Created by Kirsty Bisset and David Wills Edited by David

Beatdom
Created by Kirsty Bisset and David Wills
Edited by David Wills
Published by City of Recovery Press
--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…
---
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
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Beatdom
Contents
Regulars
4 Letter from the Editor
56 Poetry
6
9
17
30
40
64
67
35
11
32
36
42
48
52
62
Essays
Walking with the Barefoot Beat
Finding Alene
The Beats on the Road
Literature and the Art of Self-Realisation
Lest we Forget
In Tangier
Interviews
Scroobius Pip
Reviews
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India
Fiction/ Art/ Memoirs
Sisters
On the Road Changed my Life...
Domino Diaries: Havana Zoo
LSD 25000
Transylvanian Tale
The Crooked Path Toward Salvation
Postcard from Allen Ginsberg
Beatdom
3
Dear All,
The idea for Beatdom’s travel themed sixth issue first
appeared about a year ago. I had been travelling a lot
and trying my hand at travel writing. Everywhere I
went I read a few travel guides first, and everywhere
I went I found the place was completely unexpected.
The guides may have had all the right names, times
and prices, but they didn’t have the soul of the
place. Even the photos often failed to capture what a
destination was actually like.
But every now and then I’d go somewhere and it
would feel familiar. I went to Big Sur and remember
passages of Kerouac’s classic, and in San Francisco I
found myself recalling the great poets and musicians
who’d described it.
It occurred to me that the best kind of travel writing
doesn’t concern itself with facts and figures. It comes
from the experiences and the spirit of travel. The best
travel writers tell you what they felt, and I believe
that gives a far greater picture of a location than any
traditional approach that you might find in a Lonely
Planet Guide, or in a pamphlet you pick up at the
airport.
I began thinking about starting a travel magazine,
featuring only the best travel writing. I wanted my
writers to take their inspiration from Kerouac and
Whitman and to write from the heart. The magazine
was going to be called Beatdom Travel.
After a while I realized a single issue of Beatdom
could achieve the same goal. Perhaps it could even
take subjects like music and war and politics and
do the same. That way, the readers and writers of
Beatdom could explore the world around them
together, and contemplate its significance in relation
to the Beat Generation.
And so we have this, the first themed issue of
Beatdom. Inside you’ll find articles about travel in the
modern world, and in the world of the Beats. You’ll
find essays about their influences and the influence
they’ve had upon the world.
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
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bigger and closer.
Our writers and artists come from all around the
world, sharing their perspectives on the Beats and
travel. Our essays and artwork have been written,
created and inspired across America and the United
Kingdom, as well as in South Korea, Cuba, France,
Namibia and Romania.
We even have a previously unseen postcard from
Allen Ginsberg…
Issue Six is not just a travel issue. We are incredibly
honoured to present to the world an essay about Alene
Lee, written by her daughter, Christina Diamente.
Christina read Steven O’Sullivan’s essay about her
mother in Issue Four and felt the Beatdom was the
right publication to finally reveal the truth about
the woman most know as Mardou Fox from Jack
Kerouac’s The Subterraneans.
Christina has also collected some examples of her
mother’s unpublished writings, and has written short
explanations of each one. But perhaps of greatest
interest to Beat readers is “Sisters,” a short memoir
written by Alene Lee, whose writing has never before
been published.
As always we’re proud to present a piece of frantic
prose by our art director Edaurdo Jones, and poetry
by one of the world’s finest living poets, Kyle Chase.
Both these authors have books pending release by
City of Recovery Press.
After this, we’ll tackle the subject of music in
Beatdom #7, and continue taking subjects and
exploring them through a Beat vision. As a preview
to the music-themed issue, we have an interview
with British hip-hop star Scroobius Pip, who has a
new book out this month.
Yours on the road
David S. Wills
Editor
David S Wills – Founder and editor of Beatdom
magazine, Mr. Wills lives in Asia and teaches for
a living. He writes for various publications, and
runs a bookstore.
Edaurdo Jones - Writer, Art Editor... The Voice
of the Doomed. Beatdom’s regular storyteller of
the warped, derranged kind... A fan favourite and
all-round Gonzo motherfucker...
Steven O’Sullivan – Staff writer and deputy
editor.
Josh Chase - Poet and Associated Press
correspondant. From Minneapolis, Minn.
Isaac Bonan - Illustrator from France. Responsible
for Issue Five’s Ginsberg cover.
Andres Salaaf - Brilliant illustrator, who created
the cover for this issue.
Brin Friesen - A handsome author from Cuba.
Quickly becoming a Beatdom regular with his
boxing-inspired short prose.
Christina Cole - Poet and Beat enthusiast, who
owns a rare copy of Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island.
Kyle Chase - Beatdom’s resident poet, whose
forthcoming book will be published by City of
Recovery Press.
Sean Tierney - Poet.
Arlene Mandell - Poet.
J. Dean Randall - Poet with an interest in hobo
culture.
Brian Eckert - Traveller, writer, photographer.
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
Beatdom Magazine
writer who the world will soon know more about.
www.beatdom.com
Harry Burrus - A poet and Beat enthusiast, wrote
Cover Illustration courtesy of Andres Salaaf
a review of Beats in India.
Mister Reusch - Illustrator, known for his
collaborations with Edaurdo Jones.
Michael Hendrick - Beat enthusiast, who met
Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.
Cila Warncke - Writer and traveller.
Publisher: Mauling Press/ City of Recovery
Press
www.cityofrecovery.com
Editor: David S. Wills
[email protected]
Wayne Mulliins - Writer from the UK.
Regulars: Steven O’Sullivan, Eduardo Jones,
Kyle Chase
Omar Zingaro Bhatia - A celebrated artist, poet,
musician from Scotland.
All letters, questions, submissions etc., to [email protected]
Beatdom
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Walking with the
Barefoot Beat
by Christina Diamente
No girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual
suffering
And so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as
an angel wandering in hell
And the hell the self-same streets I’d roamed in
watching, watching for someone just like her
The Subterraneans, p.50
Jack Kerouac wrote the lines above about the main
character in his book The Subterraneans—Mardou
Fox. Mardou Fox was Jack Kerouac’s lost love in
the novel, and in Kerouac’s real life Mardou was
perhaps the only woman ever to walk away from
him before he was done with her. Mardou was, until
recently, the only literary persona whose true identity
had not been revealed by any of his major or early
biographers, or by any literary historians of that
period. The real Mardou had remained anonymous,
and was therefore one of the few ‘best kept secrets’
Kerouac’s books. The omission of Mardou’s real
identity and her subsequent role in the literary
history of that time, has left gaps in that history
that are both revelatory and parallel to the views of
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, and Corso on blacks and
women. This absence of her presence is, in fact,
partially a direct result of Mardou’s impact on the
biographers and their books. No biographer would
reveal her true identity, because, in her lifetime, she
fiercely (and legally) demanded anonymity.
However, Mardou, on her deathbed, spoke these
last words to me* and Maryanne Nowack (a now
deceased New York City artist): “I want you to do
whatever you can to help keep me alive.” These
words, which one could construe as a simple wish
to remain alive by any means possible, came during
the predicted end-stage of a fast-growth terminal
lung cancer, which Mardou had fought for the
previous year and a half. The words became, for me,
a directive to reinstate the speaker into the official
literary history of that time.
Since Mardou knew that she was dying and had
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requested a Do Not Resuscitate order, it was clear
that a fulfillment of this last request would have
to be accomplished in a literary manner, since a
literal fulfillment of that wish would have been
impossible.
Nineteen years after her death, I can finally say that
Mardou was my mother. Her real name was Alene
Lee (ne Arlene Garris), a 5’2” African and Native
American, and an American-bred beauty. She was
so renowned for her beauty that men throughout
New York City (particularly in the Village and in
little Italy, where she was a living legend courtesy
of The Subterraneans) pursued her well into her
40s. However, Alene was more than beautiful. She
was, quite simply, one of the most brilliant of all the
Beats that Kerouac knew in his days in the coffee
shops and bars of 1950s New York City. Lucien
Carr, one of Kerouac’s closest friends and a literary
collaborator (whose persona he used frequently
in his novels-- Sam in The Subterraneans) said of
Alene, “When I was given an IQ test, I scored 155,
but I consider Alene to be smarter than I am. She is
the most intelligent woman I know.” Allen Ginsberg,
also a close friend of both Kerouac and Carr, said
in a 1997 interview at the loft of Virginia Admiral,
“Alene was a peer, and we [Kerouac, Burroughs,
and Carr] considered her an equal.”
Alene, however, because of her determination to
remain unnamed as the real-life Mardou and perhaps
as a result of her sometimes-hostile relations with the
Kerouac biographers, came to be depicted by those
same biographers as a somewhat peripheral character
in Kerouac’s life and in the Beat Generation. In one
photographic history of the era Alene is insultingly
described as a “groupie” admirer of Kerouac’s.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, nor
a more devastating description to Alene, for she was
a fiercely independent woman, who had never even
been a Beat fan, much less an ardent fan. Another
writer, who contributed to the concept of Alene as
“less than” the men of the time, was Anne Charters,
who referred to Alene throughout her biography of
Kerouac as simply “the black girl.” This description
had infuriated Alene, since she considered it to
be a racist devaluation of herself as a person, and
a reduction of herself as a human being to a sex
and race. Alene said years later that she felt it was
Charters’ way of paying her back for her having
demanded anonymity in her Kerouac biography.
As the first biographer Alene worked with, or to be
more accurate the first that she refused to cooperate
with, Charters suffered the wrath of a woman who
was trying to both conceal her identity (because of
painful experiences she had as a result of Kerouac’s
book about her) and who was also trying to protect the
great love of her life—Lucien Carr (who had many
memories he was unwilling to reveal or discuss like
his conviction for murdering a homosexual friend).
Alene had never worked with a biographer before
and to her it seemed inappropriate to discuss her love
and sex life with a stranger—particularly since the
biography subject—Kerouac—was dead. She didn’t
feel it was honorable to reveal ‘truths’ about the dead
Kerouac or about the then alive Lucien. Exposing her
own and others’ private lives and subjecting them
to pain, was not something she was willing to do.
Unfortunately, Alene would pay a steep price for her
reluctance to speak in her interviews with Kerouac
biographer Ann Charters. She had to endure years
of pain from being portrayed erroneously as a black
girl groupie who hung out with junkies.
While subsequent biographers Barry Gifford,
Lawrence Lee, and Gerald Nicosia were able to
find a compromise pathway for Alene to express
her views and experiences on Kerouac and the time
of the Beats, Charters virtually eliminated her as a
persona and as a figure of that time, potentially as
a response to Alene’s demand for anonymity. Alene
viewed Charters’ characterizations as deliberate
attempts to dehumanize and humiliate her--creating
an unsympathetic portrayal of her in the process.
Biographers Gifford and Lee, who gave Alene the
pseudonym “Irene May,” fared somewhat better, in
Alene’s estimation, since they did not interpret or
‘spin’ her words in keeping with the aural tradition
of direct quotes that they used in the book. Author
Gerald Nicosia, in his biography Memory Babe,
referred to her simply as “’Mardou,’ and he printed
his interviews with her almost verbatim, to Alene’s
satisfaction.
It was Alene’s negative experience with the
biographer Charters that led her to demand strict
confidentiality and anonymity agreements with all of
the subsequent Kerouac biographers that interviewed
her and Lucien Carr (with whom she was living
throughout the years from 1962-1973). Both Gifford
and Lee, who wrote Jack’s Book, and Gerald Nicosia,
had to sign elaborate agreements which kept Alene
anonymous and which protected, to the degree
possible, Lucien Carr, who was understandably less
than happy about the constant rehashing of his 1944
murder of David Kammarer.
Carr, in a 1992 phone interview, had actually
requested that this work about Alene Lee not be
written, admonishing me with his feeling that Alene
“would not like it.” He subsequently cut off all
communications with me refusing to speak to me or
cooperate in any way. It was, in fact, a respectful
consideration of that admonition that delayed the
continuance and completion of this work for over
10 years.
Alene had loved Lucien Carr up to her death and
she had insisted throughout the whole 11 years of her
relationship with Carr that he was to be considered
and treated by me as a ‘father figure.’ Despite the sense
of an imperative to tell Alene’s story before all of the
live sources disappeared, the need to respect Lucien
Carr’s request weighed so heavily that only after
ten years of wandering in the academic wilderness,
and as many years of therapeutic purgings, and
the study of African American and female writers,
and a consideration of the feminist writings about
women who never became writers—who were lost
forever in time by history, only after the weight of
considering all of these perspectives – could I decide
to go forward with a history of Alene. To disobey
one’s ‘father’ is not a step taken lightly, particularly
when the price you will pay is the complete and total
loss of that father’s consideration, if not love.
In light of such an active disapproval by Lucien
Carr (who had been involved with Lee up to one
month prior to her cancer diagnosis in 1989) and
in view of a previous strongly stated desire for
anonymity by Alene herself, the reader may wonder
why then I reveal ‘Mardou’s’ identity, her thoughts,
and her involvement with Kerouac, Burroughs, and
Carr? Is there big money in it? Will it arouse the
interest of tabloids? Is it a vendetta and attempt to
cast Alene in a “Mommy Dearest” light or Carr in
a classic spoiled rich boy goes bad black hat? No.
It is quite simply an attempt to put Alene back into
the literary history of that time and to enhance the
beat history that Kerouac himself had attempted to
tell—to chronicle the times, and at least one more of
the lively characters that lived in those times.
Alene was a part of the beat history, who, though
Beatdom
7
she never claimed to be a great writer like Kerouac,
deserves at least her footnote* in the literary
records, if not more. In the spirit of Joyce Glassman
Johnson’s Minor Characters, this is the attempt to
fill in a blank spot that others have happily allowed
to remain blank.
To put it bluntly, an intellectual black and indigenous
woman actually existed and was formative in the
creation of at least one of the works of what some may
call a great American writer. Kerouac was not well
known for his collegial or intellectual relations with
women and minorities and his depiction of Alene,
while it honored her intelligence, mostly portrayed
Alene through his lens—that of a male sexual
appetite. Not only Kerouac but Carr, Ginsberg, and
Burroughs were men focused in large part on their
own talents and worth, not the talents of what they
called their “old ladies,” or whatever women they
were then ‘involved’ with. The ‘old ladies’ were
generally expected to “keep their mouth[s] shut” and
to exude an ornamental aesthetic of beauty with which
the men/writers could clothe themselves in public.
A remarkable comment that Kerouac made to Allen
Ginsberg exemplifies Jack’s deepest feelings about
women. Kerouac said, “I only fuck girls and I learn
from men.” (Barry Miles, p 131) Largely touted as a
cultural rebel, Kerouac was in fact a member of an
exclusive clique with distinctively male privilege.
