Until Ginsberg came to Pitzer, I pretty much remained dorky. (Half a dozen years later, still wanting in, I smoked pot myself.) I bought a concert T-shirt, started wearing it everywhere, and bragged about having seen "the Stones." I told myself how dorky I had been in my previous life of comfort in the wayback of my Mom's Country Squire station wagon, listening to Ambrosia, Bread, and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. The odor smelled like a combination of the pine resin I used to burn at summer camp and the skunks on our Texas highways. People were sharing roll-your-own cigarettes. At the concert, I marveled as fans around me hooted, hollered, held up lit Bic lighters, and sang along with the distorted electric guitar- all new to me. My benefactor, very hopped up, said confidingly: "ZZ Top is the warm up band!" I nodded and pretended I knew about ZZ Top. I was similarly deaf to the sound of sixties classic rock, but again, someone really cool took me to a Rolling Stones Tattoo You concert in Dallas's Cotton Bowl. I just knew that cool people read it, and I wanted to be cool. To my surprise, I seemed to be hearing-as if for the first time -lines like "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness / starving, hysterical, naked" and "who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz, / or sex, or soup." Twenty years earlier, I had originally read ”HOWL" when the older brother of one of my Dallas high school buddies said to me: "The Beats kick ass! ‘HOWL' is what started the sixties!" I read it, but it was complete gibberish to me. Various poets took turns reading "HOWL" from the book. Almost everyone in the audience seemed to have his own copy of HOWL AND OTHER POEMS. I felt self-conscious, but somehow eager to participate. They looked to be at one with each other. About 250 people, most of them a decade older than me, were there. When the 50th anniversary of Ginsberg's poem "HOWL" was celebrated a few months ago in Tompkins Square Park, I was drawn to attend, and I didn't know why. Since then, I've gotten on with my life, and yet, I found myself all along trying to figure out why the encounter with Ginsberg, unlike any other in my experience, left me feeling both regret and gratitude. I had put them aside immediately upon arriving at Pitzer in order to fit in with what I saw around me-everyone scruffily dressed in T-shirts and soiled cargo pants. "You have to look nice for the professors," she had said. Moreover, it would help me upstage the patchouli -drenched, too-cool-for-school Dead Heads who regularly put me down when I'd say "y'all” or "I'm fixin' to go to class." I carefully put on my Sunday clothes - my first wearing in four years: starched linen Oxford khaki shorts with no underwear (none clean), and sock-less white bucks, bought for me by my maternal Grandma Mimi. I leapt at the sudden opportunity to have a way of endearing myself to my “HOWL”-reading buddies. I was star struck to be set up with the legendary Beat poet. My English professor sent me to interview Ginsberg for the school paper - the first and last assignment of that kind in my life. I met Allen Ginsberg, the poet, when he came to speak at Pitzer college on a serene Southern California morning in 1991, a month before I graduated.
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