Since Allen Ginsberg, always visible though generations come and go, has never been more of a public figure than he is now, itseems more than just good timing to focus in on a man who has been far more than just an Omorary Dylan entouragent. If you've never read his celebrated "Howl, "pick up a copy today. In the meantime, here is an intimate, off the cuff portrait of the man, written by someone who has known him for years and is not only himself an author of some repute — Speed, Kentucky Ham — but of course the son of another even more important elder statesman hipster and social diagnostician, William Seward Burroughs, who will be the subject of an in-depth CREEMInterview in an upcoming issue. — Ed.

When I was hovering around puberty at summer camp years ago, a misshapen monster of a kid with bulging eyes located a gentle salamander under a log, snipped off its tail and hooked it up to a dry cell battery. When this didn't kill it, he put it in a clear plastic toothbrush container half full of water and shook it like a bartender. Another lad carried a golf club with him through the woods, admiring nature and looking for toads to send flying through the air burst open. I don't know whatever became of these fellows but I'm reasonably certain they're making lots of money and are up to no good. For young monsters generally grow up to be old

monsters, bearing the marks of their pleasures on their faces.

To look at Allen Ginsberg's face, however, though he sometimes looks monstrous, is to surely see a sort of psychic vacuum where most of us have mean streaks. No pinched lips and nothing to hide. And he uses this vacuum to draw people inside his head where they are at the mercy of his benevolent odd mind. Which would often be insulting if he meant any harm. Another way of looking at Allen Ginsberg is out of the corner of your eye while feigning intense interest in your food. But he will ask you to explain yourself. Always unanswerable questions from this man, like, "How much did you spend on lunch?" He'll do this purposely over the course of an afternoon until the victim suddenly realizes how little he actually knows about what he's actually doing. This don't work on me too well for I know the true nature of my mind to be an impenetrable void thick enough to slice.

An odd man indeed, this Allen

Ginsberg bushy behind glasses. Brown pools of eyes that somebody tosses pebbles in. Any number of gaits from business business businessman to old chinaman hopping down hill, the latter very good for rushing into lawyer's office wearing finger cymbals to roust out them demons under the desk. Aum.

Sneaky as Dylan, damp finger in the winds of change gone from Beats to hippys to yippies to Tibet chameleonlike, nobody noticing anything strange except Allen himself and the fact that he's still there reading poetry, calming chaos, auming the police and lately singing the most God-awful songs with harmonium and such exuberance that you think my god don'Unterrupt him, he'll have the strength of a in-sane man.

I spent great chunks of my growing up in small bookstores, reading anything that came to hand as long as it held my interest, but my special obsession was with the Beats. My father had unavoidably left me to be raised by his parents and I read Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs and Kerouac always with a contradictory feeling of deja vu and of having just missed the boat. And there was a party on board; I could hear the music.

But these were my people and Allen was my Godfather and sooner or later I

would go to New York and join the heroes of my bookstores. Hadn't I memorized Howl?

All right then, New York '67, lying in a slumroom in the city surrounded by sleeping people all asprawl op the floor or early bird stoned already against the kitchen sink and listening to the sounds in the street below. Catcalls. Babies crying across the way, shrieking tires in the distance, nameless grindings, subterranean rumbles and collision and finally the woh woh woh of the ambulance. Sending silent good wishes to the casualty, I am trapped myself.

Just hit blood when the airraid siren on top of the next building went off with an apocalyptic roar. Jerked the barbed needle out of my arm exploding a perfectly good vein. Black blood running down my arm, I went and woke one of my sleeping people. He says, "I think we into some kyna war, man. I been hearing planes going over." "That's the ringing in your ears," I say, but he's already trying to go back to sleep. People in the room are starting to wake up and for some reason I want to be outside. I figure it's all over so it's down the stairs and onto the early morning street. To.encounter a strangely unconcerned man. "Thisis really it," I say. "Whaddayathink?" I'm scared and the man is frozen in time looking at my arm dripping blood on my shoes . I notice that just this one siren is wailing, probably a short circuit, and hotfoot it back to my quarters in throes of confusion and resentment.

On the table my fix is full of clotted blood so I drink it and wash my arm.

Out of nowhere Allen sweeps onto the premises, a four-armed wrathful deity to remind me I should have been on my way to court already for Christ's sake. Court? Court? Oh yes, court. "Jesus Christ, Billy, I'm trying to help you but Goddammit!"

I often feel I must be a disappointment to Allen because in our meetings I've been almost uniformly stoned, drunk, generally out of it or in jail. The Brooklyn House of Detention, and Allen got me out, kept me out of trouble until my court date and made sure I got there. It was a drug rap, we beat it, I went to a friend's house to borrow a dollar and got busted again. This time Allen got the call in the middle of his first piece of female ass in five years. He got up and left that place and brought his 170 pounds to Brooklyn to get my fool ass 130 pounds out of stir again. All he did was ask me if I had any sense as he picked my brains for signs of hysteria.

Allen Ginsberg, positive proof that a rolling stone can gather moss. This man is shaggy in his hair and suit, things hang from him and his paraphernalia.

And he rolls all over the country with his squeeze box, talking to suspicious little old southern ladies over the purchase of a candy bar, to hippys in clouds of tear gas, to large crowds on suicides. Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door" relaxes this strange man, born telepath on a black leather couch, lights behind his head shimmering across Atlanta.

The gay bars were all closed the night before we went to Stone Mountain, the biggest piece of granite in the world. I didn't like the look of the skylift to the top and refused to ride in it. "It won't fall if I'm in it," says Allen. Twinkle. But he walked to the top and worked out a very impressive high. Old Tibetan trick. He asked me, "Do you believe in . God?" I said yes, he said "Sucker." I

asked him to define a Bhakti yogi and he said "That's somebody who goes around simpering all the time." How do you look at the sun, Allen; how do you listen so? He had all the answers that day for he meditateth much.

I remember meeting him in Boulder Colorado about the time Haiphong harbour was mined. A fine time was had by all. There were riots, gas, sirens at night and breaking glass and we went out together and got peppered. I'd been into the medicine cabinet again and I fucked up somehow and Allen yelled at me. Maybe I was chanting, the mountains are always west, the mountains are always west...

And I saw him west of the mountains a few months ago. He told me how dumb I'd looked when he yelled at me in Boulder. I don't remember much else except going to a party after the great Santa Cruz Poetry Festival...

But my first memory of Allen Ginsberg is my grandmother's. She told me he sat in the living room of our Florida home years ago taking tea on the pink chaise. He'd arrived on foot, beat, and he left on foot. Getting up and going to the door in the warm spring twilight, he excused himself saying he was going to Mexico. Grandma loved it.