, and forgotten rural desert towns – or trailer park-ridden villages Another friend, John the casino cashier, – with lost to a series of bad breaks nothing to offer their sick, their tired, their poor and the medical supply empire their needy: he’d built from scratch. They’re all slums, if you ask me.

Now he counts money in “the Cage,” an appropriately named room in casinos Part IV where they stuff helpless senior citizens into small, cramped rooms surrounded by metal bars. Though I’ve lived in them, though I can’t say I do right now. John counts casino money and pays out My apartment’s fairly nice, and to be honest, JACKPOTS! I think the slum I can’t escape to drunken, obnoxious gamblers, is the one between my ears. day-in, day-out. John has no hope for a better life, But I try, just like the rest of them, Instead, he simply does those things to find my teeny-tiny victories wherever I can, he needs to do, in order to whenever I can. just get by. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. John’s a prisoner to his own Still, I’ll always have my heroes. bad luck, and to his own bad health. Those American slum-dwellers, living But he keeps kicking, because his wife day-to-day, needs the insurance. doing all they can just to make it into the light.

Part III

Then there’s Richard. Richard, the cripple, a former bookie who does what he can, when he can. His wife’s a saint, but even saints can only do so much. We’re close, and I fear he hasn’t long to go.

58 Beatdom Sean Tierney

Laundry Box box i like those guys there’s a cardboard box but people behind the door don’t read that we fill with stories our dirties without a little dirty shirts quick sex pants underthings sometimes Real Frogress smelling of quick sex i found a dead frog in my typewriter sometimes smelling his carcass was right under the latch like cardboard; that grips the roller those are the ones that were worn i feel like i exorcised my writing to the grocery store and sat on when i picked him up by his tiny head in wood chairs and tossed him into the yard scratched because for all i know about the afterlife adjusted i may have been his puppet pulled slept in a ghost writer all this time on a warm mattress channeling the ribbits of a restless frog spirit those are the cozy little “nice guys” of the laundry

Beatdom 59

Arlene Mandell

Celebrating the Beats Homage to Ferlinghetti

You can’t capture their audacity Curled up on the love seat in a museum, not the genius of Kerouac with Natasha’s CLAWS via an alcohol-drenched biopic almost piercing my skin

not the spirit of Ginsberg I reread Ferlinghetti, still flashing who I last saw at a seminar Pictures of a GONE WORLD. at NYU, in a rumpled white shirt For me, too, many worlds vigorously filing his fingernails are gone.

nor the manic Gregory Corso I’m no longer young, timid, yearning swigging his brew from a quart-sized to live in PARIS, not Brooklyn, Coke bottle, befogged but charming, not uncool New Jersey - wait -- young people clustered at his feet. I’d abandon New Jersey

As for the women poets, relegated for PARIS in a New York minute! to one small alcove - let’s not even get into their depiction as “also there” On this warm May morning, there is coffee mistresses, muses and scolds. to brew, SEEDS to plant - basil, sunflowers,

catnip for Natasha. No, you can’t capture the hope, joy, freedom of the Beats with dusty I move her purring, razor-clawed body memorabilia and trivial anecdotes. put aside my Pictures of the Gone World,

look inside for VISIONS Nice Try, Beat Museum - but of the NEXT. there’s only ONE WAY to enter that once-upon-a-time-in-America world

READ THE BEATS!

Note: The Beat Museum is located at 540 Broadway in San Francisco, just a block from City Lights Bookstore.

