A TRUE SHORT STORY By Stephen Dignan via Lillian Ross I met Allen Ginsberg, the poet, when he came to speak at Pitzer college on a serene Southern California morning in 1991, a month before I graduated. My English professor sent me to interview Ginsberg for the school paper -- the first and last assignment of that kind in my life. I was star struck to be set up with the legendary Beat poet. I leapt at the sudden opportunity to have a way of endearing myself to my “HOWL”-reading buddies. Moreover, it would help me upstage the patchouli -drenched, too-cool-for-school Dead Heads who regularly put me down when I'd say "y'all” or "I'm fixin' to go to class." I carefully put on my Sunday clothes -- my first wearing in four years: starched linen Oxford khaki shorts with no underwear (none clean), and sock-less white bucks, bought for me by my maternal Grandma Mimi. "You have to look nice for the professors," she had said. I had put them aside immediately upon arriving at Pitzer in order to fit in with what I saw around me--everyone scruffily dressed in T-shirts and soiled cargo pants.  Since then, I've gotten on with my life, and yet, I found myself all along trying to figure out why the encounter with Ginsberg, unlike any other in my experience, left me feeling both regret and gratitude. When the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg's poem "HOWL" was celebrated a few months ago in Tompkins Square Park, I was drawn to attend, and I didn't know why. About 250 people, most of them a decade older than me, were there. They looked to be at one with each other. I felt self-conscious, but somehow eager to participate. Almost everyone in the audience seemed to have his own copy of HOWL AND OTHER POEMS. Various poets took turns reading "HOWL" from the book. To my surprise, I seemed to be hearing—as if for the first time --lines like "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness / starving, hysterical, naked" and "who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz, / or sex, or soup." Twenty years earlier, I had originally read ”HOWL" when the older brother of one of my Dallas high school buddies said to me: "The Beats kick ass! ‘HOWL' is what started the sixties!" I read it, but it was complete gibberish to me. I just knew that cool people read it, and I wanted to be cool. I was similarly deaf to the sound of sixties classic rock, but again, someone really cool took me to a Rolling Stones Tattoo You concert in Dallas's Cotton Bowl. My benefactor, very hopped up, said confidingly: "ZZ Top is the warm up band!" I nodded and pretended I knew about ZZ Top. At the concert, I marveled as fans around me hooted, hollered, held up lit Bic lighters, and sang along with the distorted electric guitar--- all new to me. People were sharing roll-your-own cigarettes. The odor smelled like a combination of the pine resin I used to burn at summer camp and the skunks on our Texas highways. (Half a dozen years later, still wanting in, I smoked pot myself.) I bought a concert T-shirt, started wearing it everywhere, and bragged about having seen "the Stones." I told myself how dorky I had been in my previous life of comfort in the wayback of my Mom's Country Squire station wagon, listening to Ambrosia, Bread, and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Until Ginsberg came to Pitzer, I pretty much remained dorky. I was an uncertain dreamer and eager-to-please poet wanna-be with West Texas roots and a jokester's head cluttered with vague ideas picked up from Salinger's “The Catcher In The Rye” and Kerouac's” On The Road.” One of the readers in Tompkins Square was the Buddhist poet Anne Waldman. Now in her sixties, she was wearing baggy, silver-reflective pants and a flowing yellow shirt. She grabbed her breast dramatically as she yelled "Moloch!" for the thirty-nine times it's repeated in the poem. The crowd reacted with knowledgeable "oohs" and "aahs." I couldn't bring myself to "ooh" and"aah." Nevertheless, Waldman's histrionics touched me. I felt that I, too, was now kicking ass, because I now understood that Moloch was the ancient Canaanite, the child-sacrifice-demanding fire god; he was Ginsberg's symbol of ignorance, hatred, greed and everything else that Ginsberg felt was wrong with American military-industrial society. In the program, a chorus of young men and women wound up with a melodic version of "Footnote to Howl," singing from it " Holy! Holy!..."