I grew up in Ginsberg’s “Nowhere zen New Jersey,” lived just outside of Paterson in Hawthorne above a garage (the smell of dripping gas and oil fumes forever conjure up images of that ramshackle flat), then above a Hawthorne luncheonette with a loud jukebox that droned into the night and through my mother’s skull. She in night dress, squinting in curlers, pink and alien -- the thought pains me to this day -- going down to ask, tell, plead with them to turn down the music. She being called a foreigner, laughed at for her accent, then them turning up the music, and my parents never thinking of calling the police. It was like a scene from Westside Story you never got to see. My father sleeping through it all -- was he chicken or just a truly deep sleeper? Then we eventually moved out and further away from the very people we had emigrated toward. But you can never get away from your own perceptions of how others may be perceiving you and so each oddity (clothes just cut a bit different, not an American haircut -- me wanting a Beatle haircut and getting strapped into a chair with my mother holding shoulders and neck, like you might see cops today doing with a perp, while my dad cut my hair with clippers purchased at Sears to save money on monthly haircuts and me crying in the bathroom with cut hair pasted to my tearful face, me looking like a Marine recruit who’d just lost a wrestling match with a riding mower, me with a haircut like that having no hope of fronting the Beachboy wannabe band, lip-synching the lyrics but instantly forgetting them in a friend’s room when he turned down the volume and it was my turn to show my lungs) just added fear upon suspicion that I was just a bit too weird (no jeans, no regular lunch pail, strange sandwiches, fake leather grey penny loafers) -- why do you think they called it an Alien Registration Card? -- to ever fit in. Wanting to be so conformist to everything in the society that might make me American -- reading the entire World Book Encyclopedia to learn why America was the best land and knowing it better than any kid in my class. Why did my father buy a Rambler and not a Chevy or Ford? At some point I made a list and I vowed to smoke Winston, use Esso gas, buy Gillette razors, drink Ballantine, be a fan of the NY Giants, get a Chevy Impala, like the Four Seasons, the Four Tops more than the Animals... And then suddenly at 15 or 16 conformity was totally out and conforming to the norms of nonconformity became the norm, so to speak. And you just wonder what you were busy fumbling to conform to for all those years.
Ginsberg (via Dylan) and the rest of the Beats along with the Yippies and Black Panthers, and other liberation “theologists” first hit me with the notion that the secret to deeper life satisfaction was actually NONconformity and that was first manifested when I and some friends decided to run for Student Council on a united ticket of hippie values. Not only did we get three very pretty and even smarter gals on the ticket, I decided to take all the Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman, Cleaver, Ginsberg stuff I was reading (I can go on...) and during the summer of my mild discontent, I rewrote the entire school constitution and curriculum so that things were freer, less coercive, more cooperative, less doctrinaire, more elective, open lunch, free music... What a manifesto this was. Only problem was, I was so shy and so unable to speak in front of people, especially about a thousand of them, that I ran for vice-president and my friend ran for president so I did not have to say anything in front of an assembly of my peers. But then again, I never got to throw my fist in the air as I read my educational liberational manifesto either. Rock’n’Roll High School before its time. Did that blueprint for a new society get thrown into the garbage when we moved for the umpteenth time?
Anyway, Ginsberg illustrated the classic psychological tension of the deigned important figure: noble gestures of idealism cloaking a rampant ego that had been squashed or at least underfed as a nerdy kid. Power would be some revenge for the less-than-classic-jock handsome guy and so when Ginsberg first proposed to me, a longhair student at U of M in Ann Arbor, while he was autographing copies of his books for others (not with “Please Master Please,” but not much more tactfully), it was less poetic and more pleading than one might expect. “You’re a pretty thing. Are you coming out with the rest of us afterward?” Or something along those lines. I did not go. I was not disgusted. Maybe I was too shy or overwhelmed or out of political sympathies for the unempowered? Maybe I did see this come-on for what it was -- from the heart of the matter, nothing more than a relentless drive toward reality-obliterating orgasm, or in its other guise, fame seeking. Did he also say something along the lines of “You remind me of Jim Carroll”? Or was that later, some drunken gal in the back of my cab, running her fingers through my hair? Or at a party years later in a NYC collapsing scene of finicky mail artists who were all busy making sad advertisements for themselves and then mailing them to each other in lieu of actually speaking.