One of this group was author William Burroughs –
the eldest of the literary trio, an heir to the Burroughs
fortune, and a Harvard graduate. Another, Lucien
Carr, a privileged trust fund child and Columbia
University student was the first of the three to
formulate the idea of a ‘new vision’ literature that
inspired Kerouac. Carr was a Rockefeller relative, and
both he and Burroughs were the life-long recipients
of trust funds and economic security. Burroughs,
from the ivy walled towers of Harvard and Carr,
Kerouac, and Ginsberg from the prestigious halls
of Columbia University — these three were a male
literary and social clique that accepted women as bit
players but not as minds to be reckoned with. Kerouac
and Ginsberg, though from working and middle
class white families, ultimately became powerful
literary and cultural icons (often credited with or
blamed for, depending on perspective, the onset of
the 60s hippie rejections of middle class mores and
cultural status quo). And while both helped spawn
the ‘revolutionary’ cultural conversion to ‘free sex’
and drug use as norms for the theoretical seeking of
alternate/creative mind states in the 1950s and 60s,
neither Kerouac or Ginsberg crossed the cultural
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Beatdom
race barriers that were being torn down by black civil
rights activists in meaningful ways. They listened to
black poet LeRoi Jones, now Amiri Baraka, and to
black jazz musicians like Elvin Jones, and they slept
with the occasional black woman, but they never had
serious long term involvements or friendships with
them. Kerouac, in particular, never intellectually
collaborated with female or black writers, though he
was an avid admirer of black bebop, jive, and jazz
music. His relationships with women and minorities
(infrequent) were mostly sexual. Women, blacks,
and Native Americans were ancillary to the ‘great
myths’ about himself and his friends that Kerouac felt
he was destined to write. They were as unimportant
to Kerouac as they have traditionally been to the
literary academy and the annals of the Great Dead
White Men.
But a black and Native American woman named
Alene Lee did exist during that same time and place
in the 1950s and 60s. She did influence Kerouac,
Carr, and Ginsberg. She did write. And, finally, it
may be said, she did die still in love with at least one
of these men (Carr), and in friendship with another
(Ginsberg—who was with her when she died at
Lenox Hill Hospital in 1991). Without her person
being reinserted into the Beat Generation, what is at
stake is the commodification of that history, a portrait
with no black or indigenous females in the picture.
Without Alene’s perspective, Kerouac and Ginsberg
remain more heroically palatable and more mythic
literary figures than they actually were. Ignoring
her perspective and writings or leaving them buried
comes at the cost of ignoring certain harms that
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr and others inflicted on
the lesser known members of their beat generation.
Ignoring her also comes at the cost of deleting one
of the few recorded recollections of the beats as men
and artists written by a black and native American
woman of that period.
This African and Native American woman lived,
breathed, loved, lost, learned, interacted with,
fought with, and wrote about Jack Kerouac and other
‘beats’ of that time as well. This is the beginning of
an attempt to place that woman—Alene—back into
the historical texts. It is the attempt to shed light on
another perspective about Kerouac and his peers. It is
the attempt to give voice to Alene Lee’s feelings and
thoughts about having been immortalized as Mardou
in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. And finally, it is
the attempt of a daughter to fulfill her promise to a
dying woman to help keep her alive.
Finding Alene
by Christina Diamente
There is of course no definitive way of knowing a
woman who has been dead for almost two decades.
Knowing and understanding her in life was equally
complicated. Nineteen years after her death, Alene
lives only now in Kerouac’s book The Subterraneans,
in the fading memories of the few people, still alive,
who knew her, and in the faded, disintegrating letters
and journal entries she left behind. Excerpts from a
woman, who never stopped writing but who never
submitted any of her writings for publication, are
what remain.
2:00 am, May 28, Memorial Day
1965
How clear everything is just
before waking. The inner voice
bridging the abyss told me this
morning: ‘Alene, you said you were
going to wait until you were past
forty, just like Conrad, before
you began to write. Write. You
have as much chance of making
several hundred dollars, or even a
thousand, if you do what you want
to do. Why do you feel so guilty?
Time is runnin’ out. Take hold of
life before it is too late.’
But I’m such a coward. I
know it is not a question of writing,
it is a question of beginning to do
what you want to do: not doing
‘your thing’ but taking your best
hold on existence.
Although Alene did make a serious effort to write
consistently from that point on, she never wrote
in what she or Grove Press editor Fred Jordan
considered to be a commercially viable form. Stories
were started but never finished. Outlines were written
but never fleshed out. Mostly she wrote journal
entries when she was angry or troubled, in times of
stress or great unhappiness. Always haunted by her
childhood, Alene seemed always to be attempting
to survive that past, which constantly threatened to
catch up to her. Alene had been told by her mother
that their “people died young” and she always
believed that she would as well. For Alene, the proof
of this was in the actual deaths of her mother before
age fifty and two of her sisters before sixty. Alene
believed that she too would die at an early age. So,
as she began to unravel the details of her childhood
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.
The narrative was always about what was lost and
about the pain of living.
Throughout her life she struggled with an
undiagnosed mental illness that sometimes
manifested itself in delusions, sometimes in manic
episodes punctuated by fierce pacing, and sometimes
in catatonic and almost schizophrenic fugues. In
between these states and sometimes through them
Alene wrote, sometimes remembering the past and
sometimes struggling to make it through the present.
Often she wrote about writing. In the following
excerpt, Alene wrote about her writing process on
a trip that she took back to her childhood home in
Staten Island. She was trying to recapture the Staten
Island community of her youth in the 1930s.
I found a room on a narrow street
near the docks, with a family that
had recently emigrated from
Jamaica. How strange to be here,
the original ‘Quarantine’ section
of America. Every journey to the
island seemed to lead me further
back in time, to some original
immigrant’s landing place . . . or a
place of detention.
I dreamed of these streets of
long ago, filled with crowds, colorful
costumes of many lands, waiting to
gain entrance to America.
Beatdom
9
My whole life has been one
long waiting to gain entrance. I was
a first generation northerner, but
that had never occurred to me,
until a couple of years ago. I had no
memory of any other place. North
Carolina was a place where my
mother, Mamie, was left parentless
when she was nine years old. It was
a place not of fond memories. Nor
was Washington DC, where I was
born. My mother had never spoken
of these places in any manner that
left more than a scent of them.
I would like to write about
New York, about Staten Island
in the 30s and 40s... and the
wilderness that once existed there.
The Dutch Huguenot section
where we used to fish and wander.
The people on Ely Street. The
Lorillard snuff my mother used to
indulge in. The longshoremen and
the fighting and the screaming.
The Irish I knew, with their
children with long curls. The
organ grinder man and the monkey
who picked your lucky number for
a nickel. The large mansions and
the dissimilarity of the homes on
the island--Italian white stucco
homes, and grapevines across
from ramshackle broken down
tenements. And Polish sullenness,
and the West Indians who were
the first blacks to own their homes,
and the hatred between them and
the southern Negroes. The pier
where one could fish before it
became a Naval base. And long
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
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Staten Island. Snug Harbor, the
old men and the animals and lover’s
lane. Miss Mary, who stabbed
and killed a couple of people and
who was only exiled from Staten
Island as punishment. My friend,
Veronica, who was shot, and her
husband who only served one
year in jail. And that nasty old
sea captain with his fat blowsy,
purpled-legged, false eyelashed
yet extremely beautiful ex-showgirl
wife, who went once a week to the
store for liquor. And who still lives
there and goes to the A&P once
a month. He has long since died.
She set the house on fire—the
roof is gone but she still lives there
like a queen. And, most of all, I want
to tell the story of my sisters.”
Alene did finally write about her sisters in a short
story, recovered here, with all of her sister’s real
names. In the autobiographical story, Alene recalls
her formative childhood experiences in Staten Island
of the 1930s. Alene dedicated the story to her mother
and sisters of whom she said,
I see even today, walking along
14th Street, or in Harlem,
on a subway stair, reflected in
expressions of dejection, fear,
bitterness, sometimes secret
exultation, the faces of Maimie,
Catherine, Ressie, Ethel, and
myself and know them well. For
they are truly the faces of my
mother and my sisters and I feel
their secret hurts as my own. I feel
for you but I just can’t reach you.
This is my attempt.
Sisters
by Alene Lee
Catherine was sick. They were going to put her in a
hospital. The doctor thought electric shock would be
advisable. Alene recoiled. The third one. The last of
her sisters. The most vibrant, the one who danced
like a LaChaise woman, the one who had loved the
most... why must they kill the ones who really live?
She remembered way back. Alene and Catherine
had both belonged to the band. The Memorial Day
Parade, with the bands from all over Staten Island
parading past. Alene and her friends would sit high
on the banks of one of Staten Island’s many hills.
She never knew whether she enjoyed playing most
or sitting high on the grassy mound of sidewalk
looking down on the glorious array of clashing
colors & instruments in the sun. And then, their
band, pounding out wild exciting drum beats like
war itself covering with blood the battlefield of life.
The melodies were so wild and strong that the pale
faces seemed ashen under the tumultuous riot of strict
hammering beat that pressed itself out enveloping
and deadening all other sounds and attained a
threatening ascendancy. And there was Catherine, in
her maroon & cream uniform, twirling the baton, an
inspiration to the trumpet, drum and fife. She lifted
each beautiful muscular leg into the air. Someone
whispered admiringly, “An African Queen!” Her
clear black skin sparkling, giving off light & vibrant
color, so dark you could swim and dream.
The pure joy, the feeling of what you are, pulsating
like heart beats, the suppressed pride breaking out—
it more than made up for the cold winter mornings,
waking up with wind soaring through the brown
shackles into your spine. Waking up to a cold stove,
chopping wood in the backyard and looking at the
majestic hills that seemed to form the round earth
itself. To me, those hills were the boundaries of the
world. No matter in which direction you looked they
seemed to curve round enclosing you.
The sun of band time and the sun of hot summer
mornings in the box rooms, sweating and the smell
of burning paper, which you had set to the iron
bed last night, because it is the only way to kill the
bedbugs. The sorrow of mornings, looking out the
windows at beautiful stucco & brick houses on the
hills surrounded with bushes & carefully tended
plants & flowers, a pretty blonde girl tripping down
the stairs. How could you not love those beautiful
things?
“Hey man, stop doing that, look—here comes
Catherine!”
The boys used to love to watch her walk with
quick vibrant grace down the uneven sidewalks.
Like a prancing filly. A leg swinging, stepping up,
head high and, as a boy said,
“Watch it go down, man!”
She was the pride of self in being, that pleased by
existing.
I carried these untold things, which I had not
thought about in years, across the bright sunshined
waters on the ferry, past the Statute of Liberty. The
ferry docked on the Staten Island side and I walked
up the winding hill towards the home which had
once been the only home I ever knew. I passed
the old schoolhouse with its 4 clocks, impossibly
squatting on the highest hill. Yet despite the stops at
what should have been historic streets and corners
of my life, I could not feel that things were really
very different from what I had known and imagined
them to be.
But God, it’s something to have a home where the
odyssey of your soul can be bound, even though
you may end up defeated by pickles in a wooden
barrel run by a man who liked little colored girls.
And your mother hiding from bill collectors, leaving
Catherine and yourself at the door with the strength
of “we don’t know nothin.”
We stole peaches, Catherine climbing the highest
and being the stealthiest. We picked berries from the
hills. Memories of Catherine playing hide-and-seek
and leaving me in a dark wooded garden. Suddenly
I heard the splatter of glass, and Catherine sauntered
into sight, “What happened?” “Oh, nothin.” And
as we walked to the sidewalk a man, “You little
bastards!” After a surprised startled moment of
immobility, looking first behind at a huge dark
figure, and in front at a quickly disappearing pair of
fleet feet, we gathered our wits and broke into a run.
And I was the one caught and walloped.
But that was later. Very much later. Before that
there was the organ grinder man, a funny little man
with a hunched back, an old Sicilian, with a parrot he
Beatdom
11
loved. Every week he would come by and Catherine
and I would dash out of the house, no matter what
threats pursued us, rushing towards the faint sounds
which neared as we raced, “bettcha I beat you” to the
organ, which I would stand by transfixed watching
the old man’s gnarled, sun and aged brown hands
move and create a world they seemed to share
together with the organ.
Catherine loved the parrot. The old man would let
the bird perch on her wrist and she would coo and he
would give them each a fortune. We followed him
for as many blocks as we could after ducking around
our own house singing with him, as people came
out of their homes and bought their numbers from
the bird. A parrot, an old man, and two little black
girls. One in tattered cotton dress, with a naturally
regal stance and a long leg usually poised in front,
as though it would begin to run when the signal was
given.
Catherine had been born on a farm. Afterwards
our father ran off leaving our mother Maimie in the
midst of the depression without food and money. He
came back one day with another woman and he took
Catherine. He was taken to the hospital several years
later and after a couple of months he was declared
“shell-shocked.” So then Catherine had to come to
Staten Island to the bare little cold-water flat to live
with our mother and us younger sisters, whom she
hardly remembered as babies.
Mamma never bothered to tell us we had another
sister. But there she was, one day, when I came home
from somebody’s house, standing flat in front of my
face, looking at us and the small rooms. “This is your
next oldest sister. She’s ten,” and that’s all mamma
said. Ethel embraced her wholeheartedly.
Catherine was clearly not happy to be there. She
looked around the cold water flat, the center of which
was the kitchen, like it was a prison. But Ethel’s
friendliness touched her. I was distant and resentful.
And things got worse when I was no longer the oldest
whom Ethel had to mind. “Now Ethel has mamma
and Catherine and she doesn’t need me any longer,”
I thought. And Catherine Ethel obeyed, which she
had never done with me.
But Catherine was my sister... and my mother
said she’d come to live with us... and she had just
come off her Daddy’s farm. And she was as big and
healthy as a cow, too. And neither of us knew what
to say or do.
Big, light-complexioned, with a heart shaped face
and fine thin eyebrows (not like mine which were
bushy and came straight across my eyes), and two of
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Beatdom
the biggest longest waviest braids that I’d ever seen,
all the way down her back. I don’t exactly remember
when I knew I was jealous as I could be.
And she had pretty fat legs, too! “Now I ain’t
got no black wavy hair.” And she was lighter. No
matter what Negroes say about “I’m just as good as
anybody” I knew they was favored. And it wouldn’t
be easy on me having her there. I had always thought
I was the best thing around... and it wasn’t easy to
see that maybe I wasn’t. I had never really looked at
myself critically before and this was the beginning
of it.
I was as skinny as I could be without falling
for want of something to hold me up. I was a real
tomboy and I used to fight all the time. And I used
to win most of those fights, till one day a big hefty
red-haired gal from Georgia came and hit me and
won a fight outside the school. She didn’t hurt me,
but she sure did have me pinned against the wall
and I couldn’t get out from under... and I sure was
embarrassed, since I realized I couldn’t go round
fighting anymore, and that was hard, too. And now-Catherine.
Course, I thought for the longest time that I loved
her madly and was proud of her cause I couldn’t
take admitting otherwise. But I would dream all day
long, sad things that’d make me cry out loud, even in
school, about my sisters and mamma. How Catherine
took ill and died, or lost a leg, or how her face got
burned and how people would take pity on me when
they saw how bad I felt about all this tragedy, and
they’d say what a good sister I was. I must’ve killed,
burned, and mutilated Catherine at least once a day...
besides funerals and tragedies I had going for my
mamma.
