The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960
Polsky, Ned
"Now, it is obviously easier to recognize ideologies wherever they are strongly institutionalized or highly verbal.... The true meaning of ideology for identity formation, however, can be...
...But in view of the significant minority of beats in their thirties and forties, it should place greater stress on the persistence in more or less chronic form of some psychic states characterizing acute adolescent pathology...
...However, contrary to the opinion of some beats, it is doubtful that the syndicate had anything to do with the closings, for long ago * "Italian" refers mainly to Sicilians, the dominant Village ethnic group whose criminal minority control Village nightlife and are prominent in the national crimesyndicate, not to Neapolitans living south of the Village...
...The last point seems to have been realized by the beats themselves, for jazz-cum-poetry recitals occur infrequently these days...
...but formerly beats used the I Ching, or Book of Changes for this purpose, whereas now one finds the use of Tarot cards or some Harlem-derived routine...
...The cops arrest the beats along with some of their attackers...
...Marihuana is usually "pot," though "boo" and other terms are sometimes heard...
...3, 1959, pp...
...but I doubt it...
...Some beats have correctly observed that opposition to them is in part displaced hostility toward another "invading" group that the Italians can't fight effectively because it is too rich: the uptown squares who * Syndicate enforcement methods are the well-publicized strongarm ones...
...The first fink uncovered by the beats and junkies was replaced...
...As a result of the beating the girl has a miscarriage while in the Women's House of Detention...
...Howard S. Becker, "On Becoming a Marijuana User," American Journal of Sociology, LIX, Nov...
...And the police forced the one coffee shop that earlier this summer was selling peyote openly (not against New York State law) to discontinue sales, by invoking a city health ordinance concerning potentially poisonous foods...
...Vill I looked hard for changes in the beat attitude toward politics, but found instead confirmation of my old impression that it is wrong to describe the beats as apolitical lumpen who are potential fascists (Malaquais) or potential socialists (Mailer...
...This would follow from the beat testimony cited below, which there seems no reason to doubt, concerning the pattern of narcotics arrests...
...Most likely this subcultural trait was originally transmitted to the white beats by Negro beats, for not only do Negroes set much of the tone of beat life, but Negro culture has always had a higher tolerance of sexual ambiguity than white culture, and also the non-beat white groups showing high tolerance (e...
...Much less frequently, there is also an "outside" factor...
...Surrounding this is a second, standing circle of clusters of folk and hillbilly performers and their listeners: uptown tourists and newstyle rich Villagers, "ethnic" teenagers, Italians, a few beats...
...they take jobs temporarily when all else fails,* but exist most of the time by combining panhandling, quick moves from one pad to another to beat the rent, a complex round of borrowings and repayments, short cons such as selling marihuana that is heavily cut, etc...
...The majority of beats, conversely, engage in an endless series of short-term affairs that bespeak much more of acting out than of action...
...But their use of nonaddicting drugs focuses invariably and overwhelmingly on the hallucinogens...
...Narcotics police in the Village, say the beats, used to spend all their time chasing junk (addicting drugs...
...Or they sleep in tenement hallways—the top landing, just inside the door to the roof, being the usual choice for beats (unlike homeless alcoholics, who usually must choose the less secure ground level because they can't make it up the stairs...
...In this respect beats remind one of professional criminals, who may or may not be neurotic but whose neuroses usually have little to do with the genesis of their criminality...
...You might as well claim the railway tracks stop the engine...
...But all beats reject the folksy-artsy group as people because in fundamental attitude the latter, despite the number of Negroes among them, are un- or antibeat.* The Village devotees of ethnic music are historically minded, scholarly, middle-class youths, mostly Jewish, who are trying to disown their parents' culture not by becoming beat but rather by proving that ancient proverb, "New York ain't America...
...Among the minority who could be called regular readers, the "literary" materials consist almost wholly of writing by romantic hedonists, much of it third-rate or worse and nearly all of it contemporary...
...Maurer's "Argot of the Underworld Narcotic Addict: Part II," American Speech, vol...
...I counted as junkies not only those who indicated they were, but all admitted users of addicting drugs who indicated they had ever experienced withdrawal discomfort—whether or not they indicated that drugs had been taken to relieve such discomfort, and regardless of frequency of use.** By this criterion, among Village beats under 20, about one out of 15 is a junkie...
...And as one would expect in the current bohemia, inter-racial intercourse is particularly frequent...
...Off and on during the past year—though not at present—there have been in the Village severe shortages of heroin...
...are tearing down low-rent Village housing, moving into fancy buildings that Italians can't afford, and in the process of wresting local political control from the DeSapio machine...
...Among these, marihuana is the drug of choice...
...Actually "hep" and "hip" are doublets...
...cit., passim...
...To see that Negroes living in the inter-racial beat world are still "invisible men" means to become sharply aware of something that white beats characteristically dodge: no modern urban Negro—raised as he is on white movies, white comic books, white television—can avoid internalizing white ideals, most especially can he not avoid internalizing white ideals of physical beauty, and on one level or another of his consciousness he puts himself down every time he looks in a mirror...
...Though a few beats regard Ezra Pound as one of their literary mentors, they see only the eibater l'academicien side of him and don't dare face up to such typical Poundian dicta as: "Saxpence reward for any authenticated case of intellect having stopped a chap's writing poetry...
...1953, pp...
...As I was able to explore all of it with only three Negro beats (two agreed completely, the other hedged on some parts), it should be regarded as subject to further proof or disproof...
...but it is a virtuous error, arising out of dismay at things that are rotten in the social fabric...
...About a fourth of those under 16 are fully beat and have totally abandoned, among other things, such square institutions for teenagers as parental home and school...
...of about 25 female beats queried, out of about 40 I talked with, 9 denied illegal use of any drug.* Some beats who denied such use were doubtless lying...
...this circle is a mixture of early-rising square Villagers, many of whom have brought their children to wade, and beats who get there early because they've been up all night...
...Occasionally irra tional factors are involved, such as one cop's invariable method of operation or an other's sadism...
...X111 In going through a good-sized collection of beat and semi-beat little magazines, published in various cities here and abroad, I have been unable to find 150 writers who by any definition could be called beat...
...and because they generally refuse their chances for either job training or college education, they can get only low-skilled jobs...
...John Rechy's "The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny" (one of the most dazzling American stories in years, and so genuinely distinctive that the editors of Best American Short Stories, 1960 couldn't bear to put it in their also-ran list of "distinctive" stories, much less give it honorable mention or reprint it...
...Informants recently on the west coast say that because Hawaii is now a state and one can collect unemployment benefits there, it is, among those beats who can scrape up boat fare, becoming increasingly popular as against Mexico...