60 Beatdom J. Dean Randall Christina Cole

Podunk Lake Waiting for a Bus that Never Comes Would have invited him in, my tramp friend Waiting in the shelter at Silver Spring for a bus that from the roadside, but thought better pie crusts never comes. of speaking my grandparents alone, flush Elise Cowen sat next to me and spoke in ecstasy. and to the point of every lost memory Two souls lost, alienated, lesbian lovers alone in the I borrow. With interest, I’ll never repay world. their scrubbed clean hands, white porcelain sinks, Both of us poets, but the women of her sorry countertops and the smell of Sunday’s roast generation remain forgotten. beef in cold cuts sawn against my grain. I think to how things haven’t changed much since There’s an itch in here, a tapping foot then. to be off down their road to Arizona’s Our thoughts turn to Allen: in New York one day, winter appeal. I accept pickles San Francisco the next, Tangiers – going places ad and a buttered slice with those last cuts nauseum. before their road still takes them, and I’d go And Elise and I are sitting in this bus shelter, frozen, too but for the kids and wife, for jobs sipping rancid black coffee. and finding my own way forward. I turn toward her and there’s instant understanding. North, Who are we? my road and my destination, my guide What are we doing here? outside slinging pebbles into lake water Where are we going? where I left him, where I left myself Is this all there is to life? a fish twenty years ago, that big one We dream of bumming a ride out to San Francisco, broke my line, granddad near cussing but for or boarding a bus, or doing anything to get out of mama in my ears. this hellish town. “Fiddle! Well, you’ll hook him, Our fingers clasp and we hold each other for warmth. you will. We’ll find him again and land him, Two eccentric women: children dominated by boat bottom or no. Should have brought my net authority, clinging to authority, and desperate for if I’d known you were for bass-busting. what once was but is no more. Should have known, and him a big son-of-a… Colder and colder, the bus eventually comes and I might have known, now try him in those weeds.” begin to board but Elise is not there. My cell phone rings – obnoxious sound intrudes – and she is still gone. Suddenly, I realize that it is October 23, 2007. And Elise has been gone for over forty years.

Beatdom 61 A Postcard from Allen Ginsberg by Michael Hendrick

In January 1976, Columbia Records released Desire, postcard from the Poet in my mail. It was informative the Bob Dylan LP, replete with liner notes by Allen and exciting but at the same time critical of my note Ginsberg. I was 18 years old at the time and worked to him. He took the time to write “fuck you” to me, at a newspaper in Allentown, PA, as a copywriter/ an honor I hope I share with few people. He also copyboy. detected my drug use, referring to my questions to Part of my duties included taking over the him as “dopey.” I wrote a few more after that but they switchboard for half an hour, so the receptionist were answered by his assistant, so I gave that up and could take her 9:00pm break. The USA in the mid- moved on. 70s was a steep peak in the landscape of drug-culture A few years later, Allen and Peter Orlovsky came to and just about any chemical known to the law was do a local poetry reading. I sat up front and was able available in any high school. That said, I found the to catch the microphone stand when Allen knocked it newsroom to be a great place to be on LSD, with the over with his harmonium, while singing a version of flickering fluorescent lights, tapping typewriters and Blake’s “The Tyger.” wire machines clicking out the news. After the pair finished with their readings and On a Saturday night, with my copy of Desire in songs, a queue formed to get books signed by them. I hand, I showed up to work the switchboard. Enjoying have never been one for autographs and I already had the art on the LP cover would be an excellent waste Allen’s handwriting and signature on the postcard, but of time and I proceeded to do so, until I came to the I got in line and shuffled forward. When I got to the Ginsberg liner notes. It had a vague address for him front of the line, I put out my hand to shake and said at the bottom - a school in Boulder, CO - so in my to Allen, “I just wanted to say thanks for answering happily altered state, I wrote to Mr. Ginsberg on the my letters. It means a lot for a young writer to be able subject of poetry. I am sure the note was naïve and to get mail from someone so important in the world of rambling, if not incoherent…but I cannot recall what literature. It is a big inspiration.” I wrote. At this point, Allen cocked his head and looked Four months later, I was surprised to find a puzzled.

