Night Beat Part 16

IN 1975, SOME nasty and frightening reports began to circulate about Timothy Leary. According to stories that appeared in Rolling Stone and other publications, Leary was talking to the FBI and was willing to give them information about radical activists and drug princ.i.p.als he had known, in exchange for his freedom. There was also a claim that he had written a letter to Rosemary-still in the underground-pleading with her to contact and cooperate with federal agents. Rosemary never answered the letter.

The rumors were hard to confirm-Leary was being moved from prison to prison on a regular basis by the FBI, and few friends saw or communicated with him for roughly a year-but even the idea had a chill effect on many of Leary's former compatriots. Allen Ginsberg, Ram Da.s.s, Jerry Rubin, and Leary's own son, Jack, held a press conference denouncing Leary for collaborating and a.s.serting that his testimony shouldn't be trusted by the courts.

The full truth about this matter has never been easy to uncover. In Flashbacks, Leary wrote that essentially he led the FBI on a wild goose chase and that n.o.body was imprisoned because of his statements-though he admitted that he had made declarations about certain people to a grand jury. "I think Tim played a very dangerous game with the FBI," says Robert Anton Wilson, "but as far as I know, n.o.body did go to prison." Says Rosemary: "Years later, I showed Tim a letter he had written me, urging me to turn myself in and lauding the minions of the law as being good, decent people. He said he didn't remember writing it. I think the truth is, he couldn't deal with it."

In any event, Leary was released from the California prison system in 1976, his reputation pretty much in tatters. Many of his old friends would no longer speak to him. "There was no question he was no longer the Tim I'd known before," says Frank Barron. "Prison doesn't improve anybody very much, and he'd suffered for it. His sense of invulnerability was gone. But he was determined to come back into the public and to rea.s.sert his mission."

Gradually, Leary rehabilitated his image. Shortly after his release, he separated from Joanna Harcourt-Smith, whom some thought had been an unfortunate influence in the whole FBI matter. He settled into Los Angeles and became a regular at Hollywood parties. In 1978, he married his fourth wife, Barbara Chase, and took her young son, Zachary, as his own. Though Timothy and Barbara would divorce fifteen years later, he would stay close to Zachary. It seemed that with Zachary, Leary found the sort of relations.h.i.+p that he had not been able to achieve with his son Jack-who stopped talking to Leary in 1975 and who only briefly saw him again two months before his death.

"It was a time for him to do it again," says Zachary, "and see if the whole domesticity of having a family was something really applicable to his life, and he found that it was. He was happy about that, because the sadness of his earlier family had been so great. So I think it was great for him, in his late fifties and sixties, to be a father again with a little kid, taking me to the ballparks and playing sports in the back yard. Young people-that's really what kept him going, that's what kept his theories alive. And I think that the biggest moral ground that he covered for me was communication: 'Never try and shut anything down,' he told me. I'm only starting to realize now the magnitude of the environment that I was lucky enough to grow up in. I really do consider Tim my father."

Leary went on to other interests. Primarily he became a champion of computer and communications technology, and was among the first to declare that these new developments-particularly the rapidly growing Internet-had the same sort of potential to empower creativity on a ma.s.s level and to threaten authority structures as psychedelics had once had in the 1960s.

In time, the old friends came back. Ginsberg, Ram Da.s.s, and others made peace with the man with whom they had once shared such phenomenal adventures. "When people ask me why it is I treasure and respect Timothy," says Ram Da.s.s, "I say it's because he taught me how to play with life rather than be played upon by life. That's the closest I've gotten to stating what it feels like. Timothy plays with life. People are offended by that because they think it doesn't give life its due respect. But I think it's quite a liberating thing."

IN 1990, THE newfound equanimity of Timothy Leary's life was shattered. His daughter, Susan Leary Martino, forty-two, had been arrested in Los Angeles for firing a bullet into her boyfriend's head as he slept. Twice she was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. Then one morning she was found dead in her jail cell. She had tied a shoelace around her neck and hanged herself.

Some people close to Leary believe that Susan had never been the same since the Laredo arrest and trial-that she held herself to blame for her father's subsequent troubles, and that, like her mother, she had grown depressed and withdrawn over the years. Others claim that Susan had always loved her father powerfully, and that all the years and events that kept him from her-the arrests, the flights, all the many girlfriends and wives-ate away at her. Regardless of the causes, Susan's suicide hit Leary hard-a blow that many of those close to him feel he never really recovered from. "I don't think he could push that one away so easily," says Ram Da.s.s. "I remember speaking with him on the phone and feeling a surprising vulnerability in Tim that I wasn't used to hearing."

The news of Susan's death also came as a terrible blow to Rosemary, who had been living on the East Coast under an a.s.sumed name, still a fugitive. "I'd been angry with him for a long time," she says, "but I'd been having dreams about them prior to her death, about Susan and Tim and myself in some bucolic setting with streams running and the three of us very happy. Which wasn't the case when the three of us were together. I was the wicked stepmother for most of our married life. So I knew I was being taught something, or told something, about Tim and Susan, and about my heart. And then, when she died, it was so hard. And I knew how hard it would be for him."

Rosemary, who hadn't spoken with Timothy or anybody close to him since 1972, called Ram Da.s.s, who put her in touch with Tim. "We met in Golden Gate Park," she says. "It was a great romantic meeting. When I left him in Switzerland, we were quarreling, so to meet him and find that our love was still there-the love that we had for one another-was just incredible. It validated so much for me to know that about him and about myself, and to have given up the anger and the hurt that I had felt. The emotion involved in all that just opened the way for me to love Tim again."

Leary put Rosemary in touch with a lawyer and helped her resolve her fugitive status. "It was extremely easy," she says. "I had lived such a remarkable and paranoid life for so long, never sure who to trust or what to say. It was liberating to be free of all that. I just got my California driver's license with my name on it."

Rosemary began to see Tim often. She was impressed, she said, by how open his heart now seemed. But she also saw other changes. "I could tell he wasn't feeling wonderful. He'd always had an amazing const.i.tution; I'd never known him to be ill, even with a cold." And then, around Christmas 1994, after a strenuous lecture tour, Leary was felled by a bout of pneumonia. "It was his first taste of mortality in terms of his body," says Rosemary, "and I think it was devastating for him to find himself so ill, and then not bounce back from it."

