Ryan Hotel
         At the hotel the girl unpacks her hatbox suitcase, patting between the tube tops and slivers of blouses for the gin. The bottle's forgotten in the car. She reaches for a Vantage, strikes a match, holding it until the flame burns to her fingers. Why does she like hurting herself? Didn't the accident hurt her enough? She thinks about those questions soaking in the deep claw and ball tub where she lies between the haunches of a taloned being. Afterwards, she stands on the dresser facing the mirror, and then sits in the chair with feathers carved into its arms, her compact before her face. She stares as if looking could change something. The radiators emit rattles and hisses but no heat, red-eyed pheasants and hunters shiver on the draperies. She likes this room that feels like an ice cave, the bed is cavernous, with sheets of drifted snow she runs her hand between. Lying down, the cold pillow over her face, she imagines this place before...Prehistoric muck teems with sturgeons and garfish, rocks clatter where Teiid lizards sun, swinging their whip-like tails. Volcanic ash blotting out the sun. Ice age. Eons until Lakota Sioux and Bluecoats.
            She is faraway when the rotary phone on the dresser rings. It's the black haired boy. "Come down to our room. We're smoking." She doesn't want to smoke, but goes anyway. The elevator, a grilled cage, creaks her down to the fourth floor.
            Their room is hot and small. Head against the bed-board, a baggie of pot between his knees, the blond rolls joint after joint, skinny and long like himself. The black-haired boy fires one up. After a hit, he puts the lit end between his lips and blows the smoke into her mouth. The smoke that frightens is inside her. Smoke wisps through the open transom. They hear the elevator. A woman and man's voices in the hall.
            "Who's smoking reefer?" the man calls out. Bang bang. A fist on the door. "Let me in."
            More pounding. The blond gets off the bed. "It's him."
            They all know who him is. The same voice that shouted for sea-smelling cunt at Whitey's.
            "This is for our memoirs," the black-haired boy chuckles, hands the girl the joint and unlocks the door. Corso bounds in, followed by a woman in a red muffler, much older than the girl. He plops down on the bed with the woman.
           "Give me a hit," he says in a thick New York accent. "Come on give me the spliff."
            The girl hands him the joint even as she is turning into a snowdrift. Nothing in her nineteen years has prepared her. How greedy he is. His lips pucker and gulp when he takes a hit from the joint. He reaches for the whiskey in the pocket of his jacket, swings the bottle up.
            "Do you know who I am?" he shouts, waving the bottle. "I'm the poet Gregory Corso."

        The black-haired boy catches the girl's eye. Corso is drunk. He jabs and punches; he cocks his head, squints, and then snarls. Only the energy coming out of him is youthful. She smells his hair, the gray strands less harsh than the brown. He sneers at her or perhaps he is smiling. His front teeth are missing; the gap is a broken doorway to a shed. He must not have been smiling for he stares at her angrily.
           "Did you roll this joint?"
            She shakes her head. His dark eyes are hard like walnut shells, tarpaper. She is surprised that they have no light inside them.
           "Fucking answer me." He holds up the toothpick joint and squints at it. "Who rolled this spliff?" he shouts.
            Silence.
            "Give me the pot here, give it here." The black-haired boy hands the baggie and rolling papers to Corso. They all watch him pinch buds into the rolling paper, twirling, and licking. His joint is fat as a cigarette. The woman in the red muffler lights it. "What a fine Aries am I," he recites, exhaling. "What sign are you?" he abruptly snarls at the girl.
            "Virgo."
            "I see pain and suffering in your eyes."
            The woman presses her leg against his; her arm tightens around his neck. This is what is meant by the expression, she is hanging on him.
            "What nationality are you?"
            "American," she says, chills crawling over her back like ants.     
            "No, fuck no. What ethnicity?"
            She flushes. "Czech."
           "Aaah, Czech. The Czechs love me."
            His eyes should be like her eyes. She stands up, asks the black-haired boy for the car keys. She's going for the bottle of gin.

Snowlot
           Snow buzzes, her slacks pull away from her jacket. She is running into a near blizzard. Corso is somewhere behind her, following. The car cowers, a hillock of snow under streetlight. The wind knifes into her as she fumbles the key to the trunk.
            "You're an angel," he slurs, taking the key. "I couldn't let an angel freeze." He pops the trunk.
            Her fingers swim toward the bottle nesting on top of the spare tire, but he reaches it first. What was it he stole that sent him to prison, she wonders suddenly. He twists the cap, lifts the bottle to her mouth, pours. Gin sloshes over her chin so icy it takes a piece of her skin.
            "No more," she pushes the bottle away.
            He laughs into the wind, "To the angel and hipster." He takes a deep kiss from the bottle.

