‘The 22000 Mile Journey of the Most Famous Backpack in History’
There are some very funny bits and first-class writing that very few people can experience (fiction doesn’t count).
I met Allen Ginsberg in Greenwich Village in 1963 when I was a weekend poet, the last beatnik in the Lower East Side and a bad weekday student at Hunter College in the Bronx majoring in philosophy. It was my junior year. I used to read at the Deux Megot Cafe on 2nd Avenue in the Lower East Side where I met Allen and Peter. He became my first mentor and I visited his apartment many times for advice. I met many famous people through Allen including Gregory Corso , Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan. I was involved in so many crazy beat things I can't recount them including meeting other poets like Ed Sanders and Ted Berrigan.
As background, one of the first post 50’s westerners to really delve into the mystery that was India, Allen Ginsberg, my poetry mentor, had been to India in 1961 staying in Calcutta and Varanasi with Peter Orlovsky and wrote about it, (see Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand, the Beats in India, New York: Penguin, 2008). See, that is common knowledge. But then the spiritual trail ends slowly.
Here is what happened and why Allen needs more credit than he got for starting the spiritual revolution usually credited with some justification also to Baba Ram Dass, Richard Alpert Ph.D.
When I would be visiting with Allen and Peter, Allen would always talk to me about India and philosophy in the year 1963. He would show me photos of India. I was an 'existentialist' major at Hunter and absolutely did not believe in God or western religion, I was a pseudo Marxist. I was the first beat/hippie at Hunter with long hair and a beard who smoked pot. My father hated me. When it came time to start the senior year in Fall 1963 I decided I had enough of New York and I went to the Lincoln Tunnel and started hitchhiking to Route 66 and Berkeley, CA. I left my ’54 Merc at home in Yonkers with a note to my parents saying stuff it.
Eventually I made it to CA and settled into a hippie style house in Berkeley and just stole food to survive. I was so proud of myself that I called Allen from a pay phone one day and told him my great story. Well, he just exploded and told me to get back to Hunter and New York and finish my senior year or my life would be hell. (Remember he was a graduate of Columbia.) He just went on and on and I finally got the message and I headed back to New York. My father finally paid for me to get a studio on 10th street next to Tompkins Square Park. I would go to Hunter maybe 1 day a week and get Manhattan psychologist’s notes excusing my absences as requested by the Dean. During this time I was just a crazy beat downtown taking drugs like everyone else. Most of the year is still a blur and I can't remember many details. Then Allen was happy I was in school and he started to convince me to go to India after I got my degree. And that was my plan except the Vietnam draft was starting.
A digression from my published book, 'The Sacred Wanderer' by Ravi Dass (available on Amazon for download).
College Turmoil 1960-1964
I have to admit, as people who know me and what I have done, it was hard to expect two working class people only one of who finished high school to suddenly find that a beatnik poet-sadhu hippie has been born to them in the Bronx. I couldn’t explain it, it was the zeitgeist. Blame it on Ginsberg and Dylan and Ram Dass. I had to do what I was supposed to do but they couldn’t understand it. I guess who could in those fast moving early days as I was always plunged in the avant-garde so they had no one to compare it to in the suburbs although my father I heard was a bit of a rogue when he was young.
So by my junior year in college I had to finally start the descent into Greenwich Village where I usually would go on binge weekends anyway and live in deserted tenements on the Lower East Side much like Dustin Hoffman in ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and hang out on McDougal Street in Café Figaro, write poetry, take drugs, drink, party for three days and then back to Yonkers and school Monday morning. It was really fun, although there were suicides, rapes, robberies; I was a ‘beat’ or becoming the last ‘beat’.
About this time the poetry muse arrived in me and I luckily met Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky as I said before. He also took me to meet the famous AC Bhaktivedanta Swami, founder of the infamous Hare Krishna’s one day in his first storefront temple in the Lower East Side. I started to cultivate the strategy of getting to know the right people in the right places, anywhere in the world. Nothing to be taught, just instinct maybe from growing up in Fort Apache in the Bronx, a struggle for survival and a way out of ‘poverty’. I could make it just like my rich Jewish friends from Yonkers who got to go to Brown and Cornell while my father begrudged me the $400 a year for Hunter College and I had to live at home besides. I also lost my first true high school love Barbara as she went away to college in upstate New York and the first holiday back dumped me. It took a long time to get over that. Maybe that affected my relationships with women for many years thereafter. A massive blow to my over-sized ego. The only other person of note I was close with at Hunter was noted-songwriter Erik Kaz who had gone on to write ballads for Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. His mother put him up in her hi-rise Village pad so we had a place to chill out and hide after drug binges.
Anyway, one crazy weekend that my parents were gone from Yonkers I decided to take this big long frizzy haired old Negro beat named Leo, who was a great chess player and famous around the village who liked me a lot, to my parent’s home for a bath and some food and rest in the burbs. These guys basically lived on the street but not homeless as we know it. I thought I sneaked him in and out OK from the garden complex but my mother confronted me and said the neighbors saw someone really strange in the house and that if my father found out he would kill me. He was always going to kill me anyway so I avoided that just one more time. What was I thinking with that caper?
Then when I got involved with my college friends into going to Union Square for May Day and socialist rallies that was the last straw. He told me if I didn’t like this country to get out. He backed that up with a one-way ticket on the Yugo-I-go-everybody-goes freighter to Tangier, Morocco the day after I graduated for $108. He seriously didn’t want to see me again. That’s very Sicilian, to hold a grudge even against your only son forever. Of course my mother who had given me comfort and money behind his back for years didn’t like it but what could she do. They still had my sister Joan at home seven years younger. They made sure she never went to college and got a job and married right after high school so she didn’t turn out like me. These were the wild early sixties. But before leaving, I must backtrack a little.