It turned out to be more than pneumonia. The doctors had determined that Leary had contracted prostate cancer, and it was inoperable. With the right treatment, they might be able to keep him alive for a year or two. Leary later told reporters he was "exhilarated" by the news. This would be the start of his greatest adventure-a conscious and loving journey into death. He called his friends-Rosemary, Ram Da.s.s, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and many others-and shared with them his excitement. "That's just the epitome of his personality," says his stepson Zach. "I guess it made perfect sense that he would feel that way about it. But when he was first disclosing it, I was much sadder than he was. I said, "G.o.d, how could you feel like that?' But to him it was just another card in the hand-the death card. And now I have to say I've learned so much from him in these last few months."

Indeed, it seems the knowledge of his death brought out a gentle and transcendent quality in Timothy Leary. "He's more emotionally available now," says Ram Da.s.s, "which is remarkable, because he's never handled his emotions at all. I mean, he's always been a very friendly person-fun and vibrant and stimulating, and all that-but deep emotions have been delicate to play with historically with Timothy. He's lived more on the surface of events and things rather than the slower, deeper rhythms of emotions. The last few times I saw him he was very much there, and that thrilled me. When we would look into each other's eyes, he was looking at me about death. We never said words about it, we never acknowledged it other than doing it, but it gave me the conviction that he isn't afraid of death. He knows he's going after one of the darkest secrets of the society, and it's humbled him in an interesting way."

There's also something about Leary's awareness of death's imminence that heightened his sense of play. In the last few months, there was nonstop activity around his home, and much of it was geared to fun stuff-dinners, outings to midnight rock & roll shows, around the clock visits by well-wishers and friends. "Silly silliness is being performed as a high art here," he told me one afternoon, with utter joy.

A good example of Leary's latter-day high art silliness is an event that became known as "Wheelchair Day." One day Leary decided to round up as many wheelchairs as possible, load his staff and friends into them, and hold wheelchair races on Sunset Strip, then wheel into the House of Blues, for a luncheon, designed on the model of DaVinci's The Last Supper. After the event, Leary was riding back to his house in the rented convertible of his friend, Internet rights activist and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, with two of the young women from his staff, Trudy Truelove and Camella Grace, in the back seat. The radio was blasting as they headed west on Sunset, and Trudy and Camella were sitting on the car's trunk, goofing and making dancing gestures. Leary looked at Barlow, smiled, and shouted: "Life is good!" That was when Barlow glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw the flas.h.i.+ng red and yellow lights of a Beverly Hills police car-and realized that the car he was driving was perhaps not entirely free of illegal substances. s.h.i.+t, he thought to himself, Tim Leary's last bust.

Barlow rolled down his window and said to the officer: "I know what we were doing was wrong. But you see, my friend here is dying, and we're trying to show him a good time." Barlow later told me he'd never forget the look that Tim gave the policeman: "Caught in the act of dying like he had his hand in the cookie jar."

The officer smiled back at Leary, then turned to Trudy and Camella. "I'd be lying if I didn't say that looks like fun," he said, "but just because he's dying doesn't mean you should. Now get down in the seat and buckle up and I'll let you go."

When they pulled back into traffic, Leary turned to Barlow, laughed, and said: "What a f.u.c.king gift that was!"

NOT EVERYBODY, though, was enamored of the gallows humor of Leary and his troop.

On the night of the wheelchair-race caper, I arrived at Leary's to find an ambulance outside his house, being loaded with his cryonics coffin. It turned out that a short time before, a team from CryoCare-the outfit that was to undertake the freezing and preservation of Leary's brain upon his death-had come in to remove all their equipment.

For some time, a tension had been building up between the CryoCare representatives and Leary's crew. CryoCare felt that Leary and his staff had shown disrespect for their equipment by decorating it with lights and toys, and also believed that some people at the house had been trying to keep CryoCare's technicians away from Leary. More important, CryoCare's Mike Darwin had grown alarmed about Leary's p.r.o.nouncements about his plan to commit suicide live (so to speak) on the World Wide Web. Darwin did not feel that his organization (whose brochure bears the motto, MANY ARE COLD, BUT FEW ARE FROZEN) could afford to be involved in what he termed a potential crime scene, or that they should leave their equipment in a house where illegal drugs may be present or used.

For their part, the Leary folks had become increasingly put off by what they regarded as CryoCare's ghoulish interest in obtaining the head of Timothy Leary. The problem was only exacerbated when they learned that a CryoCare official who would be involved with the decapitation and freezing process, Charles Platt, had an a.s.signment to write about the operation for Wired magazine. (Platt had also been sending serial e-mail to various parties, expressing his disdain for the Leary staff and his impatience with Leary for not dying as soon as had been expected. "What insane will to live," he wrote in one letter.) In any event, CryoCare's actions left Leary with a decision to make: He could either sign on quickly with another cryonics outfit, or he could accept that his death would be final-that his brain would not be preserved for some indeterminate future attempt at reanimation. In the end, he decided against cryonics. "I have no real great desire to do it," he told me. "I just felt it was my duty to futurism and the process of smart dying."

Leary's decision was not a small thing for him. He once told me that he did not believe that anything human survived beyond death, and that if we possess a soul, then the soul is our mind, and the brain is the soul's home. By forgoing cryonics, Timothy Leary decided that even if he could, he would not return. His immortality, instead, would be his work and his legend, and it was his hope that those things would find an ongoing life on the World Wide Web site that had become his most prized dream in his final season.

IT IS NOT LONG after this that the end came. One afternoon I had to drop something by Tim's place and we had a brief conversation. He was in the best spirits and most cogent form I'd seen him in. He told me touching stories about his relations.h.i.+p with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (about how Lennon had written "Come Together" for Tim when Leary was thinking about running for Governor of California, but then thought twice about it and kept it for the Beatles) and about how he had tried to warn Yoko that New York's Dakota was too risky a place-too exposed, too accessible-for a man like Lennon to live. "I wish I'd been wrong about that one," he said, looking at the large photo above his bed of himself and Rosemary with Lennon and Ono during the recording of "Give Peace a Chance." I left that day looking forward to visiting and talking with him some more.

