SOUVENIRS OF THE BEAT HOTEL
by baird bryant

Just off the Place Saint Michel on the left bank of Paris, the "Beat
Hotel" as it's become known, was on a dingy little Street, Rue Git le Coeur,
or as Bill would say, "Bury Your Heart Street"...Bill being Bill Burroughs,
of course, and the two,-- Bill and the Hotel, will always be associated in
my memory and my mind. I can see him now, the tall sardonic figure cooking
up some laudanum in a spoon over a candle, sucking the liquid through a
cotton ball into a glass syringe, tying off his arm by taking the end of the
leather belt in his teeth, finding the vein, sucking a little blood back
into the needle before shooting the mix into the mainline. Then the inhale,
the deep and delicious breath of gratification, the body sagging as though
about to fall onto the floor, then he would turn, quickly, menacingly,
suddenly a frightening figure. For a split second the image of him throwing
a garrote (his favorite weapon he once told me) over my head and around my
throat would flash through my mind.
"Your turn," he would say in that voice that was a kind of gravelly
whine which seemed to come whistling through his nostrils.
I would have made the "run" for the laudanum, an opium derivative
available over the counter in Paris, to a couple of pharmacies in the
neighborhood, clomping along with a plaster cast on my right foot and calf,
my arm in a sling, the result of a near-death motorcycle accident. B.J.
Caroll, a big guy, and I had rocketed up to Montmartre to score some grass
from his connection there several weeks earlier, and on the way back to the
Latin Quarter did not see the high beams flashing a warning that a car was
coming through the narrow intersection, and he didn't see mine, and we got
broadsided. Blam!! BJ was over there, the bike was spinning like a top, and
my forehead was bleeding into my eye. Some Good Samaritan heard the crash
in his apartment and came running out with a towel. He tried to staunch the
bleeding while I figured out that my left wrist and my right ankle were both
broken. The image of the bike spinning there brought another image of a
little toy motorcycle that I had accidentally hit with my toe as I was
walking up the Boulevard Montparnasse with my strange little friend (some
sort of demon perhaps), Henri Sert.
"It's a sign," he said slowly and dryly, looking at the toy.
"Something's going to happen."
What's going to happen?
"Something."
As I sat bleeding in the street, I knew then just what that "something"
was... no doubt about it, I knew, and I wondered how he was able to glimpse
through that tear in the fabric of time.
In Bill's room, with him and the black greasy walls as witness (the
only comparison being the walls of a Tibetan Monastery, covered with the
residue of butter lamps burning in endless vigil to the Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas of a sacred lineage), I took the works and played out the
ritual of entering the altered state of the opiate...a blissful realm.
After we looked at each other with the unspoken acknowledgement that we
had arrived, Bill pulled down the window shade, leaving us in a dim light,
and took half a coconut shell out of the armoire, which stood across the
narrow room from the bed. He poured water into the shell, about three
froths full, glanced into it for a second, then handed it to me.
"Tell me what you see," he said throatily.
It did not take long for the water to begin glowing, subtly... very
subtly, then it became a little window and through it I saw an endless
marshland with pussy willows growing in graceful patterns. Fish were
swimming near the surface. I described it to Bill in just that way.
Oh, the creation thing, Bill said. That's not it.
Immediately the scene changed.
I see naked people, I said. Many people making love ...in a low light
...candlelight. They're in a sensual ....wonderfully sensual ecstasy
...they're in ecstasy ...ecstasy.
What else?
The scene is changing, I said. "There's a man ...no, more like an
angel, and he's coming right up to me holding out a silver goblet"
The angel eyes seemed pleading, yet eternally patient. The image
became three-dimensional. The hand and the goblet seemed to come right out
of the coconut.
"The Silver ChaliceSthe Holy Grail," Bill said evenly, and as he said
it, the scene faded out and I was simply staring into a coconut with water
in it. I looked at Bill with wonderment... and in shock. What kind of magic
was this, and what did it mean for me? If the Chalice was being offered to
me, what was I supposed to do with it?
Bill looked back at me. You're just like me, he said, nodding his head
and looking down at his shoes. I see you as kind of a black knight.
Go figure!

........................................................

I had a "pad" at 123 Rue de Sevres, near the Sevres-Babylon Metro
station, on the second floor with a big window looking down on all the
neighborhood activity... a little photo shop a few doors down the street
across the way, a cafe on the corner where you could see the workmen early
in the morning (before I went to bed) fortifying themselves for the day with
espresso and calvados, "Patron, un cafe-calvo", they would say. "Comme
d'habitude" the Patron might reply. I could imagine this exchange as I
watched sleepily from my vantage point. One morning I heard a squeal of
brakes and a crash. When I went to the window I saw that a sports car had
hit the twelve- year-old boy from the restaurant below. There were long
skid marks behind the car, now stopped...evidence that the driver, a
stylish, obviously rich young woman was going too fast. The boy was fairly
seriously hurt. I got my camera and took an overhead shot of the whole
scene showing the telltale skidmarks. I developed the film, made an 8 by 10
glossy, went downstairs and gave it to the Patron of the restaurant. He
looked at me without understanding first of all how he was looking at a
photo of something that had just happened fifteen minutes ago, and when he
accepted that as a possibility, he failed to grasp the significance of what
he was looking at.
"Voila la preuve... elle allait trop vite," I said. (There's the
proof, she was speeding.)
"Ah, oui," he said, "Je comprends!" (Oh, yes, now I see!)
A few weeks later he stopped me before I climbed the circular stair to
my apartment. He told me that the photo clinched the case for them...the
driver had been ordered to pay damages. He invited me for a free meal at his
restaurant. When I entered the tiny place that night, I sat down a few
tables away from three Gypsies who had been pointed out to me at the Cafe
Select a few evenings earlier. It was my friend, Paulo, an Italian artist
who had whispered to me, "Voila le Roi des Gitanes." (There's the King of
the Gypsies.)
Le Roi des Gitanes? I said softly but was shushed with a cutting look
from Paulo. There were four Gypsies at the table, and It took a little
study to figure who must be the one. I looked at Paulo wondering what's the
big deal.
"il est tres puissant," (he's very powerful) he whispered, without
looking at them. Then I saw that they were giving us the once-over.
Now, finishing my free meal,- a very welcome thing,- sitting with my
back to those three, I glanced at them and noticed one of them staring at my
foot. Well, my foot was falling asleep, and the realization they were
casting a spell dawned on me and I was filled with the resolve not to be
phased ... After all, I was as strong as anybody, I told myself. But when I
finished eating and stood up, I nearly fell over and had to muster all my
strength and control to limp,- yes limp out of the restaurant. I climbed
my stairs with difficulty, filled with new respect for the magic powers of
the Gypsies and especially of "the King", who I would never stare at again.

.................................................