...The hip attitude toward Negroes is, to be sure, not only better than the usual square rejection of them but is superior to the phoney some-ofmybest-friends-are routines (which at best let in special performers of the arts, scholarship and politics under special conditions...
...Beats recognized that the hipster • For criticism of an earlier draft I am indebted to two members of the beat scene who must remain anonymous, and among the non-beats to John F. Gallagher and Erving Goffman...
...Unlike most of their age-mates, beats are keen critics of the society in which they have grown up...
...Charles Olson has elaborated.* Granted the obvious integrity of Olson himself, it remains true that "the importance of any theory," as P. W. Bridgman once remarked, "is what it actually does, not what it says it does or what its author thinks it does"—and that Olson's theory functions as a copout for poets with tin ears, with defective sense of rhythm and structure...
...And we traveled Swing Street when it still swung (where half the time we'd get kicked out despite our borrowed I. D.) to hear Billie Holiday at the Onyx Club or Tatum at the Three Deuces...
...They restrict • Cf...
...A few beats claim there is still one old-style `opium den" in Chinatown, to which no whites or Negroes and very few Chinese are admitted...
...Their badges are meant for fellow beats, and were worn long before publicity made the squares aware of them...
...3. Cf...
...Every Negro knows that the white man, though he dislikes all nonwhites, has especially hostile feelings toward American Negroes...
...previously the only "American" group one found them in was the homosexuals...
...the syndicate put aside its anti-Negro feelings in favor of its commercial interests and declared itself in for a piece of the beat pie...
...One thing the Negro must not do is try to be white...
...He may affect [distinctive dress] but usually Prefers to skulk unmarked...
...These fundamental points are garbled or suppressed, when known at all, as more and more writers discover a market for articles on "colorful" beats...
...True enough, he lacks a couple of technical craft skills (which can be taught) and sometimes falls into the worst cliches of thought as well as style...
...New York's beat scene has become a major tourist attraction, just as happened earlier in San Francisco...
...Y.: Great Benin Books, African Library Series, n. d. [1960]), available from The Shango Temple, 71 East 125 Street...
...beats say it is an upper-class drug, used mostly in wealthy show business and criminal circles...
...Although a number of beat writers are of Jewish origin, the proportion of Jews among the white male beats has severely declined in the past three years, and in the Village beat scene they now seem to be considerably under-represented...
...This is more than can be said for the entire history of some literary schools...
...f A recent example is "Wailing Wall for Richard Gumbiner—last seen," by Pierre Delattre and Alan Dienstag, in Beatitude no...
...Marihuana smokers also use peyote, hashish and synthetic mescalin in that order of frequency...
...And this is certainly true of its best-publicized examples, which have been surpassed even by the minor Victorians: James Thomson's poetic howl of urban despair, The City of Dreadful Night, is greater by far than anything Ginsberg offers,* and in on-the-road literature the genuine gusto of George Borrow, for all his prudishness, is preferable to the faked-up fervor of Kerouac...
...with others, more than 30 hours...
...Some older drug users say the greater number of burns is due to the increased mobility of today's beats...
...yet they often exist as the most vital part of a young person's or group's life, as a basis for a tentative and yet total orientation in life, without the knowledge or, indeed, curiosity, of the adults around them...
...Of course he is pleased to see beat attitudes spread, but he isn't interested in joining any organized social movement toward that end...
...paid off the syndicate after several broken windows reminded the owner of this civic duty, and of course paid the police, but was eventually closed because it got too hot to handle (one of the bar's prostitutes was discovered to be a juvenile runaway from a prominent family...
...But the net effect on their leisure is that even the most ardent intellectuals among them often can't spare the carfare to get to the better free libraries and concerts and art exhibits, seldom can attend cultural events for which admission is charged, and never can build up reasonable book and record libraries of their own...
...It might seem reasonable to call the beat an anarchist, for he objects to representative government on the same ground that Proudhon did, i.e., that no man can truly "represent" another man's thoughts and feelings— but more important is the fact that the beat doesn't want to promote anarchism or any other ism.** All this has some virtues of its defects...
...This response happens to be tragically mistaken, destructive of the self as well as incapable of provoking social change...
...In warm weather there are rooftops...
...What is still questionable is the nature of these relationships...
...Although Lewis Yablonsky in "The Violent Gang" (Commentary, August 1960) claims that today's gang "lacks all features of an organized group," he goes on to contradict himself by describing types of gang officers and their duties, etc...
...In thinking of past bohemias we tend to recall only accomplishments and forget that for, say, every Village bohemian of the 1930s who actually sat down and wrote, there were several others just talking about it and a couple of dozen others doing not even that...
...Beats say that the use of marihuana in non-beat circles was until recently pretty much restricted to jazz musicians and theater people, but that in the past year it has been spreading rapidly in the worlds of advertising, radio-TV, college students, etc.—the Playboy readership essentially—and that some suppliers formerly in the Village have shifted to the favorite hangouts of these groups because they pay more...
...Although disappointed at being barred, they admire the Chinese for playing it so cool...
...638-641...
...Identity and Totality," in Human Development Bulletin, Fifth Annual Symposium (Univ...
...Winick, op...
...and yet their presence has a real meaning, which is this: even if you're a very successful Northern Negro and move in circles that include many hip white admirers and make it with some cool white chicks, you're still expected to play it like a spade and it's still a drag...
...between 20 and 25, nearly 10 to one...
...Shortly thereafter he had his window broken...
...Moreover, while the Village - beat market has been expanding, some of its normal supplies have been deflected to new markets elsewhere...
...It is rather that among beats today the use of heroin has lost much of its glamor, is less often considered a requisite of being hip, and frequently is even considered "uncool...
...One would never catch them describing race relations as "intergroup" relations even if they knew the term, nor describing the lower class as the "working" class or old people as "senior citizens...
...Jewish women, on the other hand, are if anything over-represented...
...The horde of new teenage beats, many just arrived in the Village this summer, nearly all use marihuana...
...Until recently "hipster" meant simply one who is hip, roughly the equivalent of a beat...
...The last two features (perhaps the last three) distinguish the beat group sharply from the gang...
...Most beats dress in an ordinary lower-class manner, distinctive only to middle-class eyes...
...The circles here are as much concentric as intersecting...
...But today in the Village and elsewhere, significantly more beats are writing than was the case three years ago, and it seems that now at least as high a proportion of them are writing as was true of earlier bohemians.* In four or five cases their motives are not of the highest—come to no more than the knowledge that one can pick up some change by reciting shockers to tourists in coffee shops—but most are sincere about their writing, and in any event whatever literary talent there may be among the beats now stands a good chance of being discovered...
...Most beat literature is poor when it is not godawful...