A few days later I received a call from Zachary. "It looks like Tim is going today. You should come up soon if you want to say goodbye."

Zach later told me: "Tim just decided he couldn't live in that body any more and he wanted to get out. The key moment for him was when he went to take a shower last week and he stopped and looked at himself in the mirror, naked. That was all he needed to know. He was very clear and lucid and he looked at his body and saw it was pathetic and it was below his quality of life." That night, Leary called Zach and the house staff around him at the table and said: "Can you go on without me?"

"It was like he was asking for our permission," said Zach.

The morning that Zach called me, Tim had got out of bed and climbed into his motorized wheelchair and rode all over his ranch house. He stopped in the back yard where he sat drinking a cup of coffee, looking at the flowers that were coming to bloom in his garden. Then he said, "I'm tired. I'm going to take a nap," and wheeled back into his bedroom. A short while later his nurse summoned Zach and told him he should notify anybody who might want to see him one last time.

I sat for about an hour with several other people that afternoon and watched Leary as he slept. Occasionally he woke, smiled, took sips on the ice that the nurse gave him, and once or twice tried to say something. At one point, he opened his eyes wide and said: "Flas.h.!.+"

Later, around 9 P.M., I made another visit to his bedroom. The only illumination in the room was a string of Christmas lights, on the wall above Leary's bed. Zach sat close, holding his stepfather's hand. Tim opened his eyes briefly at one point, looked at Zach, smiled, and said softly, "Beautiful."

It was the last thing Timothy Leary said.

A FEW HOURS later, around 2:30 A.M., I received another call, telling me that Tim had died at 12:45. I headed back to his house.

The lights were still dim in his bedroom. On a nearby chair sat Trudy Truelove, staring at Tim. "I've decided to stay with him until they remove him. I've decided to be his guardian."

Tim was laid on his back, dressed in white, the red blanket turned down. His mouth was wide open, frozen in his last exhaled breath. It looked as if he was calling out silently. Somebody had placed a large orange flower in his hand, its petals reaching up to his face.

Soon, the room filled with several people. We stood there for a long time in silence, until we were told that it was time to say our goodbyes. The mortuary people had come to claim Tim's corpse.

One by one, the people in the room approached Tim, some touching and kissing him, others whispering last words. When it was my turn, I went up to the bed and looked down at him. I hadn't been able to tell before, from the darkness in the room, but his eyes were wide open, and when you looked into them, it was as if they were looking back into you. I bent over, gave him my kiss, and then turned and left the room.

ONE NIGHT NOT LONG before Leary's death, I took LSD for the first time in twenty-five years. I guess I'd just grown curious after spending so much time around Tim, but I felt I also owed it to myself. I'd left psychedelics on bad terms, and that had never felt right. It was time, once again, to see what they held for me, what might be revealed after so many years.

I lay on my bed in the dark, listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations, and once more, death came to visit. I saw what seemed thousands of faces. They were all in agony, and then they died, and were swimming in straits of beauty and grace. Their suffering, I saw, was inevitable. And so was their dying. And so was their release. Once more I saw death move around and through me, and this time I did not try to hide from it. I lay there and cried, and somehow I felt a great comfort in what I'd seen.

I thought about this experience as I sat in Leary's bedroom at three in the morning and studied him in his death. As I implied earlier, I'd always been terrified of death-even to be near it. When I visited the funeral homes to see my father, my mother, my brother, lying in their coffins, I took short glances and got away quickly. I never touched my loved ones as they lay dead. I don't think I could have.

Sitting with Leary, I realized something had changed-and maybe it had been a gift on his part. His greatest achievement, I believe, was to ask the people he knew to face the darkest part of themselves, and to be willing to be there with them-to interact with them, to guide them-when they reached that place. I can't say whether he ever faced the darkest parts within himself in that same way-maybe it never really happened until that last day and night. And if that was the time, I'm glad there were good people there for him.

Being around Leary had taught me what nothing else had: that encountering death did not always have to be an experience of freezing horror. In those last hours, Timothy Leary could still be a good therapist.

I looked at Tim lying there in his death, his eyes hollow, the skin on his face already sinking, and I was reminded of something Rosemary once told me. It was a story about one of the last times she saw Leary before he fell ill. "I'd gone to New Mexico with him," she said. "He was lecturing there. He'd gone to the bar to pick up some drinks, and I was standing out of the light. And just the way the light hit him in the bar, and illuminated the planes of his face-he was so beautiful. And it was the old face. I mean, the one from years ago. I don't know why. It was just the way the lighting hit him. Beautiful bones."

I sat there in the dark, looking at Tim, thinking of Rosemary's words.

Beautiful bones, I thought. Even in death, beautiful bones.

allen ginsberg: for the f.u.c.king and the dying.

For many of us, Allen Ginsberg's death came with such suddenness, it proved to be a mind-stopping jolt-like learning that a guiding star had just been torn from the night sky and hurled to some unreachable void. Perhaps those final days seemed like a rush to darkness for the seventy-year-old poet as well-though it was no secret that Ginsberg had been suffering from liver disease during the last few years. Always a man of candor, he admitted to the pains and losses of aging in poems and interviews over the last decade. For that matter, it seems that Allen Ginsberg had been contemplating the meanings that come from death's inevitability for nearly the entirety of his writing career. In 1959, in "Kaddish," his narrative poem about his mother's decline and death, Ginsberg said to his mother's memory: "Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century. . . . " And in 1992, he wrote of himself: Sleepless I stay up &

think about my Death.

-certainly it's nearer. . . .

If I don't get some rest I'll die faster.

As it turned out, it was only seven days before his death that Ginsberg learned his illness had turned worse-that it was now inoperable liver cancer. Hearing the news, Ginsberg returned to his apartment in New York's East Village and proceeded to do what he had always done: He sat down and wrote a body of poems about the experiences of his life-in this case, about the imminence of his end. One of these poems-a long, hilarious, and heart-affecting piece called "Death & Fame"-ran in The New Yorker the week following his demise. In the poem, Ginsberg envisioned hundreds of friends, admirers, and lovers gathered at his "big funeral," and he hoped that among the eulogies, someone would testify: "He gave great head."