Corso was the first of the beats I came in contact with... before Allen
or Bill. He just knocked on my door one day. "I hear you've got the keys
to this city," he said. When I just stood there, taking him in, he
continued: "I'm Gregory Corso." When my silence seemed to say, "and so"...
he added, "I'm the poet."
"Entrez Donc," I said, standing aside.
He came in, looking around inquisitively. He seemed to be squinting
through eyes set in a round, somewhat lantern-jawed visage with a shock of
hair rising from a low hairline. A little guy. He had a kind of
Neanderthal stoop, and Neanderthal was the best single word to describe him.
He said, my friend Jack Deere ...remember him?...told me I should look
you up.
Oh, yeah, I do remember. He was mad for a painting I did of an Indian
watching the solar eclipse... ...so I gave it to him. Regret it now ...I
should have kept it. All kinds of hieroglyphs just appeared when I was
painting it... Mayan stuff ...don't know what they meant.
Yeah, yeah...crazy, he said. Look, I want to score some grass.
"Hotel de Ville," I said. My connection's at the Hotel de Ville.
The closest metro station was Rue Vaneaux, where a statue of an
Egyptian water-bearer greets you by the entrance. On the platform below, I
showed Gregory how to use the metro map that you find in every station.
There is a directory and when you push the button by your destination the
route lights up, showing the transfers to be made to arrive there. Aside
from it being a great gimmick, it was a great map of the whole city.
Ten or fifteen minutes later we were in Ali's cafe in the Algerian
district near the Hotel De Ville. Ali was a rotund Arab in a wheelchair.
When we walked in I greeted him, then, according to usual procedure, we went
to the bar and ordered two mint teas. No sooner had they come when another
Arab rushed in the front door and urgently said something in Arabic to Ali,
who whipped a paper bag out from under the blanket over his legs and gave it
to the man. He ran out the back with it and was gone just as three guys in
business suits came rolling in the front.
One of them started with Ali, scanning him with some kind of apparatus.
The one with a thin moustache came over to us.
Vos Papiers, he said.
He wants to see our papers, I said to Gregory...passport, whatever.
Who is he? Gregory asked, incensed.
In answer to that, the detective pulled out his badge, showed it to us
and put it back in his coat pocket.
I dug out my student card. Gregory handed over his passport. He
looked them over, paging through the passport to see where Gregory had been
recently.
Ok, Americains, Qu'est-ce que vous faites ici...dans ce cafe? (What are
you doing here ...in this cafe?)
On prend un the au menthe, I said. (We're having a mint tea.)
I had a moustache and a goatee, which he flicked with his finger... he
recognized it as a mark of the hipster.
Meanwhile the one with the gizmo shifted his scanning to the cabinets
behind the bar. It was making a slow clicking sound, and it dawned on me
that it was a Geiger counter. The possibilities flashed through my mind:
(1) the cops had salted a load of grass with radioactive dust and were
tracing it with the counter, or (2) they were faking out the Arabs making
them think they had some kind off sniffer that could smell grass or hash.
Whatever it was they weren't having any luck with it and they went into
search mode...looking under Ali's blanket, opening the cupboards, examining
behind the bar... and so forth. Finally our cop approached Ali and told him
they were onto him. They knew he was trafficking and he better stop or they
would get him. He snorted at us, telling us that he could just as well
arrest us on the spot.
Vous avez de la chance aujourdui, he said, mais c'est la derniere fois.
(You're lucky today, but you won't be so lucky next time.)
We heaved a sigh of relief when they left. We had our tea and went to
Saint Germain to get some grass from two musician friends of mine on the
promise we'd pay them back within the next couple of days.

..........................................................

Gregory enjoyed hanging out with me, and I found him a wonderfully
wild and reckless rebel, and an interesting subject to shoot. Walking up to
Montparnasse one day we found we were following two monks with great long
beards. We glanced at each other with the understanding that this was a
chance for a good shot. I picked up my pace, walked past them, whirled
around and caught the two of them perfectly, with Gregory laughing in the
background between them. When I printed the photo, a glowing cross of light
is clearly seen behind Gregory's left shoulder.
I did many kinds of experiments in my darkroom. I found I could buy
huge sheets of outdated photo paper at the flea market, and produced some of
the first psychedelic abstract images by alternately painting the paper with
developer and fixer. Even black and white paper yielded yellows, oranges
and reds. I also created patterns by moving a tiny flashlight around over
photosensitive paper. Although they were black and white, seeing them, the
now famous Hundertwasser said, Eh, voila, t'a trouve le rouge. (Oh ho, you
found the red.) I was surprised, and I credited him with having "second
sight", for although I knew I was generating some other vibration, I only
saw the black and white. But down through the years, when I saw a painting
by Hundertwasser, I always felt a little secret turn of the key of
understanding his fame and fortune, and a little delight that I knew him
when... and he knew me.
While doing my experiments with light and chemicals, one day I
wondered what would happen if I found a way to definitively hold back the
developer. I hit upon the idea of using oil to do that, and I put a drop on
a negative. When I developed it, the chemical made tiny intrusions under the
oil creating a ring around the drop. When I made a contact print onto
another negative and developed that, this became a circle of light
surrounded by a kind of pearl necklace. Wondering what I might put inside
the circle, I picked up the negative of the portrait of Gregory that I
liked, and, looking at them together against the light saw that he fit
perfectly. When I sandwiched the two negs, put them in the enlarger, blew
them up and put the paper in the soup, coming up in the developer was
Gregory, rimmed with ringlets of light, looking as though he was breaking
through, burning his way through a wall of darkness. It was him and what he
was all about in a lightning stroke.
How did you do that? He said in astonishment when he saw it. He was
not the only one... everybody who saw it asked that question. My answer:
with a drop of oil.
The sandwich yielded results, some of which just floored me. I went on
one of my shooting walks in the market next to the Hotel Cosmos in Saint
Germain where my wife and I had lived for a while. I shot the people
looking at the produce, the vendors, the exchange of money, the butcher
shop, the farmer with his goat selling goat milk yoghurt.
Then I dropped in on Burroughs and took a dozen or so shots of him in
his native habitat. After I had developed the negs, I decided to sandwich
half of the roll with the other half when I made the contact sheet. After
developing, fixing and drying, I checked out the proofs with the loupe. In
the market, the man looking at the meat now had a trunk like an elephant
sucking the energy out of the meat he was looking at. And then, as I
examined another frame, there big as life was Bill in a military uniform
with crossbones on his shoulders and a death's head as the insignia on his
hat... perfect in every detail... a portrait of the General Of Death.
It brought to mind all the things he had told me ...about ordering it
up... ordering up death.
"You never know how it's going to happen," he said. "This one kid got
eaten by a lion in a bar in Juarez. Yeah, they had this old lion in a cage
in the back. Kid went to take a piss and the Lion got out and killed him."
He let out a kind of chortle. I've sent a lot of them home, he said,
turning to me with eyes rolled up, allowing me to see the monster within...a
kind of drooling cannibal or vampire, or, as I saw there in the darkroom,
the General of Death.
It was a fleeting apparition, gone in a second. He continued as if
nothing had happened
My wife, he said...we had done it many times . An apple on her head.
William Tell, except this time it was a 45 between the eyes. She never
knew what hit her. No surprise, no goodbye, nothing, just nothing... He
paused, ruminating for a while before continuing. The garrote is the
best...completely silent. It¹s all over in a few seconds. It's my favorite
weapon. He made a sudden gesture as though tightening the noose.
In Spain they call me "El Hombre Invisible." You'll see, he
said...you'll see... or you won't see. With that he gave a little snicker.
I didn't know exactly what he meant, what part of it would I see or not
see...until one night walking down the Rue de Sevres on my way home, - it
was about 10:30, just walking along when as sure as I live and breath an
invisible hand took mine and held it as I walked along. It was as solid as
could be, but cold as death, and my first thought was that indeed death
itself was holding my hand, and then it came like a shot..."el hombre
invisible!" The cold grip loosened and disappeared immediately. No, it
didn't disappear, no ...it had never appeared in the first place.
To say I was shaken is an understatement.

..................................................

One night, alone in my pad, I got into the question, who am I...
really, who am I really. I started to whisper the line, who am I, who am I,
then a little louder, with more force and conviction, I said, I want to know
who I really am. I don't care if I'm the devil himself, I want to know!
It seemed there was a stirring, maybe off in the corner of the room,
maybe behind me.
All right, I said. Who am I? I closed my eyes. Who am I? Silence,
but a sense of a presence of some kind.
I opened my eyes just in time to see a pair of black hands push their
way into my chest and come out holding a shining golden globe about the size
of a golf ball. After who knows how long...time seemed to stand still, the
hands and the golden ball faded into nothingness.
No, No, put it back! Put it back! I wailed.
I was filled with fear that the most precious part of my being had been
taken away never to be returned. It was the worst grief I had ever
experienced. I was trembling and tears coursed slowly down my cheeks.
Later, I realized it was not a theft at all... I had asked to see my
essence and it was shown to me. I see now it was a precious vision, but at
the time I was devastated, and I continued to wail in anguish. The gods who
had answered my plea must have been embarrassed for me.
I ran to see Monique, a photographer friend that lived in the Hotel de
Londres in Saint Germain. She saw I had been scared out of my wits. She
doctored me with wine and we ended up fucking like monkeys half the night.
The next morning she left me in bed, telling me she would come back as soon
as she could get away from her job. I slept the morning away in the
delicious darkness of her room. When she came back we had a repeat
performance, much to her delight, and much to my consolation. When we lay
exhausted, I felt more and more certain I had not lost any vital parts of
myself after all.

..........................................................