I first started smoking pot as a junior in college and that was the end of my suave ivy-league demeanor. The first time I turned on with this guy at Hunter, we walked into the library and I couldn’t stop giggling. Everyone looked at us bewildered. That was it. I dropped out of economics and changed to philosophy overnight. Then I became the only person ever to completely quit Phi Sigma Delta, the fraternity I joined when I was in my preppie phase. Yes, I joined a school fraternity and pledged and drank beer and ate pizza with the cops on Fordham Road in the Bronx. I hardly remember anything of this fraternity stage it was so bland, but they were glad to get rid of me because now I was the first kid at Hunter in the Bronx (now Lehman College) to grow a beard and wear leather sandals like Jesus. I had a hard time going to class regularly as required and so they said I would get expelled if I didn’t go to the schools appointed shrink once a week and bring a note. That way I only had to go to one of the usual three classes for each subject. I could also travel easily up from the Lower East Side where I found a tub in the kitchen-walk-in apartment, and where I could do drugs and write poetry when I wasn’t at school. My parents were glad not to have me at home and paid the rent but glad I was still in school.
But in the middle of all that tumult back in my freshman year my father had bought me my first car, a 1949 Ford black coupe automatic whose transmission went out the first day I took it to college. It cost $99 used in White Plains, New York, can you believe it. Then he got me his friend’s cool 1954 Mercury coupe in prime condition but I left a note saying here’s your stinking car back, I’m quitting school and hitchhiking to California in my junior year.
That was summer of 1963; there I was standing at the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel, thumb out, and going to California. Oh, there are many adventures I need to talk about before this, but hold on. I got a ride through the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then in the back of another truck and voila, I was in the outskirts of Chicago and remembered someone told me to go to the downtown ‘Y’. It was dark and lonely but I found the elevated train. I walked into the’ Y’ and there he was, a recent wandering acquaintance from New York standing on line. I was so relieved to find someone I knew after my first experience hitchhiking that far alone. Was this the first experience of synchronicity? The next day we got one of those U-drive-it cars all the way to Albuquerque. We hitched again and some nice couple picked us up and took us all the way to Los Angeles.
I somehow managed to get to Berkeley, my dream. I had the names of some people and they put me up on a couch in their home where most had no money then and used to crash around and steal food from the U-Take market around the corner. I don’t know why I was so proud of myself learning how to hide steaks in my underwear. I could have been busted. But it fed us all. Was that bad karma? One day we all went out to the Central Valley and picked string beans for a few dollars with the Mexicanos. Hmmn, this isn’t that cool, its hard work best left to the migrants. I was so proud of myself, going to stay in California forever, college dropout, and poet. But it was not meant to be.
Soon I called Allen Ginsberg by phone so proud to say what I planned to do with the rest of my life and he wasn’t happy at all. He started yelling at me for throwing my life away. He said he got a degree from Columbia and never regretted it. How could I drop out with just one year to go? Was I stupid? He said I better get back to New York and enroll in the last year. I guess it rang a bell in this very thick skull and I luckily found a U-Drive car all the way back to New York. What was I thinking, no money, stealing food, no career, was I ever grateful to this great man and should my parents be also. My own father could never have convinced me of that. No matter what people may say about him, I loved him as my first teacher and he is definitely one of the greatest poets to have lived in the 20th century. How can you ignore Howl and Kaddish and all the great political work he instigated? (He had continuing interactions with Ram Dass, Daniel Richter and Bhagavan Das for many years later.)
Well back at school, one day a week, I refused to finish the economics major because I would have to take economic statistics and I knew the teacher would fail me and I was not going to do that boring work. By now I was lugging around Sartre, Heidegger and myriad other philosophy books under my arms acting like the school existentialist but also living it in the village in 1963-1964. One day writing a paper and the next hunting for heroin on the Bowery with Gregory Corso. I made the mistake of using intravenous drugs in those days among other things and that’s where I contracted Hepatitis C most likely although I used needles in other countries including Delhi the next year with Bhagavan Das. I officially switched to a philosophy major with a concentration in existentialism and finished all the courses that last year except one, Logic 101. I just didn’t realize it being so drugged out. I went to the registrar and she said I couldn’t graduate in June and that I had to take the course at summer City College in Harlem. Well, logic, and me, that was a joke, why do they always put one course in that you will hate? So here goes, this professor was a nut. I thought I was just getting by with C’s and D’s on the tests, if this is that, then that is this and we are all crazy. Finally, the final and he said I was just about passing so I was happy and looking forward to Morocco and being a poet from Yonkers again roaming the world of Allen’s contacts. Then the fatal day when the grade postcard came in the mail and it was a D. The professor, some crew cut ex-Marine, had said to me on the last day I would only get a C if I cut my hair and joined the Marines. Right. For a moment I was in a panic because I heard you couldn’t transfer a D to Hunter. That was Friday and now the school was closed so I was in limbo all weekend, fearing my father would finally kill me. Allen’s grand plan was failing. I decided I would not go to another semester, I had had it. I finally called Monday morning first thing and the registrar said since it was a sister school of CUNY she would accept my D and I got my diploma (I never went to the graduation ceremony next January of course). I was off early September for Tangier. Fuck America!
Well, one other thing, I had to take care of was the draft, which I did in April of 1964. The Vietnam War was not in full swing yet and there was a low draft priority but nevertheless there was a draft call starting and I had plans to go to India not the grave. I had heard and I was told by the Army that even if you left the country, when your number was called after you graduated that you had to report to the closest station like Thailand and then you were taken in right there and if you didn’t report even if you claimed you never got the letter, you were considered a draft dodger. That’s what I vaguely remember. So into deep existentialist thought I went. My only strategy after more research with other genius-druggies and Allen was to volunteer and take a chance I could convince them I was crazy and get a 4-F. Why would someone looking like me ‘volunteer’, that would throw them completely off because the suburban kids who volunteered knew they were physically fit and were expected to go to Whitehall St. with their toothbrush and within two hours get on a bus to Ft. Dix, New Jersey for basic training and then death in Vietnam. So before I went down I developed a strategy, my first great marketing plan for an event. I made sure to jab a lot of needles into my forearms, let my long hair down and ripped holes in my white t-shirt, and dragged it in the filthy New York gutters. Now I was ready, beard and all to confront Mammon.