--77 times. This rendition brought me right back to my Sunday school years at Northway Baptist Church; singing -- under pressure to be a good Christian -- the many hymns about my personal salvation in Jesus. Despite having an imagination that could conjure up same pretty scary visions of the eternal damnation that awaited bad Christians, fear did not drive my beliefs. "Jesus loves everyone, even sinners?" I asked my Grandma Mimi. “I should make my heart like His, right?" "That's right," she said. So I tried to be like Him. I had heard "Jesus loves you" so many times, I thought that love was all you needed. I assumed the whole world knew deep down that caring about and showing kindness to others and diminishing their suffering would get me into heaven. So, I sang my heart out. But it was Ginsberg, at our long ago meeting, who gave me the connection I finally felt between my church singing and his "Footnote." It never before occurred to me: Ginsberg had given me a direct sense of his suffering, not only in "HOWL" but in person. Grandma Mimi and my paternal Grandma Val were battlers, since I was five, for sway over my spiritual path. I was their number one grandson and the joyful recipient of their philosophies: West Texas Baptist vs. New Age Reincarnation-Astrology-ESP beliefs. Grandma Mimi and I did regular sing alongs with a western swing album of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans doing "Yes, Jesus Loves Me." Grandma Val had a different view. She had escaped from Galveston as a teen and lived most of her life in California. "The Divine, Matter, and Energy are One," she used to tell me, “Of course Jesus wasn't alone! There have been lots of Awakened Avatars who incarnated on Earth to show misguided humanity our divine nature. You won't find the meditative rites they practiced in organized religion. The rich and powerful twisted their teachings to spiritually enslave people so they wouldn't realize their divine natures." In my DNA, Jesus' messages rattled around with the stuff of clairvoyance and the transmigration of souls. Grandma Mimi said that as long as I was saved (i.e. that I accepted Jesus as my Savior) I wouldn't end up in hell. Grandma Val didn't want me to become what she called part of "a nation of sheep." She wanted me to question everything and, in fact, encouraged me not to believe in having beliefs. I had a heartfelt attachment to my Grandmas but I was secretive about it. It wasn't exactly cool to love your Grandmas. In my crowd, I wanted to get laughs. My opportunism got the better of honesty, and I actually made fun of fundamentalist Christian "holy rollers" and "Bible thumpers" as well as Grandma Val's "crystal kooks." In that phase of early adolescent fickleness, I didn't know how to practice any of my beliefs. I didn't know that Ginsberg, when I met him, would casually and naturally demonstrate how to practice genuineness without even mentioning the word "beliefs." In the student center, I watched for the Allen Ginsberg I used to see in a 1960's picture of him wearing black-rimmed glasses and an Uncle Sam top hat. Then I saw him walking slowly toward me with short tottering steps. He had a round belly spilling over taupe-colored dress pants. He was wearing a white button down and rep tie with two Mont Blanc fountain pens and a leather glasses case bulging from his breast pocket. A Peruvian shoulder bag was slung over his shoulder. I was surprised how much older he looked than his pictures. Then it dawned on me that they were taken before I was born. One of Ginsberg's eyes seemed to be pointing in a different direction from the other one. I couldn't stop staring at his poor eye. I introduced myself. Without shaking hands, he patted me on the back, and we sat down at a redwood table and chairs. At a bar the night before, I'd scrawled a list of interview questions on a cocktail napkin, which I pulled out. He smiled at me with thick, deep red, watermelon lips through a scraggily short grey beard. I remembered we were supposed to have lunch. I didn't feel like eating, but Ginsberg ordered brown rice, lentils, and a cup of chamomile tea. I plunged in and asked him how he got into poetry. I carefully tape recorded the Q. and A. "My father was a poet," Ginsberg said, in a surprisingly deep baritone. "It's a family business." I tried to be clever. "My Dad's a proctologist," I said, " That's not going to be my family business." He laughed a little bit. So I told him one of Dad's best jokes. "My Dad wants to be a writer ," I said, "He's working on a laxative guide called ‘Looking Out for Number Two.’" Ginsberg gave a laugh at the cloddish joke. It wasn't an indulgent laugh; it was actually sympathetic—to me. "That's a good one!" he said, and patted me on the back again. Lunch came and he chewed slowly as we talked. I asked him what sort of influence his Dad was on him. "Well, he was a lyric poet, so I got trained very early in all