Major Kansas Beat Deity

Interview With Beat Poet Charles Plymell
By Jon Randall

Of Moccasins, Williams S. Buroughs said, "From the first paragraph the reader is drawn into the writer's space. Plymell has as much in depth to say about death as Hemingway did and a lot more to say about it in terms of the present generation stillborn into a world that can offer nothing. . . death from an OD. . . Death from a plane crash. . . Computerized death. . . He is saying a lot about life which has become chewed-over leftovers of death. . . 'A manifesto of ashes' . . . A very readable manifesto."

We ran into him at Ralph Ackerman's Facing Beat show. A small bohemian gathering at Gallery 16 in San Francisco's Warehouse district. The two-night event filled in a few details left out in the Beat Exhibition up town.

Goblin Magazine: What's your favorite Minor Etruscan Fish Deity?

Charles Plymell: Oh, I gotta wait 'cause last time I went there it didn't do it.

Goblin: Of all the scenes you've ever been a part of what do you think was the greatest scene, where you said: this is it!

Plymell: One would be in the 50's high on Oxy and/or Bennies wailin' in the clubs around K.C., Wichita's "Colored Town" or Oklahoma City. Driving the old Route 66. As whites, we could go into clubs with musician friends and talk and visit with artists like Fats Domino, Wilson Pickett, or even Charlie Parker, if we were lucky. Everyone was accessible because they weren't that famous and if you were cool and had a little booze or reef or bennies, you could really be happy. To put it in chronological order, this was before an old hipster by the name of Herbert Huncke hitch-hiked out of Chicago and happen to say "Man, I'm beat" to the Columbia student, Allen Ginsberg, so at that time, I knew nothing of the "Beats." But the hip language, like Lord Buckley laid down, and the bebop of Parker, et. al. was something they (the Beats) as well as a lot of hepcats left over from the 40's and the new hipsters wanted to emulate. The photo of me in pegged pants and one-button role jacket with a Mr. B (Billy Eckstine) collar beside my 54 Roadmaster was long before I heard of the Beats. And there were lots of hip people doing the same thing. The Beats just put it in a package over the next few decades. I realized that when you asked about other things happening historically, that many young people would associate it all with the Beats. It didn't happen like that, nor is it like that today. The "package" became more and more of a generic umbrella, but that's not the way it went down.

The second big scene for me happened when I moved to Ashbury St. in S.F. in '62 and met some of the old poetry people around the Auerhahn Press which was interesting but very tame, somewhat like the old bohemian scene around City Lights Books. Those were the old canons, the intellectual progeny of the literary 1920's. They were not ready for what was about to happen. Rexroth saw it coming and used to comment on what was going on, when I would visit him at his flat off the Filmore. I was dancing in the Haight-Ashbury completely out of my head on LSD and weed with some of my friends who are here tonight, when the scene was just beginning. You should ask Glenn. He remembers it all. No "hippies" yet. We called them "heads". "Did you see how many heads there were on the streets tonight?" We would say. This was before Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Rexroth or any of the old beats were aware of what was happening. Cassidy was running around. I met him in North Beach late '62 or early '63. McClure dropped by Glenn Todd and Justin Hein's place to see what was going on with the LSD. But he was such a "poser" as the skateboard kids say now. Bruce Conner had come back from Mexico with a suitcase full of marbles. We had Sandoz LSD. It wasn't called acid then and wasn't like what you got afterwards. (Except for Owsley). We worked up a rock'n roll ritual dancing to Ray Charles and then joined hands and really stepped into another world.

Goblin: Why aren't you part of the Beat Exhibition?

Plymell: I haven't seen the show and won't have time to on this trip, though some of my friends offered to take me. It's so expensive. Every time I'd think about it, S. Clay would call and we were off to God knows where. One can only crowd so much in a day. When Ginsberg called me in Cherry Valley about something to put in it, I probably sounded unenthusiastic. I suggested that Glenn Todd, who is in the audience now, and whom I've known since the above mentioned scene, is probably the only one who has magazines and memorabilia I did from that time. My collage show at the Batman sold out and someone would have to contact the owners. A friend of McClure's bought the largest ones. I don't have anything from that period (1962-63). Glenn still has Neal's driver's license that I drove Neal to get.