I walked into Whitehall and it was like the Red Sea, everywhere I went an aisle formed, these kids from Long Island never saw anything like me. The staff was bewildered. My name was definitely on the roster, I certainly had volunteered. I started my act. “Where’s my gun, I want to kill gooks”, I shouted repeatedly as the kids grew more scared. I shouted this in the grand lobby and you could hear it up to the top floor through the central staircase. The brass came out mystified and said I had to get a blood test, I went into the room, they took my blood and said to hold the cotton on the jab and fold my arm. So I let my arm down in the hallway and the blood spurted out down my arm onto the floor in front of the recruits, now more scared than ever. I shouted over and over, “Where’s my gun, I want to kill gooks”, till someone came and took me to the shrink. “Where do you live”, “in a coal shaft I said”. “Who’s your mother”, “Mary” I said. “Are you gay”, “of course I said”. “Step in here”, you’re 4-F. The Washington geniuses that plotted the war never bothered to check or had no records that I was a graduating senior at Hunter College. They knew nothing about me and I never heard anything from Selective Service for the rest of my life as if Maharaji had destroyed all the records in the Pentagon of Hell. It never came up in an employee check and I had so many of them later. Try doing that in the late sixties, not coming in for a physical but volunteering.
I left as the soon to be maimed kids were getting on the Ft. Dix bus and I waved good-bye. I was always proud of that moment but sometimes, only sometimes felt I missed a rite of passage, the military or Vietnam. My father was 4-F for a punctured eardrum, hardly anyone in my immediate family ever served. I guess I am not a ‘ksatriya’ (Hindu warrior caste). It was a useless war like Iraq is now, so I'm not sorry, except for the innocent ones who died and their families.
Living downtown in ‘63-64 was very dangerous, especially where we could afford to live in the Lower East Side, between Avenues B and C, next to Tompkins Square Park near Allen. Sometimes I hung out with the strangest types and had some bizarre ambitions like being a drug dealer to make some money or act like a big shot. Did I really think that was romantic? A few times it almost got me killed. One time in my apartment, my roommate invited up some Puerto Rican guys for a simple pot deal and it wound up with them robbing us, holding a knife to my neck no less. Another time I met this ‘cool’ blond guy who hung around McDougal Street with a Caribbean dude and they wanted me to get them some action so I met some black guy uptown in Harlem and said I could score some kilos. So we went up to this apartment, seemed like a nice family guy, not weird. My black guy asked for $1000 in cash and said he would be right back in a few hours and left me and the ‘blond’ guy there. Well, by morning he never showed up and we looked like fools and could have been ‘taken out’. Obviously, something had gone wrong and we tried calling everyone we could imprisoned in his apartment. By that night the guy gave up and sensed we were as dumbfounded as he was and he was not going to do us in so he let us go. We called him in a few days after we found out the black guy just took a plane that night and went home with the cash to the Bahamas. We had no cash to pay him back. I think I learned my lesson in dealing although I think from time to time I did sell nickel bags of pot here and there as did we all in the village and San Francisco. Believe it or not many India guru seekers kept on dealing throughout the 80’s and were caught. One, Bhagavan Das, is not even allowed back into India for getting caught dealing there in the 70’s, they still have it on the Consulate computers. He flew all the way to Delhi once and was put on a plane back to the states recently the same day. That’s a big punishment for someone who is a devotee of Maharaji; not to visit his temples forever.
Speaking of drugs, now that we have touched on the subject, I had my fair share of everything they made, everywhere in the world. Inside, outside, high and low, but I never felt the need to smoke in India; the place is so full of ‘Shakti’ that you are on a pot high all the time just breathing there. Hear that all you would be sadhus. You’re not getting high, just sinking lower. The air is a drug, try pranayam, try yourSelf.
Living on the Lower East Side in my senior year and before just hanging out weekends in the West Village my junior year was so much fun, but not everyone would think so. It was a time of change. Bob Dylan had written ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, the states were going to go through major civil rights changes that are still reverberating now into the next century, the wheel keeps turning and it’s high noon again. My one big regret was that while I was in New York I missed Woodstock. I just felt it was going to be too hard to get there with all the traffic closures, so I stayed back. I saw all the musicians anyway in the Fillmore. Well, they all didn’t go to India when I did either. One day I was walking down McDougal Street with Allen and we spotted Dylan just having a beer in a local bar and Allen had just got to know him so we walked in and he introduced me to Dylan, so young, and me, so young. We chatted and left, Allen asked him to do some events with him. Years later in the seventies Allen took me on a campus tour in Wyoming and Montana and I played my Indian cymbals and chanted with him on stage. I got a taste of what groupies are like having never left those Montana cowgirls for weeks. That’s when on the first part of the tour with Sharon, my girlfriend, from Vermont who now lives on Maui that I met Tsultim the Tibetan nun who now has her own monastery in Colorado. We followed Allen around in a little blue bug. Allen got mad one night when I had been late on stage (due to cavorting with the groupies), good thing he had a sense of humor. He would just play his little harmonium and chant his poetry and we would do Hare Ram, Hare Krishna.