Before Catherine came and before I lost the big
fight, I played mischievous pranks on any adult who
seemed easy to prey upon. I once sent an old woman
rushing up three flights of stairs in the adjoining
apartment to her house after knocking on her door
frantically and with mock hysteria screaming,
“Miss Sadie needs a kettle of hot water right away.
Something terrible has happened. Hurry.” It was not
necessary for me to witness the ensuing surprise and
anger in person. I rolled on the grass with laughter
behind the tree on the hill across the street. Of
course, I was always punished properly and harshly
for these pranks. But beatings did not leave much of
an impression on me.
Only Ethel, the youngest of the Garris sisters, had
always lived with our mother. And, they had that
closeness that develops with the youngest child... an
understanding. She was born understanding mamma
and she knew she was some strange kind of comfort
to mamma. Not like a responsibility, but something
of her heart. She was our mother’s pet, loved with
mixed tenderness, protectiveness, and resentment.
She was not pretty like the three of us older sisters.
Bird-like with darting eyes and a small sharp face
and rather longish nose, brown enough so that even
she was aware of the difference in skin color between
herself and us. But mamma was dark like her. And
her great strength was in our mamma, who she knew
loved her.
Our oldest sister, Ressie, was grown and had long
ago left the island after graduation. With memories of
breadlines and starving, she married in Washington
D.C. After a year or two in the civil service she and
her husband had gone into the ‘numbers’ business.
Ressie visited us when Ethel and I were very little.
She seemed always to be in two positions. Either
in bed, smoking, with long curved nails hanging or
sitting in front of the coal fire smoking with a cup
of coffee. Smoking and drinking coffee, that’s what
I learned from Ressie. Maimie had been very proud
of her oldest daughter. She would observe Ressie
as closely as she could, anticipating the drama that
would seem to follow in the wake of such stunning
clothes, beautifully coifed hair and beautiful hands.
Later, Ressie sent clothing home, expensive clothing,
but what was the sense of a $60 suit with no shoes to
put on, and no blouse to wear under?
There was always something missing. Something
we didn’t have the very next morning—shoes, money
for a school book or to go to the cleaners, but none
of that really mattered until later, when we were old
enough to know. Catherine took a housekeeping
job at nine years old to have money for school and
clothes and shoes. She was fiercely protective of
Ethel, as she would be of a crippled bird.
Our mother worked two jobs, one early in the
morning and the other in the afternoon to early
evening, yet barely would ends meet. Always hiding
from bill collectors because of some small thing,
a radio or a chair gotten on the installment plan, a
knock at the door, and Catherine at the door, “My
mother isn’t home.” “When will she be home?” “I
don’t know. She is visiting a sick friend.” “Well, we’ll
have to take back the...” “Well you can’t, my mother
isn’t home and I don’t owe anything,” slamming
the door. That was the home motto, “Don’t let them
in.”
I dreaded summertime. After the anticipation of
freedom when school ended, nothing ever seemed
right in the summer. Although I knew that a good part
of the Island went swimming, fishing, and dancing,
these activities were few and far in between in my
life.
With the arrival of my sister Catherine, the death
of my foster mother, Miss Janie, and approaching
puberty, my dreams took a mournful cast. I began
reading a great deal. I had never belonged to any
group, I had no friends, my family was my enemy,
and the neighbors with their incessant fighting during
the summer nights made morning light become
shame.
I began to withdraw from the intimacy and
familiarity of neighbors, and became more conscious
of the world around me. I began comparing. And,
I always came out second best. I envied everyone.
Even the ‘everyone’ that I didn’t want to be. My
sister Ethel, I envied for her nonchalance and her
ability to make light of everything and take the best
she could get from life, my sister Catherine, for her
beaus and friends and dances, in spite of the poverty
of the: ‘not-the-right-dress,’ ‘the hem isn’t straight,’
‘no handbag to match my shoes,’ and ‘my hair needs
doin.’
I don’t know exactly when I stopped liking my
sisters, in particular Ethel. But I started thinking
that we weren’t really sisters. I can invent some real
definite reasons why I didn’t like Ethel. First, she
was younger than me. When she was little Mamma
made me drag her around with me. She was ugly,
she was dark, and she was noisy. And, she was
treacherous. But she was smart too and she knew
what I was feeling and probably knew why. She was
a thief and she’d lie right in front of your face and
even if you caught her doing something she’d tell
you it wasn’t so and not crack even a bit. I’d know
she had the better of me and as a result I would have
to show her I was both older and bigger than she by
cracking her on the head a little. And that only made
me madder ‘cause I had to do it.
But Ethel was a wiser and more quick-witted child
than I. And I knew it. I viewed her with a hate mixed
with envy and a sort of respect for Ethel’s vibrant
swift body and quick mind. The way she always
seemed to sink but for a moment and then would
be buoyed up and full of irrepressible gaiety and
curiosity. I hated her without knowing how much I
really hated myself.
One of the places I would take her to was a nice
clean playground in a different neighborhood. One
day we went to the playground and sang together.
I suddenly realized that all those people were white
Beatdom
13
and I perceived what we were in those people’s
minds. No one—not one other kid—was colored. All
their parents were there with them. And we, Ethel
and I, were little “colored” girls who couldn’t make
fools of ourselves because we didn’t count in the first
place, and that’s what “we” did—sing and dance.
Little colored boys and girls singing and dancing for
white people. Nothing else. Just little niggers.
And suddenly I didn’t want to be a ‘nigger’ and
I never sang or danced there again. And whenever
I saw Ethel dancing for anyone, like that grocery
store man, who sold pickles in a barrel, with his fat
belly and cigar, sitting outside the store, throwing
pennies at her, I could have strangled Ethel. But the
words for the problem hadn’t formed in my brain
yet and I didn’t know how to name the difference
and therefore I couldn’t explain to Ethel. I would
tell her, “They’re laughing at us.” And Ethel would
look up and say “They’re supposed to laugh and
enjoy dancin’.” And I would hate Ethel because she
reminded me of how I had looked at it too. And,
Ethel could really dance and she did not care how
she looked to others. She did what she enjoyed and
she did it without fear. Ethel was my living past, in
the face of a new hate of self that I wanted to forget,
pretend never existed.
When Catherine started babysitting, my mother
tried to get me to do the same. But I loathed the idea
of working for a family as my mother had done all her
life as a domestic. It seemed like worse than suicide
to me. Any suggestion of my mother’s made her all
the more an enemy. I could see no reason why she
didn’t manage to provide me with all that I needed,
including a home. I hated her for the way we lived.
She would nag me, cajole me, beat me, trying to get
me to clean the house or put my clothes in order. She
would accuse me of lack of pride and I would only
tighten up and harden my feelings, redoubling my
determination to do none of those things. She would
scream, “Do you think I’m your slave?” and I would
wish she was.
I was determined to “wallow in filth” (as my mother
sarcastically reiterated) before I would lift one finger
to make right a condition I felt I should never have
been in. I was too afraid of the consequences of any
action on my part. Any compromise with the life
we were leading, anything done to make it pleasant,
seemed to me would lead to destruction through the
acceptance of that life.
I would sit on the curb in front of someone else’s
house, that was pleasanter, and stare at the redbricked road. I began to hate the ramshackle house
14
Beatdom
we lived in. That house was so very brown and beat.
I have never seen a house so beat. I would try to
avoid being seen entering it during the day. If it
were absolutely necessary to do so while anyone
was passing by, I would pretend that I was visiting
someone, stopping to stare upwards and peer at the
number on the door, as though I had no idea where
I was.
I’d been raised by my foster mother, Miss Janie,
since I was a little baby... and, like a sing-song
recital, parts of that childhood would come to
me from mamma and from Miss Janie, the few
remaining times I saw her-- ‘How Miss Janie took
care of me’... ‘how she loved me’... ‘would I like her
to adopt me?’... ‘how’d I like to stay with them for
good?’
It ain’t good to give a child that many choices... and
sometimes I wanted to be adopted and sometimes I
didn’t... and sometimes I wanted my mamma and
sometimes I wished she wasn’t my mamma and
didn’t take me back.
My foster parents had raised me in a clean, orderly
apartment. We had a garden, chickens, and a way
of life that made it possible, to this day, for me
to remember almost every detail of daily living.
Saturday’s I polished the furniture. After school, I
went to the store. After supper, I washed the dishes.
And in the summer, I was allowed to play for a
couple of hours. The kitchen table was round and
made of mahogany. The kitchen clock hung on the
wall above the refrigerator. The coal stove, which
was later converted to oil, was large enough for a
restaurant. The wine sat behind the stove. King, Miss
Janie’s husband, made his own wine. Paul, their son,
slept in the sun-parlor. When I was smaller, I slept
with him. The dining room was almost too small
to hold the large dining table with at least ten legs
and the six knobbed chairs I polished every week.
The living room, which faced the street, was wide
with a player piano, and a couch with a red-jacketed
huntsman and hound dog above it. I slept there. I
lived with them until I was six and a half years old.
And at about the same age Catherine was when she
returned to us, before she got left at mamma’s door,
I went back to Miss Janie’s for a short time.
While at Miss Janie’s, I was sick a good deal. I had
most of my childhood illnesses there. I remember
them pleasantly. I was waited on hand and foot. I
was given castor oil, orange juice, ice cream, and
treated solicitously.
When I was taken back by my mother and I caught
a month long illness, I was cured of being ill for
good. My mother accomplished this by making it
unpleasant. Whether I made it more difficult for her
than I would have for Miss Janie, I don’t know, but
I do know that after calling her five times within the
hour her voice began to take on a sharp edge and I
knew she wished she could slap me. I would brood
and feel put upon. Up until recently, I have always
considered my mother cruel, unfeeling, and hateful,
and though I am past twenty-one, I have harbored ill
feelings towards her as a result of her nagging, and
supposed ill-treatment of me. However, she did cure
me of any desire to be ill and physically dependent.
We lived on York Avenue and we girls went to
School 17, on the hill. Our house was the ugliest and
most beat up on the street (and in all of New Brighton,
for that matter). That house was rain washed brown,
with withered worn splitting wood and rusting nails
from head to foot. But the view from the hallway
was beautiful. You could see the island as round,
with trees and an occasional house. I loved that hall
window. It gave me a feeling of majesty, surveying
my imagined kingdom, to escape the sorrow within.
Six families lived in that old building. Three
apartments on each side, one on each of the three
floors. And, in the backyard, down a little backalley hill, there were six different scraggly vegetable
patches. And though it wasn’t the country, everyone
grew vegetables—and don’t you think they were
growin’ em for fun, like some folks do, it was so
they could eat during the summer, till winter when
there were lean salt-porked times again.
All of the six families weren’t all families to each
other either. We were family of sorts, cause we had to
be, my mother and I, Ethel and Catherine. We lived
on the top floor on the school side of the building
(every morning five minutes later than I ought to
have—I looked out the window at the red school
house with its big clocks, 4 of them, with different
times on each, to see I was late again).
Life was eventful at 205 York. I not only thought
so but so did the other inhabitants, the neighbors,
and the police. There was Miss Sadie, running down
the middle of York Avenue with a hatchet, tryin’ to
kill her old man. And she had religion too, the fire
of religious fervor and conviction. And there was
Mrs. Perry and her beer in the sink and in the icebox
and the card games. And the iceman comin’ and the
woodman comin’--a bushel of wood for 25cents and
the coal and a big black dusty bag of coal in the coal
bin and the cellar full of ashes, white grey ashes and
little half-burned coals. The steady tingle of coal
pouring into the bin. That sound of that tingling coal,
through a child’s ears, was so absorbing.
And ol’ man Johnson, the number’s runner with
his numbers slips and book, a quiet ole man with
his daughter Francis and her hunched back. And the
Smith girls, three tall, skinny girls and their men
who would show up at 205 after midnight, in cars.
Miss Ethel out on the streets on Saturday nights
with ice picks and knives, cursing and fighting,
but who never seemed to get hurt but was always
hurtin’ somebody. And me getting’ out of the police
car after freckle-faced Ray took us walking all over
Staten Island we got lost. And on the first floor, as
you went in the door, Miss Minnie (who mamma
was real good friends with) and her daughter Ethel. I
used to try to figure out what they were friends about
cause mamma wasn’t friendly... didn’t think much
of anybody. Downstairs, underneath us, Mr. Hicks
and his girlfriend, Lucille, stayed. Mr. Hicks was a
tall, slender, wavy-haired brown skinned man—an
image of konked-hair aspiration. He was real nice
to Ethel. He was her hero. Mr. Hicks always had
girlfriends and card games. When he wasn’t beating
Lucille, there were card games all night long. Men
and women would come and leave all night and
all day long, drinking King Kong beer, and even
whiskey. And sometimes they would play cards for
days.
And sometimes Mamma went down and played
cards, and of course we found ten thousand different
things to ask her, til she would get mad at us. I didn’t
like to see Mamma down there playing cards, and she
knew it. It made me look like I didn’t want to look.
And there were a lot of rough women there too, and
she was my mamma. Some of those women came to
our house at times and I didn’t like them either. They
talked rough and acted rough. Then Mamma would
drink too much and I would come down and ask
her something and she would kiss me in front of all
those people... saying nice things she never thought
to say in the dim cold morning or the afternoons
when I came home from school. How could I be
anything if she was going to be like that? Kissin’ me
and showin’ me off in front of all those people... and
in front of men I had to run from when I met them
in the dark hallways... and her kiss mixed heavy
with the smell of beer and wine and snuff to cap it
off! And her with such a pretty soft sensitive brown
face with high pronounced cheekbones, black hair
parted in the middle like a placid Indian... grabbin’
at my hair and tryin’ to show them the streak of red
hair right in the middle... why’d she always do that?
Not giving it the credit from a father and creating
Beatdom
15
doubt in me about that because I didn’t know where
it came from either... and didn’t know why she did it
or what it meant.
Winters at 205 York were without insulation. In
the winter it was cold. I started making the fire in
the stove in the morning for fun when I was seven
years old, and I made it so good that mamma stopped
getting up til it was warm and before I knowed it
was something I had to do.
My sisters and I didn’t love each other none, but
in the winter with cold air seeping through the wood
slats at night, we’d begin to like each other more.
All three of us shared a bed and we’d snuggle up
under one another and play writing games on each
other’s backs. And we’d get up under one another
like puppies ‘til Mamma came and then we were all
strangers again, fighting and hating.
In the summer it was hot and the smell of burning
paper, used to burn out bedbugs, would permeate the
house. Summer mornings I would cautiously awake
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
was there and they weren’t was a victory of sorts.
Out of sight out of mind. I would go back to sleep
with relief. The day had not yet come cause dreamin
wasn’t done with ‘til Mamma called us, warningly
and finally.