...These beats, together with many others who go to Village coffee shops entirely or almost entirely during non-tourist hours, and still others—in cluding most older beats—who rarely go to coffee shops at all (a great portion of beat social life takes place at private parties), comprise the large majority of beats...
...Cocaine is seldom used because it is expensive and the "high" it produces does not last long...
...There are several possible reasons for the discrepancy, all of which seem to be operative here: (a) Though I tried to secure a representative sample of beats, junkies may have been slightly under-represented...
...One made a remark that would be almost inconceivable from a heroin user: "Sometimes it's okay to get high by yourself, but then I always like to go out and bounce it off other studs...
...This is still generally true, but beats note that in the past year there have been two major Village raids on strictly marihuana-smoking groups...
...A. Addicting Drugs...
...Olson's essay reprinted in Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry, 19451960 (N...
...But insofar as they speak of themselves generically and are forced to choose among evils, they prefer the word "beat...
...Beat statements about group marihuana-using sessions and group heroinusing sessions consistently indicate a far greater degree of mutuality in the former, particularly with regard to both verbal and nonverbal sharing of drug-induced psychic states.'** It is possible that this mutuality has a strong latent homosexual component and that this is what bars most female beats from full participation...
...The few Village beats with any opinion suppose that it comes from the "hep" of early 1940s jivetalk...
...And their contribution in the way of a new art form, if one can call it that, consists of bad poetry read to bad jazz, with not even an integration of the badnesses...
...cit., p. 75: "The writer has never heard of a user who, having experienced the full intensity of the withdrawal symptoms in full knowledge of their relation to the absence of opiates, did not become an addict...
...Swing Street has been replaced by scattered Village clubs...
...A number of times I used the above argument with beats, and got variants of one response: better to have a poorer intellectual life than get caught up in the rat race...
...In their own eyes, beats are hip but are definitely not hipsters...
...11 Paradoxically, nearly all articles on the beats neglect the thread that colors beat life: the overwhelming majority of beats are not exhibitionists or publicity-seekers but precisely the opposite...
...It is indeed obvious to the tourist that some beats need frequently to proclaim their negative identities by costume and behavior designed to shock...
...But an important secondary reason for the coffee shops is that in the last three years the attitudes of beats in their thirties have spread rapidly downward all the way to very young teenagers (13-15 years old), who need these shops because they are too young to fake their age in bars...
...Most of even this badge-wearing minority want to remain quite inconspicuous as far as squares are concerned...
...16, P. 12...
...A substantial minority, between a fourth and a third, also wear various kinds of badges (beards, typically) but usually do so as a ready means of identifying themselves to one another and to promote a "we" feeling, not out of a desire to call the attention of outsiders to themselves...
...3, Winter 1959-60, especially p. 242...
...b) Some beats who are junkies doubtless kept this fact hidden from me...
...All the smack you want and a complete pot panic...
...This is not to imply that junkie couples achieve long-run stability (the reverse doubtless is true), but rather that in its initial phases mutual addiction "helps keep the family together...
...But contrary to some popular views, (a) the majority use non-addicting drugs exclusively and (b) the majority of such users do not eventually go on to use addicting drugs and become junkies...
...This was overcome in nearly all cases...
...Even more, they need to stop bombinating in vacuo and actually meet the people they write about—if only to learn that for every beat who is unusually given to violence there are at least two dozen beats who are sincere pacifists...
...boring from within," with the beat being confirmed in his purity as approaching daylight reminded me to stagger off for a couple of hours' sleep before rejoining the rat race...
...he knows experientially the truth in Max Weber's remark that the differ * Some material that follows is touchy if not downright offensive to most Negroes, beat or non-beat...
...Nowhere is there greater dis * Cf...
...The modern American Negro's need to be white is one culture trait that the white male beat, like most of his square white brethren, cannot emotionally accept...
...Romero's • The above percentages are tentative estimates, based on quite sketchy material concerning family origins...
...Proportionately, the amount of such behavior is as high as in the non-beat world even though the • In view of my, earlier finding (DISSENT, Winter 1958) that the beats are not totally atomized individuals but instead form a subculture, they must of course have some social organization...
...But Village beats, teenagers and otherwise, are not predominantly of lower-class parentage...
...Beats do not constitute the majority of those who use drugs illegally, but their lives often intersect with that majority at the points of supply...
...The only thoroughly beat Negro scene is the Maracanda, where most of the clientele are junkies and Charlie Parker is the squarest thing on the jukebox...
...Thus the material on drugs, full as it may seem, is actually the thinnest part of my essay...
...the white intellectual jazz mentors are Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams instead of Ralph Berton and Gene Williams...
...Moreover, the large majority of beats do not flaunt their physical presence before the public gaze...
...third, because from the onset of my own adolescence until a couple of years thereafter (at which time I enlisted in the deathstruggles of Marxism), I and some of my friends went through a "white Negro" phase similar to that of many young beats today...
...Hence the enormous Negro hair-straightening and skin-lightening industries, the profound discrimination among Negroes themselves on the basis of skin color, the high yellow beauty on the cover of Ebony who gives the lie to the magazine's title, etc...
...1, no...
...Thus miscegenation in the beat world is essentially a conspiracy between white females and Negro males, that triumphs over strong white male opposition only because the latter can never become fully articulate since it contradicts the conscious ideology...
...There is also a sprinkling (about five per cent) of upper-class renegades...
...Until about three years ago there were few Negroes in the Village and they were forced to have their own bar, Johnny Romero's...
...As for the beat talk of achieving a "breakthrough" with respect to the old literary forms: this should be translated simply as "breakdown...
...Some newer coffee shops are on the lower east side (out of the Village proper) and a couple of that neighborhood's restaurants have also become fairly beat...
...Among Village beats today, however, "hipster" usually has a pejorative connotation: one who is a mannered showoff regarding his hipness, who "comes on" too strongly in hiptalk, etc...
...nor, for that matter, can the Village Voice...
...Roughly 35% are from the lower class and 60% or a little more from the middle class...
...The beat group approximates the primitive band as described by Ralph Linton: a group of fairly constant membership larger than the family, compact, nomadic but exploiting a fairly well-defined territory, socially self-sufficient and facing inward, without rites de passage, without formal governmental machinery, etc...
...rather, these drugs are used in addition to heroin or as substitutes for it...
...Beats believe that voluntary poverty is an intellectual gain...
...A dozen or so Italian neighborhood kids are breaking away from Italian community values (always opposed to Village bohemians) and are attracted to the beats...
...The beat's only spokesman is himself...
...Around this is a third circle, also quite mixed but consisting mostly of beats asking each other what's happening, tourists with cameras trying to elbow their way into the second circle for a good shot, and tight-trousered Village homosexuals walking their dogs and cruising each other...
