My dear Lola --
Praying to the toilet god is one heck of a way to start a
morning of rumination, literary or otherwise, but obviously you had
your reasons. I would think that GW III would have less of an
impact on you than dear Uncle Franz, but that obviously was not the
case. Still I admire your use of dialect, myself, I could never get
the hang of it or as they say in Twain land 'git'. Still it is
miracle that you have survived your night of serious drinking with
or without the Mighty Muns, who I assume is your permanent
house guest. I remember when I was less encumbered with children,
dogs, cats, fish, etc, long before I moved up here to "The Village
Beautiful" I always had a series of houseguests. Maybe it was just
part of the character of that dear dead age when people used to
"crash" on floors, sofas or spare beds, sometimes for the night,
sometimes for longer.
I know that the worst kinds of house guests are poets, and
everything which has been said about them from Time Immemorial is
true, believe you me. When I was first living in New York on E. 7th
Street, I made friends with Jim Brodey, a serious madman, a druggie
of heroic proportions with a libido like a bull moose in heat, and at
times a hell of a poet. I grew up on “Howl” and “The Happy Birthday of
Death,” and Bob Kaufman's "Bomb" as well as your normal Blake, Yeats
and etc. However it's one thing to make the conaissance of a good
poet in the relative safety on one's own dorm room or apartment, and
another to be living with one and involved in that world.
I'd met Brodey on the rock and roll scene in the late Sixties.
His wife, Tandy, had been Jim Morrison's first girlfriend in high
school and she had this clown face that Morrison in his prescient
energy drew for her when he was 15. Way cool as it would turn out.
The rock and roll circus downtown overlapped the St. Marks Poetry
Project which Brodey introduced me to, innocent me! Experts at
back-stabbing and backstage politics, they involved themselves in
getting into the pants (sometimes literally) of the Beats who were
just ahead of them on the Art and Poetry Fame food chain. It all
reminded me of some kind of high school literary circle jerk if you
must know the truth. News to me since I never had a clear idea how
exactly the kinetics of culture worked, and a liberal arts
education only gives you a distorted one.
Back then being single, horny, and curious, I was captivated
with Brodey and his scene. Hanging with him gave me entree to the
art and poetry scene, and at the Wednesday night readings at St.
Marks I had a nodding acquaintanceship with all the heavy
hitters who have survived to become respectable with their teaching
jobs and Guggenheim grants. Allan Ginsberg called me “David" when
he saw me. I even got a chance to read at an open reading which I
suppose was OK because I was a friend of Brodey who eventually
wound up supporting him. (It was only later that I figured out why
his colleagues gave him a wide berth in terms of having him live
with them.) It was an incestuous scene, everyone slept with
everyone else or said they did. It turned out to be exactly the
kind of scene that Hugh Kenner called "The Hack's Progress":
" The Hack's Progress, or How to Make It in London with
Poetry, is a ready scenario for pointed gossip. By one
version, you spend your first two years at Oxford getting
known and published in the Oxford little mags. (Getting what
published? Well, you know, some poems: little sensitive ways
to say Lo, Lo or Shrug, Shrug.) In your third year you get
your own little mag together, with as many names as you can
bag, and launch it with a publisher's cocktail party in
London. No second issue ever need appear. You are now
ensconced on the carousel where the action is: round and round
and round, you-review-me-I-review-you, and together we'll all
see just who gets reviewed. This account, an ideal composite,
is not alleged to fit anyone in particular; an especially
hilarious variant is the story of X;, who, alas, did it all
and it didn't work. He ended up lecturing in the Farthest
East, one version of the doom Waugh invented for Tony Last."
(from Hugh F. Kenner, A SINKING ISLAND, "Bards and
BardWatchers", (New York; Knopf, 1988.); p. 254. )
With minor geographical tweakings and cross-cultural
translations, that was exactly the atmosphere at the St. Marks
Church Poetry Project in the late Sixties and early Seventies when
I hung out with Brodo. Indeed I was a stranger in a far stranger
land, and looking backwards at this, now entering my fifth decade,
I marvel as how lucky I was to survive, but the Past is past, and
now they've all become respectable, a few are now members of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (once Ginsberg and Burroughs
were admitted the pig had been launched as they say). There will
always be acolytes to sit at the feet of those proto-punks and
madmen I knew back then. But of course ART has a way of
transforming even the most sordid of lives, doesn't it, just look
at the posthumous career of Andy Warhol, willya?
Drug use was cordial and heavy, speed (like now...again) the
drug of choice, and being an ex-junkie was akin to working on your
sainthood though then as now again, I never saw the romance in
oblivion and think that the only dope worth shooting was Nixon
(thank you Abbie Hoffman). Brodey always took it to the limit,
whether sex or drugs, he stuffed them into every orifice while
composing some truly transcendental verse. I think his "friends"
were simultaneously awed and afraid of him like me I suppose.
Despite all, I think that his drug of choice was consciousness,
poetic consciousness. His colleagues may have been bright and
pretended to be mad though cagey and ambitious game players with
the powers that be, but Brodo was the king of that castle precisely
because he didn't give a shit and pushed them all way beyond their
limits, just like he did to me then. He lived with me on and off
for six, eight months; I lent him money, gave him a place to work
on his poetry and in return I was "with the band" and had access.