Front 62 Beatdom A Postcard from Allen Ginsberg

“I wrote back?” he asked, seemingly incredulous. be bold, but is not always bright… I said thanks, again, and was on my way. Even though the card says “fuck you” and calls me “dopey,” it has *** been a personal trophy for all these years. Transcription of the postcard: One day, maybe a year later, I was in New York City, walking up Bowery Street, when I saw William April 29, 76 S. Burroughs coming towards me. I didn’t believe it POB582 Stuyvesant Sta. was him. He had the usual suit, overcoat, hat, etc, and N.Y.10009 N.Y. two big brown paper shopping bags with handles, one Dear M.H. in each hand. I thought it could be a mistake. I let him 1.) Poetry is what you, or anyone, writes, not a pass and when he was about five or six feet behind definition which limits activity to an “idea” of what me, I turned on my heel and said, clearly, “William it should be. (There’s something dopey about your Burroughs!” He turned around in a split-second. I definitions anyway. Fuck you.) (Afterthought) stuck out my hand and said “glad to meet you” and 2.) Any conscious goal, by eliminating irrational told him I found his work inspiring. I said a few other unconscious information, & data, fucks up the things and then he started asking questions about me. creation of poetry. You discover it, you don’t figure It seemed odd for him to be interested in me. I it out in advance. ‘can’t plan genius.’ remembered all the stories I had read in Kerouac’s 3.) To talk to your private self is the way to talk to books. Sadly, I told him a little about myself but then all self. Personal is universal simultaneously. told him I had things to do but that it was very nice to 4.) Your questions are all fucked up and irrelevant. meet him. I got the feeling I could have stuck around Your (our) problem as poets is to write truth as and followed him home but I, in my youth, was fearful we recognize it, not worry about our egos being of the gentle, great man. I continued on my walk recognized - or our poems - you asked, I answered through the city and wondered how long Burroughs - Allen Ginsberg would have stood there, chatting with me. Youth may

Back Beatdom 63 In Tangier by Steven O’Sullivan

“A true document of human desperation.” -Playwright Tennessee Williams on Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical novel about life in Tangier, 1973.

The release of Choukri’s For Bread Alone came in the midst of Tangier’s development as a hideout for expatriate writers and artists. American writer Paul Bowles was one of the pioneering residents of Tangier and responsible for the English translation and release of For Bread Alone, a novel that would stand for years as a controversial testament to the darker realities of Tangier. These harsh realities coupled with the glistening promise of creation drew in expatriates seeking new approaches to life for many, many years.

Bowles had worked predominantly as a composer in New York, but when Doubleday approached him with a contract for a novel he felt it was time to Painting by Willard Leroy Metcalf make a change into full-time writing. Bowles noted, “I came here because I wanted to write a novel. I write much of his novel. He shacked up in the decrepit was sick of writing music for other people.” He had desert hotels and wrote like a madman. These times visited Tangier intermittently for 16 years prior and are vividly reminiscent of Antonioni’s landmark he moved there permanently in 1947. His wife, Jane, filmThe Passenger. One can easily imagine Bowles followed a year later. They would remain in Tangier as Jack Nicholson’s desperate journalist losing his together until his death in 1999. mind in the midst of alcoholism and the stark white walls of the hotel. Regardless Bowles did manage to Upon Bowles’ initial arrival, the city seemed accomplish his goal. The novel was written. detached from the rest of the world; isolated by endless sand dunes from the south and the waters Doubleday rejected the completed manuscript, of the Mediterranean at the north. Bowles felt a much to their later regret. Within months, thru an mythical, enchanting quality vibrating thru the city. independent publisher, The Sheltering Sky had gone From Bowles’ accounts the city feels similar to thru three printings and sat at the top of the New York Henry Miller’s Paris of the 20s. Dirty bars, broken Times book list. streets, and prostitutes in everyone’s bedroom were hallmarks of the dark side of Tangier. Despite the With the success of The Sheltering Sky, Bowles upscale, colonial European neighborhoods, violence established himself as a serious writer. And stood strong in the shadows of the forgotten slums. throughout the 50s and 60s countless others would be driven to Tangier seeking that same maddening However, Bowles moved south into the sahara to inspiration that had grabbed Bowles with such a vengeance.