My mamma was somethin’ else. She was always
complaining either about what we didn’t do, me
and my sisters, or about what we didn’t have. When
she was drinking she’d promise me a nice house...
always talkin’ about that house we were gonna
have... and how nice we was goin’ to live in it...
and every time me believing it... settin’ me thinking
about that house all the time... and mostly looking
through the windows of other people’s houses, all
over the island... and wishing I was in them... warm
and good inside... with us sittin’ down at a dining
room table and eatin’ and invitin’ friends in to visit
awhile. In reality, we never invited friends to 205
York ‘cause Mamma would sit there and act evil
and say real unpleasant things to us while they were
there and downright nasty things about them when
they’d gone after a strained half-hour or so.
But then that’s a longer story... my mamma... she
knew how to create dissatisfaction, alright. I guess
she kind of hated us all ‘cause she couldn’t give us
anything we ought to have and we were always there
to remind her of it.
After Catherine’s arrival I had to start thinking
about what I could do that nobody else could do real
16
Beatdom
well. I couldn’t be a big fighter... cause there was
always somebody bigger... I couldn’t be the prettiest
because not only were there all those movie stars
but because of Catherine. I thought, “I gotta do
something, be something that nobody can take away
from me.” And I pondered, and thought, and I read.
And I read many a day and months, and thought...
and one morning I woke up and knew that I could
get something and be something that I didn’t have
to ask anyone for and nobody could take away from
me. I could feel harder, think harder and take riches
from the world that they couldn’t stop me from
having cause most people didn’t know they were
there for the taking. And nobody could stop me from
having them as long as I didn’t let them know what
it was I wanted. And that became mine, my dream.
And being black didn’t matter, cause schools, the
principal, nobody could take from you what they
didn’t know existed. And all I had to do was guard
it, and believe in it and it would be mine some day.
Now, I was walking back to that ramshackle house to
see if I could stop our mother from putting Catherine
in for electric shock. I would try to save my older
sister. I wondered, as I walked, how I grew so far apart
from everyone on the island? It was easy to know. I
had stopped being a part of anything all those years
ago. When I became absolutely determined to shake
free of my family, I would latch onto other people
or be taken up by others for short periods of time. It
would be with other girls I liked, or girls whose lives
I liked. I always followed people for some quality.
I was never sure whether they possessed it or if I
endowed them with it. What it came down to was
that they seemed free. They were not like me, they
were not like my family.
And now, I was coming back home and I thought
I should feel glad to know that all I was and felt
and desired and been and been thought of by others
would be admired. But the world I was walking back
into had not changed with time. Only the buildings
had gotten more ragged and worn or torn down,
but mamma, Ressie, Ethel, and Catherine were all
still stuck in the time and place they never moved
from. Almost the same as when I had left them years
before. I would enter their world and try, try to pluck
out my sister Catherine, and try not to fall back into
that time warp where I became little skinny, lonely
defiant unheard child again.
The Beats On the
Road
Travel and the Beat Generation
by David S. Wills
More so than any other literary movement, the
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
serious questions relating to the environment, Beat
Generation literature and history has played a major
role influencing people over the past fifty years.
We often look to Jack Kerouac as the great
backpacker, whose On the Road is credited with
sending thousands of readers literally on the road…
but he certainly wasn’t the perpetual traveller many
think, and the other members of the Beat Generation
- whom are less well known for their journeys –
travelled far more.
It is strange that when one thinks about the Beat
Generation one invariably thinks of New York or
San Francisco, because between there lay thousands
of miles that they all travelled, and beyond them lay
a near infinite abyss that many sought to explore.
But these were mere catchments for the meeting of
minds; where the young writers and artists of their
day met and exchanged knowledge – knowledge that
lead them on the road, and was informed by their own
personal adventures.
Jack Kerouac
Hitch hiked a thousand miles and brought
you wine.
JK, Book of Haikus
Kerouac is the logical starting point for an essay
about the Beat Generation and travel. On the Road is
undoubtedly the most famous Beat text, and concerned
– as the title suggests – travelling. The book detailed
Kerouac’s journeys across North America, and
inspired subsequent generations of readers, writers
and artists to take to the road for spiritual (or nonspiritual) journeys of their own.
Interestingly, Kerouac was not always fond of
hitchhiking, although he has had a huge impact upon
hitchhikers. He didn’t really do as much travelling
as people seem to think, either. Kerouac grew up
in Lowell, Massachusetts and stayed there until he
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17
Above: Map of Kerouac’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
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Beatdom
the outskirts of the campus in rows of wellto-do houses with lawns and television sets
in each living room with everybody looking
at the same thing and thinking the same
thing at the same time while the Japhies of
the world go prowling in the wilderness. In both Japhy Ryder and Dean Moriarty Kerouac
portrayed an attractive outsider that stood against
everything society demanded. He presented romantic
depictions of these footloose individuals that etched
in the consciousness of his readers a desire to be that
free soul.
Japhy Ryder was based on Zen poet Gary Snyder,
whom Kerouac met in San Francisco, after travelling
across America with a backpack full of manuscripts.
His Buddhist wisdom inspired Kerouac to attempt
communing with nature, as depicted in The Dharma
Bums.
Perhaps his Book of Sketches is a better example
of Kerouac’s travel-writing. He details a nearly three
thousand mile hitch-hiking journey from 1952, as he
travelled from North Carolina to California, by way of
Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado,
Utah and Nevada. In the book he describes every
town he visits and every ride he took in travelling
across America.
In 1957 Kerouac travelled to Tangier, Morocco, with
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. He didn’t enjoy
his time there, but helped Burroughs with the concept
and title of what would later become Naked Lunch.
This journey was recorded in Desolation Angels –
which also details his musings on life as he wanders
across North America and Europe. The chapter titles
in this book include: “Passing Through Mexico,”
“Passing Through New York,” “Passing Through
Tangiers, France and London” and “Passing Through
America Again.”
Later, suffering from his inability to deal with fame
and his disappointment at not being taken seriously
by critics (as they viewed the Beats as a mere fad),
Kerouac attempted to heal himself by escaping to Big
Sur, as described in the novel of the same name.
After Big Sur, Kerouac returned to his mother in
Long Island and didn’t stray far from her for the
rest of his life. They moved together first to Lowell,
Massachusetts, and then to St. Petersburg, Florida.
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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 rentYork 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
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21
Burroughs
considered
Allen Ginsberg and
exotic locations and
Peter Orlovsky at
global travel as extremely
Frankfurt Airport, 1978. important. He set these
Allen Ginsberg
Both photos by Ludwig things as a goal for himself,
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,
Senegal, and wrote “Dakar Doldrums.”
Ginsberg returned to New York and attempted to
“go straight,” but moved to San Francisco and became
heavily involved in its poetry scene. In 1951 he took a
trip to Mexico to meet Burroughs, but Burroughs had
already left for Ecuador. In 1953 Ginsberg returned to
explore ancient ruins and experiment with drugs, and
in 1956 he visited Kerouac in Mexico City.
In 1955 he read “Howl” at the Six Gallery and
became a Beat Generation icon. When Howl and
Other Poems was published, City Lights Bookstore
was charged with publishing indecent literature, and
the trial helped made Ginsberg a celebrity.
During the trial Ginsberg moved to Paris with his
partner, Peter Orlovsky. From there they travelled to
Tangier to help Burroughs compose Naked Lunch.
They returned through Spain to stay in the “Beat
Hotel” and help Burroughs sell the book to Olympia
Press. In a Parisian café, Ginsberg began writing
“Kaddish.”
In 1960 Ginsberg travelled to Chile with Lawrence
Ferlinghetti for a communist literary conference. He
travelled through Bolivia to Lima, Peru, where he
tried yage for the first time.
In 1961 Ginsberg and Orlovsky sailed on the SS
America for Europe. They looked for Burroughs in
Paris. From Paris he travelled through Greece to Israel,
meeting Orlovsky, who’d taken a different route.
Together, Ginsberg and Orlovsky travelled down to
East Africa, attending a rally in Nairobi. From Africa
they travelled to India, first to Bombay and then Delhi,
where they met Gary Snyder and Joanne Kryger.
Ginsberg and Snyder travelled throughout India for
fifteen months, consulting as many wise men as they
could find.
After India, Ginsberg travelled on his own through
Bangkok, Saigon and Cambodia, and then spent five
weeks in Japan with Snyder and Kryger. He wrote
“The Change” on a train from Kyoto to Tokyo.
In 1965 Ginsberg travelled to Cuba through Mexico,
but was kicked out of the country for allegedly calling
Raul Castro “gay” and Che Guevara “cute.” The
authorities put him on a flight to Czechoslovakia. In
Prague Ginsberg discovered his work had become
very popular and used his royalties there to travel
to Moscow. He travelled back through Warsaw and
Auschwitz.
Beatdom
23
Back in Prague Ginsberg was elected “King of May”
by the students of the city, and spent the following
few days “running around with groups of students,
acting in a spontaneous, improvised manner - making
love.”
Eventually he was put on a flight to London after
the authorities found his notebook – containing
graphically sexual poems and politically charged
statements. In London he partied with Bob Dylan and
the Beatles, and organised a big poetry reading.
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.
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
meet Ezra Pound.
In1971 a plane ticket to India and West Bengal was
anonymously donated, and Ginsberg travelled to the
flood and famine ravaged area.
Back in America, Ginsberg was always travelling
– seeking wisdom and change. He moved around
the country, participating in demonstrations and
rallies. He trained with Buddhists, founded the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa,
in Boulder, Colorado, and toured with Bob Dylan’s
Rolling Thunder Review.
Ginsberg toured Europe again in 1979 – visiting
Cambridge, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Paris, Genoa,
Rome and Tubingen, among other places. He was
accompanied by Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky.
In the early eighties Ginsberg settled in Boulder, to
play a more active role at Naropa, following a series
of problems that had troubled the school. During this
time he travelled to Nicaragua to work with other poets
on stopping American interference in the politics of
other nations. (He returned to Nicaragua for a poetry
festival in 1986.)
He spent eight weeks in China following a 1984
poetry conference with Gary Snyder, and in 1985
travelled in the USSR for another poetry conference.
In August and September of 1986 he travelled
throughout Eastern Europe – performing in Budapest,
Warsaw, Belgrade and Skopje. In January of 1988 he
travelled to Israel to help bring peace to the Middle
East. Later that year he returned to Japan to help
protest nuclear weapons and airport developments.
After twenty five years, Ginsberg was re-crowned
King of May upon his return to Prague in 1990. A
few months later he travelled to Seoul, South Korea,
24
Beatdom
to represent America in the 12th World Congress of
Poets.
Continuing to travel right up until 1994, Ginsberg
went to France in ’91 and ’92, and then toured Europe
in ’93. His four month tour took him around most of
Europe, including a ten day teaching job with Anne
Waldman.
After selling his personal letters to Stanford
University, Ginsberg bought a loft in New York,
where he largely remained until his death in 1997.
Gregory Corso
The only member of the Beat Generation to have
actually been born in Greenwich Village was Gregory
Corso. He was the youngest of the Beats, and had an
extremely tough childhood, growing up on the streets
of New York without a mother and did time in both
the Tombs and Clinton Correctional Facility.
He met Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in New York and
was soon introduced to the rest of the Beats. In 1954
he moved to Boston and educated himself. His first
book of poetry was released with the help of Harvard
students.
Corso worked various jobs across America, and
stayed for a while in San Francisco, performing with
Kerouac and becoming a well known member of the
Beats.
Between 1957 and 1958 Corso lived in
Paris, where he wrote many of the poems
that would make up Gasoline, which was Next page:
published by City Lights. In October of Corso’s
1958 he went to Rome to visit Percy grave, in
Byssthe Shelley’s tomb. He travelled Rome, by
briefly to Tangier to meet Ginsberg and Giovanni
Orlovsky, and brought them back to Dell’Orto
Paris to live in the Beat Hotel. In 1961 he
briefly visited Greece. In February 1963
he travelled to London.
It seems that Corso came to consider Europe his
home, in spite of having been born in New York. His
travels there inspired him, and he spent many years
living in Paris. During a return to New York he said:
“It dawns upon me that my maturing years were had
in Europe – and lo, Europe seems my home and [New
York], a strange land.”
Beatdom
25
Neal Cassady
Neal is, of course, the very soul of the voyage
into pure, abstract meaningless motion. He
is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready
to sacrifice family, friends, even his very
car itself to the necessity of moving from
one place to another.
William Burroughs, on Neal Cassady
His name may not be as famous as that of Kerouac,
but Cassady is well known to any Beat enthusiast. He
was portrayed as Dean Moriarty in On the Road: the
man Sal Paradise followed on his cross-country trips.
Whilst he may remain most well known for inspiring
Kerouac, Cassady influenced many people to enjoy
their lives, and to break free of convention. John
Clellon Holmes talked about him in Go, Ginsberg
referenced him in “Howl” and Hunter S. Thompson
mentioned him (unnamed) in Hell’s Angels. He was
26
Beatdom
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
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
known as an exhilarating driver.
After meeting Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York
City, Kerouac and Cassady travelled across America
and into Mexico. Kerouac was inspired by Cassady’s
life and his letter-writing style, whilst the latter sought
advice about novel-writing from Kerouac, who’d
already published The Town and the City, a novel
featuring a far more conventional style of writing than
that for which Kerouac later became known.
Both the subject and style of On the Road owe their
existence to Neal Cassady. His impact upon Kerouac
cannot be understated.
Cassady settled with his wife, Carolyn, in San Jose,
and worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He kept
in touch with the rest of the Beats, although they all
drifted apart philosophically.
In the sixties Kerouac withdrew into alcoholism
and what seems like an early onset of middle-age,
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
28
Beatdom
Below: Michael McClure by
Gloria Graham
in 1996, and celebrates the inhabitation of certain
places on our planet.
Today there is an incredible volume of work
concerning the poetry of Gary Snyder, and it largely
divides its focus between his interest in Asian culture
and the environment. It is pretty much agreed,
however, that the natural world and a strong sense of
community have pervaded his works throughout his
entire career.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ballroom, San Francisco’s Human Be-in, Airlift
Africa, Yale University, the Smithsonian, and the
Library of Congress. He even read to an audience of
lions at San Francisco Zoo. He has read all around the
world, including Rome, Paris, Tokyo, London and in
a Mexico City bull ring.
His travels have carried him around North America,
South America, Africa and much of Asia.
Bob Kaufman
Kaufman was one of thirteen children, and at age
thirteen he ran away from the chaos of his New
Orleans home. He joined the Merchant Marine and
spent twenty years travelling the world. It is said that
in this time he circled the globe nine times.
He met Jack Kerouac and travelled to San Francisco
to become a part of the poetry renaissance. He rarely
wrote his poems down, preferring to read them aloud
in coffee shops.
Kaufman was always more popular in France than
in America, and consequently the bulk of his papers
can be found in the Sorbonne, Paris. Today his written
work is hard to find.
Ferlinghetti claimed to have been a bohemian from
another era, rather than a Beat. Indeed, he isn’t often
viewed in the same light. He was the publisher of the
Beats, more than a Beat Generation writer, and he
lived a more stable life. While Ginsberg, Kerouac and
co. were on the road, gaining inspiration and living
their footloose lives, Ferlinghetti was mostly settled
in San Francisco.
