Who was your first real friend? Or two or three.
Updated 3/1/22 Ukraine War...And was he world famous? Did he influence millions? (REV. 2)
My first friend. Yes, Stokely Carmichael.
Stokely Carmichael (WIKIPEDIA)
Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science.
Born:Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael, June 29, 1941, Port of Spain, British Trinidad and Tobago
Died:November 15, 1998, Conakry, Guinea
My story:
I was just walking to junior high school in the Morris Park section of the Bronx one sunny day, to P.S. 83, pretty Italian I would say. It was between all white Parkchester which had a Macy’s and Pelham Parkway, all Jewish, right next to the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Gardens, which was a gift from heaven for the Bronx. There he was, a black kid going in the same direction. I guess we hit it off pretty quick because we walked to Jr. high every day for two years.
I’m just an ordinary kid from the Bronx, no exceptional intelligence or sports ability, not a punk nor loser either. I can never fathom how I was born into this common family but now I see it as a great mystery solved. How was it Jesus was born into the worst town in Israel, in a manger, and turned into a carpenter. Look what he became. I am the bridge of the East and the West, the Old and New Testament, Jewish Ukrainian mother and Catholic Sicilian father. Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, not to mention all my careers and eccentricities and the great people I have met from this plane and the others, sojourning on Earth. So many lifetimes in one and still going. I will write soon of the ‘9 Lives of Ravi Dass’, not now. Or just remember ‘Saturday Night Fever’ that’s me and my father.
Stokely would come first to my house Tuesday nights before we walked to Boy Scout meetings. He wanted to wash the dishes. My mother said why can’t you be like him. After school I would go back to his big house and play with him and his sisters. One of them was deaf. His father was a carpenter. They never bothered me at all, I was just his friend. We never got into trouble. After 8th grade graduation he got accepted into the prestigious Bronx H.S. of Science and my parents moved us to Yonkers so I went to ‘country club’ white kids Roosevelt HS near Scarsdale. I never heard from Stokely again. We ended up in an Italian relatives apartment building in a mixed race neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks in Yonkers. I had Italian friends and just lived life and studied. But I had problems with the black kids and got into fights. I wanted out of there and finally forced my parents to move across the tracks to Central Park Ave near Nathan’s. I think it was 3rd and 4th year of high school. Now I had all Jewish friends and girlfriend Barbara. Did stupid teenage things, stole my father’s car for a night to get laid in the Bronx. And then it was all over. We graduated, Barbara ditched me from her upstate college for another boyfriend and my father said he wouldn't pay for me to go anywhere. He even bemoaned paying $50 to go to Hunter College in the Bronx every semester. He was a domestic abuser, I should have abused him when I had the chance. Such is my life Ram Dass, you growing up so prettily and rich up in Boston. Satsang babies, you would never have survived with my Sicilian father.
So Stokely told me he had to leave USA because Hoover had put him on the ‘kill list’ and he fled to Ghana and married our great Miriam Makeba for some years. He wrote me a letter from Africa which has mysteriously disappeared from the computer during iMac migration and I swear it’s in Peekskill at my sister’s house in a box of memorabilia but no one can find it. I even had a photo on my MacBook for 5 years of the first page and it’s disappeared. He invited me to Africa. he pops up every now and then, and was featured in a recent Spike Jones movie as a young man. But he’s dead but not in my mind, he’s right here. I guarantee you if I walked through Harlem and showed that photo they would applaud me, but kill you. Black people always had great respect for me when I showed that photo. Why did God put us together? How did I land in that family? Where to next? Something you should all be asking yourselves.
My next best friend. Did you personally know the greatest poet of the 20th century? The author of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’. My poetry mentor and the man that sent me to India in 1964. Were you born yet? Do you think you are born yet? Are you more than 1% alive. Those on my reading list are good souls but the rest of ‘humanity’ who consider themselves as ‘souls’ are really no different than pets. Some good pets and some bad pets. If you haven’t taken LSD before, especially when you were young, 50% of your life is missing, you will never see God. You will never be reborn. Who the fuck is managing 7.5 billion souls reincarnating into different lives, etc. It’s all bullshit. The Tibetans are bullshit with their ridiculous reincarnation mumbo jumbo. I can’t tell you more.