Where Allen and I really connected was in poetry. Before as I said, I switched my major from economics to philosophy and was especially obsessed with existentialism. Then before that in my humdrum normal teen life in Yonkers at Roosevelt High I excelled in chemistry, even getting ninety-eight on the state Regents exam. I used to keep batches of chemicals in my bedroom drawer; my mother thought I would blow up the house. Everyone thought I would excel as a chemist or chemical engineer. So I headed off to Hunter because it was almost free for non-residents. After one-year of organic chemistry and a C, I dropped the major. I don’t know what happened. I just couldn’t understand it, I switched to economics where I seemed to cruise easily with B’s and A’s, even excelling in International Economics and the favorite of the professor who I think now is some big expert on Wall St. The craziest thing is my economics thesis was on the economic development prospects for Iraq, of all countries I could have picked. I used to spend hours at the 42nd St. Library and using a portable mechanical typewriter finished my grade A paper. So anyway, after the pot experience and going to the village, I quickly picked up the ennui of the times and switched to philosophy. Of course besides delving painstakingly into Sartre and Kafka I had to take courses on Plato and Kant and Hegel but I persevered. I don’t know how people who didn’t spend the years I did on these logical epistemologies and other western systems easily pretend to understand complex Vedanta and other Eastern philosophies or even the Dalai Lama’s esoteric discourses on dependent origination. I don’t know what people are hearing, there are no words to really describe what he is saying.
So besides spending as little time as I could at Hunter I stayed in my squalid, humid apartment, wrote poems, and conjured up more bizarre experiences so I could write more poetry. One time I tried to rescue Mary, a beautiful teen-age blond nymphomaniac girlfriend from a Boston psych ward after she ran away from me in New York. As a consolation for losing her I fell into a hippie scene at the Boston Hofbrauhaus and had an affair with Jeanine in Boston and then Manhattan. Why aren’t there any more nymphomaniacs?
At this time I fell into an event that turned into the Naropa Institute founded by Allen and Anne Waldman in Boulder, CO. Anne and her husband then, Lewis, along with other support from local poets like Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, Ted Kupferberg and Ed Sanders of the Fugs set up the St. Marks Poetry Project where we would read every week. It grew out of readings on 2nd Avenue around the corner from St. Marks Place every week at the Deux Megot Café. By coincidence on my way recently to India, I stayed at an old friend’s brownstone in the East Village which just so happened to look out over the St. Marks Church yard the night before we saw the Dalai Lama talk at Radio City Music Hall. I had never planned that.
So I was quite busy preparing my portfolio, graduating, reading, partying like crazy and my strategy of meeting the highest people in each art I could (that came in handy later in Athens.) I never was a ‘great’ poet but I pretended to be so and I had an identity around the Village. I think I was more of a great thinker or local ‘crazie’. It was at this time also I hooked up with a great friend in the village who used to actually read for money on stage in the cafes, called Normal. I lost track of him for a time but hooked up with him again in San Francisco in 1968 with Denise, my new French girlfriend, and then never saw him again. Most likely died young like many of my other friends. We had some great afternoons hanging out at the Cafe Figaro, talking existentialism with the girls who came down from Sarah Lawrence or NY art schools. We partied with them, heard their stories, slept with them and then many just disappeared on the radar, suicide was very prevalent in those days due to the literature and despair in vogue. I pray for all my old friends and lovers that they found a safe reincarnation. Why I am still alive is a great mystery.
________________________________
Notes: [1] All the letters I sent to Allen from Europe and India are in his special archives at Stanford University, CA.
[2] A poem I found recently: waiting shadow & silent; mistress in the dark; as I decide to enter intercourse; or sleep away the question into nothingness
New York 1964 for Mary
Allen gives me his original backpack as a blessing to return it to India
The Wanderer Sets Out 1964
Well time to get on with the story of the ‘wanderer’ and his real education. I land in Tangier in 1964 like in a foreign movie or the next best thing to the Lower East Side with Allen’s Army backpack and a list of his poet contacts all the way to Athens I was supposed to get help from. The boat trip was offbeat, a Yugoslavian freighter crew and about 12 beats, my usual love affair with some blond, more flirting by the crew, some heartbreak that went nowhere except into poems. I found my ‘ship of fools’ finally.
Delighted to arrive in Tangier, the smell was like nothing I ever experienced, it was frankincense and myrrh in the Casbah. I crashed around, rented rooms, found roommates in other sordid rooms living out of a backpack, smoking lots of kif and hash and drinking that wonderful concoction of Moroccan mint tea and sugar in little bulb shaped glasses sitting on the main drag in these absolutely magical cafes. Then going to the Blue Moon café to see what attraction dancing boys have on Arabs at night, eating in the exotic stone soup restaurant looking through a mystical little window that hovered over the Mediterranean in search of pirates and writing more poetry. Lots of luscious couscous to discover.
My plan was to go to Marrakech but I tried hitching one day on a dusty road and could not get a ride at all so the message was head back to Tangier and stay there the rest of the time. I looked up some of the poets Allen gave me. This was my first big adventure abroad. I think taking a boat across the Atlantic for eight days assuages some of the anxiety you get when you just fly and are thrown into another distant time zone and culture, like when you change planes in Amsterdam and then are thrown into the Delhi circus. There is no jet lag, which is nice, compared to this time in India where it is taking me 3-4 weeks to adjust. I used to always go overland to India so jet lag was never a problem. That’s why I never came back for thirty years because a three-week vacation would have been wasted in complaining about jet lag.
Tangier was my first exposure to Islamic or Arabic culture. The tiles, the singing of the call to prayer throughout the day, the beautiful woolen caftans and jellaba's we got to wear, all different and of course every day was seen through the god of kif and goddess of hash. I can’t even remember much of those days, as that kind of experience doesn’t register in your normal brain repository. We just walk for hours to nowhere in particular and find the nothingness of Sartre. The best parts are the cafes in the main old souk or market, especially the main outdoor café in Tangiers Casbah, unmatched anywhere in the West. Sometimes we just would go down to the beach and walk around. I never met any women in Tangiers, they were scarce, remember there were no hippies yet. I was on a paving trip for everyone of my generation.