         Hipster. Hip referring to hip flask. A hipster carries liquor on his hip instead of hiding it in his boot like a bootlegger. Hip from West Africa via the Gullah dialect spoken in the Sea Islands. hipicat denotes a person in the swing of things, with 'eyes open.'

Snowbed
            "Open the fucking window." Corso is lying on her bed flat on his back. "Get my boots off," he mumbles. He is trying to unzip. "Get him out of there."
            What does he want first? She opens the window, gladly letting the snow in.
            "Get my boots off." She unlaces the left boot. The laces are knotted at the back of the boot. Gin makes her clumsy. How long has he had someone to take his boots off for him? She remembers a night ride with her grandfather, the radio playing. Apple blossom night. She was sure little people lived inside the radio and were singing just to her. How sweet the falling asleep had been, but better still her grandfather carrying her inside and putting her to bed. Only Corso is the girl who has fallen asleep in the car. That makes her the grandfather.
            She eases his sock off, lifts the right boot. He begins to snore lightly. Green socks, odorless. His feet smell like Band-Aids. Now he is barefooted but otherwise dressed. Should she try to take his fatigue jacket off? He rouses himself and for a few seconds, rises from the bed. She jerks on the sleeve of his jacket, pulls off one half, then the other half.
            He falls back. "Angel, get him out of there. Come on."
            Is this one of the seven steps to immortality? Initiation? What right does he have to be impatient? She unsnaps his corduroy pants, the sound echoing in the stillroom. She pulls his pants off by their cuffs, one leg, then another. He wears no underwear. When she unbuttons his shirt, her hand brushes the chest that is glossy, soft and passive.
            This is like undressing someone dead. Was it the ancient Egyptians who believed that after death, the spirit needed to return to the body? The body was placed on a slanted couch and dried for forty days. The curtains billow, the wind is hurrying in. "Get him up. " He blinks. Does he see her in that instant when she takes it in her hand? When the embalmers removed the brain through the nose with a long hook, did the body know? Her hand closes.
            "Your mouth. Come on. Get it up."
            How many times has he said these words? She thinks of his whimsical poetic language--'carrion stars,' 'vulturic salutations,' 'spangled hyena.' Like an explorer having gone this far, she must forge on. The Band-Aid smell again. She senses the other mouths that have bent over this. Like all the other eyes who have read his "ye bomb ye bang ye orangutan." Bad boy darling. Beat bad-boy, a darling, de beat, de bad, de boy. Every night he must tell a different girl to get it up. And they lick him as he starts to snore. All the hands and mouths he has invited to it. Albino Chinese mud turtle. It has the texture of wretched silk. How long before she is certain he has passed out? She lifts her head. There is the dresser with the Gideon's Bible, the darkness of the room, the thousands of others. She pulls the bedspread out from under him, then the sheet to cover him. Is this an honor? How many mouths and teeth from now until the last one to get it up before all this is ashes they have opened a hole in Rome for? She undresses and gets into bed. Lying on her stomach with her broken wing hidden under her like a wishbone, she stares down at the top of his head. She listens to the wind. She thinks of the farmhouse she was raised in, the lonely gravel road, and her mother always by herself, rattling around in the upstairs, unable to sleep, getting up, taking two aspirins, needing hot milk. Her mother really wanted to suck her own mother's breast, for she had been weaned on bitter Depression milk that had rotted her teeth. Her mother is Corso's age. This is the other kind of sleeplessness, the good kind that has adventure inside it. The moist place where her breath touches the pillow tastes of juniper berries and pine needles. A snow town is growing there, pelvic bone white. She touches his head. Her hand is still there when she drowns in sleep.

           #Bomb 1/ "Angel, lovely. Lovely," he says over and over while they wait in front of the hotel. Plows are out scraping the new snow into seven-foot drifts on either side of the street. "Where are the fucking cabs?" A station wagon with Red River Taxi lettered on its dented door pulls up. He opens the door for her.
           "To the university," he tells the cabby.
            More banners. He reaches over the seat, shakes the cabby's shoulder. "See see that's my name up there," he says with unabashed joy. "That's my name." The cabby glances at the girl in his mirror. Is disbelief the expression on his face?