"We were just babes in the woods," I said to my wife, Denny, shortly
before we broke up and she returned to the states. We were in the middle of
the woods in the middle of the night with no idea what strange forces and
weird creatures were all around us, I said. We got eaten up and didn't even
know it... our innocence got eaten, anyway. It was like our marriage passed
before my eyes, the way your life is supposed to do at the moment of death.
Well, it was a death...a death of our marriage. The images flowed past my
mind as we made bittersweet love, her voluptuous body naked and vulnerable
beneath me save a necklace sparkling hard and brittle around her soft
throat. I saw myself come home from a midshipman's cruise to my apartment
in Cambridge and tear off my shirt in my mad haste to feel her flesh against
me. I cheated on her with a Cuban whore who bared her breasts at the end of
her dance in a club in Havana, lighting within me an insane desire to taste
those swollen nipples. What a surprise to open Life magazine when I got
home to our quonset hut in Algiers, Louisiana and see that Cuban doll
pictured there. And what was it about the Eskimos sharing their wives with
guests that made me think that was a good thing to do...which I did with
Austryn Wainhouse and Johnny Welch too? It was something that Alex Trocchi
and I gave birth to. Our logic: society was hypocritical; everybody lied
about their infidelities; it would be a sexual revolution if people were
honest instead; we could start the revolution by being honest with our
mates; if we convinced two each and in turn they convinced two each and so
on and so forth, pretty soon the sexual revolution would manifest throughout
the world.
With the help of very strong Hash we launched the movement in our hotel
room and before you know it, Jane was sitting on my face and I was turning
into a huge, fearsome green dragon breathing smoke and fire. And yes,
flashing by my minds eye Denny was off to the Champs Elysees to meet up with
a black piano player we had met on the Isle de France during our
transatlantic crossing. He initiated her into the ways of the hooker, took
a taste for himself and turned her over to her first John, who wanted to
take her to Ibiza before the night was over. And yes, we each wrote a
dirty book for Maurice Girodias, the son of Henry Miller's publisher, in
which we presented our most lascivious desires to the world under our noms
de plume for the Olympia Press Travelers Companion series. My book, Play
This Love With Me is still available to this day. (Central to the plot is a
Baron who takes on the roll of the Devil.)

It was with all this and more in my background... that I sat by myself
one night in the Jardin de Luxembourg, suffering from the pain of the death
of our togetherness, that a very tall shadowy figure came out of the
darkness and sat down next to me. He was a very large man with sharp,
prominent middle eastern features.
Do you recognize me? He asked in English.
I looked at him carefully. There's something about the nose, I said,
with a strange fear circling my solar plexus.
Everybody has a nose, he said with a little toss of his big head. I'm
answering a call.
Oh? It was incomprehensible that such a huge improbable thing as
meeting the Devil himself was just presenting itself to me like that.
A call made not so long ago. Don¹t you remember? He said.
I was dumbfounded. Was it possible this was actually him?
I was speechless.
Is this going to be a waste of my time? He said with a very sharp edge
to his voice.
I just came out with it: Is this about a deal for the golden ball?
That depends on you, he said, looking at me askance.
There was a quiver in my voice. I don't want to deal with that.
That¹s me. I don't want to just hand over my soul !
There's nothing else I'm interested in. He looked down on me as though
from a great height.
I just sat there eyeing him with my insides churning from one side to
the other.
OK, he said. I¹ll see you again. You can count on it. He slowly rose
and walked away to disappear in the darkness.
How many times have I replayed that scene in my mind? Sometimes
playing it differently, like: I say yes to fame and fortune; yes, I'll take
magical powers; yes I want to be Emperor of the world. Then again no, I was
right... but do I still have my soul? Maybe it was lost already, or was
destined to be lost before we meet again? No, but...what if? Maybe you
could have simply had a nice tete-a-tete. My God, what a chance, you could
have spent the night posing cosmic questions. There hasn't been a meeting
like that since Faust beat the Devil's bargain. But my questioning always
ends up with the same answer...you did right...you're still alive...you
don't owe anybody but the bank...(on second thought, who but The Man is
running the bank?) Stop mulling it over...you did right, you have your
soul and there's no lien on it. It has to be that way, otherwise????
I just go through life knowing it's futile to buy a lottery ticket.
I'll get no help from that quarter.

....................................................

One evening Gregory said, come on, I want you to meet someone. We went
to the fourth floor of the beat hotel. Gregory opened the door to reveal a
clean-shaven young man with glasses. It was Allen Ginsberg.
Allen, meet Baird Bryant.
I approached, shook his hand, and said, it's a great pleasure to meet
you.
He waved us in indicating we should sit.
Gregory told me about you, he said, all good. Then he went back to his
notebook .
After a few moments he looked up at me and asked, have you read Junkie?
Do you know Bill Burroughs work?
I shook my head, No.
These are the journals I kept in Tangiers while I was helping him
organize his latest book... It's going to be called Naked Lunch... his
breakthrough novel...he'll be recognized as a great writer when it comes
out.
He nodded his head. He writes and writes,- fantastic stuff, but
totally disorganized...over a thousand pages of it.
A thousand pages? I said with incredulity.
Over a thousand. I helped him edit it down to something reasonable.
Before the visit was over the story came out how he had found Bill in a
little hotel in Tangiers, pages of his writing scattered everywhere in the
room. Months of shooting Heroin had reduced him to skin and bones,- the
image of a survivor of Auschwitz. Allen and his companion, Peter Orlofsky,
had nursed him back to a point where some inkling of health was at least
reachable. While they were at it, they helped him organize his voluminous
work which charted the unknown territories he had discovered in his totally
gone state as he opened doors and wormholes to hellish dimensions and
tortured planes of existence never before visited by humans of planet earth.

........................................

B.J. Carol was another friend of Gregory and Allen who became a
friend of mine. A big handsome good-natured kid who loved to hang out with
the poets and writers. After all, if you weren't working at one kind of art
or another, what else was there to do?
After spending a night getting stoned on killer grass, going out for
coffee at the nearest sidewalk cafe, BJ and I took a stroll along the Seine
past the little shuttered bookstalls built on top of the low stone walls
that lined the river. We stopped to smoke a cigarette at the break of dawn.
The sky was lighting up behind the bold silhouette of the ancient cathedral
of Notre Dame. It was a beautiful sight, and we stood in awe of the
dawning of a new day. Then a subtle transformation occurred. It became a
huge screen and a scene appeared as though projected onto it. A great
overhead shot of a battle being waged. Riders of spirited horses charged
from the right and from the left to meet in a deadly melee in the middle.
BJ, I whispered, what do you see?
I see it, he whispered back.
What?
What's happening...the battle. Is that what you see?
Yes.
Even as we agreed, the vision became hazy and a new scene took form.
It was an aerial shot, as though from a plane. We were flying maybe 6 or 7
thousand feet, seeing an ocean below through breaks in the clouds. When we
came out of clouds altogether, we were approaching a huge bay. There was a
city by the bay backed by high mountains, which somehow I knew were the
Andes. Ships, tiny so far below, left little white wakes in the water.
BJ and I checked out our perceptions against each other...we were in
synch with this scene, too.
Then it changed again. Now we were high in the Andes. A dozen Indians
sat with their legs in a shallow circular pit. I was with them, part of the
circle, my legs in the pit.
BJ, are you with me?
Where are you? He asked me.
I'm in the circle with the Indians. Are you there?
BJ laughed. No, but I know what it means, he said. He laughed again.
"It means you're going to die in the Andes!"
Well, that didn't strike a chord with me, and the scene faded out
leaving us bathed in the light shining out, now brighter, from behind the
Notre Dame.
I didn't believe him for a second, but the experience had been so
fabulous it didn't matter what he thought...it didn't matter at all. We
just looked into each other's eyes, shaking our heads in near disbelief in
face of the cosmic picture show that we knew had been presented just for us.
We went back to the beat hotel to find Allen still up, turning his
notes into poetry.
Feverishly, we recounted our experience to him.
He listened without looking at us. "You saw God," he said. "Happened
to me once, too."

.......................................

