I hope you read this!

best

Paul

So I read the article, skimmed it rather, noting additions I could have made, like that painting LaVigne did of Peter Orlovsky had another life after Ginsberg fell rather fatally for its subject: LaVigne left it with me and it hung on my wall at 1403 Gough for years, until I sent it to him strapped to the bed of a pickup headed for NYC where he supposedly had a buyer for it. He didn’t. The next time I saw the painting was at the DeYoung Museum here in San Francisco in the travelling Beats show a few years ago. The painting is mythic, but a little overrated, (and I hope Bob doesn’t ever read this): it captures what there was of Peter’s boyish beauty to capture but it is really more LaVigne’s salivating imagination of the ideal Narcissy, that neat pick curve of his cock. There is a strange foreshortening of space in the painting, not intentional I’m sure, that finally began to bug me. I was glad to see it go.

Back to synchronicity. I skimmed the article — it’s very long and it’s very good, mostly about Charley, an old friend of mine I haven’t seen or corresponded with in years. I went on to read the comments posted (Karen is right about the two dayglos pink and orange of NOW; I wonder is that the Karen that turned Charley on to Dylan? I was there.) As I came to the end, reading the last comment, suddenly there appeared on my computer screen Charley’s comment of Aug 30, 09 (today) at 6:17 p.m. How odd is that? How unlikely? That after years of separation our fingertips would suddenly touch in cyberspace?

Okay, you’re not convinced. Try this for synchronicity. It’s better.

In the summer of 1963 I shared 1403 Gough Street with Charles Plymell and Dave Haselwood and Neal Cassady and Anne Murphy and Maggie Harms and Justin Hein and Patricia Ross and Dave Moe and Marian Weston and other people I could name but I’d run out of space. As a matter of fact I did most of the fucking cooking. And cleaning. I was losing my mind. Dropping acid and out. Trying to write a novel. You wouldn’t believe the chaos and energy and creativity – Charley writing poetry and reading it to whoever would listen, Justin painting sunburst murals in the hall, Ginsberg shaking his glory locks, Neal smacking Anne with a rubber hose. I thought life would be like that from then on, but, you know, it didn’t really last much past the sixties.

It got to be too much for me, so me and my two lovers, Justin and Maggie, jumped in the Volks — it was Mag’s car, she drove, with the baby on the top of a suitcase – and headed for Mexico. Bye, Charley, bye, it’s your scene, take it! Sad though, because the previous winter we had all bonded – Charley, Dave, Maggie, Justin, me – we were the Fool Troop, we called ourselves, stoned and holy. So our little truncated caravan bounced up and down the Pacific coast of Mexico for a few weeks, we stuck a pin in the map and headed for it, run over by a Mexican truck that crushed the Volks, before we landed in the Merced Mercado in Mexico City where we were when we heard the news – eleven minutes after it happened – that Kennedy had been assassinated. We headed home, that was enough to put an end to the party. We drove up the middle of Mexico to some little border town in Arizona out in the middle of nowhere. We left the customs station and turned onto a US highway. A car was coming toward us, the first we met. As we got closer somebody waved – both cars stopped. Believe it or not, it was Charley, headed for New York with his girl friend Anne Buchanan. The last person we said goodbye to when we left, the first person we see when we cross the border. Synchronicity. Charley went on to NY. We went on to SF.

I went back to 1403 Gough Street and lived there for about fifteen more years, a place where I sometimes find myself in dreams in the middle of the night. Oh yeah, when I was leaning into Charley’s car out in the middle of the Arizona desert, I noticed a magazine lying on the backseat. It was NOW, but it had a different cover from the first, pinker, more garish, more day-glo, cheaper looking. I was glad I had the original issue.

Glenn Todd