In those last few days, Ginsberg also talked to friends-his lifetime compeer, author William Burroughs; his lover of several decades, Peter Orlovsky; poet Gregory Corso; among others-and he wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton (to be sent via George Stephanopoulus, another Ginsberg friend), demanding, in jest, some sort of medal of recognition. At one point during his last week, he listened to a recording of "C. C. Rider" by 1920s blues vocalist Ma Rainey-the first voice Ginsberg said he remembered hearing as a child. He sang along with it, according to one report, then vomited and said: "Gee, I've never done that before." By Friday, he had slipped into a coma. Surrounded by a few close friends, Ginsberg died early Sat.u.r.day morning, April 5, 1997.

A quiet closing to a mighty life. Not since the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1980 murder of John Lennon has a certain segment of popular culture had to come to terms with the realization of such an epochal ending. Allen Ginsberg not only made history-by writing poems that jarred America's consciousness and by ensuring that the 1950s Beat movement would be remembered as a considerable literary force-but he also lived through and embodied some of the most remarkable cultural mutations of the last half-century. As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or the s.e.x Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky, and unyielding in the psyche and dreams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King, Jr.'s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept on the margins. Just as Dylan would later change what popular songs could say and do, Ginsberg changed what poetry might accomplish: how it could speak, what it would articulate, and who it would speak to and for. Ginsberg's words-his performances of his words and how he carried their meanings into his life and actions-gave poetry a political and cultural relevance it had not known since the Transcendentalists of the 1840s (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Th.o.r.eau, among them) or since the shocking publication of Walt Whitman's 1855 cla.s.sic, Leaves of Gra.s.s. Indeed, in Ginsberg's hands, poetry proved to be something a great deal more than a vocation or the province of refined wordsmiths and critics. Ginsberg transformed his gift for language into a mission-"trying to save and heal the spirit of America," as he wrote in the introduction to fellow poet Anne Waldman's The Beat Book. In the process, he not only influenced subsequent writers like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll, but Ginsberg's effect could also be found in Norman Mailer's Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself, in the writings and deeds of Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, in the lives and exploits of 1960s insurrectionists like Timothy Leary, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman. One can also hear Ginsberg's effect on such current artists as Sonic Youth, Beck, U2, and several of our finer hip-hop poets.

Ginsberg was also, of course, simply a man-at turns generous and compet.i.tive, self-aware yet self-aggrandizing, old in his wisdom, juvenile in his tastes and affections, and relentlessly promiscuous though deeply faithful. More than anything, though, Ginsberg was someone who once summoned the bravery to speak hidden truths and about unspeakable things, and some people took consolation and courage from his example. That example-that insistence that he would not simply shut up, and that one should not accept delimited values or experiences-is perhaps Ginsberg's greatest gift to us. Today, there are many other artists who have carried on in that tradition-from Dylan, Smith, and Reed to Coolio, Beck, and numerous others-and so in that way, Ginsberg's death does not rob us of unfulfilled possibilities, as happened in the horrid deaths of Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G. That's because Ginsberg's entire life was a process of opening himself (and us) up to possibilities. Still, Ginsberg's loss remains enormous. There is no question: We have seen a giant pa.s.s from our times. It is only fitting to look back on what he did for us and for our land.

ALLEN GINSBERG was born in 1926, the son of politically radical Russian-born Jewish parents who were also aesthetic progressives (Allen's older brother, Eugene, was named after labor organizer Eugene V. Debs; Ginsberg also recalled that the music of Ma Rainey, Beethoven, and Bessie Smith filled the family's home in Paterson, New Jersey). Allen's father, Louis, was a published and respected poet. Louis and Allen would have many arguments over the years regarding poetry's language and structure, though in his father's last few years, the two men often shared stages together, exchanging poems and genuine respect and affection.

But it was Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, who proved in many ways to have a more profound and haunting effect on her son's life, mentality, and writing. By 1919, she had already experienced an episode of schizophrenia. She recovered for a while and returned to her life as an activist and mother, but when Allen was three, Naomi experienced an intense relapse. She committed herself to a sanitarium, and for much of the rest of her life, she moved from one psychiatric inst.i.tution to another. During the times she returned home, she would often declaim frightened fantasies about a pact between her husband, Hitler, Mussolini, and President Roosevelt, all involved in an attempt to seize control of her mind. Also, she took to walking around the house nude. Allen-who was kept home from school to take care of his mother on her bad days-would sit reading, trying to ignore Naomi's nakedness and ravings.

Growing up witnessing painful madness and missing the attendance of a loving mother had an enormous impact on Ginsberg. For one thing, it taught him a certain way of preparing for and dealing with hard realities. In Jerry Aronson's film The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, Ginsberg stated: "I've had almost like this screen built, so I could hear people dying and get on with it. . . . I could survive without tears in a sense, so that the tears would come out in a poem later, rather than in an immediate breakup of my world. My world already was broken up long ago."

Naomi's problems-and her absence from the home-also brought out a neediness and uncertainty that stayed with Ginsberg in many ways his entire life, and that affected how, as a child, he made connections between erotic incentives and emotional fulfillment. Ginsberg often related how, during the lonely nights when his mother was away, he would cuddle up against his father, Louis, Allen rubbing his erect p.e.n.i.s against the back of his father's leg while Louis tried to sleep and ignore the activity. Finally, Naomi's mental problems also made Ginsberg both more afraid of his own possible madness and also more sympathetic about the troubles of others-and it left him with a fear of shadows and ghosts and as a person p.r.o.ne to seeing visions. By the time he was eleven, Allen was already writing about these matters in his early journals, and he discovered something that gave him a certain comfort and strength: Words, unlike so much that surrounded him as a child, were something he could have dominion over, something that could express his thoughts, something he could take pride in.

But for all the loneliness and fearfulness that characterized his childhood family life, Ginsberg also inherited his parents' clear intelligence and much of their political compa.s.sion. By the time he was sixteen, he was also coming to the realization that he was attracted to men s.e.xually; in particular, he wors.h.i.+pped a high school cla.s.smate who left Paterson for Columbia University in New York City. In 1943, Ginsberg received a scholars.h.i.+p from the Young Men's Hebrew a.s.sociation of Paterson, and he promptly headed for Columbia.