...Second Interim Report of the State of New York Committee on Narcotic Study, Legislative Document (1958), no...
...Beats not only tolerate deviant sex roles but, to a much greater extent than previous bohemians, display a very high tolerance of sex-role ambiguity...
...And yet, the beat literary scene is not nearly as dismal as it was in 1957...
...and Jack Gelber's play The Connection (which acts much better than it reads).** And because the beats, unlike their French existentialist cousins and rather like the earlier Dadaists, see "the absurd" in its comic implications as fully as its tragic ones, a good deal of beat literature that fails as Art is quite enjoyable as Wisecrack.t The beat writer with the most raw potential is Gregory Corso...
...1938, p. 179, fn...
...Since an important factor in some kinds of retreatism is an inability to meet job norms (whether legitimate or criminal), it should be emphasized that beats typically can meet such norms but voluntarily choose not to do so...
...The true meaning of ideology for identity formation, however, can be fathomed only by descending into those transitory systems of conversion and aversion which exist in...
...But all are in the dark about "hip...
...235-242...
...They might even encourage it, for surely the only real solution to the psychological problems peculiar to the American Negro is the very solution that so worries our Southerners: miscegenation on a grand scale, the production of more and more Negroes who can pass, and ultimately the total "mongrelization" of the two races...
...police came looking for junk...
...the four beats I asked about this thought there was something to it...
...Artists by definition know how to play, and hence attract many people who want to play all the time, which in turn makes it harder for artists to get their work done...
...I deny merely that it is good poetry...
...Consequently, even among the oldest beats it is uncommon to find a couple who have been living together more than two or three years...
...In the absence of actual analysis of drug samples, such statements should be treated with caution...
...g., seamen, ex-convicts) have had a special conditioning factor—prolonged absence from women—that is lacking in the beat world...
...However, it is expensive ($15-20 for a toy, a ball about the size of a large pea) and beats regard it as something to try once for kicks but otherwise not worth the price-partly because it is less powerful than its main derivatives and partly because there is rarely an opium layout and experienced preparer available...
...XII A few beats, invariably among the youngest, are not so much interested in jazz as in the folk music of the "ethnic" set...
...Howl will remain important in our literary history as the most influential programmatic statement of a beat worldview...
...The beats have not significantly extended the range of the old forms...
...These armchair social analysts need to catch up with current sociological theory and learn the differences between "conflict" and "retreatist" delinquent subcultures...
...Charles Winick, "The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians," Social Problems, vol...
...209-212...
...often there will be 10 or 12 people sleeping on a loft floor...
...To those who insist on finding a German ancestor for the beats, I would suggest that the proper ancestor is not the storm trooper but rather the philosopher-poet Friedrich Nietzsche, who correctly described himself as "an ardent anti-antisemite," as "opposed to everything that calls itself Reichsdeutsch," and as "the last anti-political German...
...Given the fact that beat writers are not notably reluctant to take the first things that pop into their heads and send them out to the world (if only via the mimeograph machine), and that on a most conservative estimate there cannot be less than 2000 beats in New York alone, it * When the Fire Department raided beat coffee shops, the proprietor of The Folklore Center on Macdougal Street went so far as to issue a mimeographed broadside (dated June 12, 1960) praising this action and condemning the beats...
...beat whose outlets are entirely or almost entirely homosexual is proportionately very much rarer than his non-beat counterpart...
...their connections simply had no junk...
...Cf...
...Extx ERntsoN** This essay is both more and less than a portrayal of the beats of Greenwich Village and its environs...
...And square writers, who as often as not simply lift their material from beat writings, don't know this fact, or minimize it because it is unexciting, or explicitly deny it...
...Beats frequently use non-addicting and non-hallucinatory stimulants, such as dexedrine...
...Contrary to what many white beats believe, there is hardly a Negro alive who in his heart of hearts doesn't want to be white, and the various kinds of Negro chauvinist movements invariably represent a reaction formation against the forbidden desire to be white...
...They want to escape the hustling scene but of course have difficulty adjusting to a square scene, and hence are attracted to the beats, toward whom they are motherly...
...As Howard Becker has shown, marihuana smoking is a group activity in which the psychic response to the drug in large part has to be taught to the newcomer.* (It appears that marihuana is a drug in which tolerance not only does not go up, but as a result of learning actually goes down...
...To obtain marihuana at all, beats have sometimes been forced to buy it in a form (already rolled into "joints," rather than loose) and at a price (75 cents or $1 per joint) that they say are usually reserved for the rich college crowd...
...The remainder are quasi-beat, not so much because they have doubts about beat life as because they are not yet able completely to escape parental control...
...What one would not necessarily expect is the peculiar pattern that homosexual behavior takes among the beats...
...The intersection of beat and "ethnic" circles, and indeed of Village social circles generally, can be seen at its warm-weather wildest in the hundreds of people who on Sunday afternoons gather round the children's wading pool in Washington Square Park...
...For several years Smith's has been a favorite place for junkies and marihuana smokers to meet their connections...
...XV I found it relatively easy to talk with beats, though the talk often had to be literally in their terms and representatives of the nonexhibitionist majority had to be sought out: first, because they are However, the emergence of West African nations is causing a shift among some Harlemites from a North African Moslem orientation to a West African non-Moslem one...
...This has raised his status in the eyes of some: "A way out bit, man...
...Winick, op...
...Erikson omits this passage from later versions of his paper...
...16 published in New York by a defecting editor from San Francisco...
...In this essay Village commercial establishments frequented by beats appear pseudonymously, except for one bar now defunct...
...IV Many beats are teenage runaways, but hardly any are being sought by the police...
...In terms of the Kinsey heterosexual-homosexual rating scale from zero to six, beats show an unusual clustering at points two, three and four...
...e) Additional support for the view that marihuana smokers may greatly outnumber junkies is that the latter often must turn to crime to support their habits and/or turn themselves in for treat ment—both of which bring them to the attention of the authorities—whereas mari huana smokers do neither...
...About the only carryover from earlier mystical concerns is that some beats continue to take an interest in divination...
...Statistically speaking, they represent a small portion of either American Negro Moslems or jazz musicians...
...c) Beats are somewhat unrepresentative of New York drug users generally, because nearly all the junkies attracted to New York from the rest of the country (New York is now estimated to have between one-third and one half of America's junkies) probably go to non-beat circles...
...Nearly all beats I talked with at any length were told that I would write about them, and with four exceptions fairly easily accepted this...