The kif was green and minced up and you smoked it in a special long kif pipe as well as the hash but it came in bars like flat Hershey chocolate without almonds, a dark brown, very potent and cheap. I got the idea one day to smuggle some hash for money even though I heard if you took it across the ferry into Gibraltar or Spain you could be caught and as is well known being jailed for drugs is never pleasant in those countries, but who am to think things through. When I left, I was told how to hide it in your underwear with a type of wrapping and how to behave and I got through miraculously on the ferry.
I’m just glad my parents are both dead so they don’t have to read this. Sorry, mom and dad, that’s who we were, working in a factory just won’t cut it. I just don’t know what my karma was that led me to do all these things. OK, let’s blame it on Maharaji as usual. It’s either him or free will. Sometimes I couldn’t even find a pattern to follow like you can these days, I just made it up as I went along, or the script was up there but I didn’t see it down here. I think I was still living existentially; India and yoga was a long way off, and I was an ATHEIST. I forgot all about that, I am so into God these days I forgot that I was an atheist way back then, and that changed the first week I was in India—I’ll get to that in a later chapter, it’s really bizarre and unparalleled as far as I know –why me?
I traveled through Spain alone, eating little loaves of bread with cheese and wine, sleeping wherever it was cheap, seeing bullfights and living like long forgotten writers. I did the coast cities mostly and then Barcelona, walking on the famous esplanade. I remember something about Madrid so maybe I was there. Did I have a goal; I guess it was Athens where Allen said there was a great group of poets and the beginning of western civilization and philosophy, and a jumping off point to India and more drugs and adventure. Somehow I had an idea or met people who said winter is coming and maybe Switzerland was a good place to get a job as a foreigner and they gave you housing; to save money up to get to Athens as I would be broke soon. That’s another story.
Of course a dollar went pretty far in those days but my father was content to just give me a gift of a one-way ticket and my mother a little cash. I don’t know how I got by without her sending a $50 bill every now and then to American Express in some European capital. I used to literally beg from tourists for a café latte later in Rome. So I reached Berne and went to the youth hostel. It was getting cold and there were other foreigners. The drug of the moment was Romilar, a cough medicine. We used to drink a bottle or two and thought we were flying off the balconies and levitating, it was a gas. That’s why someone who contacted me later, Brummbaer who wrote about it, an artist, via email in the US, says he remembers our screwy escapades. I haven’t been to LA to see him yet. He may be dying. It’s where I had my first girlfriend named Heidi, in Europe, where we had to have sex in hallways because she lived at home, but she was captivating. I met her at a café where we used to hang out. I was sort of an American beatnik celebrity.
Finally I went to an employment agency, tired of levitating, and they found me a job, even though I looked like a beatnik and wouldn’t shave, at Rudolfstüber. I was a bar server and the best part was when someone ordered apple cider I would go down to the cellars and fill up the carafe and then stick the tube in my mouth for a slug. They supplied me with a bedroom and a gigantic down comforter. I stayed as long as I could stand it for a month or so until I saved some cash, then some gay rich guy tried to convince me to go with him on a trip and at first I thought it might be fun –was I gay, could I pull it off. I strung him out since he was paying for dinners and such but when it became time to put up or in, I skipped town and left for Rome.
Arriving in the middle of night on the outskirts of Rome I took a bus and headed for the Piazza Di Roma, where the Spanish Steps are that I heard about. I just went to the top across the road to a park and slept outside, quite illegal, but where was I to go at 3 a.m. The next few days I explored Rome like a tourist, Keats’s library next door, the Coliseum, the roundabout’s with giant statues, the fountains with coins and tourists. The most holy Vatican and all the art. I guess I was picking something up besides taking care of myself. I did have art history and music and all the liberal arts classes at Hunter so I was enjoying the ‘real’ thing now. I do remember Venice but I have no idea when I was there or where I stayed, it’s so East of Rome from Switzerland and I was headed to the boot to get a ferry to Athens. It was really one big blob from Tangier to Athens, traveling alone, little money, not really finding my ‘cup of tea’ yet.
Athens of the Poets 1964 - 1965
I was so happy to get to Athens, it was so different, the Acropolis, that giant towering stone of ancient philosophy. I had the name of a poetess to look up, Kate Johnson. She had a wide rambling shack full of books that looked over Athens in the area I wanted to live called Placa, high up just below the Parthenon on the Acropolis. I couldn’t stay there with her dogs and cats so she found a local who rented me a small cave with a wooden slat door, a hole in the floor for the toilet and a wooden rickety bed and candle. It was painted with whitewash, had no windows, just the door and he said it was the cave where Socrates drank poison –should I believe that, why not, it was on the Acropolis wasn’t it and I was a philosophy major and poet and Socrates was congratulating me for being a philosophy major, the last of my kind. I did my beatnik thing there, writing poetry, smoking pot, cruising around Placa for delicious pastries and desserts. I connected with other famous poet friends of Allen’s like Harold Norse, George Andrews, Charles Henri Ford and Phillip Lamantia who always spent some time in Athens away from the Village. Everyone was impressed I knew Allen and wanted to know about the New York goings on. At about this time in winter 1965 Kate Johnson told me about this house at 101 rue Daphnomilis, the opposite hill in Athens from Placa, that had some interesting foreigners in it like Michael Riggs (soon Bhagavan Das) and John Mills, (Dharmadipo, first husband of Annapurna) and Daniel Richter, a mime who did the choreography for Kubrick’s ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ later in England and lived with John and Yoko for four years during the ‘Imagine’ period (He wrote two books about this). There were also floaters like Princess Zena Rachevsky of the Russian Czar’s ex-family, and Olivia de Hauleville related to Aldus Huxley, another world-traveler. It was a congregation of the future new-age culture.