Ginsberg arrived at the university planning to study to become a labor lawyer, but two differing intellectual milieus changed that course. The first was Columbia's formidable English studies department, which then included Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling; Ginsberg became enamored of these men as mentors and soon changed his major to literature. Over the course of the next year or so, Ginsberg also met another group of men-some of them fellow Columbia students, closer to his own age-and it was this fraternity that turned his life around and that would function as a sort of secondary family for much of the rest of his life. Among these men were William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and a football star with literary aspirations named Jack Kerouac. The bond that developed between them transformed not only their own destinies, but also those of future generations. In particular, Ginsberg and Kerouac seemed to share a special connection. Both were haunted by their childhoods-Kerouac had an older brother, Gerard, who had died young, and Kerouac's mother used to hold Jack as a child and tell him, "You should have died, not Gerard." But the most important thing these men shared was a sense that, in the mid-1940s, there were great secrets lurking at America's heart, that there were still rich and daring ways of exploring the nation's arts and soul-and that there was a great adventure and transcendence to be found by doing so. Indeed, America was about to change dramatically, but the significance of that change wouldn't be fully understood or reckoned with for another twenty years. In 1945, the nation emerged victorious from the horrors of World War II and would enter a long era of new prosperity and opportunity; the new American life, many politicians and critics declared, was now the world standard of the good life. But all this came at unexpected psychic costs: The knowledge of the possibility of nuclear devastation changed all the possibilities of the future. Plus, for all the nation's victories abroad, there were still many battles unwaged at home-including the delicate question of minority rights. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the rest of their crowd were beginning to be drawn to some decidedly different ideals and hopes. They heard the music of bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Thelonious Monk, they tasted the visions of marijuana and Benzedrine, they prowled the reality of Times Square. A new world-a world still largely underground-was being born, and they had keen eyes and a keen need for it.

The friends.h.i.+p that developed among them was complex, sometimes tense, sometimes loving, but what held it together for so long was a shared desire to inquire-in matters of the mind, of aesthetics, and of the senses. In time, this group became the nexus for a literary and artistic community known as the Beat Generation-the first countercultural movement that would have a major impact on America's popular culture. But all this was still years away, for before Beat became a movement or style, it was simply the way these men chose to live their lives, to examine their own experiences and their view of things both internal-like the spirit-and external, like the night and music and s.e.x. Sometimes these men related to each other s.e.xually (Ginsberg later told stories of he and Kerouac jacking each other off after a night of drinking; years later, Ginsberg also had an affair with Burroughs). Mainly, the group would spend nights consuming alcohol and mild drugs (though Burroughs soon turned to heroin), staying up until dawn, talking about the poetry, visions, and madness of Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, Celine, Genet, and Baudelaire; about how language might learn from jazz; about what was truly holy and what was truly allowed in one's life. Along the way, the group derived a certain ethos and aesthetic that they called the New Vision: It relied on stretching one's experiences, finding truths in distorted realities, in s.e.xual pursuits, finding spirituality in the lower depths of life, and most important in making a commitment to an extemporized manner of living, writing, talking, and risking. Somewhere during this time another friend of the group, a bis.e.xual junkie prost.i.tute, Herbert Huncke, referred to them as "beat," meaning beat down, wasted. Kerouac saw in the word another possibility: beatific. In time, the term went both ways: Beat came to stand for the idea that to discover one's true self and the self's liberation, you first had to descend into some of the most secret, used up, and bereft parts of your heart, soul, body, and consciousness. Consequently, Beat became hard-boiled and loving at the same time, erotic and spiritual. Later, Ginsberg would write Kerouac: "I can't believe that between us . . . we have the nucleus of a totally new historically important generation."

But the budding movement also could lead to costly excesses. In August 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed to death a friend of his, David Kammerer, after a night of drinking and arguing. Carr was a beautiful young man, and Kammerer, who had been obsessed with him, had relentlessly pursued and pushed Carr. After the stabbing, Carr went directly to Burroughs' apartment and admitted what he had done. Burroughs advised Carr to turn himself in to the police. Carr then went and awakened Kerouac and repeated his confession. Kerouac helped Carr get rid of the knife. In a few days, Carr turned himself in to the police, and Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as accessories after the fact. Ginsberg as well was castigated for being part of such a dangerous crowd. In truth, though, Ginsberg felt that in some way the group's "libertine" att.i.tudes had helped make the tragedy possible-and that understanding made Allen much more careful, in years to come, about any excesses that might lead to violence. Eventually, Carr was sent to prison (he served two years), and for a short time, the old crowd dispersed. A few months later, Ginsberg was found in his Columbia dormitory in bed with Kerouac; for that infraction-and for having written offensive graffiti in the dust of a windowsill-Allen was suspended from the university for a year. Things went up and down for the group for a few years. People drifted in and out of New York, and then in 1949, Ginsberg got involved in the life of Herbert Huncke, drug addict and thief. That a.s.sociation resulted later in Ginsberg's arrest and his being committed to the Columbia Psychiatric Inst.i.tute-a turn of events that would in time have great effect on his poetry writing.

Prior to that, though, in late 1946, a new figure showed up in the Beat circle-and his involvement with the crowd had a seismic impact on both Ginsberg and Kerouac. Neal Ca.s.sady was a sharp-featured, handsome, fast-talking, brilliant natural prodigy. He didn't so much write (in fact, he wrote very little), but he did live his life as if it were a novel. He drove across America relentlessly, loved to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e frequently each day, and also f.u.c.ked a good number of the beautiful women (and some of the men) he met along the way. He became involved with Carolyn Robinson, and the couple eventually settled down in Denver for a time. Kerouac was taken by Ca.s.sady's intense, fast-clip language-like a spoken version of bebop-and with Ca.s.sady's willingness to go as far as he could with the sensual experience and sensory rush of life. Ginsberg was impressed by the same traits, but he was also entranced by Ca.s.sady's beauty. One night, following a party, Ginsberg and Ca.s.sady found themselves sharing the same bed. Ginsberg was scared of his own desires, he later admitted, but Ca.s.sady put his arm around Allen and pulled him close, in a gentle motion. It was the first time in his life that Ginsberg felt truly loved, and it was also his first pa.s.sionate s.e.xual experience.