Henri Sert was one of the most mysterious persons I¹ve ever met. He
said he was from the Isle of Mauritius, but one night I happened to use a
Spanish phrase and his ears perked up.
Hablas mi lengua, he said, followed by several words spoken with such a
thick Castilian accent that I couldn¹t understand a thing. If that was his
language, he was not from Mauritius.
Que dices? (What did you say?) I asked. He set his jaws together and
turned away. I never got him to say another word in "his language", but
that phrase, whatever it meant was so loaded it conjured up images not of
the Isle of Mauritius but of the Spanish inquisition. After that he
disappeared for two and a half weeks and when he showed up again I asked him
where he had been.
Dans un sort de caveau, (In a kind of a cave) he said, looking me
unblinkingly square in the eye. This time, the image conjured up was a
Dante-esque cave filled with Hell-fire. One afternoon I went to the room he
was staying in near Les Invalides (where Napolean¹s
Tomb is enshrined). I was in a chair and he was sitting on his bed looking
at me with those unblinking eyes.
Il y a quelqu¹n d¹autre vivant dans toi. (There¹s another person living
inside you.) he said.
Qu¹estce que tu veut dire. (What do you mean) I asked.
Je le vois, et il n¹aime pas que je le vois. (I see him, and he doesn¹t
like me seeing him.)
This evoked the flash of something from a few days before. I had
stopped in the Tuileries (once a royal garden) to rest on a bench. I
casually checked out a statue done in the Grecian styleSa handsome young
warrior. As I looked at his head, another face appeared beneath the
surfaceSa very alive person was in there, pleading with me to help him. I
was gripped by a nauseating sense of intense claustrophobia, of what life
would be like encased so tightly, so rigidly in that stone, heedlessly
begging unwitting passersby to set you free. And torture upon torture when
the one who finally perceives you is powerless to do anything about it.
His face was so heavily burdened it could only be compared with the look of
the damned on the ceiling of the Cistine Chappel. It was too much to bear.
I turned away and left the garden.
Now, under Henri¹s gaze I felt a kinship to that tortured soul inside
the statue. Had he been a projection of another self within me dying to be
free yet afraid to be discovered lurking in the secret crevasses of my
being.
C¹est bizarre, mon amisSmaintenant que tu me dit ca, ca me fait penser
(It¹s strange, my friendSnow that you tell me that, it makes me think), I
said. Je le savait pas, mais oui, j¹ai le sens qu¹il est la. (I didn¹t know
it, but yes, I feel his presence now.)
As if to bring the point home to me, a strange episode occurred some
days later. Henri and I were walking home about 4 AM when we entered a kind
of mist and both of us simply stopped walking. We looked at each other
wondering what was happening. Across the street the Egyptian water-bearer
statue there by the entrance to the Metro caught our eye. Little
wonder...those two big jugs, shaped like amphoras except with handles, were
being lifted into the air...slowly but surely. We stood there transfixed,
and there was this deja-vu question which one of us had to ask, "Tu voit ce
que je vois?" (Do you see what I see?) Henri said.
Il leve les bras (He's raising his arms), I replied.
Exactement (exactly) he said.
At that instant a little mini-Cooper police car pulled up right in
front of us and two cops got out with their guns drawn. They came up to us
and asked us what we were doing out at this hour. We explained we were
going home after a party with friends. We were close to home, so when one
of the cops saw the address on my student card, he holstered his gun.
"Allons y," he said, "C¹est un foutou etudiant Amerloque." (Come on,
it¹s a fucking Amorican student.)
Henri and I stood there as they drove off, immobilized by the
weirdness. The water-bearer had regained his eternal pose, the cops were
gone and we were alone except for a newspaper truck which came down the
street as we started to walk. It¹s backfire hit us like a rifle shot and my
foot, about to touch down, missed the ground completely.

A few weeks after the magic coconut trip, still wearing my caste and
with my arm in the sling, I made another one of my visits to Burroughs.
When we had gone through the ritual and arrived in the promised land, Bill
pulled the curtain and motioned for me to sit on the bed facing the armoire,
which had a large mirror on the door.
Look in the mirror, he said.
I stared at myself for what seemed too long a time when suddenly
everything disappeared. I was left hanging in space, peering into the void.
An image took shape. A man with the air of a gangster about him was
carrying a woman over his shoulder. I couldn¹t see her clearly, but I got
the impression she was someone I knew well. The man opened a door and
carried her through.
The scene faded away and there I was looking at my own reflection
again.
I described the vision to Bill.
She was familiar, hey? Who could that be?
It could be my wife, I replied.
What was happening to her?
She was being carried away.
What would account for that?
She could have been druggedSor murdered.
How long she been gone?
Six months.
And you¹re surprised she¹s being carried away? Come on!
I still care about her. I still love her.
He turned to me with eyes devoid of any trace of
sentimentalityScompletely ruthless.
He spit it out in my face: Love is a powerful weapon! Never forget
that!

I never forgot that, and I never forgot the magic mirror. In fact, I
was waiting for the right moment to try it with a mirror of my own. It came
soon enough one evening when Janine, who I was living with, went to see her
estranged family leaving me alone in my apartment.
I smoked a joint, a good one, let it take effect and settled down in
the dim light in front of an 8 by 10 inch mirror. This time, as I stared
into my eyes, the flesh melted away to reveal the white skull with hollow
eyes staring back. That faded into nothingnessSthe void again.
Suddenly I was confronted with an alien visage. It was gray with lines
of stitching running around it. Something like a baseball. Its eyes were
moving rapidly at me and around the room. Its mouth was moving about ten
times the speed of normal talk. It was obviously desperate to communicate
something of extreme importance, but I hadn¹t the slightest idea what it
could be. Was he about to be destroyed? Was Earth about to be destroyed?
What? I don¹t understand! Talk slower!
The eyes rested a second on me. He talked slower, but it was still
five times too fast.
I don¹t understand, I shouted.
The image faded away. I was left looking at my own reflection.
I took the bus, one of the old ones with the platform and the ticket
taker in the back, to Saint Michel and clomped my way up the stairs of the
beat hotel to Bill¹s room. I recounted the strange story of the alien
encounter.
So, his face was stitched like a baseball?
Yes.
Aside from this trip you just took, have you looked in the mirror
lately?
I felt the side of my head. Fourteen stitches.
Reminds me of you, he said with a wry smile.
He was trying to deliver a messageSan important message, I said.
Reminds me of you, he said, more forcefully.
I¹m not an alien, I said in rebuttal.
Are you sure?
His question threw me into a quandary. Was I sure I was not an alien?
Could I be one without knowing it? Who was the person Henri saw in
meSsomeone I had been totally unaware of hiding inside me? Had I slipped
into a parallel universe where spirits lived in statues and I WAS an alien?
Alien? Bill said. Brian Guyson, when he was living just down the hall
here, wanted to meet an alien. Woke up one morning and there was a seven
foot caterpillar standing at the foot of his bed! Ha!
So, you don¹t think Earth is about to be invaded by aliens? I said
weakly.
Sure it is!! He roared. Damn right it is!
He refused to discuss it further. He cooked, heroin this time. We shot
up, entered the blissful realm, and I walked home, out of my gourd, still
wondering what the fuck to make of it all.