64 Beatdom they were able to offer French thief-turned-writer Jean Genet as well a guiding editorial renowned playwright Tennessee Williams would approach in refining the both settle in Tangier, turning out many promising wild-eyed manuscript works. which at the time was merely a scattered Bowles’ fiction also inspired Beat madman William stream-of-conscious S. Burroughs to take up residence in the city in 1953. narrative running amok Stamp from 1957, when Burroughs’ infamous lifestyle and actions had led to in Burroughs’ mind. Ginsberg and Orlovsky an outlaw status in his favorite cities, thus he needed were in Tangier, helping a new refuge in which to create. One Burroughs One must remember Burroughs edit the manu- biography states that he rented a room above a that Burroughs’ first script of Naked Lunch. homosexual brothel. In addition to this, drugs two publications, flowed easily and cheaply in the streets of Tangier. Junkie and Queer, These surroundings left Burroughs quite at ease and while controversial in content were conventional in he began the initial work on what would eventually terms of style. Sure they were graphic tales of drug- become his magnum opus, Naked Lunch. induced homosexual depravity, but they were written with a literary suit and tie in hand. Naked Lunch was Burroughs’ first stay in Tangier was brief as he his first attempt at a non-linear narrative and such a attempted a return to America after only a few radical approach to writing was certainly going to months. However, his standing in the eyes of friends, take some trial and error shots at refining. Just as family, and publishers remained tarnished. Even Kerouac and Ginsberg had found their own unique Allen Ginsberg, once his closest friend, refused him voices with On the Road and Howl respectively, on all accounts. At this time Kerouac was neck deep Burroughs was about to come into his own. in a Buddhist devotion, working on a biography of Siddhartha Gautama. The style Burroughs developed at this time, and later at the Beat Hotel in Paris, can be seen as a So, back to Tangiers it was. natural evolution resulting from an adaptation to his surroundings. Just as George Orwell did with Down Despite a modest allowance from his parents back and Out in Paris and London, Burroughs took in home, royalties from Junkie were still not coming the desperation of his circumstances, financial strain thru, so he began turning out travel articles on and social disdain, and fueled a machine with them. Tangiers to supplement his income. A machine powerful enough to turn out a work that would radically redefine literary concepts across the With the comfort of a cornucopia of exotic drugs globe. This style would become his weapon, and (not readily available back in the States) and sexual with everyone subsequent work following Naked counterparts, Burroughs dug in deep and worked Lunch he would wield that weapon with a devastating tirelessly on the Naked Lunch manuscript. efficiency.

For the following four years Burroughs remained One can imagine Kerouac and Corso dashing from in Tangier continuing to write until his departure one bodega to the next, desperately eluding dawn. for Paris in the fall of ‘59. And in the meantime his Drink, drink, drink it down, down, down... chasing inspirations grew. blindly after women, men, cats, dogs, and mice... thoroughbred Americans ravaging Tangierian Eventually, his reputation at home began to nighttime with shouts and screams, kicking the heal, and his friends sought him out. Kerouac and air, and pumping fists at darkness... then, finally, Ginsberg arrived in Tangier in 1957. Up to that point, facing the inevitable sun-up of the shattered glass Burroughs was the only one with any kind of global of last night’s Grecian vase... stumbling back to travelogue and perhaps his confidants were looking the brothel and Burroughs delivering a scolding at to catch up with him and experience firsthand some arrival... having been up all night typing away at of the visions that Burroughs had caught wind of the masterpiece fueled by a Eukodol kick (crazy and sent home in letters and stories. Additionally, German-made opioid).