Ginsberg fell in love with Ca.s.sady, and his pursuit of that love-and the intensity of how wrong it all went-proved a key episode in leading to his development as an artist. Ca.s.sady, in the meantime, started to discourage the attraction. Ginsberg was undaunted and followed Neal to Colorado. Though he and Neal still had occasional s.e.x, he knew it meant little to Ca.s.sady. He returned to New York, devastated, and later went on to fall into trouble with Huncke.

BY THE EARLY 1950s, Ginsberg had gone through severe pain over his loss of Ca.s.sady and had also gone through psychiatric treatment. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, and was working in an advertising agency in Manhattan. One day, discussing this matter, Ginsberg's therapist asked him what he really wanted to do with his life. Ginsberg replied: Quit his job and write poetry. The therapist said: "Well, why don't you?" Then, in 1954, the old crowd started to rea.s.semble in the San Francis...o...b..y Area. The Ca.s.sadys had moved to San Jose, and Kerouac settled in for a visit. In San Francisco itself, a poetry movement was beginning to burgeon, inspired in part by the success of local poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti-the latter who had just opened the nation's first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights, and who had started to publish local poets. Allen headed for San Jose. He was thinking about poetry, but he was also still thinking about Neal. One afternoon, Carolyn walked into her home to see Neal and Allen in bed, Ginsberg sucking Ca.s.sady's p.e.n.i.s. She ordered Ginsberg from their home, drove him to San Francisco, gave him $20, and left him there.

It was the best thing that ever happened to Ginsberg. He soon fell in with the poet crowd in San Francisco's North Beach area, and he met a man that he would stay involved with for decades, Peter Orlovsky. All the hopes and visions that had formed years before in New York were starting to come to fruition for some of the old crowd-especially for Kerouac, who had finished two novels, and for Ginsberg, who was ready for something to break loose in his poetry. One afternoon in August 1955, Ginsberg sat down at a typewriter in his tiny apartment and attempted to write a poem for his own ear, but also a poem that would catch the free-flowing style that he had seen Kerouac hit upon in his own recent writing. Ginsberg wrote the whole day, thinking about many things: his lost loves, his found loves, the discarded people of America, the discarded promises of America, the fear that was just behind him, the fear that lay ahead for all.

Two months later, in October, Ginsberg-with help from Kenneth Rexroth-organized a poetry reading, to be given at a cooperative art gallery, the Six Gallery, to showcase a handful of the scene's poets. Six poets read that evening-including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia-to a crowd of maybe fifty to one hundred people, with Kerouac sitting on the gallery's floor, drinking and tapping out rhythms on a wine jug, urging "Go! Go!" to the cadences of the poets' words. Ginsberg was the last to read, and as he began "Howl"-the poem he had written in one sitting two months earlier-the crowd was transfixed from the first lines: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Ginsberg went on to describe the fearsome evil that he saw America becoming-"Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!"-and when he finished, the crowd exploded in applause. "All of a sudden," Rexroth later said, "Ginsberg read this thing that he had been keeping to himself all this while, and it just blew things up completely. Things would never be quite the same again."

"Howl" was one of the most incandescent events in post-World War II literary history or popular culture, and its arrival later ensured the Beats their place on the map of modern time. Also, because "Howl" was a poem that had such force when read aloud by Ginsberg, it marked a return of poetry to the art of vocalization. But most important, "Howl" was the first major American work of the era that spoke for the outcasts, for the mad and the lost, and about what would soon happen in the nation's soul. In the context of those times, in the midst of a frightened new patriotism that was being defined by fears of socialism and communism and a desperate need to believe in the a.s.surance of the family structure and traditional mores, "Howl" battered at the heart of the American ideal of civilization. It was a heroic work, on many levels. America was hardly prepared to admit that h.o.m.os.e.xuality might be anything other than a form of madness; for a poet-for anybody-to declare pride or pleasure to be queer was to run a monumental risk. To talk about-to cherish those who "let themselves be f.u.c.ked in the a.s.s by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy"-was no small matter. In effect, it meant aligning oneself with madness, with inexpressible values. To find grace and worthy companions.h.i.+p and celebration in the company of junkies, prost.i.tutes, and black jazz revolutionaries only pushed the ante more. Something opened up in America's culture and in its future the day that Ginsberg gave utterance to these thoughts with "Howl." The following year, working from quite different quarters, Elvis Presley in his own way helped push the gates open as well. "We liked Elvis," poet Gregory Corso later said of the night he and Kerouac watched Presley on "The Ed Sullivan Show." We identified with the s.e.xual wiggling of his body."

"Howl" and Presley. Nothing would ever be the same after that. America's libido, America's likelihood, had been ripped wide open.

THIS ISN'T TO SAY that "Howl" was immediately or widely read or praised. Quite the contrary: The reaction of some people was that "Howl" should never be widely read. In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published the first editions of "Howl") and a City Lights Bookstore employee were arrested for knowingly selling obscenity and put on trial. The prosecutor was a Bay Area district attorney, Ralph McIntosh, bent on closing down p.o.r.n shops and prohibiting the sale of magazines with nudity. The ACLU, Grove Press, Evergreen Review, and poet Kenneth Patchen, among others, offered their support to Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and "Howl." Among those testifying on behalf of the poem's serious merits were Rexroth and author Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In his final argument, McIntosh asked Judge Clayton W. Horn: "Your Honor, how far are we going to license the use of filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language? How far can we go?"

Horn ruled that "Howl" was not lacking in social relevance and therefore could not be ruled obscene. In delivering his decision, Horn also offered what may be the single best succinct review that "Howl" received: "The first part of "Howl' presents a picture of a nightmare world, the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. . . . 'Footnote to "Howl" ' seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends in a plea for holy living."