...For example, nearly 20 years ago, when I was v. p. of my high school jazz club, a 13-year-old zoot suiter, we often used to make the Harlem "balcony scenes"—boosting old Bessie Smiths and Hot Fives from the balcony of the Rainbow Music Shop before the wartime scrap drive wrecked the supply, going wild in the Apollo Theatre's sweet-smelling second balcony—odoriferous from pomade and pot, though we didn't know about the latter at the time—to a Basie-Millinder twin bill...
...In addition to the remarks of white beats quoted above, there is evidence from the Negro side that all is not well...
...With some beats in the sample I spent less than five minutes...
...Recently a few marihuana smokers have experimented with using peyote exclusively for extended periods...
...Lack of virility, however defined, is a frequent problem among the white males (and a characteristic of all long-time junkies...
...To describe only what is more or less deliberately exposed to tourist view is to forget that the cool world is an iceberg, mostly underwater...
...A partial justification for this procedure is the statement of Lindesmith, op...
...1 The individuals in question resent any label whatever, and regard a concern with labelling as basically square...
...These methods are nonviolent, flexible and various...
...Heroin is the drug of choice among beat junkies, though a few are hooked on barbiturates...
...The one other comparative survey of drug use I know of that does not depend on arrest rates also finds that marijuana smokers outnumber heroin users, though the differences are not nearly as startling...
...For there are beats with genuine literary ability, and despite their cockeyed theories this ability is occasionally beginning to show itself...
...adolescence...
...Less, because I have not depicted some of the Village beat world's well-publicized aspects, but have tried for completeness only in regard to the changes that have taken place in that world since my last acquaintance with it (1957...
...is more of an "operator"—has a more consciously patterned lifestyle (such as a concern to dress well) and makes more frequent economic raids on the frontiers of the square world—but stressed their social bonds with hipsters, such as their liking for drugs, for jazz music, and, above all, their common scorn for bourgeois career orientations...
...Recently the most influential halfway house among Negroes has been Islam.* These halfway houses are part of what Franklin Frazier calls the Negro "world of make-believe"—few Negroes or whites are really fooled by an American Negro's claim to be somebody else—but they do ease the pain somewhat...
...Beat writers start with a great deal against them...
...For the white beat, the Negro fulfills the liberal's demand that he entertain plus the radical's demand that he symbolize the results of reactionary oppression plus the Harlem thrillseeker's demand that he act out the primitive in all of us...
...I talked with about 285 male beats and directly or indirectly queried about 205 concerning their possible illegal use of drugs, of whom only 14 denied any such use whatever...
...White beats should be given credit for the best of conscious intentions, but it is disheartening how regularly their actions confirm that old Negro proverb, "Whenever you see a white man with a colored man, the white man wants something from the colored man...
...This is not because they are aware that "just fooling around" with heroin almost always leads to addiction, for there is hardly a heroin addict alive who didn't know that to begin with...
...Conversely, a few beat men hustle themselves a couple of nights a week in uptown homosexual bars, making enough money to stay straight in the Village the rest of the week...
...would be charitable indeed to say that a tenth of the beats are concerned to write...
...The theory put into practice gets rid of "artificiality" by getting rid of art...
...Such implicit ideologies are often overtly and totally unideological...
...The figures are exact for those denying illegal use of drugs...
...Many younger beats have been thoroughly socialized to drug-taking without ever having been socialized to drinking, and are teetotalers when it comes to alcohol...
...Apparently Negro and Puerto Rican areas at first felt the pinch as much as the Village, not merely because of the syndicate pullout but because many more white junkies began trying to score from them...
...During the past four months (May through August) there have been recurrent shortages in the Village marihuana supply...
...they gain by giving up the evil effects of meaningless work, gadgetry and the mass media...
...III There has been in three years a great proliferation of Village coffee shops, chiefly because square patronage makes them profitable...
...Whether he will surpass the limits imposed by beat ideology or remain an extraordinarily gifted primitive is problematical...
...Each of the three words "organized social movement" sounds obscene to the beat's ears.* And though naturally amused to see some of his fellows such as Allen Ginsberg achieve notoriety and shake up the squares, he doesn't regard Ginsberg or anyone else as his "spokesman" (much less "leader") in the sense that squares conceive of spokesmanship...
...Contrary to what I expected among the non-junkies, this avoidance is typically not a rationalization for any kind of work incapacity (such as one finds in, say, the neurotic sleeper who can't get up in the morning), but is almost always a matter of conviction pure and simple...
...This freedom from routine * Beats quit jobs as soon as possible, seldom working a total of four months per year...
...VI Naturally, the Italian residents of the Village are going down fighting...
...also Alfred Lindesmith, Opiate Addiction (Bloomington, Indiana: Principia Press, 1947), p. 215...
...As early as 1938 David Maurer noted that due to the rapid decline of opium smoking much of its argot was being loosely transferred to other types of drug taking, "frequently without a full knowledge of the original meanings of the words transferred...
...Sensible of America's inequitable distribution of income and its increasing depersonalization ofwork and leisure and its Permanent War Economy, the beats have responded with the Permanent Strike...
...middle class, $4500$ 9000...
...If it means that the beat • This and other intelligent objections to the beat life-style can be found in the anonymous "open letter to the beats from a spy deep in enemy territory," Beatitude No...
...Nor was it necessary, except with a few paranoid-homicidal types, to keep from them my disagreements or the fact that what I wrote would in good part be critical...
...But the cops have the judge lecture the male beat that he is barred from the Village and will be rapped the next time he's found there, so now he stays east of Third Avenue...
...Most square articles on "the beats" go astray because beat writers, being highly visible, get all the attention and thus a small and atypical part is taken for the whole...
...The phrase is obsolete, the activity obsolescent...
...typically more tolerant than political sectarians, more willing to accept an outsider who makes an honest attempt to understand them...
...The beats of course can't make bail...
...parity between beat theory and practice than in the role that Negro beats, wittingly or unwittingly, are forced to play for white beats...
...To estimate the proportion using marihuana, it would not be far wrong to simply reverse the above estimates concerning beat junkies...
...17-20...
...For humorous effect, beats will sometimes use a term that is no longer current except among square writers: "Got a reefer, man...
...11-39...
...The Negroes around Polelle's haven't much in common except such desires, and range from very beat to Ivy League types...
...These shortages have been more frequent and of longer duration than heroin shortages, a situation the beats say is truly extraordinary: "Man, there's never been anything like it...
...A few beats live off parents or girlfriends and are "social parasites" as pure as anyone living off dividend checks...
...work is bought at an enormous price: not only does scuffling often consume more time and brainpower than a square job,* but its effect on leisure is more stultifying than any job dissatisfaction would be...
...The nature and depth of the beats' relation to jazz have remained unchanged over the past three years, except that these years have produced some new heroes (e.g., Ray Charles) and a new villain (for some beats, Ornette Coleman has replaced Dave Brubeck as the arch fraud...
