The summer was not an easy one to be me. With the death of Allen Ginsburg, April 4, 1997, I was forced to face the real and inevitable grinding daily force of mortality, my place in the world, and the downfall of a generation I knew only through it’s literature. I did not know a single member of the beat generation. Both of my grandfathers, killed by [1 each] car and cancer, were dead before I knew them. My grandmothers, both mysterious to me, were also dead.
I planned to ease the passing of this great American artist, at least for me, by taking up one corner of the heavy mantel he laid down. I decided that the passing of this man bore more notice than what the New Yorker and nattily dressed professors could afford. I would allow the spirit Ginsburg to “Howl” through the dreary, echoing, chambers of my still-soft skull. I decided to write in a style which made testement to the existence of this giant. I would footnote every word I wrote, attributing it to Allen Ginsburg. After all, I was using a language handed me by him, carried in his vest pocket, worn through it’s use, and all the sultrier because of it. There was nothing I could create that I could take more than glancing credit for, every thought I could think was already discarded by him.
And I did it, too. I got to work. I mashed up life between the molars of my mind, and spat it back on the page. At the time I was using the archaic “Gallon” as a measure of my writing. I wrote in pencil, on scraps of paper. 3 Gallons worth in four months.
I had gotten itchy feet, I caught it from Casandra Lawliss. She had it for years, and she had it bad. Forced by an overwhelming malaise to take the dog and pencil show on the road, we sat up all night volleying different destinations for a day trip. None of them rang true until I suggested Lawrence Kansas at 5:45 AM. It was decided. I even got on the phone and called information, on the off chance Wm. S. Burroughs would have a listed number. He did not.
We were geared up, coffied up, purposed up, and we were looking for the best route from Minneapolis Minnesota to Lawrence Kansas. We wanted to get on the road by noon because in our capacity as shiftless drifters, we had imagined obligations to be back for by three on Monday afternoon. Poring over the Rand-McNally, lips ringed with the black crust of thick coffee, the phone rang at Casandra’s apartment. It was Sara Parkel, friend of us both, and oblivious to the plan hatched only hours earlier, while all decent, God-fearing people were sleeping. She speared an IOU for three days sleep, on the end of her pointy-stick words. William Seward Burroughs was dead at the age of 83 from a heart attack. He didn’t look a day over 200.
My previously itchy feet began to swell. They busted my shoes and the tatters fell to the carpet. Still they grew, grotesquely popping the insufficient toenails off to ricochet around the room. My feet floated up from the floor, looking like transplants from the Wonderdog balloon in the Macy’s Parade. Upward they drifted carrying my body upward. I held on as long as I could to the pencil in my right hand. Before long I was inverted, feet cracking the plaster overhead, a rain of dust and paint chips watering gardens of despair.
My eyes slipped to Casandra’s when my ken failed and I shot up through the battered roof and skyward. I had come loose of my moorings. I had no context to live in a world absent him, no star to steer her by, so my tall ship was adrift.
It would be 10 weeks before I could find back the pencil. Seventy days of drinking and crying and screaming. I finally came to, side of my face wet from drool and a tooth-marked #2 anchoring me to the earth.