Though Ginsberg was vindicated and suddenly famous, he was determined not to arrive as the Beats' sole writer-hero. Over the years, he helped Jack Kerouac in his long quest to publish On the Road-a book about Kerouac's adventures with Neal Ca.s.sady (who was called Dean Moriarty in the published text)-which had been turned down by numerous major publishers since 1951. The book was finally published by Viking, in 1957, as a result of Ginsberg's efforts, and went on to both good commercial and critical reception, and is now recognized as a milestone novel in modern literature. Ginsberg also championed the cause of William S. Burroughs-a much tougher sell, because Burroughs was a drug user who wrote radical prose (such as Junky), and because he had killed his wife in a shooting accident in Mexico in 1951. Ginsberg understood that his old friend felt a tremendous guilt and Ginsberg also believed Burroughs might never redeem himself unless he could concentrate his soul and mind on his writing. Ginsberg later helped Burroughs a.s.semble the final draft of Naked Lunch and worked tirelessly until the book was published in the United States. (Which resulted in Naked Lunch's own obscenity trial and another ruling that the book could not be held to be called obscene.) The Beats were-at least for a brief time-a force in American arts and letters, but there remained many who were incensed by their words and beliefs. In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stood before the Republican Convention and declared that "Beatniks" were among America's major menaces. In addition, Norman Podh.o.r.etz-an old cla.s.smate of Ginsberg's at Columbia and by 1958 the editor of Commentary magazine-a.s.serted that the Beats were an affront to the nation's central ideals. By the end of the decade, the Beats had been sidelined, declared a silly aberration by moralist critics on both the right and left. But despite all the resistance and disdain, Ginsberg continued to grow and thrive as a poet-and to remain undaunted. At the conclusion of one of his most defiant works, "America," he wrote: "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

Then, in 1959, after a night of taking Benzedrine, listening to the rhythm & blues of Ray Charles, and walking New York's streets, Ginsberg sat down to write "Kaddish." It was his tribute to his mother, Naomi, whose mental pain had grown so horrifying that, in the late 1950s, Ginsberg signed papers allowing doctors to perform a lobotomy on her. Ginsberg never truly got over the guilt of that decision, and he would never enjoy the union and relations.h.i.+p with his mother that he'd longed for his entire life. In 1956, Allen sent Naomi a published copy of "Howl." Naomi died shortly thereafter. A few days after learning of her death, he received her last letter: "I received your poetry," she wrote. "I'd like to send it to Louis for criticism. . . . As for myself, I still have the wire on my head. The doctors know about it. They are cutting the flesh and bone. . . . I do wish you were back east so I could see you. . . . I wish I were out of here and home at the same time you were young; then I would be young."

In "Kaddish," Ginsberg remembered everything about his mother-tender things, scary things, the amazing perceptions that sometimes blazed through her madness-and with enormous love and compa.s.sion, he finally found her place in his heart (and recognized his in hers) and let her go to her death. It was most likely Ginsberg's finest moment as a poet, and it is impossible to hear any of his readings of that work and not be moved by how profoundly "Kaddish" measures just how much that people, families, and nations can lose as their hopes and fates unwind.

FOR THE NEXT three decades, Allen Ginsberg would remain an important artist and active force. Indeed, more than any other figure from the Beat era, he made the transition from the styles and concerns of the 1950s to those of the decades that followed. Jack Kerouac died in 1968, after living an embittered and alcoholic final few years at his mother's home in New Jersey (his mother hated Ginsberg and came between the two men's friends.h.i.+p whenever possible). Neal Ca.s.sady went on to become a popular figure in San Francisco's mid- and late-1960s Haight-Ashbury scene; he became the driver for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' legendary cross-country bus trek, and he also became a driver and companion to the Grateful Dead. But perhaps Ca.s.sady pushed his spirited self a bit hard. One day in 1968, after leaving a wedding in a small Mexican town, Ca.s.sady collapsed while walking alongside some railroad tracks. He died the next day, just short of his forty-second birthday.

Ginsberg not only survived, but kept pace with the spirit and needs of the times, with the permutations of youth culture; also, he kept faith with the humane and impa.s.sioned ideals that had made "Howl" so powerful in the first place. In 1964, he became friendly with the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Ginsberg's and the Beats' work already had meaning and effect for these artists. Dylan recalled that after reading Kerouac and Ginsberg, he realized that there were people like himself somewhere in the land-and indeed, when the singer made his startling transition to the electric, free-a.s.sociation style of music found in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (and again later with Blood on the Tracks), Dylan was taking the language, cadences, and imagery of the Beats and applying it to a new form. The impact of this melding on 1960s music-like the effect of Ginsberg's "Howl" on the 1950s-was colossal. (In fact, one of the early proposed cover photos for Blonde on Blonde showed Dylan standing with Ginsberg and poet-playwright Michael McClure.) In addition, John Lennon had read the Beats in his years as an art student in Liverpool and changed his spelling of the group's name, Beetles, to Beatles, in part as tribute to the spirit of that inspired artistry. Dylan and the Beatles changed not just a specific art form-that is, rock & roll-but also transformed the perceptions and aspirations of youth and popular culture at large. But without the earlier work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, it is possible that these 1960s artists might not have hit upon quite the same path of creativity-or at least might not have been able to work in the same atmosphere of permission and invention.

Ginsberg also became increasingly involved and influential in the political concerns of the 1960s and thereafter-though he did so in a way that made plain his own conviction in a politics of nonviolence and joy, rather than of destruction and hatred. In some ways, in fact, the 1960s culture of the hippies and radicals amounted to the realization of what the Beats began to envision and prophesy in the late 1940s (interestingly, "hippie" was a term first coined by the Beats, meaning "half-hip," and the phrase "flower power" was first verbalized by Allen Ginsberg). In the summer of 1968, Ginsberg helped organize Chicago's Festival of Life (along with the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and members of the Black Panthers), in protest to the Democratic Party's promotion of the Vietnam War and as a rebuke to Hubert Humphrey's capitulation to the party's hawkish elements. But when the events of those few days turned suddenly brutal and b.l.o.o.d.y-with policemen clubbing young people, old people, anything in their path, and demonstrators tossing bricks at, and taunting, the already enraged cops-Ginsberg turned sickened and horrified. On one occasion, as police raged through a crowd bas.h.i.+ng protesters, a policeman came upon Ginsberg, seated in the lotus position, softly chanting. The policeman raised his club to crash it down on Ginsberg's head. The poet looked up at the officer, smiled, and said: "Go in peace, brother." The cop lowered his club. "f.u.c.king hippie," he declared, then moved on. In 1970, when several of the key Chicago activists-known as the Chicago Seven, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale-were brought up on federal charges of conspiring to riot, defense attorney William Kunstler called Ginsberg to the witness stand. At Kunstler's request, Ginsberg recited parts of "Howl." When he reached the poem's climax-"Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!"-he turned in his chair and pointed at the judge who had been so hostile to the defendants, Julius Hoffman (ironically, the same judge who years earlier declared Naked Lunch not obscene).

