More Ginsberg memories.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Allen Ginsberg - Biography

Now, to more memories of Alien Ginsberg. In some ways, Allen was a bad influence during that first year I knew him, in 1946-47. In teaching me how to be hip, he made me look down on those who weren't. (You mean you haven't read Rimbaud or Baudelaire!) But we also often just had fun. He liked jazz, and so did I. I can remember one morning I skipped class so that we could get the bargain rate--it was either 55 or 95 cents if you got there before 11:30 a.m.--at the Strand Theater, where the great tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet was performing with Lionel Hampton's band. We also frequented the Three Deuces, one of the many jazz clubs that lined Fifty-second Street. It featured another tenor saxophone player, Flip Phillips. Late one night, we went to Carnegie Hall to attend a concert in the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" series that featured both Jacquet and Phillips. I was still so un-hip that Allen had to explain to me that the strong aroma in the hall was from marijuana.

Herbert Huncke was the only friend of Allens I met that first year (by the way, Herbert later wrote a very accurately titled autobiography, Guilty of Everything). Allen was away most of the next, serving in the Merchant Marine, but during the 1948-49 school year he introduced me to Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lucien Carr, Vicki Russell, and Allen's father, Louis. Carr seemed guarded and hard to know, but Kerouac and Cassady not only were open and affable, they could be downright exuberant. I would never have guessed the undercurrent of torment that was part of both men. Vicki was a hooker who wanted to use my apartment as a pad where she could entertain her johns, for which I would be rewarded with a commission. Thank goodness I wasn't quite hip enough to accept that proposal.

Allen made a special effort for me to meet his father, and I think the reason was that Allen saw me as a "respectable" friend and there was part of him that, until at least 1954, had wanted to keep one foot in the respectable world. He often talked about how T. S. Eliot, as a bank official, Wallace Stevens, as an insurance company executive, and William Carlos Williams, as a family doctor, had combined lives in poetry with regular careers. The last time I saw him before I left New York to go to law school, he was wearing a suit and told me he was working for a market research firm.

Allen got arrested in 1949. I was on the subway one Saturday morning in March when, looking over another rider's shoulder, I...