Before the beats arrived in Paris, there were several chapters in my
life that revolved around different people, first of whom was Alex Trocchi.
He was a big, lumbering Scots writer and editor of a little literary
magazine, Merlin, the only competition to The Paris Revue, which Alex looked
down on as trendy and fashionable. Merlin published stories, poems and
plays that not only had teeth but had absolute fangs, like Waiting For Godot
by Samuel Beckett and other works by the likes of Pablo Neruda and Jean
Genet. Jane Lougee was the publisher. She financed the magazine drawing on
her father¹s cash and goodwill.
I had been saving up to go to Paris my last year as a Lieutenant J.G.
in the navy, ever since I picked up a copy of Esquire and saw a picture of
Vali, an Australian who lived in Paris. There she was with a chalk-white
face, deep black around her eyes, looking like the closest thing to death
itself. Indeed, it was the look of La Mort which she had originated. There
was something so intriguing about her. She seemed to personify the
seduction of the cosmic conflict between wild revolution on the one hand,
and the impermanence of life itself on the other. When I met her in France,
I told her, "You¹re the reason I came to Paris." She appreciated that very
much, and sometime during my stay she graciously posed for photos and also
danced for a film, The Vipers, that Shinkichi Tajiri and I were making.
In any case, with the money saved in the Navy, I was able to ease
Alex and Jane through some dire straits that they found themselves in from
time to time. When they were so broke they couldn¹t buy a meal, I would step
in and take the four of us, my wife Denny being the fourth, out to some
little restaurant they knew that served wonderful food and wine at a
reasonable priceSa treat for everybody.
Although Jane did get a stipend, as it were, from her father, it was
barely enough to keep the magazine going. I was shocked to learn that she
helped make up the difference by holding down a nighttime job scrubbing
floors on her hands and knees in an office building on the Champs-Elysees.
Alex divided his time between writing the first draft of Cain¹s Book and,
under the name of Frances Lengel, churning out dirty books (Helen and
Desire, etc.) for Maurice Girodias, the son of Jack Kahane, owner of Obelisk
Press, publisher of Henry Miller.
I was in Trocchi¹s room when a handsome American knocked on the door.
He told us he had looked us up because he had a piece that he thought would
be perfect for Merlin. It was called The Red Cloth. It was a series of
drawings every one of which contained a picture of the red cloth. First
when it was picked up by an army of crusaders who flew it as their banner.
It flew as their battle flag when they attacked another army who was
fighting under their standard topped by a crescent moon. It was this army
who, triumphant, took the red cloth as their symbol of victory. The
crusaders attacked again to regain the cloth with the result that both sides
did each other in and all that was left was the red cloth.
I thought it was great. A morality play with no words necessary. But
since there were no words, Alex had a hard time considering it a piece of
literature, and after all, Merlin was a literary magazine. I pointed out
that it used a universal language. Anybody anywhere could understand the
message, and it was a good message: the world is all too prone to destroy
itself over a worthless piece of cloth that has become a symbol to die for.
Alex was convinced. Perhaps as a reward, he named me as another editor
of Merlin. I shared the honor with Christopher Logue, the image of a 19th
century literary figure, a small man with angular hawk-like features, fitted
with a long leather coat, a silver handled cane and Ben Franklin half
glasses.
He carried himself with an imperious air, very straight, tapping his
cane on the sidewalk as he strolled down the street. But all was not well
inside that bold figure. It was a year or so later that he confessed to
Jane that he could bear to live no longer and was off to Cannes where he was
going to end it all by walking into the ocean. When Alex heard this,
he was furious.
My God, the poor fellow. Why in hell doesn¹t he do something useful
with his stupid life, like robbing a bank or something? My God!
I gave Alex money for the trip. He got a taxi to the station and took
the first train South. On arriving in Cannes, he went straight to the beach
to find Christopher already up to his crotch and heading out. He ran after
him.
Christopher, I love you! He shouted as he approached him.
Christopher stopped and slowly turned around. He must have thought he
was hallucinating.
Don¹t waste your talent, ChristopherSyou have great talent, don¹t throw
it away.
Christopher burst into tears, Alex took him in his arms.
I love you, he said. Do you know that?
So Alex brought him back into the fold in Paris. In the years that
followed, Christopher Logue returned to England to become a highly respected
poet and playwright. I remember hearing him described as The Poet Laureate
of England.

Alex introduced me to Girodias and put in a good word for me. It so
happened that Maurice was looking for someone to translate an erotic novel
from French to English. It was L¹histoire d¹O (The Story of O). Although
it was published under the nom de plume of Pauline Reage, the real author, a
French literary figure, remained a secret. Speculation went as far as to
suggest it was Simone de Beauvoir.
I would like to do it, I said to Maurice. I would love to do it.
All right, I¹ll give you the chance, he said. It doesn¹t pay well, but
it¹s a chance to prove yourself.
How much does it pay?
Standard price for a book: six hundred dollarsSin installments.
I glanced at Alex. He nodded, yes.
OK, I said. I¹ll do it.
I left with the book under my arm. Alex gave me a slap on the back to
welcome me as a full-fledged member of the "stable". Alex went off to score
some hashish, and I went back to the Hotel de Londres to give the good news
to Denny. Alex and Jane turned up, full of high energy. We loaded up a
pipe and got really mellow before the hunger pangs drove us out to the
Beaux-Arts for a great meal topped off with a Napoleon, a scrumptious desert
crowned with whipped cream.
I found that the translation came easily. It¹s the story of a woman
who has all her conditioned inhibitions broken down one by one. I liked the
message so much that I made a deliberate change in the meaning of a crucial
word. The word, "livrer" is conventionally translated as "to deliver". I
translated it as "to liberate", "to free" as in to free from, to liberate
from sexual conditioning. Being a boisterous egomaniac I thought it was a
clever thing to do, strengthening the message.
Pauline Reage, or whoever she really was, did not agree. Girodias took
it away from me and gave my translation to Austryn Wainhouse, another member
of the stable, to make it more "literary".I think the only thing he had to
do was to translate that one word correctly. The rest of it was good, and
when I read the final result, I recognized most of it as my work.
In any case, the channel had been opened, the lines of communication
cleared, and some months later I ended up writing my original novel for
Olympia Press, The Traveler¹s Companion Series. These were the "DBs" as
"Gid" (our affectionate nickname for Maurice) termed them, short for Dirty
Books.
I came up with a cast of characters: Willy the Sculptor, the erotic
renaissance man who had multiple talents as an illusionist, a photographer,
filmmaker, and sculptor; the Baron, a phony nobleman whose darkest desire is
to become the Devil, or at least play the role of the DevilSa dream that
comes true, thanks to Willy¹s nefarious machinations; Lila, the con woman
who gets conned but plays the game to the hilt. I entitled it Play This
Love With Me.
Well, I just turned these characters loose and they had one of the
farthest out, sexiest, funniest romps in the whole Travelers Companion
Series. Not too long ago now, I worked with a guy in the film industry who
finally got the courage to tell me when he was growing up he used to laugh
while he masturbated to my book.
As I mentioned before, Alex and I started the sexual revolution. We
just decided, enough of this Bull Shit, we¹re going to be honest about our
desires and our affairs. We¹re each one going to convince two others to do
the same, and they will be pledged to convert two others to do the same
until the revolution circles the globe. Free at last, free at last! And if
the world didn¹t buy it, no matter, we would be free as birds, flying high
above society¹s constraints. We would live as gods, above the law, beyond
judgments of good and evil. We would blow the gates to the Garden of Eden
and once again live in a state of grace in Paradise.

