Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson

Author:Joyce Johnson [Johnson, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780413775597
Google: WmOmPwAACAAJ
Amazon: B001LFDACS
Publisher: Methuen
Published: 1999-07-01T23:00:00+00:00

There was a dark radiance about Elise when she was happy — you could always hear it immediately in her voice, like a light turned on behind the words.

“Allen’s back,” she said.

He was back, but not for good, of course, he’d be going away in a couple of months. Peter was with him, Peter was so beautiful. They’d be moving in that night. Sheila didn’t mind.

I asked her who Peter was.

“Oh, Allen’s lover.”

I went up to see them later that week. It was sometime early in December.

The apartment shone, as if every inch had been mopped and swept. Peter loved to clean, Sheila told me. He’d been a hospital orderly, which was how he’d learned to do it so well. “I adore him,” she said, and showed me how they’d rearranged the furniture. In one of the rooms, the two mattresses she and Elise had bought from the Salvation Army and carried up the six flights of stairs when they first took the place were lying on the floor side by side.

I remember feeling very shy.

I lost my shyness after a few more visits. It all seemed strangely normal, like being with a new kind of family. I saw that what you learned to consider normal did not necessarily have to remain constant; “normalcy” in fact might be an artificial idea.

The truth was that to me, those four small tenement rooms in Yorkville seemed the most exciting place in the world that winter. Allen’s energy was like a magical force, sweeping up people, ideas, manuscripts, bringing them together in new combinations that would last for an afternoon or a lifetime. He excluded no one from the warm, steady beam of his attention, talking as earnestly to a kid who’d come up on the subway with a notebook of doggerel in his pocket as he would to Randall Jarrell.

Howl had just been published. You could find the small, square, black and white books in only two places in the city — Elise’s kitchen and the Eighth Street Bookshop. Like a guerrilla general, Allen ambushed the world of the established literati — presenting himself to be interviewed at the New York Times, Time, Life, and the Village Voice; turning up at publishing houses and cocktail parties to convert agents, editors, critics into supporters of his revolution. He exhorted, charmed, raged, stripping himself naked on occasion to prove his point, as he’d done at a reading in Los Angeles in response to a heckler. Like a young blond apostle or a little brother, Peter Orlovsky was always at his side, sweet and tireless, providing a balance.

In the apartment in Yorkville, Elise waited, ironing, making soup, taking messages, lying down on a mattress to smoke a cigarette and stare out at the vista of rooftops where pigeons circled in the winter sky. She spent a lot of time with Lafcadio Orlovsky, who was staying alone in a rooming house. A weird silent boy whose adolescence flamed across his face in pimples, who’d spend hours

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