He travelled a little – going to Japan during World
War II and studying in Paris after attending Columbia
University. He lived in France between 1947 and
1951.
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
Harold Norse
Soviet Union, Cuba, Mexico, Chile and Nicaragua.
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 cutand 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
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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 get where you are not
You must go by the way wherein there is no ecstasy
…In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not
And what you do not know
Is the only thing you know
And what you own
Is what you don’t own
And where you are
Is where you are not.
to make a living.” I first read those words on a bus
rolling through the high plains outside Mexico City
and they echoed in my head as we plunged south,
through the impoverished streets of Acapulco to the
wild beaches of Guerrero. It struck me that in all my
years of work and education no-one ever suggested
it is important to think about how to live. If I wanted
any wisdom on that front I would have to find it on
my own.
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
to the jungles of South America, never quite catching
up to her dreams. Their journeys are tragic, not
triumphal, yet the dream remains – wistful, stubborn
– of California sunsets and the glint of diamonds.
Travelling your own road requires a fervent belief in
the infinite possibilities of freedom, but catastrophe
and failure are always among the possibilities.
Vincent Van Gogh, who is unjustly dismissed as an
ear-hacking auteur, wrote luminous, philosophical
letters pondering his struggles to live with artistic
integrity in a material world. “I think that most
people who know me consider me a failure, and… it
really might be so, if some things do not change for
the better,” he wrote on his thirtieth birthday. “When
I think it might be so, I feel it so vividly that it quite
depresses me… but one doesn’t expect out of life what
one has already learned that it cannot give.” What
life, faced square on, cannot give is any assurance of
a happy ending. There is powerful literary testimony
to the fact that courage is no guarantor of success.
The Californians wanted many
things, accumulation, social success,
amusement, luxury, and a curious
banking security, the new barbarians
wanted only two things – land and
food…. Whereas the wants of the
Californians were nebulous and
undefined, the wants of the Okies were
beside the roads.
Land and food are buried deep in the heart of
every personal saga. Even rolling stones need a
resting place. (Kerouac first uses “beat” in the sense
of beat-up, worn out, kicked around. Only later did
it become a badge of honour.) Truth is, unhitching
yourself from the comfortable yolk of everydayness
is difficult business. It is an act of necessity,
desperation even, undertaken by those who refuse to
live half-lives. If you heed Thoreau’s injunction to
“step to the music [you hear], however measured or
far away,” you are liable to find yourself lost, cold,
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
wanderers. There is nothing lazy about going in search
of experience. Hunter Thompson scraped, rowed and
rolled across the Americas not because he didn’t want
to work but because he wanted meaningful work.
The tragedy of The Great Gatsby is that the idle rich
flourish at the expense of hungry, intelligent young
men who cannot find honest labour. Hell, even Dean
Moriarty, “the most fantastic parking-lot attendant
in the world,” pays for his adventure with stints of
“working without pause eight hours a night.”
Dylan, Bob ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ from Highway
61 Revisited
Eliot, T.S. ‘East Coker’ from Four Quartets
Gellhorn, Martha Travels with Myself & Another
Kerouac, Jack On The Road
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
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
fans of Jack Kerouac is how reading his seminal
novel On the Road changed their lives. I have come
to the conclusion that sadly this isn’t actually true. I
myself went through the same emotional rollercoaster
after reading this book, but many years on I have
figured out that sadly it hasn’t really changed my life
a great deal (if at all), but that I just really, really liked
his book. Below you will find a short essay on my
related life experiences and how I tried to emulate the
adventures within the book and become more “beat”
after reading Kerouac for the first time.
As so often happens in my life my introduction to
something important and life changing, in this case
Kerouac and the Beat movement, occurred purely by
the most random of occurrences. In 2004 I had grown
fond of an American animated series called “Home
Movies.” The series revolved around a young boy
named Brandon and his friends as they write, direct
and star in their own home movies, while interacting
with a number of memorable and off-beat characters.
In one episode, the main character Brandon decides
to run away from home and “Live on the road, just
like Jack Kerouac.” This throw away line that would
barely register with most viewers started to play on
my mind and as a fairly young (24 years old) man
with little experience of American literature; I had no
idea who this Kerouac fellow was or why Brandon
would want to emulate him.
A short trip to Amazon provided me with my first
taste of the Beat visage. Glowing references and
“classic” status were thrown about like confetti
and littered many of the books on offer, but one in
particular seemed to stand out from the crowd in its
referential glory. That book of course was On the
Road. Devouring the book chapter after chapter, the
story of a young man seemingly looking for answers
from other people in a society that he didn’t quit fit
in struck a chord within me. Having grown up either
being made to read “serious” books in school or
32
Beatdom
trashy horror novels for fun, it came as something of
a shock to discover that the printed word could be so
personal, beautiful and meaningful. Though I didn’t
fully understand it at the time, something had been
identified inside of me. I then came to fully realise that
my quiet social awkwardness and misplaced feelings
towards myself and society, a feeling that I wanted to
do my own thing and be damned with conventional
culture were by no means unique. I had discovered,
thanks to this cartoon, that these feelings had been
experienced by people just like me 50 years earlier
and that they had even gone through the trouble of
writing books about it.
Always wanting to see the world, and in particular
America, I had managed to experience a brief flurry
of adventure in my nineteenth year, when a student
work programme had allowed me to travel and work
in America on a Summer camp for Jewish children
in the Pennsylvania mountains. Though ultimately a
false dawn in my new and exciting life of travelling
the world and having adventures like a Welsh Sal
Paradise, it did give me a taste of what was possible,
even if the highlight of my trip to the USA was lasting
just one weekend in Manhattan before flying home.
Though brief, I started to believe that it was possible to
have the kind of life I had only read about and it none
the less provided me with some frame of reference for
the future I wished to experience.
After returning to the UK, I took a menial and
soul destroying job as an office administrator for
the Health Service, with the sole intention of saving
enough money in order to plan my next trip abroad.
Around this time, however, I also started an illicit and
secret affair with a femme-fatal-like, slightly older
work colleague. I justified this to myself as a worthy
and fun escape from the brain sapping monotony
that everyday life in a modern office offers. Eager to
impress and deepen our emotional bond I offered to
lend her the book that had come to mean so much
to me. She eventually returned it some months later
upon my repeated request and when quizzed as to
what was her favourite part of the book, she crushed
me by replying “Ohhh, all of it.” Needless to say, the
book was unread and any further connection I was
hoping to make with this woman would have to be
purely physical and have nothing to do with something
as unpopular and time consuming as intellectual
attachment.
in her sad, trapped despair or ripping my clothes off
with her sweet, angel voiced fury.
Undeterred I vowed to continue my Beat studies
and continue with my original plan to travel and apply
myself to fully understanding the messages they taught.
However, I was having trouble putting into practice
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
middle-aged, sagging, dog-eared, dried up, miserable
excuse for a women that seem to populate offices
everywhere. The connection with Kerouac once again
came to the fore as I soon found that Neil embodied
the spirit and soul of Dean Moriarty, a friend that I had
been unconsciously looking for (at least in my mind)
since I first read On the Road all those years ago. Neil
typified the complete embodiment of how to live life
without regret. He was tall, good looking, insanely
confident and the women loved him, everything I felt
was denied to me, either through reality or my own
warped view of self. To my surprise, he was also a
good person and an even better friend.
open my own business.
Over a year has since passed and it brings us pretty
much up to the present at the time of writing. Having
stayed in intermittent contact with Neil during this
time, it was with great excitement that I received an
email from him letting me know that he was planning
on travelling across North America. I felt that this was
the right time to make another change in my life and
the thought of a real life On the Road adventure with
my surrogate Cassady was too good an opportunity to
pass me by. The dreams from my youth of travelling
and exploring life dusted themselves off and I
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
Deborah Baker.
Review by Harry Burrus
Baker’s choices are interesting in that she calls this
The Beats in India but spends more time with Corso
than with Gary Snyder. Corso never made it to India,
despite years of discussing the trip, while Snyder and
Joanne Kyger spent time there with Ginsberg. Baker
presents Joanne Kyger in a rather unfavorable light.
Tibetan mysticism and Buddhism, Vaishnavites,
Hindu gods and goddesses, are broached as Ginsberg
pursues a guru and hoping to receive instruction from
one. Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s time in Calcutta and
Benares receives a fair amount of attention, but it is
the Indian political and poetic scene with its various
players that fills a large portion of the book and
unless one is interested in the different deities of the
subcontinent it can be tedious.
Given the numerous Indian poets presented, I felt
it was more the essence of what being Beat was that
allowed them to be so prominent and, yet, we do
learn something about early 1960s Indian politics and
poetics.
However, it is the persona of Hope Savage that
looms large in this story. Like Allen, she, too, is on a
quest, searching for something elusive and undefined
and more than likely unobtainable. Hope Savage is younger than this group, born
around 1938. She is presented as being intelligent,
good-looking, inquisitive, and dissatisfied with her
surroundings – wherever she is. She travels the world
searching for that unnamable something, something
she can’t find in the United States or wherever she
happens to be. She must move on. Corso says he’s in
love with her – she helps him out a lot with material
things (via money she gets from her family) – yet,
Corso marries someone else. Hope doesn’t have
romantic feelings for Corso. She does encounter
Ginberg in briefly in India.
Deborah Baker took dead aim to weave Hope
Savage into this story. I wager the majority of Beat
aficionados have never heard of her. She’s not known
for writing
a collection
of poetry or
a novel. She
appears
in a few
letters
of
some minor
characters
(that most
have never
heard of)
and
yet
B a k e r
introduces her as a colorful thread that weaves through
this story, yet, her story goes nowhere because no one
knows what happened to her.
What interests me the most about this book is the
structure. The syntax. It is a fractured narrative that
meanders back and forth through time, beginning well
into Ginsberg’s Indian journey, and unfolds largely
through flashbacks. We also have flash forwards,
things that happen years later – in many ways this is
a collage.
Not surprisingly, Ginsberg’s Indian Journals contains
more detail about his time in Indian than does Blue
Hand. Baker uses many of AG’s entries as springboards
to energize her account. Interestingly, Savage’s name
barely surfaces in Indian Journals. Clearly, Baker
was more attracted to the character of Hope Savage
than Ginsberg was.
No doubt, Hope Savage was an unusual person
and I wanted to hear more about her, see a number
of photographs, but I felt I was being teased by
Baker. Baker presents this multileveled personality,
but why? Just to add mystery? Baker really couldn’t
go anywhere with Savage since so little is known
about her. Perhaps it was just to show there was an
enigmatic female out there who had her own quest
and was wrapped in the Beat shroud.
Beatdom
35
I saw a little girl get bit by a dog this afternoon
in Central Park. I watched her from a stone bench
beside the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner) crowd
of men arguing baseball just down the street from
the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goyanightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand.
She went off like a car alarm but it was the way she
screamed that made the old men give up baseball
and rush over to console her. In 30 years it is
the solitary bonafide miracle I have witnessed.
You’ll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot
Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling
from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping
his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing
his way down onto their heads—there wouldn’t
be a flinch— “We’re talking béisbol here coño.”
She might not even remember why she’d never
pet a dog again.
The Esquina Caliente finally cheered her up
enough that she smiled and jammed her head against
her mom’s shoulder. The men went back to baseball
and the mom carried her child home.
I closed up my notebook and followed the little
girl and mom to Calle Neptuno where they caught
a cab and I decided to walk over to the mother of a
friend who sells guarapo (sugarcane juice) out of
her garage near the Malecón.
I wondered if maybe that girl would pet a dog
again.
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
but more famously a pimp. Women from all over
Havana would converge on the path he took each
morning to get his coffee at the Cafe El Louvre. He
seduced the most beautiful woman in Cuba and her
lover, a French gigolo named Luis Lotot, challenged
the Cuban for her love and ended up murdering him
in revenge.
I’d started a laughing fit at the gym that day because
I’d mentioned I wanted to meet Felix Savon, the
three time Olympic Heavyweight gold medalist.
Most the coaches at Trejo are either Olympic gold
medalists themselves or have coached Olympic
gold medalists either on the national team or the
Olympic team. Everybody knows everybody in
Havana anyway. I wasn’t aware that a not-tooclosely-guarded state secret was that Felix Savon
was a homosexual.
“Sure you can meet him! We’ve already talked to him
about you. He’d like to meet you in the Presidential
suite at the Nacional this evening. He’ll bring his
medals to show you but he won’t wear them around
his neck.”
The Cubans have a saying you’re reminded of on
a daily basis, reinforced with good and bad material:
“Life is a joke to be taken very seriously.”
While I was grinning to myself about this, I got to
a street corner and noticed a sweaty, filthy, beaten up
old man crawling on the ground like a crab across
the intersection. All he had on was a loincloth. Out
of perhaps 400 people walking on the sidewalk, and
the 15 taxis, 10 bicycle taxis, forty cars on the road, I
had the only pair of eyes staring. I appeared to be the
only person unaccepting and remotely concerned of
this man’s role in the universe. Keep in mind there
aren’t all that many traffic lights or stop signs in
Havana and yet I’ve never ridden a local taxi going
under 45 miles an hour through a street as busy as
Times Square. In New York they have arguments
with their horns, in Havana they have opera. As
he progressed to the center of the intersection, still
in the middle of the street with the cars patiently
waiting for him to pass, I noticed there was a rope
attached to his ankle tied to something that remained
off stage behind a lamppost. I reached into my
breast pocket and took out a cigarette waiting with
my match until I saw what in the baker’s fuck he
was dragging. Then I saw the edge of the rock and
with some more heaving and Sisyphean anguish,
the full bulk of its size: a truck’s tire.
I lit that cigarette and zigzagged a few streets till
I got to that garage where my friend Lesvanne was
jamming sugar cane into a grinder while his mother
dumped a pail of guarapo into carafes full of ice
and poured one of those into the cups of waiting
Beatdom
37
construction workers on their break. After the first
sip you have to wipe the chilled foam off your lips.
Lesvanne had just come back from Miami.
Lesvanne used to sleep with American tourists
for gifts provided they weren’t from California. He
was a man of principle.
The first time I met him he showed me his worn
digital camera. He showed me a few photos of his
common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the
American tourist female “friends” he’d made.
I’d asked him if his American “friends” presented
any kind of problem with his “wife” and he asked
why it should?
“Would you like to see a video of my wife?” he
asked.
I said sure.
All I could make out was underwater blurs of
color undulating in curious ways.
“What am I looking at here?”
“That’s her gallbladder. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him
why he would film his wife on the operating table
having her gallbladder removed.
“Because I love all of her, man. Inside and out. I
want to know all of her.”
Lesvanne also looks and dresses a helluva lot like
Sinbad which makes his principles and wisdom
especially surreal to contend with.
Emotionally, I’ve never met a Cuban who required
38
Beatdom
you taking your shoes off before entering into their
lives. Self-consciousness isn’t really part of the
equation. Lesvanne has a little more fun with it. He
taunts you with his enjoyment.
“How was Miami?”
“Let’s walk. I’ll show you the pictures.”
“First I have a question.”
“Dime.”
“Two questions.”