It was during the writing of Play This Love that Denny and I moved to
our pad at 123 Rue de Sevres, and another cast of characters entered our
life. The hub of this group was Montparnasse instead of St. Germain, and
included were Shinkichi Tajiri, his mate, Ferdi, Lou Weber, Costa Alex,
Paolo Vallorz and Tingueli.
Shinkichi, who Willy Joe called "Buddha Head", was a slight but
powerful Nisei who grew up in Los Angeles. When he was a teenager, he and
his family were victims of the Japanese relocation program that went into
effect after Pearl Harbor, (His birthday was December 7)). First, they were
taken to Santa Anita racetrack where the family was given a horse stall to
live in, then they were imprisoned at Manzanar, a hastily built
concentration camp between Palmdale and Lone Pine, California. Years later,
when Tajiri met the great sculptor Noguchi, they had in common this
experience of having lived in an American concentration camp. Noguchi¹s
mother was American, so he was not forcibly interned, he volunteered,
perhaps to show solidarity with the Japanese or as a protest. In any case
he spent six months working on a landscaping project in the camp at Poston,
Arizona. Tajiri became his student and set the course for the rest of his
life as an internationally recognized iconoclastic avant-garde sculptor.
He did have a serious detour however. He enlisted in the army and was sent
to join the Japanese-American Division, the 442nd., the unit that fought its
way up the length of Italy and into Germany. They had the highest casualty
rate in the European theatre. He said he went through the war without ever
loading his gunShe simply decided he was not going to kill anybody. He was
taken out of action when he was shot in the leg. He was my true mentor. It
was an education just to hang out with him, to watch him work, not to
mention working with him.
Ferdi was a pint-sized Dutch artist, Tajiri¹s protégé and mate. She
had been a kid living in Eindhoven when the Allies bombed the city and
dropped paratroopers on itS a disastrous move. They had been betrayed by
spies in the underground, and the Germans trapped and destroyed them. So,
in a very real sense, she too was a veteran when she and Shinkichi met up
and got together.
Costa Alex, a Greek American artist (I think his real name was
Alexandropoulis) was a dead ringer for Picasso. The build, the shape of the
face, those unique eyes and the level gaze were all the same.
It was uncanny,- he could have been a clone of Pablo.
Paolo Vallorz was an Italian artist who traveled in well-oiled circles,
sometimes doing a little procuring, but still recognized as a real artistSa
very smooth operator.
Need I say anything about Tingueli. Anybody who has visited Paris
these days has most likely seen his work in the big fountain and pond
outside the Modern Art Museum. A crazy animated spectacle of pieces being
sawed in two, machines bashing each other, water twirling. After he became
rich and famous he moved to Switzerland where, in his grand house he kept a
formula four racecar in the living room. At the drop of a hat he would fire
it up and blow the minds of his guests with it¹s deafening roar and the
power of twenty pent-up tigers.
One night Tajiri and I, high as kites, were lounging around my pad
listening to a Stan Kenton record with an amazing trumpet solo by Maynard
Ferguson. Tajiri came up with the idea of making a film using that music
for the track. It was very evocative, and we began spouting ideas for
visuals that would go great with it.
"That feels like bumper carsShere we could take off on the
motorcycleSthis is like flying." After a good session, we had an outline.
We could start with the four of us smoking and passing a joint, just like we
were doing. Then, as we lay back, stoned, our spirits could rise from our
bodies to take off on Tajiri¹s monster motorcycle, a 650cc Triumph, to race
into a tunnel where something extraordiinary would happen. We borrowed,
first of all a little Kodak 16mm camera with a three-lens turret that took a
50 foot load. When we needed a more sophisticated camera, we borrowed a
Bolex from Bobby Coogan, brother of Jackie Coogan (The Kid in Charlie
Chaplin¹s film of the same name), and finished shooting the first part. To
get the effect of us rising out of our bodies, we needed help, which we got
from Ferdi. First of all we set up the shot of Tajiri and I zonked out on
the couch, one stop underexposed. When Ferdi had shot that, she capped the
lens and wound the film back as we held our positions on the couch. When
she started shooting the second exposure, we twisted around as though coming
out of our shell, then rose out of the picture. The effect: our spirits
worked themselves out of our bodies and rose out of them, leaving them
behind while we were free to set out on our wild trip around town.
We weren¹t sure yet what would happen when we zoomed into the tunnel,
but Tajiri remembered there were some vendors in the flea market who sold
old newsreels and movies. We went there and bought a couple of newsreels
for little money. We were gassed when we borrowed a projector and saw
several shots we could use: a crowd cheering at a soccer match, a can-can
and then, the crowning shot men in loin cloths climbing over one another to reach and wrestle away a
baton.
Tajiri knew what it was. It¹s a magic baton, he said. Whoever is
holding it at the end becomes empowered to have whatever he wants, food,
money, women. We knew exactly what to do with itSthis is what our heroes
would find when they roared into the tunnel.
So we went shooting over the next month or so, gathering the rest of
the footage needed to edit the film. We got shots of the bumper cars at a
little street fair. We filmed a little locomotive in a park in such a way
it looked like a big one with the train wheels passing close to the lens.
On Bastille day we took the camera down to the Seine and made beautiful
shots of fireworks bursting in a black sky. I got a great kick out of
following the tracer up to catch the burst in the center of the frame. I
made a shot going up in the elevator car at the Eiffel Tower. Tajiri made a
low angle shot of me losing my balance, flailing my arms then falling. In
the edit, we cut from the trip up the tower to me falling, then to a sea
gull winging away. It created the illusion that I went up the tower, fell
off and turned into a bird. When the music was matched to the sequence, the
trumpet getting ever higher and higher until the fall and then a feeling of
AAAAHH, beautiful lyrical release and transformation. Tajiri came up with
the title, The Vipers. It was the term that musicians had used for marijuana
smokers because of the hissing sound made when toking on a joint.
When the film was finished, we climbed on Tajiri¹s bike, took the film
to the Cannes amateur festival and won the Italian prize, The Golden Lion
for the best use of the language of film. The prize was offered by the
magazine, "L¹Altro Cinema". The publishers of the magazine approached us
after our screening and confided in us they were going to give us their
prize.
Keep it a secret, thoughSwe¹re not supposed to tell anyone.
We agreed, but the night of the presentations, high on grass and
Belladona suppositories, as soon as they said, "And The Golden Lion for the
best use of the language of film," before they announced the names of the
winners, we stood up. The Italians were miffed, to say the least, but went
on to present us with a handsome gold plated ceramic lion about fifteen
inches long.
After the ceremonies, their spokesman said to us, Next time wait until
you¹re names are called before you stand up. And make your next film about
Cocaine. At this he gave us a wink and a smile and was gone.
Sounds like it would be good for business, I said to Tajiri.
I think we just got a prize from the Mafia, he said, holding up the
Golden Lion.
We looked at each other and broke up laughing.


Back in Paris we held screenings every few nights, usually filling my
little living room with people who had heard of this crazy film you had to
see to believe. Stan Kenton came to town. We invited him to come see it in
a little screening room down the street. He sat without saying a word.
When it was over, he said, you guys have some sense of humor.
It struck me later that he didn¹t trust us. For all he knew we were
agents of Interpol.
It was a different story when Chet Baker came to town. BJ¹s brother,
Dave ran a recording studio on the right bank. BJ told us that Chet was
going to be doing some recording at the studio, so we went down to hang out
and dig the session. Chet was so incredibly handsome it was actually
difficult to look at him. And his horn was so sweet any woman would melt.
After the session was over, we told him we¹d like to show him our movie. We
were willing to bring the mountain to Mohammad, as it were, and show it
wherever he was staying. Well, he was staying with my friend, Benoit
Guersain, a French Bass Player.
That night we hauled the projector, a very heavy piece of gear, and the
film into the Metro and came out across town near Benoit¹s apartment. A
cloud of smoke billowed out when the door opened.
They were both greatly enjoying what was obviously a serious high.
They offered us a pipe, and a heavy toke of the thick prickly smoke made us
both cough convulsively and propelled us instantly into the stratosphere.
Moving slowly, I went about setting up for the screening. Chet picked
up his trumpet and blew a few bars of My Funny Valentine before breaking
into a wonderful improvisation on the theme.
As the film played, scenes were met with exclamations of appreciation.
Yeah! OK! Yes, man! Also laughter.
When it was over, I asked them how long they thought the movie ran.
They agreed it was 25 or 30 minutes.
How long is it? Chet asked.
It¹s twelve minutes long, I said.
They both looked at me in disbelief.
No shit? Benoit said.
No shit, I said.
Man, you guys have twisted the tail of time, Chet said, shaking his
head. We shared another pipe before Tajiri and I packed up our bag of
tricks and floated home.
On arriving, Tajiri smiled and said, nice guy.
A real prince of a guy, I said.

It was during this time that I met Dave Amram, one of the great beat
composers and musicians. We used to go to a little club on the Boulevard
Raspail not far from Montparnasse. Dave would jam with whoever came to
play, black or white, blowing his French horn until wee hours in the
morning. We would find ourselves on the sidewalk as dawn broke. The birds
filled the air with their tweeting. We stopped to listen one morning.
"I¹m going to write a song about this", he said. And I¹m going to call
it The Birds of Montparnasse.
He did exactly that, and he included it on the record he cut while in
Paris.
I saw him again in New York years later and took a beautiful photo of
him in his apartment, composing a symphonic work by candlelight.

One night Allen and Gregory came by with a stranger.
Gregory introduced him. Baird, this is Jack Kerouac. Jack, Baird.
Welcome to Paris, I said, shaking his hand and ushering him into my
pad. He was stocky, strong as an ox, with a rugged face looking out from
under the brim of a woolen cap. I had heard his name mentioned by Allen and
Gregory, but it didn¹t mean much to me at that time. I introduced him to
Janine and Henri. He chose a seat by the window and sat there not looking
at any of us. He accepted a glass of wine I offered and thanked me for it.
But it was obvious his mind was elsewhere. He seemed to be totally
uninterested in whatever was going on. But there was an air about himSa
charisma that Allen and Gregory obviously held in reverence. Here was
genius.
Allen spoke: Jack is about to have his latest novel published. It
took three years, but it¹s finally happening.
I looked at Jack. Congratulations, I said.
He nodded in my direction.
Allen continued. It¹s called On The Road.
He wrote it in three weeks, Gregory chimed in. How about that?
I was impressed, very impressed. Wow, I said. I glanced at Jack. He
was out there somewhere...wherever he was he was perfectly content.
Gregory continued to enlighten me about Jack. He didn¹t write pages.
He fed a teletype scroll into the typewriter and just kept typing. You know
how a musician improvises? Yeah, well that¹s how Jack wrote On The Road.
Never went back to rewrite anythingSit just flowed out of him right onto the
scroll.
Allen capped it off. It¹s a great piece of work, Baird, he said. It¹s
the great American Novel of our time. You¹ll see.
Jack, who had been looking at the ceiling, gave a little toss of his
head as though to say, OK, it¹s been good but let¹s go now.
Everybody stood up. Jack gave a little smile, a little nod and a
little salute, which I returned.