the nineteenth century classical forms, and read a lot of Poe before I was ten, and Wordsworth, and Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' and Keats 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to Melancholy.' I got all those very early," he said. "Do you have a definition of poetry or one that you're particularly fond of?" I asked, thinking of what might please my English professor to hear. "Well, I've worked out lots of them," he said. "You want one?" He took a bite of his lentils and brown rice. "Maximum information minimum number of syllables comma," he said, taking his time to chew and swallow, "rhythmic articulation of feeling period; quote first thought best thought unquote." The definition intrigued me, but I had no idea who he was quoting. They didn't say things like "first thought, best thought" in Texas. My Dad and his pro sports -watching, hunting and fishing friends liked to talk about ‘killing a ten-point buck with the first shot.’ They liked to give gag gifts to my father (e.g. a box of ball point pens engraved with his name, M.D., and office number and saying: ‘Ask me about your Hemorrhoids!’”) Ginsberg communicated something that was totally new to me in "first thought, best thought." I could only fuzzily suspect it as something having to do with trusting my own mind. I tried to get fancy. "For you, what's the connection between poetry and the soul?" I asked. "The soul I don't know anything about; spirit I do. Spirit is breath. Spiritus, breath. Poetry comes out on the breath," he added. I could hardly believe his forthrightness. He gave no sign of patronizing me. I was so taken by his easy-going, genuine response to me that I was unable to think of what to ask next. "Oxygen of the heart?" I said tentatively, borrowing a Pitzer professor’s definition of laughter. I'd taken a class called “Laughter in Western Literature” the previous semester. "Yeah," he replied, even more respectfully." Well, the inhalation feeds oxygen to the heart and the exhalation feeds oxygen to the consciousness, to other people's," he said. I was thrilled to think that Ginsberg and I were beginning to riff off each other. I'd heard he was a Walt Whitman fan, so I asked him what that sort of thing meant to Whitman. "What sort of thing?" he asked, sharply. My question had been clear as mud, as we say in West Texas. "Breath," I said weakly, "I mean you get these gusts of feeling in 'Song of Myself.'" Ginsberg's tone turned curious. "What did he say about it?" Ginsberg asked, "You remember? Did he use the 'breath' as a reference point?" I tried to pass off something else I heard one of my professors say in class. "When I read a line of Whitman, it seem like a line equals almost the tidal amount of breath you can take into your lungs," I said. He amended what I'd said without belittlement. "Sometimes," he said. "But I was thinking of the idea of breath, link in Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' it says "O wild west wind!" Inspiration is, after all, breath. Inspiro, unobstructed breath—breathing in unobstructed breath." "Though the Greek, I believe is pneuma, which is breath. But, I don't know the etymology of the English word soul." His reference to my earlier question and one of my favorite topics, etymology, gave me a hopeful jolt. "I don't know either," I said,"sounds dark, Anglo-Saxon." Again he was respectful. I asked him what made his poetry from the "Howl" period different from 1991. He just shrugged again. "More Buddhist," he said, "More focused on inner peace." "Peace seems more possible when you look at it from that perspective," I said. "I never thought of it that way.” "Well," Ginsberg said earnestly, "as the old Quaker saying goes 'speak truth to power.' That's one thing. But personally working out your own peace from within, waking up, so to speak, to the Buddha that's already there inside you gives you the power to help others." What he was saying sounded just like what the Bible taught, that "the kingdom of God is within." It sounded so right to me. But I could hear Grandma Mimi dismissing the Buddhist version, because it wasn't in the Bible. Then Ginsberg said that he and Jack Kerouac used to enjoy studying Buddhist writings. He said they both appreciated spontaneity--living fully in the moment. He and Kerouac had been particularly fascinated by the Heart Sutra literature from a 1931 collection of Buddhist writings edited by Dwight Goddard called “A Buddhist Bible." He said that if I felt a connection to it, I should check the book out. I knew the Lord's Prayer ("Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven") and, the following week, when I read the Heart Sutra ("Emptiness is Form, and Form is also Emptiness") I found out that it was the Buddhist equivalent of the Lord's Prayer, recited in much the same way, as a kind of blessing and is a condensed version of all its scriptures. The Heart Sutra's message seemed contrary to everything literal in the Bible I'd ever learned; I still felt compelled by what my Grandma's expected me to believe. But, I listened closely as Ginsberg told me that he and Kerouac liked exploring ideas that are contrary to Western thinking, but essential to Buddhism—the relationship between Form and Emptiness as well as Impermanence. Maybe these were the mystical ideas and meditation techniques of the Awakened Avatars that Grandma Val had been talking about. Ginsberg explained that even though Form and Emptiness are contrary things they are identical—that form is empty, it's seen, but it's empty of permanence. He said form and emptiness are like a dream—full and empty at once. When he used the dream example a light went on in my head. Ginsberg also told me about Impermanence and its relationship to being spontaneous. He said, "everything changes; the past is gone, the future is uncertain--this means living fully in all we have--the present moment." His joy in discussing Buddhism was contagious. "I don't know a thing about Buddhism," I said. "My Southern Baptist Grandma would probably call it heresy," I added. Ginsberg was still respectful. He just laughed. He summed it up: "Buddhism isn't a religion, it's a way of life." That made sense to me. He made it sound so real. "My other Grandma didn't trust organized religion," I said, hoping this information would be of some interest to him. Then I said,” Essentially both my Grandmas were saying the same thing: be kind and help others--that was the bottom line." Ginsberg nodded agreeably and went on talking about other books he and Kerouac liked, including works by Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Jules Verne, Dickens, Rabelais, and Shakespeare. I'd only read sprinklings of them. "I do know Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 by heart," I said and, eagerly, started reciting it. Ginsberg's face lit up. When I got to the final rhyming couplet, Ginsberg joined in: "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That I scorn to change my state with kings." Suddenly, he changed the subject and asked me where I was from. When I told him Galveston, he said he'd sailed out of Galveston with the Merchant Marine. I asked him if he'd heard any Texas sayings like:" 'I'd like to buy him for what he's worth and sell him for what he think he's worth;' and 'sharper than a skeeter's pecker;' and 'mean as a skillet full of rattlesnakes.' “Ginsberg let out another laugh and started to cough. I thought he was choking, so I hit him firmly on the back. He took a sip of tea. His eyes were watering. "'Don't let him skid your rig,'" I went on. "That's oil field slang for when a crook taps your well by drilling across the fence, meaning 'don't let him steal your girl." "Or in my case, guy," he said. Still the opportunist, I got cute with him. I checked my tape recorder to be sure I was catching his answers. "What do you think about people from my generation born in the late sixties?" I asked. "I like to sleep with them. They're young and fresh, fresh mind, fresh sex," he said and went back to his lunch. I was taken aback by his candor, but I liked his sincerity and ability to express himself so freely. At this point, I began to have doubts about my plan to boast to my buddies about my meeting with Allen Ginsberg. "One of my teachers told me you never get embarrassed," I said. "If I get caught in a lie, that's embarrassing," he said," To be caught telling the truth is not so embarrassing, unless somebody rejects the truth. Like if you'd gotten mad when I said that about fresh sex, but you reacted with good humor to it. The reason I speak about sex is because sexual openness is also openness to nature, to ideas and openness to experience and humor." He shrugged. Neither one of us said anything for a while. " 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.' " he said. "What's your proclivity, women, men, or both?" he asked, "I'm the girl type," I said. He didn't say anything. He just continued eating. After lunch, Ginsberg asked me to join him and others for a hike on a nearby mountain path. It was hot and I had my shirt thrown over my shoulder. "Stop," he said. He had a small camera on a strap on his shoulder. "Let me take your picture." I posed with the shirt still in place. "Either take the shirt away or put it on," he said. I tossed the shirt on a bush. He snapped a couple of shots of