“Dime.”
“Felix Savon?”
He smiled. “What about him?”
“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.
He showed me photos from his visit to Miami.
While he tried to show me the pictures he was
stopped in the street dozens of times. People from
their homes invited us for coffee. Kids egged him
on to play pelota. Store keepers shook his hands.
Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about
his mother. He kept embracing people over and
over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried
to show me a photograph people came over to look
and ask questions about his trip.
Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of all the
stuff Lesvanne saw in Miami that he was determined
to own once he moved to America and got busy
making a success of himself: hummers, houses,
pools, jewelry, women, bars, boats. Lesvanne had
one favorite outfit he wore nearly every day that he
washed every night. It was blindingly bright.
I didn’t say anything until he’d finished showing
all the pictures.
I’d lost count of how many people he’d kissed
and hugged hello on our walk. It threw me because
after breaking up a couple times with long term
relationships I went months before I realized that
I was having no human physical contact. How did
that happen?
We found a bench in a quiet park and I noticed a
statue of John Lennon on another bench down the
path from us.
“Okay, so you’re loaded but maybe you’re also
afraid of losing everything all the time. Your afraid
your wife is gonna take you for half. You have to
live in a gated community because you’re afraid of
everyone. You have no sense of community or even
give a fuck about your neighbor. Your kids don’t
respect you and just want money to buy shit to
distract themselves from being bored all the time.
All the old people you know are in old folks homes
because nobody wants to deal with them. You can’t
be friends with any kids because everyone will think
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:
Agencia Brasil; Opposite: Brin Friesen; Below:
loaded. Then you’re happier than here?”
Gildemax
“Why not?”
Beatdom
39
Lest We Forget
-In Memoriam of HSTby 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
simply, an idealist), then surely you’ll have yourself a
down the pavement towards unknown lands.
traveling companion of some sort.
Hop onto I-10 West out of Houston and don’t look
Thus, let me introduce, coming along on our binge,
back. Preferably at night, around 12:30, when you
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
If Hunter’s along for the ride we’re going to have to
in bed watching Cheers re-runs and wonder aloud just
make
a few last minute changes.
what the hell kind of banshee moved in next door.
The skyline’ll be burning bright and you watch it
fade in the rear view. That slick silhouette will always
guide you back home.
How to pack a last second suitcase:
1) No more than one extra pair of pants from the
ones currently on your body.
2) A thoroughly random assortment of shirts
(preferably with lots of buttons to be worn loosely
and with abandon) so as to appear in public with just
the right touch of mismatched eccentricity to keep the
hounds off you. Hotel lobbies are the gauntlet of the
hospitality industry.
3) People always talk about taking cameras on
trips. Personally, I don’t know what the fuck to do
with them. Take pictures?
4) Toothbrush. For scraping the death off your
tongue in the morning.
5) A coat or jacket of some kind. Never forget
that wherever you go and wherever you are, it’s cold
out there.
6) A formidable roll of cash.
7) DO NOT take all the dog-eared copies of
books by your favorite authors (i.e. ones discussed in
this magazine). Leave that shit at home. We’re getting
out, remember?
8) Notebook or typewriter. Laptops cause
problems but if push comes to shove. . . tomato,
tomahto.
Rules 9&10 are only of so-so importance and are
purely for impulsive situations and involve a small
bottle of sambuca, a bag of coffee beans, and a dozen
plastic straws.
40
Beatdom
Quick now, dawn and debauchery wait for no man!
First and foremost, we’re going to go trade in the
aluminum shitbox for some real driving power: A
pearlescent white Pontiac ballbuster. Gritty American
muscle and a bottle of Jack Daniels coming out the
exhaust. Heave, ho!
You can barrel down I-10 in one of those mothers
and lay waste behind you. This ain’t dustin’ crops,
boy. You’re up with the big dogs now.
Additionally, while the ink is drying on the ballbuster,
Hunter’ll be loading the trunk with two double-barrel
shotguns and a bag of golf clubs. With plenty of shells
and balls to boot.
Soon as the ink’s dry we slide in and peel out of the
dealership, nicking the curb on our way out. I’m no
pock-marked Englishman, but even I could give you
a drawing of the madness soon to ensue.
Destination: Ace Hotel, Palm Springs.
We trade shifts and bitch the whole way arguing about
who’s to buy the first round of drinks at the hotel,
but we manage to pick up enough steam on the home
stretch to pull into Palm Springs with plenty of sun on
our backs.
As we pull up in front of the Ace, Hunter clambers
out readjusting his green dealer’s visor and clutching
his leather carry-all to his chest, cigarette hanging out
of his mouth. I toss the keys to an unassuming dwarf
(valet?) and hope for the best.
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 retrothe 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 at Beatdom.
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 fartfilled cushions of the hound.
Beatdom
43
Some days I look back at my travels, and wonder how
I’m still here in one piece. Why am I not listening to the
sounds of earthworm tails slithering across my coffin’s
nails? Why haven’t I been locked away in a cage or the
thorozine hotel for the rest of my days? Many a person
close to me ponders these same questions. Perhaps, it just
wasn’t in the cards for me. Fate is a fickle beast.
March 18th marks the anniversary of the day I was spit
out of my mother into this cruel world, sopping wet,
covered in blood and guts, kicking and screaming. One
year this day brought a special present: a surprise spur
of the moment trip to Las Vegas. I refuse to write about
Vegas. Someone else has already written of the seething
madness that is Vegas. It is his, and his alone. Any tale I
could write would only be viewed as some dime-a-line
hack’s attempt to duplicate it. Instead, I’ll write about my
flight home from Vegas.
***
5:30 AM. The alarm clock on my nightstand is a freight
train running through my spinning head. My tongue is
coated with the taste of stale Scotch. I’m wondering where
the hobo - who obviously took a shit in my mouth - has
gone to. I stagger to the bathroom to scrub this foulness
from my mouth. My bladder is swollen. I opt to relieve
the pressure from it first. I look down into the toilet and
see a spunk filled condom swirling around in the bowl. A
steady blast of deep yellow, toxin filled urine causes it to
almost dance around in the water. I shake the last sticky
drops of semen-laced urine from my prick, and then flush
this final reminder of the call girl with the tattooed Monspubis down into the sewers. Good riddance.
What had I been thinking? Oh, yes-- all my companions
had left on a trip to California earlier in the week. I had
been left to fend for myself, drunk and alone, with a head
full of speed. I begin cringing at the thought of having
my cock flossed with a dry Q-tip by some intern with a
thick Middle Eastern accent, in some clinic filled with
the shamed faces of the burnt. Perhaps I’d take a quick
shower to wash the filth of Sin City off of me before
shoving my belongings into my suitcase and calling a
cab. I had enough time to spare.
Twenty minutes later I’m in the back of a cab heading
towards the airport. My brain is throbbing against the
roof of my skull. I begin cursing the Gods of shit- lordfuck- luck for allowing me access to the previous night’s
carnival of sex, drugs, and debauchery. “Just get me on
this flight, with no delays, I promise, I’ll never ever do
this again.” I offer this as penance to the Gods as I cross
my fingers behind my back.
44
Beatdom
Within minutes of my offering I’m at the airport lugging
my overstuffed suitcase into the bowels of the beast.
Somehow I’ve lost one of the wheels. I’m stumbling
through the madhouse dragging the lopsided beast
behind me, like some sort of wounded elephant. Every
three steps or so the broken side of my case catches the
rug. The case twists violently behind me. I nearly fall
several times wrestling with this sack of booze, sex,
and God knows what soaked clothing. I feel a thousand
glaring eyes burning through me. When I arrive at the
ticket desk I find a sea of angry souls corralled into the
gates of commuter hell. “Damn you! Damn you! Damn
you!” I silently scream inside of my aching head.
I take my place at the end of this wretched line, behind
an octogenarian couple, fresh off of a gambling-awaytheir-life-savings-to-the-sugary-clean-sounds-of-thatsweet-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
buffalo behind them. “You bastards are never going to let
this go smoothly are you!?” My angry inner voice shouts
to the Gods. I smile, and offer my elderly comrades help
with their luggage. Thirty-eight minutes later I’m at the
ticket agent.
A small plump woman - with the smiling eyes of a
person ready to lose all control, then happily stab my
eyes from their sockets with the ball point pen she keeps
behind her ear, if I so much as think of making her day any
harder - greets me. The usual rigmarole is played out and
she asks me for my ID. I remove my wallet, and pull my
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
skull at maximum decibels. I grasp my ID between my
thumb and middle finger. Then in one smooth motion, I
slide the bag into the palm of my hand, like Chris Angel
performing street magic on the strip, and pray my hands
are quicker than those smiling eyes.
She hands me the ticket. I eagerly smile and walk
briskly away towards the gates as she suspiciously eye
fucks my broken case of unmentionables. Sirens of
paranoia are screaming through my head like nuclear
winter is upon me.
Had she seen it? “Jesus, are you there?” No! Now is not
the time to ask for help. Not that I’m deeply religious,
but I find only talking to God when you’re in desperate
need of help is just wrong. Old smiley eyes had probably
already called the Gestapo on me. I feel the Mylar bag
begin to float in the ocean of clammy sweat filling my
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
at a machine next to some land-whale, hoping her mass
would somehow shield me from the eye in the sky. There
was only one thing to do: eat the fluff. I muster up an
Academy Award-worthy fake cough, cover my mouth
with my snack-filled palm and suck the bag into my
mouth.
Ha! Now there was no evidence. I couldn’t have risked
taking any chances trying to dispose of it in any other
way. I made my way to the security screening line. I
observe the procession of shoe-less, belt-less wonders,
stuffing their pocket contents and carry-ons into plastic
tubs before shoving them into the open jaws of the
X-Ray machine. My eyes find amusement in the sneering
grimaces of seasoned air travelers every time some rookie
hasn’t removed all the metals from their pockets, or was
beyond the TSA’s liquid limit. These greenhorns only
slow down the progress of the salty air dogs to the gates,
and the silent hatred of these kindergarteners is evident
in their snarling eyes.
“ Them I-talians are a strange bunch.”
“Yeah, a bunch of grape stomping savages if you ask
me.”
This causes Tex to erupt with a thundering laugh from
deep in his beer barrel.
“Shit boy, I like your style. Name’s Billy Joe Butler,
but you can call me Tex, everybody calls me Tex.”
How’d I guess?
“ Pleased to meet you, my name’s Jones.”
“Well Jonesy, What brings you to viva Laaas Vegas?
Broads, booze, gamblin?”
Let the mind fucking begin.
I’m three people back from the mouth of the beast when
the paranoia really starts seizing me in its razor sharp
claws. My thoughts race to visions of a gang of TSA goons
tackling me, and dragging me off to some interrogation
room away from the eyes of decent Americans, where
then a large man would force an unloving gloved hand
into my terrified rectum, and probe me without even the
common decency of a reach around, while his partner,
the grandson of a Nazi war criminal who escaped to the
States hooks a car battery up to my testicles in order to
force confessions about anything they want out of me.
I try to go to my happy place, as I walk into the beast’s
mouth.
“Well I’m really not supposed to say, but you seem like
a decent American, I think I can trust you.”
I manage to look as calm as a duck on the water as I
stroll through and quickly snatch up the contents of my
tub. Five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight steps, nine
steps, and finally ten steps away the fear washes off me. I
don’t dare to look back; this would only arouse suspicion.
I then make my way quicker than it takes for two fleas
to fuck into an airport bar, to bask in my victory, and
drown the lingering remnants of paranoia in the bottom
of a glass of the sweet brown nectar of the Gods.
“You gotta be shitting me! Them A-rabs is in Vegas
buying up white women?”
I take an empty seat at the bar between a beer barrel
bellied Texan wearing a world champion sized gold belt
buckle, and a pencil pusher, who’s eagerly crack berrying his time away. I order my glass of Johnny Walker on
the rocks with three olives. This arises curiosity in Tex.
“Well shit fire son’a bitch boy, I say, I aint neva seen a
man put olives in his scotch before.”
“ No? It’s an old Italian tradition.”
It’s not, I just love mind fucking people when I travel.
“Sure as shit you can trust me.”
“Well I work for the NSA.”
“Really, dealing with terrorists and them sand
niggers?”
“Yes sir. You see we had intelligence that one of bin
Laden’s head honchos was here in Vegas trying to buy up
white women for his harem.”
“They sure are.”
“Well, did ya catch em?”
“Bet your ass I did Tex! Nobody gets away from
Jones.”
“Well what happened?”
“He was holed up in the Presidential suite over at the
Bellagio.”
“ Shit, I was at the Bellagio all week!”
“Well, you should thank your lucky stars they have
sound proof suites, he made some awful noise.”
“What do ya mean.”
Beatdom
45
“Well, Tex I needed to get some information out of
him.”
“How’d you do that? Chinese water torture?”
“No, we don’t use that any more, but you’d be surprised
the information you can get out of man when you got his
nuts hooked up to a car battery, and a white hot pair of
vice grips clamping down on his asshole.”
“Shit, I bet boy! You’re a goddamn American hero
Jonsey! Bartender, get Jonsey another drink on me!”
“ Now Tex, I trusted you as a God fearing American
with this information. If this were to get out we’d both be
getting worse than the vice grip treatment.”
“Don’t worry, Jonsey I won’t say a word.”
“You’re a good man Tex.”
With this I sucked down my drink and headed to the
gate, leaving old Tex smiling, knowing people like me
were keeping this great country’s white women safe from
hostile foreigners.
I approach the gate just in time to hear my flight will
be boarding shortly. I send my praises to the Gods of
shit-lord-fuck-luck for getting me here with no delays.
I take my place in the line of ants entering the mouth
of the mound. I’m starting to feel my cheeks pull back
into a Cheshire sneer, my joints are starting to feel a
strange electric tingle, the acid is beginning to creep up
on me. I’m greeted at the gates of the sky vessel by a tall
sky waitress who resembles an ostrich. I mosey down
the aisle and find my seat in row twelve, seat A. It’s a
window seat, thank you Jesus! I clamber into my seat and
sit back. I watch the line of boarding passengers slither
through the aisle towards me. I might as well be on a
game show, the grand prize: whoever will be my travel
companion. “Come on big tittied blondey, big titties,
big titties, no fatties, no fatties, big titties, big titties, no
fatties and stop!” I get neither. A slim man who looks
like he just left a Star Trek convention takes the middle
seat, and a middle-aged house wife rests her wide denim
covered ass in the aisle.
Soon the ostrich and a very effeminate sandy brown
haired gentleman named Chip are giving us our bendover-and-kiss-your-ass-good-bye-in-case-of-anemergency speech. Then I hear the rumbling scream of
50,000 horses, as the sky chariot blasts down the runway
and into the sky. My head snaps back into my seat and I
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
acid has me wrapped tightly in its tentacles. The ostrich
is now pushing a cart down the aisle towards me. I’m
frozen in fear, wondering if the economy is really that
bad, that the airlines have actually took to training large
flightless birds to work as stewardesses. Soon the ostrich
is upon me, squawking about what I’d like to drink. My
mind scrambles for an answer and before I can even think
I blurt out “Burger Buns?”