Hajj, as he was known, because he had been to Mecca and gone through
the great ritual of the Hajj, was our connection for H, Horse, Heroin. He
liked to come around to my place and get everybody stoned. Once in a while
he would come up with some of the pureS extraordinarily clean and powerful.
On one of these occasions when I had a few extra Francs, I figured I would
pay Burroughs back for the many times he had turned me on, so I bought some.
I took it to Bill and found him with one of his old friends who I¹ll
call Deke. In a beat sort of way he was a well dressed, good looking
hipster, and the saxophone on the bed confirmed his credentials.
The works were on the table, so the fixing was in the offing.
Here, I said, pulling the bag out of my pocket, try some of this.
Deke was very interested.
Surprise! Bill said. OK, let¹s see if this is any good.
He cooked up a spoonful and said to Deke, You first.
Deke took the spike and expertly mainlined. He slowly sat up very
straight and closed his eyes. His jaw fell open and he let out a little
sigh, then a little whimper.
Bill looked at me. Another surprise, he said. I see we have to treat
this stuff with respect.
Uh huh, I said. You next.
Bill was not disappointed. Then I joined the fun. We all sat there
scratching and nodding off.
Deke finally spoke. Where did you score this shit?
From the source, I said.
Well, man, I want someSnot some, I want a big bagful, he said.
Oh yeah? I said. I didn¹t know if he was kidding.
Yeah, he said. Come on, I want to negotiate. He got up, picked up his
sax and said, come on.
He led me up the stairs, took out his key and opened one of the doors.
A tape recorder sat on the table.
You like Jazz? He asked.
Sure, man.
He turned on the recorder and started to play his saxophone. After a
few minutes he stopped.
No lie, you can score this stuff? I¹m interested.
So it would seem.
I¹m not just whistling Dixie here, he said. How much can you get?
How much do you want?
Much, I want much.
In dollarsShow much?
Five hundred dollars much, he said.
Hajj was going to be very happy, I thought.
Yeah, I can do that, I said.
When?
I have to set it up. Two days.
OK, Baird, he said. Two days from now. Deal.
He started blowing his sax again. I glanced at the recorder. It was
recording.
Next day I went to see Hajj at his place. He was very happy.
Something he could sink his teeth into. He said he would have it next
evening. We would meet at nine in the café downstairs from his apartment.
I went by the beat hotel to let Deke know that the deal was on. Cash
and carry. I would need the money at eight O¹clock, He should have the
stuff by 10.
Next night, right on schedule, I went to pick up the money at the
hotel.
If you burn me, I¹ll have to kill you, Deke said and laughed.
I¹m not going to burn you, I said with anger. If I do you¹ll never
find me. It was my turn to laugh.
OK, OK, he said. I know you¹re cool. Here¹s the bread. Count it.
It was a wad of dough: twenty-five twenties. I folded it in two and
stuck it in my pocket. It made a big bulge over my leg.
By the time I reached the street, my heart was pounding. This was the
real deal and no doubt about it, it was fraught with danger. I walked to
the Metro at Saint Michel and went down into the entrance. I don¹t know by
what instinct I was motivated, but instead of turning to the right and going
on down to the trains, I crossed under the street and went halfway up the
stairs on the other side. When I turned to see if I was followed, a
heavy-set guy in a trench coat came hurrying down the stairs. He stopped
when he didn¹t see me going to the trains. He turned and looked up at me.
And there we were in a moment of truth. I knew he was following me, he knew
I knew.
I ran up the stairs, saw a bus just pulling out, ran and caught it,
leaving my tail behind. I made transfers from one bus to another, from the
bus to the metro, the metro to another line on the metro until I knew that
nobody was, or nobody could be tailing me.
I arrived at the café forty-five minutes late. Hajj told me he had
about given up on me, that he was ready to take the stuff back. There was
nobody in the café, but we made the trade under the table anyway. Two big
bags of white stuff. Now I had a big bulge on both legs.
I was nearly an hour late to get back to the hotel. I realized that,
by all rights I should take my cut, but once in Deke¹s room I pulled the
stuff out of my pockets like hot potatoes, glad to get rid of them.
"Deke slit open one of the bags and took a snort.
It¹s not the same stuff, he said.
I took a snort. He was right, it was not the same stuff. (Later, when
I told Hajj, he said, you should have told me you wanted the pure. I
replied, I didn¹t know I had to tell you.)
It¹s plenty strong enough, I said. Let¹s shoot some, that¹s the proof
of the pudding.
So we didSit was not dynamite, but it would get you there.
One thing, there¹s a lot of it, I said, cooking up another spoon.
The second time around we did get there.
Deke picked up his sax, turned on the tape recorder and started to
blow. In a little while he stopped.
Now that¹s over, who¹s your connection?
It was that recorder running there that turned the key to the truth of
the situation. I remembered he had done the same thing two days ago. First
the sax, then the questions.
Hey, I said, let¹s play back that cool solo you blew the other day.
I reached out, rewound the tape and switched to playback.
After a few bars I said, I like what you were doing just nowSplay that
again. He turned off the machine and began playing again.
Yeah, that¹s good, I said. I turned it on record. Now I kept telling
him, yeah, yeah, that¹s it, man, keep it up, don¹t stop. I egged him on
until our talk about the dope deal was completely recorded over.
Just at that point a stomping of feet and laughter came down from the
room above. It might have been coincidence, but I was sure that whoever was
up there monitoring this scene, agents or overseers or cosmic cops, they
were cracking up at the hell of a funny joke that had just been played on
Deke.
Sometime after I came back to New York I met Burroughs at a party. I
asked him, whatever happened to Deke?
Big mistake. Tried to bring that score into Texas in his horn. Texas
is the worst. Got twenty years.

I became convinced that life on earth was being observed by
interdimensional beings who could appear or disappear at will, who were
checking things out, giving a little push here, a little pull there. I
called them Othe overseers¹. I was not only jealous of their power, I
wanted to become one of them, become privy to the secrets behind the veil of
illusion.
My theory explained all kinds of weird phenomenon. Such as one
afternoon, walking near my pad, I suddenly heard music playing just above my
head. Not heavenly music radio or a scratchy record, piped to me from another dimension. It stayed
right over my head as I walked along.
One evening lying by my window half asleep, I opened my eyes to see a
golden city float by above the clouds. Once, I opened them to see a vase of
flowers in the middle of my table. One night, rather than in my room, I
found myself in an underground hallway supported by arches of alien
designSnot of this earth. All these apparitions were undeniable evidence to
me that other dimensions could be perceived, and were indeed real.
Another time, in the Jardin de Luxembourg, sitting near the statue of
Pan, I looked across the garden to see that all the people walking there had
the legs of goats. They were all Satyrs. One of them was wearing the robes
of a priest. I recognized his face as that of the Photoshop owner down the
street from me.
Later that day, I went to the shop.
"Je vous ais vu dans le Jardin ce matin. (I saw you in the Garden this
morning.
Oui, he said, vous voyez bien. (Yes, you are seeing well.)
Je veux savoir ce qui se passe ici. (I want to know what¹s happening
here.)
Mais tu sais ce qui se passe. Tu vois ce qui se passe. (But you know
what¹s happening. You can see for yourself !)
Mais, je veut etre dans le coupSje veus avoir les pouvoirs! (I want to
be in on it. I want the powers!)
Ah, c¹est autre chose. T¹a deja fait ton choix. (Ah, that¹s another
matter. You¹ve already made your choice.)
Comment ca? (How¹s that?)
La, dans le Jardin. Quand tu voulait pas jouet avec ton boule d¹or.
(There, in the garden, when you didn¹t want to bargain with your golden
ball.)
I was shocked. Alors, c¹est ca! (so, it¹s that?)
Oui, c¹est ca! Les Jeux sont faites, juene homme! Au Voir! (Yes, it¹s
that, young man! The bets are down! Goodbye!)