I sort of ingratiated myself into the scene even though there were no extra rooms, so Bhagavan Das and I slept on floor landings. We made do with curtains and a bed, we had no need for drawers, as I never changed my jeans for months at a time. I do remember taking showers from time to time when forced. A hippie psychiatrist named Dr. Sheldon Cholst was supporting the entire scene for those who needed it with his money. I have no idea what happened to him as of Rishikesh, but now I know he died. We used to go out every night together as the Greeks did to a local taverna up the street for greasy souvlaki, gutsy retsina wine and delicious desserts. I never starved, Shelly always gave us an allowance but it used to piss him off that Bhagavan Das (Michael Riggs) would take his allowance and just order a cab to drive him all over Athens sightseeing every month until the money or gas ran out.
It’s worth describing him as he had a part in the great drama of Ram Dass and ‘Be Here Now’. If I was 21 years old (1943-1964), then he was probably 18 in order to have a passport and travel alone. As I said he was 6 ft. 4 inches, long blond hair, big frame, wispy blond beard and the same knack for wearing weird clothes as I did, and came from Laguna Beach of a modest family, his father played piano in clubs and restaurants, his mother I think a homemaker. He claimed to have landed in Dublin and stole James Joyce spectacles from some lighthouse museum. I think I saw them. He also always wore lots of necklaces, mostly with animal bones that usually got both of us into trouble later in the Middle East. The major thing I remember about him was that he was with his big frame and big voice quite an imposing blues guitar player/singer, much better than he ever was a kirtan-wallah. I think once he tried blues recently but gave up.
The main occupation when I first arrived at Daphnomilis was consuming psychedelics of any kind and doing art from that experience. These people were on the forefront of the psychedelic revolution that Leary and Alpert were doing at Harvard and Millbrook, Alpert later becoming Ram Dass. The same drugs they were getting from the Swiss labs were making their way down to Athens regularly and someone was constantly high, pure Mescaline and LSD available whenever we wanted. Talk about abundance. While this was going on, in the background, I had become quite friendly with Richter, a really out-going and smart artist. He told me he had a vision of putting out a poetry magazine called ‘Residu’, financed by Cholst but proving very difficult to do out here in the Aegean.
So, Ron Zimardi to the rescue with his newly minted BA and friendship with Allen Ginsberg. I slowly took over editing the magazine. I started by writing to Allen to tell him what was going on and requesting some poems, for without Allen in it, it would die. I then started to meet some Greek poets who I eventually put in the magazine like Ellie Synadinou and Nanos Valaoritis and more of Richter’s pet poets like Peter Stevens and other acid friends who he thought should be in the magazine. When they saw Allen’s letter arriving promptly with two poems for me, that cemented my standing with everyone involved and I stepped on the gas and was almost ready to publish except for one problem that irritated me. I felt that Cholst’s submitted drug-related prose was not fit for this august publication. We argued incessantly as I can be a stubborn Capricorn and even though he paid for everything we had ‘art’ to consider here in the home of western civilization and Greek drama. I eventually lost the battle and he never forgave me. We had a party and Residu was launched to critical acclaim and remembered still to this day. It’s in a lot of college collections and one online bookseller where I bought a rare copy also remarked how it stood out among hundreds of other publications of its kind. Once we went to the famous island of Hydra for a week to relax after the publication, the Aegean is beautiful like Hawaii.
But my writing, which I haven’t talked about, undertook a dramatic transformation, which I think permanently altered my brain or mind for many years regardless of the psychedelics or maybe because of the psychedelics. Throughout Europe I was just writing in my usual imitation-Ginsberg style. Everyone was talking about William Burroughs in those years and his method of cut-up poetry where he would just cut-up printed-paper and re-glue them into a new poem or essay like ‘Naked Lunch’. I thought it was astounding but I wanted to go a step further and decided to cut it up in my mind and then put it on paper after, like just writing randomly and see what the output was or using Tantric yoga to hold back orgasms. I liked it and that became my new style, ‘writing on the very ceiling of galaxy’, and my contribution to ‘Residu’. I wrote three pieces called ‘Statements’, ‘2/3 Blue Largo Anthracite’ and ‘Mentage’. I don’t think anyone cares to this day.
Here is the second part of that story. Dr. Cholst decided to close up the house after ‘Residu’ and was moving everyone to London for the season but he called me and Bhagavan Das into his room and said something to the effect that the Western world is not big enough for all three of us and so I’m giving you two guys enough money to get to India, you won’t be supported in London so bye-bye and fuck-off. Go visit Kashmir; sit in a boat and all the hash in the empire will be delivered to you as everyone here can attest. But “stay out of Europe”. So hash or London. I guess it will be hash. Notice I didn’t say God. If that isn’t proof of the ‘whatever happens next’ is the right move, then what is?
We started hitchhiking the next night and I never saw anyone regularly of that crowd again except for Dharmadipo and Dan Richter in Maui recently. Before I tell the hitchhiking story here is what happened to them. Based on the success of ‘Residu’, they were able to pull together the famous Albert Hall poetry reading in 1965 and got Yevtushenko and Allen Ginsberg and others to appear before a packed house in London, which had never been done for beat poetry before. And of course, I missed another great evolutionary moment as Maharaji made me baby-sitter to the Laguna Beach surfer on the way to his immortality. When will I get my due, I feel like Solieri in Amadeus.
Overland to India for Drugs with Bhagavan Das 1964
I know most people don’t have this much adventure or experiences in their entire lifetimes but on we go, it’s not begun yet for me and it’s not fiction. So we went north through Greece using our dual charm and his guitar on everyone to get lodgings and food and rides. We ended up in Istanbul in 1965 and then we started noticing we were the only westerners around for the most part who looked so weird. We started becoming sightseers, that is, after we lined up the day’s smoke. Bhagavan Das took LSD in the Blue Mosque while I looked out for him. We ran around the underground Casbah, which I always wanted to go back to. I found a nice Swedish blond girl to chase around and get neurotic over but she was going to Israel unfortunately, which I had on my plan, but not now. We explored this fascinating city and the great bridges over the historic seas but it was time to move on to Mother India and destiny so we headed out on cheap trains now as hitching through Turkey was not very advisable. We went to Ankara and discovered Turkish baths and when they discovered Bhagavan Das with his blond hair they couldn’t stop walking on his back for fun. So we left before they made him a pet or raped him, but it was like nothing we had ever been to. Who knew steam baths in 1965, or who even took baths. We took a train all the way through Turkey to Dogubayazit, ate nuts and fruits and slept and smoked. When we got to the Iranian border in this desolate frontier, Bhagavan Das did not have the right visa so we had to sleep in the army post for some time till they wired his right papers and they let us through. That could have been the end of the trip but I guess Maharaji had other plans in mind. Who cared about such things in those days?
