Early in Samuel Kashner's memoir, the author recounts when he was 13 and encountered a photograph that would alter his life. In the black-and-white picture, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Neal Cassady stand in front of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, circa 1950.
"They had their arms around each other," Kashner writes. "They looked happy. They looked like friends. They looked like they understood each other. And Allen Ginsberg—he looked like me."
In 1975, the 17-year-old Kashner dropped out of college six weeks into his freshman year, and instead enrolled in the new and very experimental Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics to study at the feet of the beatniks, and specifically, become a poet like Ginsberg. The beginning of the next year, Kashner arrived in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, and found he was the only poetry student there. His warmhearted account, When I Was Cool, documents the ensuing two years, when Kashner joined an aging gang of infamous artists as their protégé and accomplice.
Kashner's firsthand portrait of William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Ginsberg in their latter years offers a fascinating counterpoint to the myths and legends these men developed over the years. Kashner's quick-paced and efficient style successfully conveys this eventful time when he lived amongst the aging hipsters. That it is delivered by someone with genuine affection for them gives the figures a real humanity, plus, there are enough side stories to keep anyone interested. The book also documents the changes the young Kashner was going through, and his own transformation is as compelling as the recollections he provides of his better known mentors.
His initial impressions of the remaining beatniks diverge from tall tales like Kerouac's On the Road. Following the Buddhist teachings of the Naropa Institute, where the Kerouac school was housed, Ginsberg had shaved his characteristic beard and imbibed more Celestial Seasonings than any "tea" Kerouac had recounted them smoking decades earlier.
Kashner's first assignment came like the slap a baby receives at birth, as Ginsberg handed his student a stack of unfinished poems to finish. Most of his school projects were similarly task oriented. His next instruction was to help the toothless Corso assemble an already behind-schedule poetry book. To do so, Kashner had to police the decrepit delinquent, and most importantly, try to keep him away from heroin. Kashner also acted as a caretaker of sorts for Burroughs' son, Billy, who is not-too-slowly drinking himself to death.
"Butterflies in youth, maggots at the end," Burroughs said dryly at one juncture, and as Kashner interacted with his heroes, he was often torn between the elder beatnik's epitaph and a genuine affinity for his mentors. Over the two years, Corso, the poet of Bomb and numerous other screeds, seemed to take perverse delight in torturing young Kashner. With a wife, a son, a prostitute mistress, and a serious heroin jones, Corso was a mess, dependent on Ginsberg's and Kashner's patronage. Despite repeated assaults on his naivety, including an attempt to forcibly inject him with heroin, Kashner ultimately forgave the abuse.
In the end, the aspiring poet saved his true affinity for the school's headmaster. "I would have done almost anything to please Allen," Kashner gushes. "I had arrived at the Jack Kerouac School wanting to learn how I could become Allen Ginsberg; but I ended up wanting to take care of him."
While Kashner refused repeated sexual advances from his mentor, he developed a chaste love for the aging bard. In this hagiography, however, Ginsberg emerges as a flawed hero. As the Kerouac school director, the poet acted as benefactor to a dysfunctional crowd plagued with ego and addictions. At the same time, Ginsberg was quite aware of his own legacy. Kashner portrays the writer as a latter-day Picasso, willing to dash off a drawing, or in this case a poem, with pen on napkin and declare it art.
When I Was Cool concludes with an incident more than a decade after Kashner has graduated from the Kerouac institute, when he is a married professor and failed poet at a Virginia school. Ginsberg travels there to give a performance Kashner has organized, and in front of a well-over-capacity audience, is introduced by his former apprentice as "the father of my country." The reading is a hit, of course, and when Ginsberg leaves early the next morning, Kashner finds a note scrawled in a copy of the sage's Collected Poems. "This is from my heart to yours, still young old friend. Love, Allen."
It is the last time the student sees his teacher, but there is no remorse. Both have pledged their mutual feelings and said their goodbyes. They are happy. They are friends. They understand each other.