I couldn¹t accept that the Devil¹s disciples were the only game in
town. There were all kinds of possible players the other side of that veil
of illusion. Players who were interested enough to keep watch on me. And
who knows, maybe one of them would hear my plea to join them and look on me
favorably. It was worth my best shot. It came over me that to make myself
accessible I needed to get away from my routine.
If I were going to be transformed into somebody else, I would have to
leave my ID behind. I gave my passport to Vali to keep for me. She
understood intuitively. She said she would take good care of it until I
came back, if I ever did.
I walked past the Porte d¹Italie and right on out of Paris. A long way
into the countryside I went. Down a little dirt road. Two women stood at
the crossroads, watching me.
What keeps him going, one said to the other.
Must be solar powered, was the reply.
Overseers, I said to myself. I walked on past. As dusk fell I came
across heavy steel plates flush with the ground. The sound of sloshing
water came from beneath them. I listened with concentration. It sounded
like H.P. Lovecraft¹s monster, Cthulu. I was sure of it: Cthulu lived in
there. As night fell, I spotted a haystack. I wormed my way into the
stack, making just enough room for me to lie prone.
Then I did experience a transformation. Not so much of myself as of
everything. Everything disappeared, including myself. All that remained
was the void, an emptiness so vast, yet with a sense of great energy
movingSgreat energy moving in the cosmosSmy being faintly discernable,
nothing more than a dotted line, within this immense flow.
I remained in this state throughout the night. The first earthly sound
was that of an airplane taking off and flying over my haystack. My first
thought: the overseers have found me, there¹s no getting away from them.
But I learned a fundamental truth from that experience: there are many
illusions, but behind the veil, beyond all illusion there is emptiness.

Of all the bizarre situations, each holding a secret teaching, there
was another big one in the wings.
I wrote a letter to my Mother asking specific questions about several
family issues. I went to the post office, bought the stamps, mailed the
letter. When I got home, I found a letter from my Mother under the door.
It was beyond comprehension. It was an answer to the letter I had mailed
only fifteen minutes before. I took that as proof that time can be warped.
Even more unsettling, someone around there was warping time, and making me
the butt of the joke.
My paranoia came back full strength. I flipped out I took my passport, went to the Gare Saint Lazare and jumped on a boat
train. It was full of passengers going to Le Havre to embark on a
trans-Atlantic crossing on the Liner, The United States. Luggage was
everywhere. I had no ticket, but I made a crazy plan to somehow get on the
ship. I would play like I lost my memory and didn¹t know who I was, (no
acting necessary). I would pretend that the only thing I could remember was
that I was supposed to take that boat. For that to work, I had to hide my
passport in some of the luggage, remember their name so I could pick it up
after we set sail and voila! I would be on my way back to the states.
I salted my passport away in the flap of a knapsack. The name on the
tag: Alice Botherwell.
When I went through that charade with the customs agents, I also told
them that I could remember the name Alice Botherwell. After consultation
with the purser of the ship, they asked me to sit over on the chair to one
side while they considered the matter.
First, two cops came up in a leisurely manner, then two more, then I
was encircled by them, some of them looking at me with blood in their eye.
In an instant, they pounced on me, pinned me down, held my arms behind me
and threw me into the paddy wagon.
It was a short ride. The next thing I knew, I was being locked in a
cell in the local insane asylum. They gave me pajamas and a robe and took
my clothes. I slept through the night after all that tension. An attendant
came around in the morning. He asked me what my problem was. I told him
there was no problem, I just wanted to get home for Christmas. He pulled
out his keys. I¹ll let you out if you won¹t run away. I promised, and he
unlocked the door and swung it open. I wandered around the hall for a
while, then went back to lie down.
As I lay there, I replayed my train ride and my arrest, and started to
turn my situation over in my mind.
Ah, well, I thought, they¹ll take good care of me while I¹m here.
Immediately a voice cried out, L¹enfant! (the infant!)
My next thought came. Whatever happens, I¹m OK with it.
C¹est l¹homme! (There¹s the man!)
If my Mother knew I was here, she¹d get me released, I thought.
Voila le bebe, (There¹s the baby) the voice announced forcefully.
I realized that the voice was judging my thoughts unerringly. It went
on and on. Under such an onslaught, my mind felt like it was being opened
with a prybar. Then it took on greater significance. It struck me that
this could be like the Delphic Oracle. If so, she could answer the
fundamental questions of life. I was drawn like a magnet off the bed, into
the hall, then, hearing the voice coming from the next room, entered there.
Lying on the bed was a very old blind woman who looked like my Mother
in another twenty years. But if time travel was happening, then maybe she
was here from tweny years in the future. Whether or not it was her, whoever
it was she was obviously insane, still making pronouncements on my thoughts.
I now concluded that I was in the presence of an Oracle.
C¹est le fou qui entre! (It¹s the crazy man who enters now!)
I spoke up. C¹est pour quoi la vie? (What is the purpose of life?)
She stopped. Was I screwing it up by talking?
I repeated the question louder.
The attendant burst into the room.
Salaud! Que fait tu? (Dirtbag! What are you doing?) He grabbed my
arm, pulled me into the hall, threw me into my cell and locked the door. He
left, muttering to himself.
An hour later another attendant came, opened the door and told me to
come with him. We crossed the courtyard to another building, went down the
hall and into a room where a man was sitting with an array of electrodes on
his head. The machine, something like a lie detector was running, scrolling
out the brainwaves. Every ten seconds or so it made a beep and the scribes
went into convulsions.
It looked like brain alteration to me. If this was transformation, I
wanted no part of it. I told the attendant I had to go to the bathroom. He
took me down the hall, opened the door to the John, and waited outside.
There was a little window in the wall. It was only 13 or 14 inches square,
but I went through it like a snake.
I dropped to the ground and pushed my way up the hill in back of the
asylum, climbed a chain-link fence to find myself on the street. I walked
to the first house, a large, elegant one, and rang the bell. A man of forty
or so, with an aristocratic air about him, answered the door. He checked me
out in a glance: pajamas, robe, slippers.
Yes? He said (in French).
I¹m the American from Paris, I said.
Was it you who sent the cigarettesSthe Pall Mall¹s?
Yes, the Pall Mall¹s, I said.
Come in, he said. He called into the next room. Here¹s the American
who sent the Pall Malls!
His wife came out, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.
How nice to meet you, she said. What can we do for you?
Would it be too much to ask to give me a lift to the American
Consulate?
Not at all, he said. He drove me down the hill and dropped me off at
the consulate.
I walked in, obviously a mad man. I want to see the Consul, I said.
He¹s not in today, she said, drawing back away from me.
I walked past her into a hallway.
You can¹t go in there, she yelled after me.
I went into the first office, frightening the man behind the desk.
Lying open in front of him was my passport. Good thing I had mentioned
Miss Botherwell when I was playing the amnesiac.
I came for this, I said, taking my passport from under his nose.
As I was leaving, the paddy wagon screeched to a halt in front, and the
men in white coats came running into the lobby and grabbed me.
All the stories about the superhuman strength of the crazies came to
the fore, and I tossed them about like a bear shaking off dogs. They
finally tackled me and muscled me into the back of the wagon and I soon
found myself back in the cell.
This time it was a Nunn who came in with a big needle full of evil
yellowish fluid.
How did you escape? She asked
I went through the window
Impossible, she said as she stuck the needle in my arm.
The world slowly faded away. My thoughts were about my passport, which
I still gripped in my hand. Something had changed in my psyche. Now it was
wonderful to be reunited with my identity. I¹m glad I¹m me, I¹m glad I¹m
me! I told myself. I felt like Dorothy, clicking her heels together as she
said, there¹s no place like home, there¹s no place like home.



The next morning a woman from the consulate came into the cell. She
was very business-like. She informed me that since no crime had been
committed, no charges would be filed. She informed me that passage had been
arranged on L¹Isle de France, which would depart at eight o¹clock that
evening. I was to wait in the hospital until they escorted me on board.

So ended my European Odyssey. On the ship I met Al Maysles. Ten
years later I would help him and his brother David shoot the epic
documentary, Gimme Shelter.
A French friend, Daniel, rescued most of the negatives I shot in Paris
and brought them to me, along with my copy of The Vipers. After seeing the
film, Shirley Clark asked me to shoot the revolutionary, The Cool World,
which now resides in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. I
was director of photography on Heart of Tibet with the Dalai Lama, and have
worked on over a hundred other films, many with earth-shaking intent,
including the
"trip scene" in the graveyard in Easy Rider.
After a year in New York, I married Jane Lougee. She was my assistant
on The Cool World. We were together many years but finally divorced.
It¹s now fifty years that I first landed in Paris. Dave Amram is
still going strong. David Maysles is gone, but his brother Albert is still
productive. Alex Trocchi, Bill Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso
are all gone.
That in itself is a lesson in impermanence. Another lesson learned:
be yourself. Ultimately, the greatest lesson for me was learned in a
haystack: behind the illusion is emptiness.
Ask the Dalai Lama whether that¹s true or notS

I did.

Fin.