...The cops, discovering that the girl is underage, point out to the couple that if anyone talks about the miscarriage they will have to charge her as a sexual delinquent and him as contributing to her delinquency...
...386-397...
...Furthermore, their ideological refusal to work is not essentially a product of neurosis, even for the most neurotic of them, but is largely cultural in origin...
...If the three hundred and more beats I talked with are in any way representative, then many journalistic detractors of them—sometimes misled by ambiguities in "The White Negro"—have made utterly false equations between the teenage hoodlum and beat worlds...
...upper class, $9000 or more...
...ence between the white man's attitude toward Indians and toward Negroes is that the Indians were never slaves...
...Beats suffer not from political apathy but from political antipathy...
...Beat marihuana smokers not only confirm this, but indicate that even after the user has internalized group norms and thus can get high alone, his drug-taking continues to have a much more social quality than that of the heroin user...
...for example, Priest Ofuntola Oserjeman, Orisha: A First Glimpse of the African Religion of Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad and now U. S. A. (N...
...Users unanimously state that this has not been due to an increase in Village arrests but entirely to another factor: the syndicate some time ago decided to pull out of the drug business at least temporarily—this is what the Apalachin meeting was about—because of successful government prosecution of some very big shots (Genovese, Stromberg, et al...
...A similar change seems to have taken place in the ideology of jazz musicians...
...And this ideology does mean that white beats meet with Negroes more often than white squares usually do...
...Indeed, some white Village pushers and users of heroin moved to the more racially mixed areas of the upper west side and lower east side...
...and thus get seats on the rim of the pool and on the steps leading down into it...
...But most beats of several years' standing have at one time or another—usually justonce—tried the expedient of working barely long enough in a given year to be eligible for unemployment compensation...
...it will hardly do to call these beats "exhibitionists" just because squares have lately stolen their signals...
...f In the opinion of some beats, which I share, the new teenage beats will end up producing proportionately fewer junkies than older groups have done...
...there are goatees instead of 12-inch peg pants, etc...
...but more than occasionally beats are also slugged by junior hoodlums from the local Catholic Youth Organization—described by one beat as America's only juvenile gang with a lawyer on retainer...
...Otherwise there seems nothing unusual about the religious origins of the beats...
...and as often as not, such couples have managed to stick together only by replacing sex with the symbiotic cement of mutual drug addiction.** X For obvious reasons beat drug-taking is a furtive affair, and hence few outsiders realize that it is a totally pervasive part of beat life, both as an activity and as a topic of conversation...
...of Chicago, 1954), P. 68...
...They totally "resign" from society in so far as this is possible, not least of all from its politics, and reject extreme political sects with no less vigor than they reject major parties...
...or parks, where one has a 50-50 chance of not being awakened by the police...
...I summarize one of many incidents: A beat couple are set upon and stomped by the C. Y. 0. gang...
...The other addicting opiates and synthetics—morphine, codeine, demerol, dolophine, pantopon, etc.—are all used freely by junkies when available, but in the Village they are available less often than heroin or barbiturates, and no beat junkie seems primarily addicted to one of these drugs as such...
...as a group they seem the most psychologically disturbed of all beats and as often as not are remittance men, i.e., are sent money by their parents to stay away from home.* The composition of the Village beat population today, compared with that of three years ago, shows several other changes in addition to the greatly increased number of young teenagers...
...Although beat heroin users and beat marihuana smokers are part of one subculture, they tend to split into two separate groups when it comes to the specific activity of taking drugs, each developing its own customs...
...The very concept of office is nonexistent in any beat group...
...Although the white beat grants the Negro a fuller role than other white "pro-Negro" groups do, he does it merely by compounding the limited roles those groups demand...
...Rechy's story is in Big Table, vol...
...XIV Both white and Negro beats are notably given to calling a spade a spade...
...But apart from the music itself, and the fact that now one merely listens to it at Birdland instead of stomping to it at the Savoy, not much has really changed...
...Given the system's values, the method chosen usually represents a quite rational police estimate as to how severely the holdout needs to be punished—whether it is best to just scare him, or have him fined, or cause him expensive repairs, or close him for a bit, or have the S. L. A. lift his liquor license, or send him to jail...
...Far from being lumpen, beats are more keenly aware of the range of political alternatives than is the average voter...
...The Connection is published by Grove Press...
...During the past three years the beats have produced some permanently valuable additions to American letters...
...I mean, lots of studs've been eighty-sixed from bars but he's the first one eighty-sixed from the whole fucking Village...
...VII, no...
...16, July 1960, no paging...
...second, because I agree, as any socialist must, with many of their criticisms of modern society...
...Most beats scuffle...
...The kids under twelve usually restrict themselves to throwing water bombs and feces down on the beats from Macdougal Street rooftops...
...Generally, the only real hindrance proved to be that the beats, who by definition avoid work, are nightpeople...
...True, most beats are decidedly neurotic...
...Many a beat, sociable enough with other beats, goes for weeks at a time without engaging in a single real conversation with a square, his "conversation" with squares being limited to the few ritualistic phrases required to make food purchases, etc...
...Except for a few upper-class places north of Washington Square, every Village coffee shop or bar or restaurant, beat or non-beat, pays "grease" to the syndicate as well as to the cops.* Many younger Italians of course make violent efforts to roll back the beat invasion, especially during summer with everyone in the streets...
...Instead of worrying about the Negro becoming "too fay-oriented" the white beats might consider accepting him in his inescapable aspect of Negro-wanting-to-be-white...
...It is said that some ex-Village pushers of marihuana * "Smack" is one of several terms for heroin...
...This conviction is so strong that many beats are willing to starve for it...
...But this forthrightness of speech and attitude, laudable as it may be, is not accompanied by much clarity of vision...
...Holy poverty" enforces comparative poverty of the mind...
...In one way this last is typical of the odd job the beat takes when, despite all his efforts to avoid it, he must work: he doesn't want to be seen working by other beats, and prefers a job away from the beat scene (except that it is considered all right to work in a beat coffee shop...
...The daily newspapers, except for the New York Post, ignore such things as much as they can, and even the Post dare not offend part of the readership by mentioning the C. Y. 0...
...But unlike our slick young technicians Corso shows some real talents (which cannot be taught): he often does have something to say, usually makes you feel that he feels what he's saying, and displays in abundance a virtue that is the keystone of fine poetry—loving, imaginative play with language...
...And some beats sit out the wee damp hours in Smith's, one of the restaurants in the area...
...But the biggest change in the composition of the Village beat scene, and in Village life generally, is the far greater absolute number and far greater percentage of Negroes...
