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Memories of Gregory Corso
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Memories of Gregory Corso
By Gerald Nicosia
I knew Gregory Corso over a 24 year period, and have
so many memories that sometimes I think I should write a book about him.
In fact, Gregory was always mad that I had written Kerouacs biography
and not his. He used to say in his Greenwich Village bad boys voice:
“I got one thing against you, man … you went for the dead one,
man. You didn’t come for the living one”—meaning himself.
Gregory often pretended to be mean; and sometimes, drunk on vodka, he could
truly be one of the meanest people you ever met. If you had a big nose,
he could (drunk on vodka) spend an hour finding 5,000 brilliant poetic ways
to make fun of your big nose. I have seen many people, men and women, leave
a room in tears because they could not bear Gregory’s relentless, incisive
jabbing at all their weak points. The more he saw you were hurting, the
more he’d keep after you—till he got a response, the response
he wanted. If you simply came back and said, “Aw Gregory, you’re
just full of shit,” he’d probably smile and leave you alone for
the rest of the night—depending on how much vodka he’d drunk.
There were some nights when he simply wouldn’t quit, when a kind of
animal anger in him just kept burning at white hot heat, and those nights
it was better to leave him alone. The next morning he’d be all smiles,
ask you to have coffee with him, and by the way, could you lend him twenty
dollars?
But there was a big, real heart inside Gregory Corso. In the things that
mattered, he did not fool around. I will never forget that when Jan Kerouac
was banned from speaking at NYU in 1995, at a conference about her own father
(Jack Kerouac), because the Sampases had cut a deal with Helen Kelly, the
NYU programs director, almost all the Beats turned their backs on her. It
was simple: Sampas had (still has) a major connection with Viking Penguin,
where most of the Beats were or wanted to get published. A petition went
round for Jan’s right to speak at the conference, but most of the Beats
wouldn’t touch it, fearing to lose their upcoming Viking Penguin contract.
Gregory Corso (along with Ed Sanders) was the only Beat who signed for her
right to speak. Gregory said he didn’t give a fuck what John Sampas,
Viking Penguin, or anybody else thought of his supporting Jan Kerouac. She
was his friend’s daughter, and he wished to help her. After he’d
signed the petition, he looked at me with an expression of sincere pain
and said, “I wish I had done more for my own kids. That was where I
fucked up the most in my life.”
There’s so much I could write, but I am just going to describe a night
in November 1980, in San Francisco, when I had just turned 31 years old.
I had only moved to the West Coast (from Chicago) a little over a year earlier,
and I was still pretty much of a Midwestern greenhorn in the ways of the
Beat world. One night in North Beach Gregory offered to educate me. He explained
that the “tuition” was that I would have to pay for his food and
drinks all night long (mercifully not for his drugs too, his favorite “Thai
stick,” which he bought himself). When my money ran out, he warned,
he would find new companionship. It sounded like a good deal. It was, and
I got one of the fullest nights of “education” I will probably
ever receive. Thankfully I was smart enough to go home afterward, stay up
the rest of the night, and write down as much of it as I could remember
in my journal.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Gregory Corso in front of the Café Puccini, in his grey pants,
red suspenders, black ‘Oscar Wilde’s vest,’ brown khaki shirt,
leather bomber jacket, which he says he got from his father, who’s
still alive—his face is peeling—he’s smoking a joint of Thai
stick—giving puffs of it along with golden tequila to a Yorkshire terrier
tethered to a parking meter, ‘taking care of the dog, who was nervous,’
Gregory says—then he finds out it belongs to a beautiful woman in the
Puccini in a red coat—he tries to make her, but her girl-friend comes
in and ‘interrupts’ (as he complains) and they go out together
… Gregory says he told her she was a bitch ‘because nobody does
that to me … even if it’s a woman … manners are important.’
Inside, he says he wrote poetry for a while but now he’s stepped outside
the role of the poet, he’s just living—he’s quoting all his
poems to me, the new ones: star throw no ;tomorrow
I’ll close the door—like an act of Jesus.