But he was amusing; to be a good house guest in New York you
either have to have money to contribute to the communal pot, or
access, cook or be charming, and to be honest, he had all sorts of
stories : how he knew Dylan, had lived with the Band, had a
screenplay that Robbie Robertson and Warner Brothers was interested
in. After a while, truth was not the issue, it was the delivery
that counted, the delivery and the idea. He told so many lies
which were almost right, I really never knew, but then again
it hardly mattered though only when I wasn't directly involved
and when I was well, I won't go into that right now. It was a
horrible job to clean up the shit he left behind in your life.
But I was talking about house guests, and poets as a rule were
not to be trusted with the silverware. I'd go away for a few days
when Brodey was living with me and come back to a wrecked
apartment. Having smoked all my dope and drunk whatever booze I had
around, he was crashed out, and when I asked him the why's and
wherefore's, he's just launch into another improbable tale and then
he showed me some dynamite verse which at times wasn't so dynamite
but he talked a good game and what the hell, I forgave him.
Eventually living with him was driving me around the twist. I
think I moved to the Other Coast just to get away from him, but it
took me years longer to know him without falling into being
involved if you know what I mean.
I don't know what's come over me, talking about Jim Brodey and
all that old time. Maybe it was you talking about your roommate
Muns, or GW III, that stuporous vision. I'm thinking about Brodey
because I saw an item a few weeks ago in the NY Observer, a paper
which ex-New Yorkers should read if only for the gossip and the
venom of literary feuds. Anyway there was a small piece about Jim.
He'd died a few years back from brain cancer, a complication from
AIDS. When he died a few years back, the Times ran this squib with
no details and I never knew what happened. I read and knew, but
anyway, it seems that his "friends" at the St. Mark's Poetry
Project were doing a memorial and publishing a complete volume of
his verse (some of which I have in the original ms in my files).
Typical of them I suppose, but then again, down there nothing had
more status than being a dead...Dead Poet's Society? now I
understand what that means. I would have actually gone to the
memorial just to see them all, but it's too long of a drive and the
kids have been sick.
Yours,
David
Good morning Mr. Swinburne (or his roommate) --
I think the idea of spectral/conceptual albatrosses around one's neck merits some further investigation. Obviously Uncle Frankie is Private Enemy No. 1 for both of us in that respect, but when I referred to G. Wackaroon the Turd, I wasn't really thinking of him as a ghost to be laid to rest or even as a karmic Doppelganger, but as a damn nuisance -- thereby reducing him to manageable form. In Jungian terms, we need to zap our archetypical parameter RAM and rebuild our Gestalt desktop as it were, whether awake or asleep. Mr. Wackaroon is merely one of a string of these recurrent entities of mine. Uncle Frankie, to give the devil his 'do', gave as well as took, but there have been plenty of other psychic vampires who have come to plague me in more or less real time and then remained behind in a half life, however unwelcome, to be my 'roommates'.
I first encountered Rocco Rippenstein (his real name was John Smith) when a friend of mine who had reviewed "Being Frank" for a local newspaper suggested that Rippenstein might be a good candidate to do an interview with me. Rocco, my friend explained, had known Frank right up until he (that is, Frank) died, and he was doing a lot of freelance writing for another local paper. So I contacted the guy and sent him a copy of "Being Frank". Well, a week or so later my fax machine began spewing out long stream-of-consciousness communications from Mr. Rippenstein. Something about the book had really rubbed him the wrong way. He protested (overmuch, methought) that he could never write about a book that had SEX in it, he complained that I was cashing in on the considerable pecuniary potential of the Zappa mystique with my filthy little tome, he bellyached about my lack of ethics in choosing to write about my relationship with Frank in the first place. Over the course of several days he severely overloaded my fax machine, nearly burning it out with these missives, each more outraged than the one before.
I made the mistake of writing him back. A grave mistake indeed. Mr. Rippenstein evidently didn't have any other assignments on deck, and he fired off a whole new series of faxes which made even less sense than the first gaggle had. He took each paragraph of my letter (more or less at random) and broke it down sentence by sentence (also more or less at random), creating a new, page-long, xenochronous argument for each clause. If Count Korzybski had written "Alice in Wonderland", it would have read a lot like the Rippenstein Letters. At one point he even insisted (since I was so obviously unprincipled and brazen) that I sign a release promising that I would never reprint any of his deathless correspondence in any form.
I kept mum, and finally when the fax terrorist recognized that he wasn't getting anywhere with his bizarre campaign, the avalanche of correspondence slowed to a trickle, then ceased entirely. I breathed a sigh of relief. I suppose I should be glad he gave up our penpal-ship, even to the point of overlooking some suspicious coincidences in the liner notes to a certain CD I won't mention -- nor will I mention the annotator. I still have all his faxes in my files, by the way.
Mr. Rippenstein had made a very big point of declaring that he would *never* think of betraying his precious friendship with Frank by stooping to write about it. However, a few months later he evidently managed to scrape together sufficient anecdotal 'dottle' to eke out an article in a local publication, describing Frank's last days. I don't mind giving people inspiration, but I like it to be freely bestowed, not pilfered from the jimmied trunk of my psychic car, as it were. And my mental garret is far too full already with un-invited lodgers. Well, that's just the way it goes, I guess. Into each life a little Rippenstein must fall. But, Dr. Fraud, what does it all mean? What purpose of the Blind Watchmaker do these Rippensteins of the universe possibly serve?
Just wondering --
N.