...XI Almost all Village beats technically are literate, and some whites have even attended college, but at best a sixth are habituated to reading (none seem addicted) and far fewer are concerned with writing...
...Now, it is obviously easier to recognize ideologies wherever they are strongly institutionalized or highly verbal...
...Now, it happens that several prominent jazz musicians have been converted to Islam...
...The shops selected were of course non-Italian, though hardly any commercial establishment within blocks of the area doesn't have fire violations...
...The illegal use of drugs is one of the handful of things that characterize all male beats with very rare exceptions, and a good majority of the females...
...Negroes and Puerto Ricans controlled some distribution in their neighborhoods but were not equipped to fill entirely the hole that the syndicate pullout left in their own supplies, much less take over distribution elsewhere...
...The older ones, upset by the noise and the Negroes, this summer petitioned their political chiefs to do something—whereupon two of the most prominent coffee shops were closed by the Fire Department for violations, one of them later being permitted to reopen at half its former capacity...
...over 25, nearly eight to one.* About a dozen • These estimates differ astoundingly from those usually found in the literature on narcotics, where it is typically estimated that about 91 1/2 % of all New York drug users known to authorities use addicting drugs and about 8 1 % use non-addicting drugs men and two women stated that most beat women smoke marihuana but few are real "potheads" (devotees of marihuana) and that most smoke it mainly because their men do...
...apparently most come from families that would just as soon be rid of them...
...This psychic sharing among marihuana smokers reaches its peak in the "contact high...
...cit., p. 244...
...In the Village at least, Zen now appears to have been a beat fad whose only lasting significance in American intellectual history is that it (along with jazz-cum-poetry) marks the first time that a west coast bohemia exerted a major influence on an eastern one...
...Articles by beat writers, who belong nearly always to the publicity-seeking minority, implicitly deny this fact...
...Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), pp...
...Thus, among beats under 20, marihuana smokers would outnumber junkies nearly 14 to one...
...In so far as most beats, whites and Negroes alike, can be said to have a dominant intellectual interest, it is jazz music...
...Not only do they shuttle between New York and California, but they have their own "international set" whose principal stopping places are in Mexico, the Balearic Islands, and Paris...
...Beats are in fact more mobile than old-style hoboes...
...One of the rare exceptions is Caroline Bird, who nearly four years ago correctly noted of the beat that "his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to make everyone over in its own image...
...With respect to drugs there was the special problem that anyone investigating this area must of course convince the people involved that he is not a fink or a plainclothesman, and I was not always able to do so...
...Today, the big boosting scenes are Goody's and the Colony instead of the Rainbow...
...Their admiration for it is not requited, to judge by musicians' complaints...
...Most of the violence is directed against Negroes and much of it is focused in and near the main beat crossroads, Washington Square Park...
...over 25, about one out of nine...
...15, June 1960 (San Francisco), pp...
...At the hearing everyone plays it cool and all are released...
...Their anti-work ideology is not nearly so much a sign of inability to accept the reality principle as a sign of disaffiliation from particular, mutable realities...
...They are not apolitical but consciously and deliberately antipolitical, which is something else entirely, and, as a common attitude, something new in American history...
...But their intelligence and native talents are likely to be superior when not average, and their neuroses usually do not as such incapacitate them for holding jobs...
...rejects any rational political planning, it means equally that he is not going to be a sucker for any charismatic leader whether of the right or left...
...No one ever claimed they would make it go...
...Although beats are characteristically ignorant of history, even of their own history, most know the oft-discussed origin of "beat" as applied to the postwar disaffected...
...Such involvement is socially not very different from the relationship of adolescent whites to Negro jazz in several American non-beat and pre-beat bohemias...
...A few of the newer beat women are worn-out ex-prostitutes from the Times Square area, in their early twenties, who realized they had nothing to show for several years of hustling—no love, no money, no friendships...
...Try reading, say, Proletarian Literature in the United States...
...They are victims of a primitivist ideology that, in its oversimplified anti-academicism and anti-historicism, prevents many of them from reading much at all, prevents most of the others from reading anything written earlier than the day before yesterday, leads them into false and fatuous notions of "spontaneity," and keeps them from fully learning the technical skills involved in their art and fully exploiting whatever talents they may have...
...Less known are the police methods for handling those who contribute too little or the rare idealist who contributes nothing at all...
...And with the rare beat who conceded that the rat race occasionally could, with much prodding, be made to yield up work meaningful in itself, the argument quickly became the old interminable one about the virtues of remaining simon pure vs...
...between 20 and 25, about one out of 11...
...Even beats with numerous and continuing post-adolescent homosexual experiences typically do not feel the need to define themselves as homosexuals and create some sort of beat wing of the homosexual world...
...Maybe so...
...I'd guess that at any given time these homeless beats number not less than 150...
...The consensus is that marihuana supplies have not significantly decreased but in recent months have had to be spread over a suddenly expanded market...
...Today, hundreds of Negroes can be found in any number of Village coffee shops and bars, some of which, e.g., Polelle's, function mainly as places for Negroes who want white girls to pick up same...
...Although for most beats I did not obtain data on frequency of use, it seems certain that the majority use drugs at least once every couple of days, whether the drugs are addicting or non-addicting or a combination...
...V On the increase in the Village and its east-side adjunct are beats with literally no place to live, without even a slum sleeping-room...
...When the syndicate pulled out, for some junkies there was at first total panic...
...the Negro's desire for white girls is continually and subtly opposed by the white males, whatever their conscious beliefs may be, not merely in the terms with which one usually opposes a sexual rival but with such remarks as "X is too hung up on balling white chicks" or "Y's trouble is that he's too fay-oriented," etc...
...Panic," usually in the form of "there's a panic on," means that there is a drug shortage...
...The beats used to get high and roll around in the pool with the kiddies, fully clothed, until the Park Department erected signs restricting the pool's use to those under 12 years of age...
...13, Oct...
...Consequently, even among the non junkies there is wide spread malnutrition, and many instances of beat "passivity" owe as much to lack of food energy as anything else...
...Interest in Zen passed its peak over a year ago and has radically declined...
...I used the following rough-and-ready class definitions: lowerclass origin if parents annual combined income was under $4500...
...Today, despite the attention given to beats in the mass media, despite the consequence that some beats now resemble professional "angry young men" securing toeholds in the lower levels of our "establishment" (the slicker cheesecake magazines) and yearning for our peculiar version of the aristocratic embrace (Life), Miss Bird's observations are still generally valid...
...Y.: Grove Press, 1960), pp...
...but at this writing the police haven't bothered to replace his replacement, and the current fink, who is known to all the regular customers and knows that he is known, often gets baited with stage whispers of "Can anybody turn me on...