Allen went to India about 1961 and Japan but mysteriously he never met Maharaji or any great saint even though they existed at that time. The big mystery. I also missed Maharaji in 1965 but Bhagavan Das who I took to India met him and stayed with him and then brought Richard Alpert, Ram Dass to him in 67 or so. Then Ram Dass brought me to Maharaji in ‘71. WTF. In the meantime I was killing myself on Madison Avenue and Max’s Kansas City with the Warhol gang. I got married for two years and Serene was in ‘Midnight Cowboy’. Then I met Denise de Casablanca and we went from NY-San Francisco-NY-Paris-Morocco-India. We landed at Muktananda’s where we broke up. I became a monk, Ron Swami for 2 years and got ‘Shaktipat’.
Do you know what it’s like to be in Allen’s home as a junior in college while his mind is whirling away, talking philosophy and politics, throwing in names you can’t even dream about. He took me up to his Cherry Hill country home in the winter with Peter Orlovsky, we got along great. I met Peter’s brothers and Corso and Kerouac and Dylan and Ed Sanders and Ted Kerrigan and Anne Waldman before I went to India.
I hung out with Warhol’s crowd but that was separate than Allen’s and that was around 1967 after India. Just routine stuff those days at McSorley’s Ale House and New York. (That was the same with Ram Dass, he knew everybody.) I wrote about my senior year in my book, running away to California, being called back by Allen and him telling me to go to India after I graduate and how he helped me totally avoid the Vietnam draft. We remained in contact until India (see the other posts and the Stanford archives). I stopped writing poetry in India, I had done ‘Residu’ magazine with ‘2001’ man-ape choreographer Daniel Richter in Athens in 1964. I revered William Burroughs writing style.
I saw Allen occasionally but since I got into computers and moved to California we drifted apart and he got into Chogyam Trungpa and I into Maharaji and Ram Dass. I think we met and hugged once in the 90’s at a reading in San Jose before he died . I will never forget him. And my mother hated his foul language.
Maharaji said in India about my third best friend that he, Ram Dass, was our guru not him. But we just didn’t pay attention and always devoted ourselves more to Maharaji after his death especially after Ram Dass led us down some ridiculous rabbit holes with Joya and Trungpa and Muktananda. In those days after Maharaji died in 1973 we would have done anything Ram Dass said. He’s the heir, right. Well after the Joya fiasco in 1975, which I helped break up by having forbidden ‘sex’ with another student and almost getting killed by her, disappointed, I went to California, got married and started my big career with IBM. Putting yoga to good use in marketing.
I saw Dr. Peter, Balaram, more than others. I saw satsang sometimes, heard about Ram Dass high on pot living or dying in the Santa Cruz mountains. Always in some kind of scene with his nut-case devotees. Fooling around with the Grateful Dead or Wavy Gravy and LSD. Not my cup of tea then. Just a blue suit and wingtips and then IBM moved me to Boca Raton, Florida, the birthplace of the IBM PC. Trying to be friends with Sheldon Adelson and Bill Gates and raise a son. I was in a Maharaji fog for 25 years making sure I would get SSA now in Thailand. Work, play, work. You know he asked me to edit/publish ‘Inside Out’ in 1976. I guess he thought if I did ‘Residu’ I had a brain compared to the other satsang ‘kirtan singers’, names unmentioned. That was a giant gift to the prison community and to me. That book is the next best thing to the New Testament. It even has a hatha yoga section. It is the best for Covid quarantine. But because of their dislike of me they won’t republish any of it now at the Prison Project or Ram Dass foundation. It’s available here in my posts free. You’re reading too much garbage put out by the ‘mindfulness’ factories. Anyway there was nothing ever forever to compare to sitting in front of Maharaji by us kids in India in the early 70’s. (I once stayed/slept in Calcutta at Dakshineswar Kali Temple Calcutta, the home of Sri Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi. I loved him also, I can feel him in me. How lucky I was to be drawn there.) Ram Dass drove me out of my body a few times, once even trying to stop the Bangla Desh wars. And now the ‘nobody’ is being jerked all over the place by the divine Mother. God help me.
So we reconnected on Maui for three years, blah blah then I went to Thailand, he died and I became ‘nobody’ as Maharaji scripted for 11 years to this day. It’s all in the book.