When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School by Sam Kashner

Author:Sam Kashner [Kashner, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781437979503
Google: q5K7pwAACAAJ
Publisher: DIANE Publishing Company
Published: 2004-02-22T11:00:00+00:00

28. Saint Petersburg

One morning in the middle of the fall semester, Peter came over early to wash my face—he said I didn’t do it right. He wore a white dress shirt and a pair of garish, green-checked Bermuda shorts and sandals. He said that I must not be washing my face properly because my skin had broken out around my forehead. I was embarrassed; that’s not what I wanted to hear from Allen Ginsberg’s longtime companion.

My parents almost never brought up the subject of bad skin, that splash of acne on my face, the gift of adolescence. It usually occurred just before some big, important event, and with the first student poetry reading coming up, that was perfect timing. Peter said he and Allen had realized on the farm they had at Cherry Valley, in upstate New York, that washing your face with ice-cold water kept your skin taut, and it seemed to cure pimples.

Peter had a beautiful complexion. I noticed how a lot of the mountain men—guys who lived by the rivers and streams up in the foothills of the Rockies and came back down the mountain to beg for money and to troll through the Dumpsters behind restaurants— had unusually good complexions. They also looked very rested. I would’ve thought living outdoors, with the constant hunt for food and shelter, would be exhausting.

Peter said he was going to make me exercise; he was going to make me strong. He said that I looked like “before.”

“Before what, Peter?” I asked.

“Like the drawing of ‘before,’” he said, insistent.

“Someone sitting before an artist, like a model?”

“No, like Charles Atlas bodybuilding—the drawing of Charles Atlas before he lifted weights.” I was insulted and relieved at the same time. I hadn’t mastered all of Peter’s verbal tics. Allen and Bill spoke perfect “Peter.” They knew what he was talking about at all times.

Peter said he was very strong. He showed me how he could crack a walnut with his thighs. We shared the walnut. I kept the broken shell. I thought it would be valuable someday.

After he taught me how to wash my face, Peter asked if I would type up his poems, which were going into his first book. He was very excited about it. He said that everyone thought he was ignorant, and that he just stayed with Allen because Allen was famous, but Peter said he had a lot of poems that he’d saved up through the years. It’s just that for a long time he took care of everyone, but now he wanted to take care of his poems, the poems he’d been saving. He once secretly showed his poems to Frank O’Hara, he said, and Frank told him they were wonderful and he should publish them. “Maybe one day Allen will accompany me to Sweden when I win the Nobel prize,” Peter said, laughing. “Why don’t they give out a Nobel Prize to the person with the cleanest asshole?”

I wondered about that myself, I told Peter.

Peter said he

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