“Gregory says the hardest thing for him to accept was the coming death
of his children—he read some poem about having thrown out God, love,
religion, all other grand concepts, but death was hiding under the sink—so
he threw out death and the sink too—he said, ‘My humor saved me.’
On the way to the Caffe Sport, he wanted me to buy him a dinner. I say,
‘I love you, Gregory!’ Him: ‘Love nothing.’ Me, yelling,
‘Come on, Gregory! You can’t say that!’ Him: ‘So feed
me, then! What kind of love is this if you won’t feed me?’
“The Caffe Sport was too expensive. I ended up buying him dinner at
Little Joe’s on Broadway. The waitress got pissed off that he kept
drinking out of his bottle of tequila there. ‘What is that, Gregory?’
she asked petulantly when he pulled out the bottle again. He responded:
‘Ichor, the blood of the gods.’
On the street again he says, ‘Most of these people are dead—they’ll
never wake up.’ Later he tells me he’s getting tired of people
turning away from him—he’s ‘disappointed in human beings
… I open the door and they don’t come in … they’re gonna
die … I’m alive, I’m not gonna die … they’re dead
already.’
“I said I wasn’t good enough to write one-line Blakean apocalyptic
verses like him. He said, ‘You been writing since you were eight, you’ll
get there’—he’d said he was all alone in his room and started
writing at eight—I told him I’d done the same thing. ‘Now
you’re waking up, but when I first met you, you were asleep,’
he said. ‘No, just dozing,’ I replied. ‘Dozing’s dangerous,’
he said. ‘I don’t doze … you gotta be awake all the time
… you want to get married, raise a family, you gotta keep your eyes
open all the time. People think I’m a dumb drunk … I take care
my kids, I know what’s goin’ on all the time … I do everything
delicato.’ He gestures with gentle turn of his wrist.
“At the Puccini he shows me clippings from the New York Times about
his participation in the poetry Olympics in Westminster Abbey. He says the
article says he won. Later I get a close look at it, and it actually says
they ‘applauded enthusiastically.’ But it did give his picture,
and he was the only poet they quoted … it said he was leaning against
a statue of Shakespeare and they asked him whether the Olympics were necessary
to revive poetry—he said, ‘I don’t know whether we really
need to help poetry, you see, poetry’s been around for a long, long
time.’ I ask, ‘Did they know you were putting them on?’ ‘You
bet they did! They loved me!’
“He tells me that spirit is individualistic and that’s why it’s
beautiful. ‘If you die thinking it’s all going to go on after
you when you’re gone, you’re all wrong, you lose, but if you think
that when you die everything else is gonna go too, and something entirely
new is gonna be born, then you got it, then you’ll never die.’
He quotes: ‘We don’t bewail the dinosaurs, and that’s no
joke!’ He said he starts with the sunset and proceeds to the sunrise—most
people make the mistake of starting with the sunrise and following it to
the sunset—that’s how they see life.’
“Gregory told the Italian bartender at Dante’s that he’d
come back that night with a pistole, an Italian name brand—I think
it was a Rosco. They said, ‘We got plenty of pistoli.’ He told
me they were dumb, they thought he was talking about real guns and violence.
He said he was talking about ‘the pistol of my mind … the hot
lead inside me … I don’t believe in violence … I’m not
gonna shed any blood … I got a Rosco!’”
You get the idea. The magic of Gregory was always in the wild, inventive
things he never stopped saying, and in the way he made what would otherwise
have been ordinary dead time into an enchanted kingdom of marvels that only
he could see, and that he would let you see too, if you were willing to
pay the price of his always demanding company. It was worth it, every dollar,
every hurt feeling, every bother he ever created. Like a few thousand other
people, I miss him terribly.
Pax vobiscum, you lost child and fallen angel. You are now a shining star
in the heavens, as we always suspected.