The ostrich snaps her head back and the Trekie and the
house wife’s eyes snap to me.
“Excuse me sir, what was that?”
You fool what the hell are you thinking? Surely she’ll
have the Sky Marshalls on you in no time!” My finger
nail grip on reality screams, trying to shake me back into
the reality of the situation.
“A cola and some rum.”
The ostrich cocks her head, smiles and gets me my
drink. That was a close one. I slam the drink down in a
single gulp. I then decide that looking out the window
will probably be my best bet to avoid any eye contact or
conversation.
I’ve stared up at the clouds from the Earth on LSD
countless times, but never had I stared from 25,000 feet
down through the clouds at the Earth in this state of
mind. My breath was taken from my lungs as I looked
down upon God’s brush strokes. Perfect blends of green
and blue. Deep canyons and crevices from his fingertips
molding her form. From here I could see the Earth truly
is a living being. I could make out her veins sucking the
life giving water from the soil in deep darkening spider
webs across the landscape. Rivers cutting through her in
winding wild paths. I watch the soil rise and breath. I
was captivated. Never in all my years have I seen such
beauty. I now knew there was a God. From here I could
see why he loved her so much. It is beyond any words. I
spent the rest of the flight with my face pinned inside of
that window.
Hours passed like seconds and soon I heard the
captain’s voice snapping me back to reality. We were
about to begin our descent into Dayton. I watched the
earth slowly grow below me and come into focus. Tom
Petty was right: coming down is the hardest thing. The
plane touched down smoothly and soon the ants were
again filing out of the shuttle and into the world. I walked
off that plane forever changed and humbled by my God’s
eye view of the world…
Beatdom
47
48
Beatdom
Winter in the Eastern Bloc, it’s about 9pm, the night
sky outside is blacker than hell. We are just about to
cross the border by train between Hungary and the
north of Romania; this is the frontier land before we
reach Transylvania.
The train slowly grinds to a halt and a couple of
brutish looking Magyar border guards approach us
and bark the singular word “passport” in our faces.
We oblige and hand over our British documents
and the transaction passes without further incident.
An American Jew named Brian who had become a
travelling companion of ours is not so lucky; he is met
with deep suspicion. Apparently the Hungarians don’t
like the Yanks very much, something about too many
Hungarian immigrants arriving in the United States.
They look him up and down with a vague sense of
ritualistic tradition and with unnecessary theatrics
hand him back his passport.
The train begins to crawl into the darkness once
again. An hour later my head is out the window and
I am dragging on a cigarette, watching the bluish
gray smoke swirl away into the night-lands as we
pass them. Something feels different, something
in the air. Through the murk of the landscape I get
the sense that something is towering over us. As the
tobacco exits my system and my airways clear up a
little, it suddenly occurs to me what the difference is
- it’s the atmosphere, the air is mountainous; we are
in the Carpathians. I know from what little I’d read
back in Scotland that our destination is somewhere
in the middle of three vast ranges which are within
these mountains. Some time later I fall asleep. Can’t
remember what I dreamt.
Suddenly I am jolted awake by my travelling
partner, “We’re here” he shouts. Sleepily, I respond,
“Where?” “Cluj-Napoca!” I grab my backpack and
my guitar case and jump onto the concrete of the
dimly lit platform. Cold air smacks me in the face like
a son of a bitch.
You know now how we arrived, for clarity’s sake
I will go back in the narrative and explain why we
were there in the first place. The two of us were art
students at the time and in our 3rd year of study we
were given the opportunity to escape on what is
known as an Erasmus Scholarship. In the office the
‘coordinator’ handed me a slip of paper which had
a list on it, a list of destinations. As I scanned my
eye down the paper I saw the words ‘Cluj-Napoca,
Romania, (Transylvania)’. My mind recoiled at the
thought that Transylvania was even a real place. I
thought it was from the archives of fiction. I had to
find out for myself.
Cut to the train station in Cluj-Napoca. We enter
into what I can only surmise is the waiting room. It is
thick with cigarette smoke and foreign language. We
walk through instinctually and emerge into the street.
A gaggle of taxi drivers sharing stories raucously
gesticulate and laugh. We stand blinking. 30 seconds
later we hear the crack of a whip and some hollering
and through the smog from right to left pass a horse
and cart carrying around seven passengers being
pursued by a pack of rabid looking dogs. I turn to
my travelling partner,
“It looks like the dark
ages.” He nods grimly.
Within two minutes
of arriving we are
in a taxi speeding
towards an unknown
neighbourhood with
an address written on
a match box. We also
have a phone number.
The driver tells us in
broken English that the
address doesn’t exist.
He proves himself to
be a really nice guy by
phoning our ‘contact’
on his mobile and not
abandoning us until
he knows we are ready to be abandoned. Eventually
we find the international student halls and we wave
goodbye to our driver. We walk through the door and
are met once again by an authoritative looking man
demanding our passports. He has been expecting us
evidently but just wants to make sure we are who we
say we are. Once he is satisfied we are shown to our
rooms, or rather room. The distance between our beds
was no more that a metre. We were going to get to
know each other pretty well.
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
irritating. I did not understand. He is to this day the
single most indecisive person I have ever known, but
this was part of his charm. I will say one thing, he
was fucking brilliant at poker because he had no idea
himself that he was bluffing. You could never tell.
Over the next week or so all of the students had
pretty much arrived. There were 2 Spaniards, 4 Poles,
a Slovenian, 2 Lithuanians, a Hungarian, a German
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
in the middle of nowhere and sat down at the village’s
only bar/shop. It soon became clear that the owner
also had a business of driving people up into the
mountains. He closed up his shop up and we filled up
the two minibuses.
We moved through the countryside and started
climbing up through the hills. The hills became
mountains and the road became ice. It was as if the
road itself became a frozen river. The vehicle began
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 doublebunking for warmth. I thought I heard the howling
of wolves somewhere up the valley but dismissed it
as paranoia.
By morning spirits had hit rock bottom, the Spaniards
had never before experienced snow and refused
absolutely to get out of bed. We left them to their
misery and climbed up the valley. The snow became
thicker and at some points was close to a metre deep.
On we went.
We reached the 3rd lodge at around 10 in the morning
just as the sun was rising. This was the timberline. We
were at about 1200m. The sun cast an orange glow as
it rose over the vast mountain cliffs to our left which
blazed on our right. After a real struggle we reached
the 2000m sign-post which was on the edge of a
frozen lake, completely covered in snow and invisible
to those who didn’t know of its existence.
Some of the group went on to see a glacier which was
further up but I remained where I was, alone. There
were some huge boulders that were presumably swept
down by ancient ice which I climbed up onto. From
here I could look down the valley and past miles and
miles of snow and dark pine forest. Mist was creeping
up the valley, soon to engulf us. I suddenly realised
how silent this land was. There was not a sound to be
heard. I thought back and realised that I handy even
seen a bird up here. There were no airplanes, we were
far from any flight path, no telephone masts, nothing. It
was the most profound silence I had ever experienced
and it gave me an almost inexplicable feeling. I don’t
think there is a word for it. I lit up a cigarette and
inhaled the smoke mixed with mountain’s air. I’ll be
searching for that silence for the rest of my life.
The artwork featured here was all created in
Romania, by Omar Zingaro Bhatia.
Learn more about the artist at his blog: www.
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’ve been driving for 18 hours straight, most of them
supplemented by heavy doses of caffeine and THC.
The combination of fatigue, a waning buzz and hours
spent in wistful rumination leave me in a strange
emotional state. The best way to describe it is I feel
as if I don’t exist. It’s like one of those out of body
experience scenes in a movie where the spirit floats
above the bed and looks down with detachment at its
earthly form. I see me sitting in my black sedan on a
drab, cracked slab of concrete in Davenport, Iowa, in
the center of a vast plain.
My view of the journey here is less clear. The nearly
1200 miles I traveled from New Hampshire passed
in a string of flashing white lines and gradually
flattening landscape that didn’t seem to have a
definitive beginning or end. Images of the drive are
burned into my head: a fine mist settling over the tops
of the green hills of Pennsylvania, farmhouses and
huge, long irrigation machines, an abandoned factory
in some small, sad town whose name I’ve forgotten,
a child’s face in an adjacent vehicle whose piercing
gaze momentarily captivated me as I blazed past him
on the highway.
All I have of the immense distance I just covered are
a few random snapshots and even those don’t seem
real. Nothing seems real. Any sense of purpose I had
upon setting out is lost. The only thing I’m sure of is
that this is Jack Kerouac’s fault.
***
I first read On The Road in August of 2005. Right
from the first paragraph, in which Kerouac states he
was getting over, “…my awful feeling that everything
was dead” and “…I’d always dreamed of going west,
seeing the country, always vaguely planning and
never specifically taking off,” he was speaking to me.
Like Kerouac, I won’t bother going into much detail
about what led to my particular depression except that
it was the perfect storm of being rejected from the law
schools I’d applied to, dumped by my girlfriend, laid
off from work and having to move back in with my
parents. Within the span of a few weeks the entire life
I’d
imagined
for myself was
gone.
In particular,
one memory from my first reading stands out so
clearly that I often suspect it’s embellished. I’d been
entranced by Kerouac from the opening page, but the
following line served to stir something in particular
inside of me: “What is the feeling when you’re driving
away from people, and they recede on the plain till you
see their specks dispersing? –it’s the too huge world
vaulting us, and it’s good bye. But we lean forward to
the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
After reading this I set the book down on the bed
next to me. The mid-afternoon sun was blaring
through the bay window at my back. My journal lay
on the bedside table with a pen stuck in the pages as
a marker. I lay back in bed with my eyes shut and my
arms folded underneath my head. A feeling of calm
washed over me.
I’ve often thought back on this episode, knowing it
to be seminal in my life, but never completely sure
why. With the passage of time I’m now able to discern
just what happened in that moment: I realized, for
the first time, that I wanted to be an artist; nay, that
I was an artist and I needed to start acting like one.
Pulling myself out of the hole I was in required living
a spontaneous and creative life. A man who does not
do what he was born to do is bound to toil in misery.
***
“Sir? May I help you?”
The voice comes from behind the reception desk,
produced by one of those blond, round, low-income
American women whose age is nearly impossible to
determine.
“Sir, breakfast doesn’t’ start til’ 8 a.m.
I’ve been standing in the dining area, idly handling
a miniature box of cereal. I haven’t spoken in nearly
a day and when I reply, “Yes, of course,” it sounds
like I’m shouting at her. I see fear in her eyes, the
perception of danger at this swarthy out-of-stater
gripping Frosted Flakes, yelling at her from across
Beatdom
53
the lobby.
I set the processed, enriched corn product down and
stride cautiously to the desk. The clerk hides behind
one of those tight-lipped smiles that only narrowly
masks discomfort.
“I need a room…one suitable for sleeping.” I try to
discern if I’m still yelling.
She smiles awkwardly. “Is it just you tonight, sir?”
Sensing that my New England accent is frightening
her, I merely nod.
“Sir, it’s $39.99 per night.”
I grunt, reach for my wallet and remember it’s in the
car. I point to the parking lot and turn out my pockets,
hoping she’ll understand. As I step outside I take
inventory of the out-of-state plates. On the interstate
cars pass east and west, motoring to some destination,
setting a course towards the satiation of some need, all
of us sharing Davenport at 3 a.m…never to know each
other, never to know the outcome of even a chance
meeting…all ghosts, floating across the phantasmal
plains, acting on the perception that something must
be done to gain peace, that we’re somehow doing the
right thing.
was a wasted movement. I was stuck in the middle of
nowhere spinning my wheels. I began experimenting
with drugs and alcohol in the 10th grade. While not
satisfying on any sustained, deep level, getting high
and wasted temporarily alleviated my boredom with
life. They met, in a crude way, my desire for a different
perspective.
I entered university hoping that I would find my
niche as my studies became more focused. Instead,
I got more off track with each successive semester. I
knew that the end game of my collective four years
was a career. I was racking up tens of thousands of
dollars of debt for a piece of paper that said I was
qualified to do this or that. The unspoken mandate was
that I get a job right away to pay back my loans. It was
essentially a sophisticated form of debt-bondage.
The pressure was mounting to choose a direction.
All around me, people were getting more and more
certain of what they wanted while I became less sure.
My reaction to having no vision of my own was to
increasingly define myself in opposition to the goals
of others and mainstream society. A man who knows
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,
“..merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream…”
float through my head, sung hauntingly by children
who don’t grasp the truth of what they’re saying,
who may not until, years later, they find themselves
in the midst of an enormous field, potentially lying
in another man’s semen, knowing how they got there
only theoretically.
***
When the future I’d banked on came crashing down
around me it felt like I had lost everything. In reality,
the placebo plans I’d made had never been mine in
the first place. The things I’d decided to do were
merely a reaction to being lost. Stripped of them, I
had a chance to start over.
I started to write every day in my journal, something
I hadn’t done since high school. At first the words
were cathartic, a way to release my inner turmoil. But
as I pressed forward with them I began to uncover
pieces of myself that had been so cracked and fleeting
I was never able to pull them together. In particular, I
revisited an idea of going out west that I’d entertained
since beginning university. The move was vague,
both in terms of geography and purpose, but that was
the beauty of it. For sixteen years I had been pumped
through the educational system where, generally, my
choices had been dictated to me. What I wanted was
to do something completely of my own volition.
In that time I also made a point to catch up on all
the books I’d long been meaning to read. They were
mainly a distraction from myself; none of them
excited me in more than a superficial way. That is,
until I picked up On The Road.
Really, what I found in that book was sympathy.
Sal Paradise was going through what I was.
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.”
“The straight line will take you only to death,” says
Sal at one point in the book. In response to this ethos
he and Dean Moriarty set off back and forth across
the country in search of “kicks” which are a series
of movements and deflections. All the while “IT”
remains elusive and ill-defined, knowable only by
experience. Through all of their starts and stops Sal
and Dean follow an internal compass, circling in upon
“IT,” that visceral state of awareness that will unite
and give purpose to their divergent experiences.
Jack Kerouac was the corroborating voice I never had
in my life. He showed me a way out of my dilemma,
that salvation was possible. He was a New England
boy, just like me, who had barreled headlong into the
west, navigating by his own moral lodestar, creating
crazy, beautiful art in the process. I never wanted
to be the next Jack Kerouac. What I was looking to
become was a truer version of myself. Dear ol’ Jack
just pointed me in the right direction.
***
I open my eyes to brilliant sunlight reflecting off of
ubiquitous whites, tans and beiges. I prop myself up
on one elbow and as the hotel rooms comes into focus
I recall the mad dash across a third of the country
which led me here. The neurosis of last night is gone.
In its place is a feeling of calm determination that I
am one step closer to something worth pursuing.
The scene is reminiscent of one from On The Road
when Sal awakens in an Iowa hotel and for a brief
spell doesn’t know who he is. The difference is that I,
perhaps for the first time, have a sure sense of who I
am. The sun rising over the plains hearkens not just a
new day in the middle of America, but the dawn of my
new life. To borrow Kerouac’s terminology, never has
“the East of my youth” felt further away or “the West
of my future” closer. I experience a fleeting encounter
with “IT.” It is a sacred taste, finally, of “something
else.”