We fiddled around in the towns leading up to Tehran and shopped and ate exotic food, drank from tea urns, sat on magic red carpets and shared food with the villagers who were always amused by our looks until Tehran. We checked in to the Sikh Gurdwara and they told us not to go venturing out much or at night so one night I didn’t see Bhagavan Das around and we got worried because of his looks, as we started to get into more Muslim countries, was worrisome, especially the animal bones he wore in his necklace on his giant outer shell. Then we got a call from the police and they said to come fetch him down the street. So I ran up the street and an angry mob had him cornered in an alleyway and were throwing rocks like they do to adulterers to kill them and the police were trying to protect him. I got in the middle and dragged him back to the Gurdwara to safety. We left town the next day for Isfahan and points South and then arrived by bus, as you could not hitchhike here in the desert at Herat in Afghanistan. Believe me I sympathize with the US government and the troops over there now if they had only asked me before they went into this mess. My first impression and I remember this vividly to this day as we got off the bus in Herat’s center is that this is what Jesus saw in his day; dirt and camels and heavily robed dark people with beards—a scene from the Bible that you can’t experience anywhere else on Earth. How strange, stranger than us, but luckily, these people were a lot friendlier than the paranoid Iranians.
Here is where you experience real Asian hospitality, you just can’t leave. They shower you with food and tea and drugs all day long and “come to my house, no, my house”. But in retrospect, if only the US can know what I know, there is no progress to be made so quickly, it’s two thousand years behind and they like it that way, they are all drugged out on hash and opium, so what is democracy anyway, a Plasma TV? Right, they need paved parking lots for their camels. We trudged slowly through to exotic Kandahar on buses and then, to oriental Kabul, magnificent in those days, we were blown out by now, and they with us. We were still eating kabobs and meat, and the most fantastic fresh hot flat breads from Iran to Afghanistan, never to be reproduced in the US at the silly Whole Foods packaged bread counters. We had to get our visas ready and everything in order to get into crazy Pakistan.
We took a bus to Lahore and went to the big Sikh Gurdwara near the mosque on the Maidan, the place of the famous fort. We were there a few days and nights sight-seeing as it must look like what we would see in India but before we left we thought we would sleep out under the stars on the Maidan field the last night. It’s appropriate to note that the Gurdwara manager told us emphatically not to sleep outside the temple at night, it was dangerous. I think he meant especially the way we looked. So sure enough, as we were sleeping outside, I felt this metal tapping on my forehead. I awoke and we both had gun barrels pointed at our heads by two soldiers who were yelling at us in Urdu I guess and we had to stand up and put our hands up. This dialogue went on for some minutes and we couldn’t say anything except to say over and over the usual, ‘Americans. Americans.’ I guess the loud sounds traveled and the Gurdwara manager came out running and rescued us. I don’t like guns that close to my forehead with idiots pressing the trigger finger and I really felt scared like they would just shoot us and get away with it or make it accidental. Why is everyone always trying to kill me? (Even now in Thailand I had three instances where some people tried to kill me for sure.) The next day we left for India hurriedly and happily.
Finally God in the Punjab India
Due to the recent wars between India and Pakistan, the only way to cross the border at Lahore was to take a short train ride from Lahore to Ferozepore, Punjab, and stop on the border where they review visas on the train. Finally the much-anticipated moment after a month of dusty roads and wilderness or maybe many years, we kept going and pulled into Indian territory. We gathered our things, I got off the train and just as my foot touched the Indian ground I felt a sudden sharp jolt of electricity throughout my body. It traveled from my foot right to the top of my head. It was definitely real and I remember it always, even now, an image as vivid as any I have ever had in my life, as my welcome back to my soul’s home or maybe putting the soul back into Ravi Dass or creating Ravi Dass.
We made it to the mystic East of Siddhartha and just like him we gave up everything to seek our true natures. I knew I belonged here, was welcomed here; the values and traditions of India deeply embedded in me from previous lifetimes I imagined. I have been enriched and enhanced as a person by India and always owe it a great debt of gratitude no matter what I say about its current decrepit condition. That pretty much sums up the feelings of every one of the hundreds of people I know who have come here. (Except for the inept US government who always sides with Pakistan.) What would life be like for us now? In Ferozepore Bhagavan Das and my life took two different turns as this would be the trend throughout our future chance meetings (up till some years ago when I stopped noticing entirely).
We took a rickshaw into the town in search of lodging, not knowing where the hell we were in India, only that we need to get to Delhi somehow. And here we experienced the first taste of Indian hospitality (vs. that of our Muslim friends in Iran and Pakistan) that I was to have in the many years of traveling around this most holy land. The scenario is always the same, the rickshaw-wallah does not have a clue where you are going, only take foreigners far and charge them for it and leave them and escape. You start yelling at them because it’s getting ridiculous and then an Indian will invariably come to the rescue, sort the problem out for the poor foreigner, tell you how much to pay and take you home with him. It must be his Vedic duty to strangers...father, mother, and then guest. Maybe that is why foreign armies always occupied them.
