I gazed across the street at the Art Nouveau stained glass sign of Vesuvio Café, where the Beats had congregated back in the fifties—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. Suddenly I found myself recalling an evening I’d spent with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs during my senior year at Duke. It was one of the most memorable of my life, that evening, though I rarely told anyone about it, lest I be expected to share some revelation of cosmic proportions, when in truth the conversation, and the poetry reading that followed, had been disappointing, certainly, as compared with the magnitude of their celebrity.
Like so many college students in the eighties, I’d been fixated on the counterculture of the fifties and sixties—from Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground to Bob Dylan and the Beats. A religion major with a focus on Buddhism, I was headed to San Francisco as soon as I graduated, with high hopes of establishing myself as an artist there. I’d read all the Beat writers and identified with their antiestablishment ethos; as a psychology minor, I’d been influenced by the writings of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Alan Watts, which had led to my research paper on the clinical use of LSD in the treatment of alcoholism. The local Hare Krishna chapter had been the subject of my photo essay for a documentary photography course; I’d even considered having the Hare Krishnas cook one of their famous vegetarian dinners to honor Ginsberg and Burroughs.
Instead, I organized the dinner at a local vegetarian restaurant before Ginsberg’s reading. At a table of twenty people, mostly Ginsberg’s posse, along with a few of my friends, I was the only woman. But in spite of the Beats’ notorious indifference toward my gender, I’d managed to seat myself next to Ginsberg and directly across from Burroughs. Tommy, my four-year college boyfriend, with whom I’d finally disowned my virginity freshman year, was also seated next to me. A clean-cut prep school kid when we’d first met, he now sported shoulder-length hair and a beard, while my own hair hung down to my elbows, crowned by my signature Greek fisherman’s cap. We sat smoking Lucky Strikes, too shy to speak, completely awed by our dinner guests.
Ginsberg, with his wandering eye, was jovial and troll-like as he held court. Burroughs sat regally and silently in his dinner coat, lighting one cigarette after another with a dramatic sweep of his arm each time he struck the match. I’d half expected to meet the two youthful men I’d seen posed with Paul Bowles in a photograph, Tangier, 1961. But these men were old, Burroughs in particular.
Ginsberg showered Burroughs with doting attention and private jokes that made the rest of us feel like onlookers. They discussed the Lemur Center at Duke—one of the reasons Burroughs had desired to make the trip to Durham. He was a big fan, apparently, of lemurs.
When the salads arrived, Ginsberg praised the restaurant’s tofu-tahini dressing.
I seized my chance to join the conversation. “I know. I’ll miss this dressing when I’m in San Francisco,” I told him.
“Ah, San Francisco,” said Ginsberg with an ironic little twirl of his salad fork. “And what ’ill you be doing there?”
“I’m going to be an artist.”
Nodding vaguely, he encouraged me to spend time at the San Francisco Art Institute. “It’s a wonderful place,” he said. “I taught a writing workshop there once.”
After dinner we all drove to an auditorium on campus where Ginsberg would read. My friends and I sat on the edge of the stage, drinking red wine from the bottle, as the beatniks had once done at Ginsberg’s quixotic first reading of “Howl” in North Beach. But the mood wasn’t there, the sterile auditorium half empty. Ginsberg read a series of sexually explicit homoerotic poems, and people started filing out. His provocation of the mostly conservative-looking crowd appeared intentional, and perfectly in character; he read one lewd poem after another, a determined smile on his face, clearly getting a kick out of the audience’s reaction. Toward the end, he read “Sunflower Sutra” and a string of older work, rewarding those of us who’d stayed.
Afterward, we went into a brightly lit reception area with white tablecloths, wine, and platters of cheese. Ginsberg came up to me with his big grin. “How did you like the sphincter poems, Frances?”
I sensed he was making fun of me because I’d been the only woman at dinner, surrounded by male sphincters. “I thought they were great, Allen,” I replied witlessly. That was the power of the icon that was Allen Ginsberg: he’d lost the majority of his audience, and yet I would be the one to obsess over my unclever reply to him for years to come.