In addition, Ginsberg became a key player in the 1960s argument over psychedelic drugs, such as LSD. He had, of course, taken several drugs in his days with the Beats, and already had some psychedelic experience. But in the early 1960s, Ginsberg heard about a Harvard professor, Dr. Timothy Leary, who was conducting authorized research at the university, and was sharing the drug psilocybin with his project's volunteers. Ginsberg contacted Leary and arranged for a visit to experiment with the drug. Leary and Ginsberg struck up an immediate friends.h.i.+p and had considerable influence on each other's thinking. Ginsberg believed strongly (in contrast to most of Leary's cohorts) that it was a good idea to move psychedelics from the domain of a small elitist group and share them with artists, writers, poets, and musicians-and as a result, hallucinogenic drugs and their visions made inroads into the arts, and later helped trans.m.u.te the aesthetics and ideals of late twentieth century music, literature, painting, film and video. Ginsberg also convinced Leary that psychedelics could be a way of enabling people to examine and transform their own minds, and that it would be the young who would prove most receptive to such possibilities.

Ginsberg later forswore psychedelics, but his friends.h.i.+p with Leary continued off and on for more than thirty-five years. During the last few weeks of Leary's life, in the spring of 1996, the two men spoke often. Leary knew that Ginsberg had planned a trip to Los Angeles, in July, to attend an art show featuring Burroughs' work. Though Leary's health was daily diminis.h.i.+ng as his body succ.u.mbed to prostate cancer, he hoped to live until Ginsberg's visit and made the date the last mark on his calendar. Leary would die without seeing his friend one last time. But in the hours preceding his death, Ginsberg's Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche, managed to reach Leary, uttering a final prayer for his pa.s.sage into death.

GINSBERG STAYED active in politics, arts, and popular and renegade culture for the remainder of his life. In the mid-1970s, he toured with Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue, singing and reading poetry. A few years later, he released his own sets of songs and collaborations with such artists as Dylan and the Clash-and it proved as exhilarating as his best poetry had a generation earlier. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Ginsberg befriended and encouraged many other poets, punk, and rap artists.

Of course, as time went along, the role of the renegade has grown more acceptable, more a.s.similated to some degree in mainstream culture. What was shocking in the 1950s was less shocking in the 1970s; what was disruptive in the 1970s was commonplace and profitable by the 1990s. Ginsberg understood this inevitable progression of how radical works and impulses are first resisted, then gradually diffused, and in his own way he had fun with that fact and mocked it a bit. He took to wearing suits and ties as he grew older-in part, it gave his p.r.o.nouncements more authority, more respectability for some critics, but the other thing was: Ginsberg looked great in suits and ties. But for all his venerability and respectability, there was a part of Ginsberg that would never be domesticated much less silenced. In 1979, the National Arts Club awarded him a gold medal for literary merit. At the awards dinner, according to Burroughs' biographer Ted Morgan, Ginsberg bemusedly read a poem called "c.o.c.ksucker Blues," to the genuine consternation of his audience. He also remained a relentless supporter of author Burroughs. In the late 1970s, after his own 1973 induction into the rarefied ranks of the American Academy and Inst.i.tute of Arts and Letters, Ginsberg began a campaign to have Burroughs inducted as well. Ginsberg met with a great deal of refusal-Burroughs was not a writer that several of the other fine authors wanted in their company-but the poet persisted. It took six years, but Ginsberg won Burroughs' entry into the inst.i.tute, in 1983. Also, Ginsberg remained a fierce advocate of free speech. In recent years, he even took up a defense of NAMBLA-an organization dedicated to lowering the age of consensual s.e.x between men and boys. Ginsberg's involvement with the outfit outraged many of his long-standing admirers, but Ginsberg would not be cowed. "It's a free speech issue," he said repeatedly, pointing out that to stifle the ability to discuss such a matter in a free society was perhaps its own kind of outrage. Also, apparently, he stayed as s.e.xually active as he could. In "Death & Fame" in The New Yorker, Ginsberg boasted about the many men he had seduced throughout his lifetime, and he detailed what it was he liked about his s.e.xual intimacy with these partners. But for all that Ginsberg did or attempted to do, to this day "Howl" still cannot be played over America's airwaves during the day, due to the efforts of Jesse Helms and the Federal Communications Commission.

AND SO HE IS gone. In the days since Ginsberg's death I have seen and heard countless tributes to his grace, power, skills, and generosity-but I have also seen and heard just as many disparaging remarks: what a shoddy writer he was; what a failure the legacy of his Beat Generation and the 1960s generation turned out to be; what an old lecher the guy was. Perhaps all this vitriol isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's another tribute of sorts: Allen Ginsberg never lost his ability to rub certain nerves the wrong way when it came to matters about propriety, aesthetics, morality, and politics.

But I also know this: Allen Ginsberg won-against the formidable odds of his own madness-scarred childhood, against all his soul-crippling doubts of self, against all those stern, bristling, authoritarian forces that looked at this man and saw only a bearded radical f.a.ggot that they could not abide. Ginsberg won in a very simple yet irrefutable way: He raised his voice. He looked at the horror that was crawling out from the American subconscious of the 1950s-the same horror that would later allow the nation to sacrifice so many of its children in the 1960s to a vile and pointless military action-and he called that demon by its name: "Moloch!" He looked at the crazed and the despairing, those people hurting for a fix, for a f.u.c.k of love, for the obliteration of intoxicated visions, and he saw in them something to adore and kiss, something to be treasured and learned from. And Ginsberg looked at himself, and for all his hard-earned pride, l.u.s.t, vanity, and audacity, he would not shut up even in the face of his own vulnerability. In one of his best poems, 1992's "After Lalon," Ginsberg wrote: I had my chance and lost it,

many chances & didn't

take them seriously enuf.