I shower, gather my things, dig in at the complimentary
breakfast and get back on the interstate. Driving
across the plains I think of Sal and Dean searching
for kicks. Surely they traveled this same highway at
some point, burning towards that “next crazy venture
beneath the skies.” I find myself wondering more than
once “What would Jack do?” But more often, and
more importantly, I think: “What am I going to do?”
***
Brian J. Eckert is a native of New Hampshire.
He attended The University of New Hampshire,
graduating in 2004 with a degree in political science.
Since then he’s lived in Denver, Seoul and Pretoria
and traveled to many points in-between. A camera
and notebook are never far from his side.
He writes a blog at http://thebohemianexperiment.
com. The Bohemian Experiment combines elements
of a blog with other forms of self-expression including
essays, stories, poetry, photography and, occasionally,
social deviance.
Beatdom
55
Ed Higgins
For Allen
who howled through just about everybody’s idea of
the real weirdo poet
given enough time and eventually under his
dynamo words
who kept growing on us scolding about us all the
illuminated while or
sometimes even when he didn’t we still
thought you cool ol’ queer
Jew anyway contemplating prophecy and
apocalyptic celebration
who bared his comparably Walt-wide soul in
incautious combustible
mixtures across the tops of our jazz-jived
brains inducing Cool and
his tempo of Madman Blake dooming the
whole beautiful universe
who had more odd jobs than the American dream
still has nightmares to ride
herd on or we’d then ever heard four fucking
letter words for
as repeatedly whenever he’d get into our
pubic beards with his fire
who made fine old fun as if he could not be
responsible for the effects of our
psychiatric misbehaviors he was beating up
on or poking holes into
to reach roots to better check on what best
56
Beatdom
amounts of husbandry
he could pour down to muck up or stimulate
oracular irritation
who yacketyacked screaming warnings like a jugged
jeremiah anarchist
smiling jesus almighty antichrist and zen
master debater balled
and bald too talking self-conscious all about
bold rhythm and meter
who to remove our contaminated sex, soup, poetry,
Eisenhower and all later
latter lonelinesses, or commitments to the
horror of sodding sad war
chanting himself into harsh melancholy
reminderings
who for all transient suffering sang kaddish and
praise of hazards to humans
and all sexy life here including gnarled trees
and the torsos of boys
or other fruited delicacies such as life itself
who died obeying all the laws about death and the
poet’s still ownership
of the universe he loved with all the litany of
praise––
who is now on his way to that countdown to eternity,
howling.
Poetry
A collection of Beat-themed, counterculture-inspired poetry
from around the world
Kyle Chase
Slumland Heroics
Part I
I have seen the slums of cities
all across America –
from Vegas’ “Crack Alley” to the
Uptown heroin markets of Minneapolis.
These slums & urban ghettos
These black and white working class
stomping grounds, I’m convinced:
They
are
WE.
And I know:
They are
America!
These are the places where Americans live,
where American dreams are crushed, and where
Black Market Carnegies and Project-produced
Rockefellers
thrive!
And do what they do; they keep real America
rolling.
A very good friend of mine, Annie,
she’s lived in the slums of
Chicago,
Atlanta,
Minneapolis,
and despite her faults – and she does have some –
I can’t think of anyone more American than she.
Or Dan – better known as Old Man Dan –
a book smart man
born into a family where
book smarts weren’t the right smarts – a
culture in which the Einsteins and Hawkings
were the ones who best knew how
to survive!
That is real America.
Part II
Annie and Old Man Dan
are my true American heroes,
as is the 80-year-old department store
worker (I think he’s from Detroit),
who risks his limbs to pack garbage
into a monstrous and terrifying
GREEN MACHINE!
This man does his job just to keep health care
Beatdom
57
for himself and his wife.
It’s sad, but it’s true, and I love him for it.
Another friend, John the casino cashier,
lost to a series of bad breaks
the medical supply empire
he’d built from scratch.
Now he counts money in “the Cage,”
an appropriately named room in casinos
where they stuff helpless senior citizens
into small, cramped rooms surrounded by metal bars.
John counts casino money and pays out
JACKPOTS!
to drunken, obnoxious gamblers,
day-in, day-out.
John has no hope for a better life,
Instead, he simply does those things
he needs to do, in order to
just get by.
John’s a prisoner to his own
bad luck, and to his own bad health.
But he keeps kicking, because his wife
needs the insurance.
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.
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Beatdom
I have many heroes, and they all live in Slumland
Urban projects, Section 8 houses, and forgotten
rural desert towns – or trailer park-ridden villages
– with
nothing to offer their sick, their tired, their poor and
their needy:
They’re all slums, if you ask me.
Part IV
Though I’ve lived in them, though I can’t say I do
right now.
My apartment’s fairly nice, and to be honest,
I think the slum I can’t escape
is the one between my ears.
But I try, just like the rest of them,
to find my teeny-tiny victories wherever I can,
whenever I can.
Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.
Still, I’ll always have my heroes.
Those American slum-dwellers, living
day-to-day,
doing all they can just to make it into the light.
Sean Tierney
Laundry Box
there’s a cardboard box
behind the door
that we fill with
our dirties
dirty shirts
pants
underthings
sometimes
smelling of
quick sex
sometimes
smelling
like cardboard;
those are the ones
that were worn
to the grocery store
and sat on
in wood chairs
box
i like those guys
but people
don’t read
stories
without
a little
quick sex
Real Frogress
i found a dead frog in my typewriter
his carcass was right under the latch
that grips the roller
i feel like i exorcised my writing
when i picked him up by his tiny head
and tossed him into the yard
scratched
adjusted
pulled
because for all i know about the afterlife
i may have been his puppet
slept in
on a warm
mattress
a ghost writer all this time
those are the
cozy little
“nice guys”
of the laundry
channeling the ribbits
of a restless frog spirit
Beatdom
59
Arlene Mandell
Celebrating the Beats
You can’t capture their audacity
in a museum, not the genius of Kerouac
via an alcohol-drenched biopic
not the spirit of Ginsberg
who I last saw at a seminar
at NYU, in a rumpled white shirt
vigorously filing his fingernails
nor the manic Gregory Corso
swigging his brew from a quart-sized
Coke bottle, befogged but charming,
young people clustered at his feet.
As for the women poets, relegated
to one small alcove - let’s not even
get into their depiction as “also there”
mistresses, muses and scolds.
No, you can’t capture the hope,
joy, freedom of the Beats with dusty
memorabilia and trivial anecdotes.
Nice Try, Beat Museum - but
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
Homage to Ferlinghetti
Curled up on the love seat
with Natasha’s CLAWS
almost piercing my skin
I reread Ferlinghetti, still flashing
Pictures of a GONE WORLD.
For me, too, many worlds
are gone.
I’m no longer young, timid, yearning
to live in PARIS, not Brooklyn,
not uncool New Jersey - wait - I’d abandon New Jersey
for PARIS in a New York minute!
On this warm May morning, there is coffee
to brew, SEEDS to plant - basil, sunflowers,
catnip for Natasha.
I move her purring, razor-clawed body
put aside my Pictures of the Gone World,
look inside for VISIONS
of the NEXT.
J. Dean Randall
Christina Cole
Podunk Lake
Waiting for a Bus that Never
Comes
Would have invited him in, my tramp friend
from the roadside, but thought better pie crusts
of speaking my grandparents alone, flush
and to the point of every lost memory
I borrow. With interest, I’ll never repay
their scrubbed clean hands, white porcelain sinks,
countertops and the smell of Sunday’s roast
beef in cold cuts sawn against my grain.
There’s an itch in here, a tapping foot
to be off down their road to Arizona’s
winter appeal. I accept pickles
and a buttered slice with those last cuts
before their road still takes them, and I’d go
too but for the kids and wife, for jobs
and finding my own way forward.
North,
my road and my destination, my guide
outside slinging pebbles into lake water
where I left him, where I left myself
a fish twenty years ago, that big one
broke my line, granddad near cussing but for
mama in my ears.
“Fiddle! Well, you’ll hook him,
you will. We’ll find him again and land him,
boat bottom or no. Should have brought my net
if I’d known you were for bass-busting.
Should have known, and him a big son-of-a…
might have known, now try him in those weeds.”
Waiting in the shelter at Silver Spring for a bus that
never comes. Elise Cowen sat next to me and spoke in ecstasy. Two souls lost, alienated, lesbian lovers alone in the
world. Both of us poets, but the women of her sorry
generation remain forgotten. I think to how things haven’t changed much since
then. Our thoughts turn to Allen: in New York one day,
San Francisco the next, Tangiers – going places ad
nauseum. And Elise and I are sitting in this bus shelter, frozen,
sipping rancid black coffee. I turn toward her and there’s instant understanding. Who are we? What are we doing here? Where are we going? Is this all there is to life? We dream of bumming a ride out to San Francisco,
or boarding a bus, or doing anything to get out of
this hellish town. Our fingers clasp and we hold each other for warmth. Two eccentric women: children dominated by
authority, clinging to authority, and desperate for
what once was but is no more. Colder and colder, the bus eventually comes and I
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
by Michael Hendrick
In January 1976, Columbia Records released Desire,
the Bob Dylan LP, replete with liner notes by Allen
Ginsberg. I was 18 years old at the time and worked
at a newspaper in Allentown, PA, as a copywriter/
copyboy.
Part of my duties included taking over the
switchboard for half an hour, so the receptionist
could take her 9:00pm break. The USA in the mid70s was a steep peak in the landscape of drug-culture
and just about any chemical known to the law was
available in any high school. That said, I found the
newsroom to be a great place to be on LSD, with the
flickering fluorescent lights, tapping typewriters and
wire machines clicking out the news.
On a Saturday night, with my copy of Desire in
hand, I showed up to work the switchboard. Enjoying
the art on the LP cover would be an excellent waste
of time and I proceeded to do so, until I came to the
Ginsberg liner notes. It had a vague address for him
at the bottom - a school in Boulder, CO - so in my
happily altered state, I wrote to Mr. Ginsberg on the
subject of poetry. I am sure the note was naïve and
rambling, if not incoherent…but I cannot recall what
I wrote.
Four months later, I was surprised to find a
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postcard from the Poet in my mail. It was informative
and exciting but at the same time critical of my note
to him. He took the time to write “fuck you” to me,
an honor I hope I share with few people. He also
detected my drug use, referring to my questions to
him as “dopey.” I wrote a few more after that but they
were answered by his assistant, so I gave that up and
moved on.
A few years later, Allen and Peter Orlovsky came to
do a local poetry reading. I sat up front and was able
to catch the microphone stand when Allen knocked it
over with his harmonium, while singing a version of
Blake’s “The Tyger.”
After the pair finished with their readings and
songs, a queue formed to get books signed by them. I
have never been one for autographs and I already had
Allen’s handwriting and signature on the postcard, but
I got in line and shuffled forward. When I got to the
front of the line, I put out my hand to shake and said
to Allen, “I just wanted to say thanks for answering
my letters. It means a lot for a young writer to be able
to get mail from someone so important in the world of
literature. It is a big inspiration.”
At this point, Allen cocked his head and looked
puzzled.
Front
m 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
make a change into full-time writing. Bowles noted,
“I came here because I wanted to write a novel. I
was sick of writing music for other people.” He had
visited Tangier intermittently for 16 years prior and
he moved there permanently in 1947. His wife, Jane,
followed a year later. They would remain in Tangier
together until his death in 1999.
Painting by Willard Leroy Metcalf
write much of his novel. He shacked up in the decrepit
desert hotels and wrote like a madman. These times
are vividly reminiscent of Antonioni’s landmark
film The Passenger. One can easily imagine Bowles
as Jack Nicholson’s desperate journalist losing his
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
Doubleday rejected the completed manuscript,
endless sand dunes from the south and the waters
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
With the success of The Sheltering Sky, Bowles
hallmarks of the dark side of Tangier. Despite the
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.
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Beatdom
they were able to offer
a guiding editorial
approach in refining the
wild-eyed manuscript
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 manubiography 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 drugbecome 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.
French thief-turned-writer Jean Genet as well
renowned playwright Tennessee Williams would
both settle in Tangier, turning out many promising
works.
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
Of course, true to his restless nature, Burroughs
left Tangier with Kerouac and Ginsberg in 1959 and
the trio met up with Gregory Corso, and later Peter
Orlovsky, taking up residence at the Beat Hotel in
the Latin Quarter of Paris.
masseuse who was passing thru Tangier
twenty years ago on a holiday trip and
somehow has never left; a Belgian architect
who also runs the principal bookshop; a
Swiss businessman who likes the climate
and has started a restaurant and bar for
his own amusement; an Indian prince who
does accounting for an American firm; the
Portuguese seamstress who makes your
shirts. . .”
Yet Bowles, the grandfather of Tangier madness,
remained. Who knows if Burroughs and Bowles
ever even crossed paths. Regardless, Bowles’
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.
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Beatdom
An Interview with
Scroobius Pip
Interview by David S. Wills; Photo by Charlie Salazaar
Scroobius Pip is well known throughout the United
Kingdom as an emerging hip-hop star. As one half
of dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip, he has seen his
words reach millions through a hit YouTube video,
two successful albums, TV performances, and a full
schedule of concerts and music festivals.
But perhaps it would be more accurate to describe
him as a spoken word performer. Yes, he frequently
and famously reads his poems to music from many
genres, but he is as comfortable reading without as
he is with it.
In 2006 Pip toured the United Kingdom in his Toyota
Space Cruiser, doing spoken word performances in
venues, as well as outside concerts. At the end of
that year, Pip teamed up with dan le sac and to write
“Thou Shalt Always Kill.” The song was released in
2007, reaching number 30 on the UK charts, with the
video going viral online.
The duo released their first album, Angles, in 2008.
The album contains some fantastic lyrics, exploring
dark themes with an optimistic outlook. Their sharp
wit and intelligences shocked and delighted listeners,
and they soon had a strong following.
On January 11th, 2008, Pip sent out a message to
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67
his MySpace fans, asking for assistance in creating
a book of poetry. He wanted artists to illustrate his
words, for a book which was released in March,
2010.
In that same month, dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip’s
second album was released. Titled The Logic of
Chance, listeners were treated to another brilliant
combination of words and music. With the success
of the album, they are now embarking on another big
UK tour.
Fortunately, Scroobius Pip was kind enough to
take time out of his hectic schedule and talk to
Beatdom…
When did you first begin writing poetry?
beats?
Almost from the start I always thought that some kind
of music would be involved. I worked with a kind
of jazzy, hiphop sound for a while and then started
working with dan. It works great as we really give
each other space and allow each other to excel. It’s all
over emails. Sometimes I will have a vocal written;
sometimes the beat will inspire the vocal. It varies!
Your songs often deal with pretty dark topics… but
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
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
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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 prayFor 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
soundChippetty Flip; Flippetty Chip;My only name is the Scroobious Pip.
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