Beatdom 65 masseuse who was passing thru Tangier Of course, true to his restless nature, Burroughs twenty years ago on a holiday trip and left Tangier with Kerouac and Ginsberg in 1959 and somehow has never left; a Belgian architect the trio met up with Gregory Corso, and later Peter who also runs the principal bookshop; a Orlovsky, taking up residence at the Beat Hotel in Swiss businessman who likes the climate the Latin Quarter of Paris. and has started a restaurant and bar for his own amusement; an Indian prince who Yet Bowles, the grandfather of Tangier madness, does accounting for an American firm; the remained. Who knows if Burroughs and Bowles Portuguese seamstress who makes your ever even crossed paths. Regardless, Bowles’ shirts. . .” influence on Burroughs is indisputable. Hell, beyond mere literary influence, Bowles inadvertently led It is this diversity that gives Tangier its beauty and Burroughs to Tangier in the first place which in hand appeal. It’s as if time slows down in the secluded city provided the backdrop and experience that pushed and each resident finds an expression and appreciation Burroughs into new territories as an artist. for life they’d not yet possessed or had perhaps lost along the way. Maybe it comes in quietly from the And that’s where we’re going to leave Burroughs. coast with the tides or maybe it blows in stiffly with On his way to Paris. Since this is a travel issue, I the winds from the southern desert. want to focus on one man and the mythology he created at one destination. So we return to Bowles. Of course, even in Bowles’ time the bastardization of Tangier had begun. The city was beginning to When Bowles initially arrived in Tangier he modernize with the destruction of the classic and old regarded it as an attractively unassuming city. Yet to be replaced with brand-new European eyesores. no more than ten years later in 1958 Bowles had Yet Bowles maintained that even in lieu of such witnessed a complete transformation. No more was drastic changes that Tangier never lost its aesthetic the peaceful white city Matisse had taken inspiration appeal. from the in the early 1900s. The city had experienced a deranged westernization. The traditional cloaked To hear Bowles tell it there was a deep, dark charm garb of the Moslems had been replaced with jeans to the city in the years prior to his writing the article. and t-shirts. Yet this change Bowles witnessed was In the 40s and early 50s (around Burroughs’ time not, in his eyes, for the worse, “The foreigner who of arrival), the Zopo Chico served as the hotspot of lives here on a long-term basis will still find most of most social life. The Zopo Chico was essentially the the elements that endeared the place to him in the town square, housing many of its nightclubs and old days.” sidewalk cafes. Bowles recalls a time when the cafes were open all night and all day and he would go in at The above quote came from a travel article on 5 a.m. to watch the nightclub cats stumble dutifully Tangier Bowles penned in 1958. A bit later on in the home with the night’s luster still in their eyes. article Bowles gives an account of the prevailing cultural mash-up found in Tangier. His words are Thru Bowles’ eyes the beauty and charm of Tangier devastating: would be forever preserved by its topography. The buildings and the streets might change, but there You will run into a Polish refugee who was nothing anyone could do to change the rolling arrived ten years ago without a penny... hills surrounding the city, the high plain on which and today runs a prosperous delicatessen it stands, or the mountains off in the distance that and liquor store; an American construction frame the whole picture. Bowles brilliantly noted worker who came to Morocco to help that the beauty of the sky and landscape could never build the United States air bases, and has be destroyed in that, since become a freelance journalist; a Moslem who spent years in a Spanish jail “You don’t look at the city, you look out of it.” for voicing his opinion on Generalissimo Franco, and now is a clerk in the municipal administration offices; an English Keep it burning.

66 Beatdom An Interview with Scroobius Pip Interview by David S. Wills; Photo by Charlie Salazaar

Scroobius Pip is well known throughout the United Space Cruiser, doing spoken word performances in Kingdom as an emerging hip-hop star. As one half venues, as well as outside concerts. At the end of of dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip, he has seen his that year, Pip teamed up with dan le sac and to write words reach millions through a hit YouTube video, “Thou Shalt Always Kill.” The song was released in two successful albums, TV performances, and a full 2007, reaching number 30 on the UK charts, with the schedule of concerts and music festivals. video going viral online. But perhaps it would be more accurate to describe The duo released their first album,Angles , in 2008. him as a spoken word performer. Yes, he frequently The album contains some fantastic lyrics, exploring and famously reads his poems to music from many dark themes with an optimistic outlook. Their sharp genres, but he is as comfortable reading without as wit and intelligences shocked and delighted listeners, he is with it. and they soon had a strong following. In 2006 Pip toured the United Kingdom in his Toyota On January 11th, 2008, Pip sent out a message to

Beatdom 67 his MySpace fans, asking for assistance in creating beats? a book of poetry. He wanted artists to illustrate his words, for a book which was released in March, Almost from the start I always thought that some kind 2010. of music would be involved. I worked with a kind In that same month, dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip’s of jazzy, hiphop sound for a while and then started second album was released. Titled The Logic of working with dan. It works great as we really give Chance, listeners were treated to another brilliant each other space and allow each other to excel. It’s all combination of words and music. With the success over emails. Sometimes I will have a vocal written; of the album, they are now embarking on another big sometimes the beat will inspire the vocal. It varies! UK tour. Fortunately, Scroobius Pip was kind enough to take time out of his hectic schedule and talk to Your songs often deal with pretty dark topics… but Beatdom… you seem positive, or at least you try and put forth an encouraging message. Is this a conscious effort to change the world or just your own personality When did you first begin writing poetry? coming through?

Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I think it’s more a personality thing. I like drifting Probably 2005, I guess. But then, when I look back between light and dark. It can cause some really to all the little punk lyrics and stuff I wrote as a kid good emotional and impactful reactions. Whilst I I kinda realise that they can be as poetic as anything else. It’s all written from the heart.

What poets have influenced your writing?

A lot of poets on the current UK spoken word scene really inspire me. Polarbear, Kate Tempest and many more. US people like Sage Francis, B Dolan, Saul Williams and Gil Scott Heron also. I tend to take influence from cinema, music and pretty much anything else I come in contact with as much as any individual poets.

Your name comes from the poem, “The Scroobious Pip” by Edward Lear… What made you choose it?

I loved the story. It’s about a creature that doesn’t know what it is. It goes with the wild cats for a bit, goes with the birds for a bit, and so on. By the end of it he realises that he is simply The Scroobious Pip. He doesn’t have to fit into anyone category and can just be his own creature.

Inspiring. When did you first begin putting your words to music, and how do you go about setting your words to dan le sac’s

68 Beatdom like to talk about some dark subject matters though, I am a very positive person! I think it’s optimistic to Who do you consider to be among the best poets of acknowledge the problems in this world. today?

I accidently answered this earlier, I guess! In the UK What inspired you to begin the Poetry in (e) i would say polarbear, David J and Kate Tempest are Motion project? at the top of the pile. But there are so many! I run a spoken word tent at Camp Bestival and like to get a I had several people asking me if I wanted to put out a real range of amazing poets. book of poems and felt that, since I never read poetry as a kid, it would be a bit hypocritical to sling out a poetry book. So I came up with the idea of getting As a bearded spoken word performer in the public people from all over the world to illustrate a poem spotlight, some might compare you to Allen each then release a collection of poetry artworks. Ginsberg… Do you have any feelings towards the Beat Generation?

We know from your MySpace blog that you acquired It amazes me. I have afew DVDs on Ginsberg and the artwork for the poems from your fans, but what Kerouac and it all just seemed like such an amazing can you tell us about the actual poetry? time. When we were touring America we stopped of in Boulder, Colarado which is full of Kerouac The poetry is from all different times in my writing and Beat Generation type shops. It all amazes me. “career.” Some are from “Angles,” some from “No Although, if im honest, from years of open mic Commercial Breaks” and some that have only ever nights, the wonder of Ginsburg has been cheapened existed in my spoken word live sets. Due to that, the a little for me by all the poets that think talking in his introductions I have written for each piece and the way and draaaaaaaging certan worrrrrrrds. Pausing. artwork/posters in there it has become a great scrap And continuing....makes anything they say a poem. book for me! I’m so so pleased to have it printed. Harsh i know! But it really has grated at times! Please dont hate me for that! Issue Seven

Beatdom #7 will be a music-themed issue, where we explore the relationship between the Beat Generation and music. We will have essays about the influence of jazz upon the Beats, and look at the influence the Beats had upon musicians from subsequent generations. Most of all we want to think about the spirit of the Beat Generation as it exists today. We will be looking at artists from the present and exploring the impact the Beats had on their work.

Submissions

As always, Beatdom is open to submission from its readers. If you have any queries or ideas, please contact David S. Wills at [email protected]. We give precedence to essays, but are also open to a small number of poems, short stories and memoirs.

Beatdom 69 From “The Scroobious Pip” by Edward Lear

The Scroobious Pip went out one day When the grass was green, and the sky was grey Then all the beasts in the world came round When the Scroobious Pip sat down on the ground The cat and the dog and the kangaroo The sheep and the cow and the guineapig too-- The wolf he howled, the horse he neighed The little pig squeaked and the donkey brayed And when the lion began to roar There never was heard such a noise before And every beast he stood on the tip Of his toes to look a the Scroobious Pip At last they said to the Fox - "By far, You're the wisest beast! You know you are! Go close to Scroobious Pip and say, Tell us all about yourself we pray- For as yet we can't make out in the least If you're Fish or Insect, or Bird or Beast." The Scroobious Pip looked vaguely round And sang these words with a rumbling sound- Chippetty Flip; Flippetty Chip;- My only name is the Scroobious Pip.

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