           #Bomb 2/ They sit at the student union, triangular couches and block cushions surround a crackling fire. A boy in a green tee shirt approaches them. Corso's bottle sits in the middle of the table. The boy shakes Gregory's hand, tells him he loves his Hair poem. Shows him a mimeographed copy of it on his clipboard, wants Corso to autograph it. "Where did you get that?" Corso screams, jumping up. "Give me that. Where did you get that?" The boy cringes, holding out his clipboard as if to ward off blows. "From my teacher." Corso rips the poem from his clipboard. "Who's your teacher?" he growls in the boy's face. "That's a violation of copyright. Who's your teacher?" The boy hurries away. Waving the poem, Corso chases the boy who tries to run. Corso cuts him off, pounces. "Who's your teacher?" He shakes the poem. "You violated my copyright. Who's your fucking teacher?" At last the boy dodges him and races from the student union. Corso falls into the chair beside her and lights a cigarette. The girl thinks of all the laws he's violated. Why should copyright law be the only sacred one?

           #Bomb 3/ "The Italian Daddy is here," he shouts as he mounts the stage for his afternoon reading. Standing room only. Of his fellow Beats only Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orvslosky show up. She sits one seat away from them, half drunk. Even taking tiny sips with Corso, he has made her take so many, she is wobbly and in a haze. Now she will see. How many times has he recited Bomb? He's been hauling it around the world, reciting and reciting the poem, until it must be worn down like a prayer rug. Later when she listens to the weariness with which Ginsberg recites Howl she truly appreciates the energy with which he reads. It is as if the poem is brand new. He plays with the words, he prances across the stages, jabs the air, races then slows, pensive, then expansive, he laughs, he weeps, he explodes. He makes a cosmic joke. Boom the spotted eagles, boom woodpeckers, boom red-rumped swallows. He is spitting out the words with savagery.

           Reading Bomb for the first time, Corso was booed off the stage at Harvard, the audience outraged by his light-hearted stance. The poem speaks to a different age, the atom bomb is almost passé now in a world of heat-sensing weapon systems, neutron bombs that destroy people but leave property standing. Corso's rant was against the low-tech age.

           He closes with Marriage "Like SHE waiting...bereft of 2000 years and the bath of life." The applause is crashing. A standing ovation. The girl sees her friends as she and Corso are leaving. The black-haired boy raises his hand as if to wave, then turns quickly away. The blond doesn't look in her direction.

           #Bomb 4/ He seems to like her at his side. He calls her an angel, leaves his jacket on her lap when he goes off to the men's room carrying his whiskey. Her hand slips into one of the jacket pockets, empty but for a prescription bottle. It's from a pharmacy on Bleeker Street in New York City. A world away. She reads his name many times on the bottle: Gregory Corso. How different that name there compared to his name on a book jacket. For sleeplessness. Nembutal. On the street they are called yellowjackets.

           #Bomb 5 Kenneth Rexroth is reading in the main auditorium. Every seat taken. He is older than the rest, white-haired and handsome, distinguished looking. He recites one of his translations from the Chinese. A poem with lotus blossoms and twilight. The girl enjoys it, a loveliness of clarity and shadow.
           "The last line saved that poem," Corso yells. Everyone in the auditorium turns to look. Sitting beside him, the girl's cheeks flame. Rexroth reads another poem. "That's a single image poem," Corso blurts out. "You're not a jazz-blower, Kenneth. You're an academic." A titter moves through the auditorium. Rexroth stares down from the podium, fixing Corso with a stern look. He shuffles the onion skin pages in his notebook. The microphone picks up their rustling. Corso reaches for the bottle. Deep pockets must be the reason he wears that jacket, pockets having long taken on the contours of bottles. Rexroth is chanting a long poem full of snow and mountain roads.
           "No beatific. Kenneth, you're blowing smoke up our asses. Nothing spontaneous in any of that humbug."
           Rexroth stops, slams his notebook shut. "I'm tired of your sickness, Gregory."
           For the first time the Italian Daddy's bravado and bluster have deserted him, his eyes widen in genuine surprise.
           "Aaah, bloom blaaah. You're establishment. No poetaster but no Jarrell or Whitman either. Just skilled enough to win with great last lines."
           "Leave or I'm not going to continue."
           The auditorium fills with silence.
           "Don't admonish me," Corso shouts. "Rebuke rebuke rebuke." The audience is spellbound. He sways to his feet, reaches for the girl, and wraps his arm around her neck. "Reprimand rebuke. Fools. Don't admonish me."
           She wonders if they think she is Gregory's girl. Sick like him. The room fans into a peacock's tail of eyes as she half carries him out.

Copyright 2002, Stephanie Dickinson

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.