Free When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner Page B

were given some training in martial arts and meditation to aid in their awareness of all potential situations.
    They opened the door for Rinpoche and he moved slowly out of the backseat of the car. They accompanied him into the apartment. Peter had cleaned house like a demon. He even cleaned the sidewalk in front of the house with a toothbrush. Allen had taken a bath and a shower, and he was wearing his best suit and the pin he was given upon his induction into the Academy of American Arts and Sciences. It was like inspection at military school. Allen made sure my shoes were polished and that I had worn my seersucker suit. Peter was wearing sandals, but with socks. He was making tea.
    Rinpoche was coming for one of his poetry lessons, which Allen gave him from time to time. They wrote three-line poems together: Ground. Path. Fruition. One idea embodied in each line. Allen’s latest City Lights book was dedicated “to Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche Poet”: “Guru Death your words are true / Teacher Death I do thank you / for inspiring me to sing this Blues.”
    Rinpoche was a practitioner of what he called “crazy wisdom.” Allen loved that phrase. It seemed to mean that Rinpoche could do whatever he wanted, and his students would study it and try to learn a lesson from it.
    â€œI still think you’re too attached to your beard,” Trungpa told Allen as soon as he arrived. “I think you should go upstairs and cut it off again.”
    Allen looked unhappy. “But I don’t want to cut it off.” He stamped his feet like a little boy. “I just grew it baaaaaack.” He even said “whaaaaa,” imitating a baby crying. But he went upstairs anyway to shave it off.
    I was left on the couch in my seersucker suit. Peter was sittingwith Rinpoche, and the Vadjra guards were situated throughout the house, as if the president were upstairs taking a leak. Peter tried making small talk with the leader of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
    â€œI haven’t been with a woman in thirty years,” Peter said. “That’s a long time not to taste pussy, don’t you think, Rinpoche?”
    â€œToo long,” Rinpoche said.
    I couldn’t tell if Peter was a genius or a complete idiot. When I saw the movie Being There with Peter Sellers, I thought that Jerzy Kosinski must have known Peter Orlovsky. Peter’s honesty was painful to watch, like someone trying to walk after a stroke.
    I suddenly remembered that Head of the Poet Peter Orlovsky was the name of Robert LaVigne’s painting that Allen had seen before meeting Peter in Foster’s Cafeteria in San Francisco so many years ago. LaVigne had painted Peter’s giant head on a canvas four feet by six feet. Peter, from a Russian family, looked a lot like Sergei Essenin, the poet who married Isadora Duncan and who had once prowled the halls of the Plaza Hotel, naked, wielding a pistol. Essenin was one of Allen’s heroes; he kept a tape recording of Essenin declaring his poetry to a Russian throng in the 1920s. Whenever Allen played it, he cried. Essenin slit his wrists in a hotel room and wrote his last poem in his own blood. Allen once recited that poem to me, his eyes filling up with tears: “In this life, there’s nothing new in dying, / But nor, of course, is living any newer.” He said the poem is called “Goodbye, My Friend, Goodbye.” I thought at the time that you would really have to be a serious poet—if not a great one—to give a title to a poem after you had slit your wrists.
    Allen would play the tape on an old reel-to-reel, looking over at Peter sitting up straight in his chair, hands splayed out on his thighs, like he was posing for another portrait or had become a piece of Russian sculpture. Allen would gaze at Peter’s beautiful Russian head and hair as if Essenin himself were in the room with him.
    Allen and Peter had an unusual relationship. They had