Week ends in the Country

                           That year, Gordon  Ball appearently ended his work with Jonas Mekas, and went up to Cherry Valley to live and work on Allen Ginsburg farm.  In the fall, he called me and asked if  I would like to come up for a weekend. Also he had invited my neighbor, Esta Kormorsky, and we were to travel together. He and his long time love, Candy, had parted for good, I guess.  Esta was a true trooper in the best New York tradition, and was ending a relationship with Larry Baer, a romantic devil-rebel,  whom she had been with for a long time.  I guess I introduced her to Gordon.  1773 First Avenue was a wide open venue of lost, mixed up souls.  At minor crossroads of marginal humanity.

I could not see Esta replacing Candy.  But she was a fun traveling companion.   Anyway,  I wanted to talk to Gordon, get his opinion about some film work I was doing at the time.  I'd get mine, she'd get hers.
 

But mainly I wanted to meet Allen Ginsburg.

   Intimadated and a bit  wary of being in such famous company, my portfolio was too slim, my resume almost non-existant.  What could I say to these recognized poets?   The bus left Port Authority before dawn.  I was finally going to the Poet Authority!!! We crossed the river via the George Washington Bridge, through the palasades and up the Hudson River to the New York Turnpike.  I told Esta what I knew about Allen, I think I quoted most of Howl.   She had studied him at CCNY, where she was in school.

            Up high above  the Hudson we sped to an Albany in transition.   White buildings and castles of government. Much still under construction.   Capitol of the Empire State, of Northern riches and glory.  Rockefellows and Roosevelts.  Vanderbilts and Carnegies.   Or is that Pittsburg?  Construction of expressways spoke of expanding commerce, growing empire.   Then on through a dingy-dawn Schnectedy, dominated by General Electric factories. As grey, grimy as Albany was white.  Industry is the town. Rust belt remains.  A big big light bulb on a main factory.  Ready made pop art. Oh, Thomas Edison.   If you could only see what you have done!   The very air thick as gravy with grime.  Does the sun never shine here?   I realized why the light factory was there.   There was never enough light in that town.   And me, still lost and confused,  my own true love had left me some time back.  I was becoming a pickled zombee. I needed this trip.

            I think we ended up in Cooperstown.  Baseball's Hall of Fame there meant little to me.  I had flunked out of baseball in Jr High, never to give it another thought.  Gordon was to meet us at the bus stop.   There was no station as such.   Passengers were just dumped on the sidewalk.  Nobody was around, but very soon Gordon drove up in an old car. He got out.   Esta got a big kiss. Gordon was a good kisser, but all  I got a hand shake.  Who was he trying to impress?   He explained later that Allen wanted his friends  to conform to country standards.   A hand shake, if even that, was to be enough in the way of greetings between males.  Men dont kiss anymore, except in Italy and France.  And amoung hippies in the East Village. (And of course, queers.) Not here.  Not since Judas, they say, kissed Jesus to mark him in betrayal.  And dont make a Mafioso do it or you will be sorry. Dead.
 

        We made our way up-country.  It was late fall, not cold, but under uncertain skys.   Finally we drove through a gate to a sturdy looking farm house.  Two stories, and a dormer attic.  At little distance was a big barn with checkerboard doors.  Various animals were about.  The dogs greeted us, Godly and Sad Eyes were the ones I remembered.  There was a cow.  A Horse.   Many Chickens and a billy goat that stayed tyed up, for reasons I would learn later.  There was a stock tank behind the house,  and I liked it already.   Gordon pointed to the attic window.   "You will sleep there", he said to me.  Hell, I would have slept with the goat I was so delighted.

        We went in.   There stood Allen, a living doll.   He radiated his gigantic personality in teddy-bear reality.  This was not the celebrity Allen, the poster child for the pot generation, this was the real thing.  He would not let you think of him in anyway but a man.  He was as real and genuine as his poems.   What did I expect?   I was not dissapointed.  It is that way I feel about some people, especially those you know a little about before meeting in real life.  You seem to know the kind of person they must be to have said in print or on the media, what they said.   Their was a sort of semantic body language cluing you in. And Howl:   Anyone that could have gotten to the naked reality of life in the world of 1950 as he did, could not be an ivory tower snob, like other poets I did not know.  Howl.  I wrote many poems in sloppy tribute.   I wanted to be a beat poet.  I later gave some of those poems to Gordon.   I dont think he showed them to Allen.   I was too ashamed to.  Didn't my crazy friend Jimmy Carter send some poems to him?  Jimmy got a letter back that he carried with him.  Allen's advice was:   "Play your fucking violin.   Why are you building a brick shit-house of words to hide your insecurity?."   To Jimmy, this was so revelatory and so prescious he read it to any and all, and finally left the tattered letter at the Harlem tavern near Manhattan School of Music's Spanish Harlem campus, in a pool of beer.
 

            I seemed to see Allen in black and white, grainy, Frank style.  And there was Peter Orlovsky and his brother Julian, not the buff youth, but pot bellied and sad, suffering depression no one could understand.   Right out of the Robert Frank film I had just seen.  What a trio I was previledged to meet, but the tempo was so relaxed, the context of a farm where real farming went on,  made a wonderful first floor leveling.  No occasion.  Just people involved in living in the country.  Also present was Ray and Bonnie.  A poet and poetess couple who were well known.  Ray seemed like a laid-back Neil Cassady to me.  And Bonnie.   A striking, beautiful woman, with a published book of poems to her credit,  daugher of a famous ambassador, recovering from a sad-bad drug addiction.   Both were.  I think.  Peter was the only one that seemed agitated, but I learned it was part of his lovable style.

                                    Gregory Corso regularly visited, I was not so lucky to meet him.   Allen had recently been to Massachusets to give a eulogy chant at the funeral of his friend, Jack Keroac.  It was a crazy time.   The great Human Be-ins of 1967 had been a success in San Francisco and Central Park.  Another Kennedy was murdered.  The most famous black preacher ever was shot down.   The 1968 Chicago  convention was old news, Allen had been there.  Richard Nixon, with his secret plan to end the war, beat Hubert Humphry for President. 1969 had been witnessed sensational Manson murders and Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.   Teddy Kennedy had driven off the Chapaquidic bridge.   There was somone in the back seat, who drowned.  Woodstock Nation was set up not far from the farm, a delerious utopia. Six months later,  The Rolling Stones give a concert in Altamont California, in which a murder is witnessed at the stage and on camera.  The Hell's Angels, supposed to keep control, unwittingly set off ugly riots.  A few months later , an anti-war protest at Ohio State University, was going to experience a police riot, leaving four students dead.

                                The kitchen was right up front.   There was a wood stove, that kept the whole down-stairs cozy.   The house must have been tight, because the weather was cold both times I was there, and the house was comfortable.  A gas refrig kept the food cold, but the electricity was not on.   This was by choice, I assumed, and the tv was run by a car battery.   Not much tv was watched, but Gordon liked Laugh In, and that was one exception.
 

                                MORE ALLEN.  MORE FARM.   LATER    LATER.........

BEGINNING BIO:         Home page