me then he hung the camera on the strap on my shoulder. "You know that Buddhist idea of impermanence?" Ginsberg asked. I shook my head no. "The past is gone, the future us uncertain--all we have is the present? Living fully means not playing mind games with yourself and fretting about your future or your past," he said. "That sounds exactly like what my Grandma Val used to tell me. She used to say to focus on the moment, that being happy and enjoying life would be easier that way." "Was she a Buddhist?" Ginsberg asked. "I don't think she knew it, if she was,” I said. He laughed. "Some people just have the view naturally," he said. "You know," I said, "it's cool to finally know somebody I don't feel like I have to hide my love for my Grandmas from.” "Are they still living?" Ginsberg asked. "Yeah. The Baptist one lives in West Texas. Grandma Val lives in Galveston," I said. He raised both eyebrows in a gesture of recognition at the mention again of his old port. When we returned to campus, he said he was going to rest a while before the night's activities, and asked if I'd help him upstairs to his Bungalow guest room on the second floor of the student center. We climbed its back steps to his door. I handed him his camera. He started to kiss me on the lips. Instinctively, I turned my head away and the wet smack landed on my cheek. I gave him a hug. "You're like Kerouac," he told me. "You're tolerant." The kindness, respect, and generosity that Ginsberg showed me stayed with me. I wrote up the interview, as a Q and A, and it was published in the Pitzer student newspaper. I got absolutely no reaction from anyone to it, not even from my English professor. Nothing. For the next week, I read compulsively—“The Buddhist Bible,” “A Policy of Kindness,” “A Primer on the His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” “Works by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche,” Kerouac's “Mexico City Blues,” Dostoyevsky, Jules Verne, and all of Ginsberg's poetry. After graduating, I worked as a desk clerk in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas, where Geronimo made his last stand. I then formed a Texas blues rock band,“The Lonely Hunters," with my old friends Wes Anderson, Luke Wilson, and Rochester Session. I played guitar with them. I worked on Wes Anderson's movie “Bottle Rocket.” Then I lived on an Indian reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. After that, I met a Tibetan lama and started attending Buddhist retreats. I spent almost a year in Nepal. I came to New York and ran a Tibetan handicraft store which failed. I got married, got divorced, worked on more Wes Anderson movies, managed a Dean and Deluca store, got married again, and developed a daily Buddhist meditation practice. A Tibetan Buddhist house painter at a retreat told me that "first thought, best thought" was a quote from his guru Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first masters to teach Tibetan Buddhism in America. Trungpa Rinpoche was also Ginsberg's friend and mentor. The house painter told me about the ancient tradition of mystical wandering yogis, itinerant meditation-practicing spiritual seekers, living in the wilds of Tibet, who sang dohas : spontaneous songs about the realization of enlightenment. I saw Allen Ginsberg as part of this tradition. I started singing my own dohas, incorporating everything I'd learned from my Grandmas and every teacher I've had since into spontaneous songs; I'd sing them during my daily meditation sessions. Not long ago, I was talking to an old college friend about people we used to know. "People change" he said. "The only thing that doesn't change is that everything changes," I said. My friend asked me how I thought I’d changed. I shrugged and said, "More Buddhist," knowingly trying to reproduce Ginsberg's deep voice in delivery of the line. Buddhism today is to me what Ginsberg told me it was to him in 1991: it's not a religion, it's a way of life. I remember how manipulative I was with Ginsberg. Why didn’t I realize that he embodied kindness and generosity? I regret having been unable to resist the temptation to show off to him. I had led him on. He had shared his experience and wisdom with me. I had shared nothing with him. I also regret not having let him kiss me. Does that make me gay? I don't know, and I don't care. I do know that Ginsberg showed me what it means to have a good heart. It's what the Tibetan Buddhists would call compassion. What he gave me reminds me of what Grandma Mimi used to say "Be sweet as sugar, to everyone you meet." and what Grandma Val meant when she said, "Kindness is everything." Didn’t Ginsberg demonstrate all that with me?