...This comes out most clearly, though not exclusively, in beat sex life...
...American intellectuals, and those of European origin especially, misunderstand this because they are prone to see every irrational excrescence in American political life as a sign of fascism round the corner (recall the panicky overinterpretations of MacArthur's "triumphal" return from Korea, etc...
...My talks with beats were not formal interviews and varied considerably in length...
...In this respect as in some others, it is misleading to rely on the beat literary record, where one can, occasionally, find a quasi-political stance...
...Among these writings are: Gregory Corso's poem "Marriage...
...Three junkies say that there have been a sharply increased number of sick junkies unable to support their habits at former levels, trying to taper off on such things as Cocinil, and hitting drugstores so often that some stores have been totally "burned down," i.e., refuse to supply even non-prescription items to known junkies...
...I use the word "beat" for brevity and ask readers to note that it obscures as much as it illuminates...
...But these shops cater also to beats from various parts of the city who want to avoid Village tourists...
...According to them, they really do accept the Negro in his totality...
...However, if one makes it clear to the beats, as I did, that he is essentially a square, he will run into some who will give him a rough time, he will occasionally be put on (a combination of being conned and being baited...
...Apart from questions of secrecy, it is hard to estimate the percentage of junkies among the beats because there are marginal cases (those who use addicting drugs occasionally but have not become addicts) and because some addicts cannot yet admit to themselves, much less to an outsider, that they have been hooked...
...Their bed-hopping "genitality" comes about precisely because they too are sexually impoverished—" orgastically impotent" in Reich's terms— and have yet to discover that in sex life there is no automatic passage from quantity to quality...
...Those who see the beats exclusively through their literature should remember that over 90% of the beats neither write for publication nor wish to do so...
...cit., pp...
...And some Puerto Ricans are beginning to enter the beat scene...
...This is the San Francisco magazine, not the rival Beatitude no...
...Complaints about increasing dilution are always common among junkies, the main reason being the junkies' increasing tolerance of drugs...
...this substantial minority is essentially passive...
...And the jazz world is the single non-beat segment of American society that often attracts beats...
...and hashish now work the uptown east side bars, and that earlier this summer two Village pushers took off for Provincetown when they discovered that what would be a $5 bag of marihuana in the Village was selling for $15 to the Provincetown sportscar set...
...Corso's poem is most readily available in Allen, op...
...In part this is the result of low-income Villagers moving eastward in the face of rising Village rents...
...Marihuana users were safe if they stayed on their own scenes, and were arrested only if they were discovered accidentally—typically if they were on a junk scene when the such as marihuana...
...Among them are "disorderly premises" (almost anything will make it stick), "finding" heroin in the place—one astonished response: "Man, don't crucify me, you know I only smoke pot"—and having a New York newspaper columnist blast the place until the owner comes across or the police are "forced" by the publicity to raid him...
...All types of beats at all age levels fail to establish deep and lasting sexual relationships...
...My italics their relations with squares to that bare minimum needed to live at all...
...So the Negro who finds his status intolerable sometimes concludes that if he can't change his skin, at least he can try to escape his status as an American Negro—can try to enter some halfway house by pretending to be a Jamaican or Haitian or whatever...
...the other figures are estimates, as I didn't start keeping strict count of these until part way through my investigation...
...Their meager amount of intellectual consumption is not only questionable as such, but of course also stunts their growth as intellectual producers...
...The several white beats I met who knew my earlier critique of them —unfortunately I met no Negro beats who knew it*—all disputed my claim that they accept the Negro only for his "Negro-ness" (as bringer of marihuana and jazz, etc...
...More, because much of it holds good for beats elsewhere...
...Consequently much of the information below, though gathered from Village beats, deals with general New York drug distribution...
...But that is no reason for even our social scientists to remain merely tourists and write, for example, as if beats typically were devoted to "conspicuous consumption of the self"—an absurdity comparable to suggesting that most homosexuals are drag queens...
...etc...
...But it has been very hot ever since the police stationed an informer there and one night arrested eleven people, and since then it has had a fink on more or less permanent detail...
...Opium itself is often available...
...Beats who use no illegal drugs are few...
...Although the white beat's attraction to the jazz world is often the very core of his "white Negro" role, there is little uniquely "beat" about all this...
...The argot is of course subject to rapid change...
...The "spontaneity" nonsense may be discerned not only, or even primarily, in Kerouacian prose, but in the myriad beat poems written according to the new poetic that has received its most erudite expression in the "write like you breathe" and "composition by field" prosodic theory * Still far less than 10%, however...
...But it is of the most tenuous sort...
...d) The number of New York marihuana smokers may indeed be several times the number of junkies, but the latter pose such a severe problem that narcotics police must give them near-total atten tion, and hence marihuana smokers rarely come to the attention of the authorities...
...To sleep, some drop in on friends who live in cheap lofts...
...IX In the Village beat world, as in all bohemias by definition, the socially disapproved forms of sexual behavior are tolerated if not encouraged...
...A full psychological analysis of the beats, which I do not attempt, should in general proceed along Eriksonian lines...
...B. Non-addicting Drugs...
...In other words an extraordinary number of male beats, whites as well as Negroes, are fully bisexual or in some cases polymorphous perverse.* They accept homosexual experiences almost as casually as heterosexual ones...
...Nor do they give up heterosexual involvements...
...and thus practice an inverted form of "keeping the nigger in his place...
...both come directly from a much earlier phrase, "to be on the hip," to be a devotee of opium smoking—during which activity one lies on one's hip...
...VII Beats avoid work...
...The inner circle consists of people who arrive by one p.m...
...e.g., public outcry leading to pressure from high brass, or an owner's strong political connections, or the owner of, say, an established homosexual bar being outbid by someone else who wants to obtain the local homosexual business...
...Nearly all Village beats most of the time and most of them all of the time want not even a hostile relationship with squares...
...Born 1930: The Unlost Generation," Harper's Bazaar, February 1957...
...There are many stories about marihuana being cut with bay leaves, oregano, etc., and about an increase in the number of "burns" (in which someone who claims he can obtain drugs takes money in advance and never returns).** Beats feel that the marihuana shortages, unlike those of heroin, have little to do with the syndicate lying low, for the distribution of marihuana has always been only slightly syndicate and mostly independent...
...Now all junkies can obtain heroin regularly again—a few believe that syndicate members previously unassociated with the drug traffic are entering it—but complain that the price has risen steeply in the form of greater dilution...
...The unusual breadth of beat sex life is accompanied by very little depth...
...Today's use of "hip" extends this process, for now the word has the generalized meaning of "in the know" and even among beat drug users doesn't always refer specifically to knowledge of drugs...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