It turns out this time we stopped in front of the town music instrument store and the men who came out owned the shop, they were Sikhs. They took us immediately a few blocks to the big family two-story house down a dirt lane and gave us rooms and food. This went on for quite some days. They organized bhajan singing for us and Bhagavan Das sang for them on his guitar. One day we all made a pilgrimage to the main Sikh holy shrine in Amritsar, the famous Golden temple. We walked around the large pool, went into the inner temple and bowed to the holy book, the ‘Granth Sahib', not realizing then that it contained poetry of Sant Raidas, my future name. They customarily feed you at every Gurdwara and then we left. Strange, my first big interaction was with Sikhs not Hindus in India, I always liked them and have met many in the last fifty years. They are usually so groomed and clean, easily identifiable and business like, maybe that is why they attract us at times compared to the innumerable Hindus who are all over the map socially and caste-wise.
Then one day a week later in the bazaar, a prosperous village Hindu business man took us on a tour of his house and showed us a closed off room he said was used for meditation retreats. Mind you this spiritual and yoga stuff is all completely voodoo to us. He would put you in this dark room and provide food for a week under the door and you were expected to commune with the gods. This was not for me yet, but Bhagavan Das in his usual extreme approach accepted and the next day stepped into history. I said I would wait, just playing with the adorable little Sikh kids, eating and hanging out. But that was not my ethereal entry into the history books for some people from the town came to see me that week and asked if I would speak to the villagers. I said why not, how hard could that be. So on Saturday they came to fetch me and as we got going many more people joined the parade and I was getting skeptical and nervous, what had I agreed to. We ended up at the local Hindu temple where there were hundreds of people sitting on the ground and I thought I would just join them sitting but they led me to a tucket like the one Maharaji sits on of wood and asked me to sit down cross-legged with my back to the temple deity, garlanded me with marigolds and then all in unison looked up at me from the ground smiling. Someone said something in Hindi like an introduction and I stared at them in frozen time not knowing still what to do. But then words just babbled out of my atheist mouth with the topic of my talk ‘God is One’. I wish I had a recording of this because this had to be the reason for the lighting bolt at the station. All I remember is that phrase; maybe I went into a trance and kept talking. I must have said many things or maybe just ‘God is one’ over and over as if in a trance like a Himalayan yogi. They expected me to say something like this looking as I did the American Jesus holy man. After I was done babbling, more garlands and they touched my feet and we went home. I have no clue what I said still. One day you are here to indulge in drugs and the next day you are telling the converted and the blessed to believe in God. That was not me, I was possessed, and by whom I did not know yet. I will go back on this trip if possible to see the descendants of the family and see this temple where I spoke, show them the photo, some of whom are probably still in the music store and surprise them, and maybe even give another talk. (It never happened, but hello and thanks anyway.)
So Bhagavan Das is in lock-down for a week and I am getting restless alone so instead of waiting, I left a message that I took the train to Delhi, wished him good luck (I thought probably he would last a few days at most but he did the whole week), and I will meet you at the Ashoka Vihara hostel in Mehrauli.
Good Old Delhi
I never experienced such a large train station and confusion in my life. Taking the bus took hours to get out of town as the train station is in the old city and I had to go clear south near the Qutab Minar. The Buddhist Ashoka Vihara hostel in Mehrauli run by Vira Dharmawara Maha Thera was a well-known stopover in Asia. I heard about it from the Americans who had been to Kashmir before invading Athens. It was a big walled compound he must have been given and he lived there essentially providing room and board and it turned out, much needed respite and comfort to westerners, at least those who made it that far. In all the time I had been visiting, there was only one weird obnoxious mad German who converted into a Hindu monk.
So Bhagavan Das showed up a few days later and we called a connection that we had from the Athens Americans for some drugs, and he happened to be the son of an Embassy Consul from the states. He would bring over hash, opium and heroin to this big room on the other side of the courtyard and we would bullshit and shoot up and smoke. Imagine still carrying on like we were in New York or Athens. How hip were we, the kings of the western world? If I didn’t have HCV by then from the Bowery days and Normal and his girlfriend I sure got it here sharing needles.
All the while in the back of my mind was the seeping thoughts of ‘what am I doing’ because day after day, the more I was in India, the less the drugs affected me until one night I finally said I had enough, time to move on, there must be something better than this replay. So I went to see Raihana Tyabji finally, a Sufi saint, another connection from Athens who lived with Gandhi when she was young, her parents being singers for him. She lived in one room of the Gandhi Ashram between Old and New Delhi. Her room was full of really beautiful vibrations I never had experienced till then. She waved her arms and sang to God and the heavens.
Now that I think about it there had to be a definite spiritual connection from Raihana to Maharaji even before I met him years later. She was, as she herself said, just a Sufi medium. You would ask her questions like where should I go in India and she raised her tiny little arms and pointed her little wrinkled toothless face towards the heavens in her bed, sway and pray silently, and pull down answers for you. She had to be channeling Maharaji; who else could have interfered in Bhagavan Das’ and my life so much, sending us all over India for many years. In that case we were the first to be guided so closely in India by Maharaji in 1965, albeit not in person, but so what, it’s the big Kahuna for sure. At this first meeting when I asked where I should go she pulled down ‘Rishikesh, Sivananda Ashram’.
And lo and behold where am I today forty-three years later in 1996. I just took it for the gospel truth that I should head there so I packed up and left Bhagavan Das with his karma, which by now was starting to take its own course and annoying me.
*But the night before I did one of those gutsy rambunctious maybe stupid things I am known for and ever regret. I built a big bonfire in the Vihara, said a few Sanskrit prayers I just learned and burnt all my poetry notebooks and ‘Allen’s knapsack’, which I guess had reached the end of its own Keroacian road. I told Bhagavan Das to meet me in Rishikesh and go see Raihana himself. I’ve had it with drugs; I am already feeling higher than I do without taking drugs. Time to get on with life as we know it.
Allen’s contribution/lineage
So you can see now how Allen is greatly connected to American spirituality. He went to India, sent me to India, on the way I took Bhagavan Das to India who met Maharaji first and then took Richard Alpert to Maharaji who became Baba Ram Dass, who took me to Maharaji. The rest is history.