Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(33)
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.
It didn’t matter that most everyone had walked out of the reading, or that I hadn’t known how to reply to Allen Ginsberg, or that William Burroughs couldn’t have been bothered to say a word to me or anyone else at dinner. They were two of the most legendary figures of the twentieth century, and I had spent an evening with them. I had made an important discovery, too: they were only people. We all were. And some of us were also artists, or trying to be artists. Everything was happening on a continuum, I saw, and I allowed myself to believe that night that maybe I would be next, that perhaps a bit of magic dust had floated my way, off the stiff shoulders of these two old men.
I still had the signed copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems on my bookshelf in the Haight. It had survived the ’89 quake, when my bookshelf toppled over, crashing into my dresser, sending my books in every direction. Ginsberg had signed the book, his childish inscription the only evidence that still remained of my evening with the Beats.
San Francisco Camerawork Gallery was located just south of Market Street in a former warehouse boasting floor-to-ceiling windows, creaky hardwood floors, and a freight elevator that could carry a crowd, twenty at a time, two floors up to the opening reception.
I’d spent nearly twenty-four hours installing my piece, breaking for a short nap on the gallery couch sometime before dawn, and afterward heading to the airport to retrieve my parents. Now my mother stood paralyzed in my installation room while my father peeked in from the door, as if afraid to enter.
I picked up a plastic cup of wine and took in the rest of the exhibition, mostly innovative photographs of the artists’ interpretations of the show’s theme, which was family. On one wall, enormous color murals of family beach scenes offset a black-and-white triptych of an African American family posed in front of their church. My piece was the only installation work.
“Good work, Franny,” said Anthony Aziz, the gallery board member who had proposed my piece for the show. “Powerful stuff. I spent thirty minutes with your piece—longest I’ve ever spent with a video installation.”
I’d met Anthony when he was a graduate student in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Later, he’d teamed up with Sammy Cucher, a friend of mine from the New Genres Department, to form the collaborative artist team Aziz+Cucher.