I just saw Ginsberg in Lawrence, Kansas at dinner with Burroughs. He didn't mention the show and I didn't either. We recited some Shakespeare of all things. He's assuming a very professorial role . At dinner, Ginsberg made the point that he no longer eats sugar. (We were all discussing our heart attacks.) Before Bill went to bed, he showed me the skull he had got in Mexico, sculpted in sugar. I said, well, at least Allen won't eat it. Burroughs chuckled and said, "No, Ginsberg won't eat my skull."

Goblin: When you were hanging with the Beats in the 60's did you have any idea that the whole scene would become legendary?

Plymell: The Beats had already been publicized. I came here in late '62 through some friends from Kansas, I met Dave Haselwood of the seminally famous Auerhahn Press, himself from Kansas and Bruce Conner and Michael McClure also from Kansas. Dave just drove in today for Glenn's soiree before we came here. Gradually, I met more poets:Lew Welch and Dave Meltzer. Dave Haselwood shared the Gough St. pad with me after I had lived there with Ginsberg and Cassady about a year or so after I lived in the Haight before it was "the Haight." Duncan and his scene. Ferlinghetti, who later published me. Dave had a big soiree for Jonathan Williams who screeched when one of a number of San Francisco poetry munchkins crashed the party and signed his guest book. Upon meeting Haselwood earlier, I said I had moved to Ashbury St. just off Haight St. to start a scene. I meant it to just sound hip, so in that sense, I didn't know the Haight Ashbury scene would become what it did. I preferred the Haight Ashbury because it was a nice little Russian neighborhood. You could get good Piroshkis there. The literary scene was not that important as it was during the "Howl" trail and a new sound was being born. Two entrepreneurial kids from Reno had sold their parking lot there and opened a "Head Shop" on Haight St. Later, Dave would suggest we go to a little club nearby and hear a new talent he'd got word of, Grace Slick. The Beats, Ginsberg, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, et.al. had done their thing and didn't know what was happening in the Haight until it was full tilt, until 1963 when they showed up at my Gough St. scene where I had moved to get out of the Haight.

But well before that, when we had LSD parties in the Haight while the scene was beginning we wrote Sandoz laboratory, that we needed some LSD to perform some experiments. And they were pretty fearful as in Tiger, Tiger. McClure would come by but he wouldn't take LSD then. He later wrote a book about drugs and later was on local T.V. as a guide/impresario for the Haight.

Goblin: Neal Cassidy is a legendary figure now. Did he really have that aura and magnetism around him when you were in his presence that he was going to become this Shaman dude?

Plymell: No, he was just a Phenomenon, not a Shamanonan.

Goblin: What gave him that energy, that whoom? Was it the drugs or just him?

Plymell: A combination. We had criss-cross bennies in my day, we'd go down to Mexico on some really strong Benzedrine. He always liked any kind of speed, methamphetamine before breakfast or after. He'd offer me some if he had a surplus.

Goblin: He was hard to understand, cold in some ways . . .

Plymell: He was defensive. He didn't want anyone to associate faster than he did, which kinda got to be a bore sometimes. Pretty soon it turned into his being the errand boy to go get a beer mainly because he was always driving around on bennies like I did in Colorado and Kansas, but he seemed concerned that he couldn't enjoy the literary landscape as well.

Goblin: What was your relationship to him exactly? Did you tolerate him because he was so charming?

Plymell: He was like many of the people I had run around with in the 50's in Kansas, so we became pretty good pals. I met him in North Beach before I met Ginsberg. I liked his action. It took me back to the 50's, and I liked that. Always doing something on the edge, but cool enough to let it go and not be in the scene for its publicity, which was very uncool in the 50's.

Goblin: Many people think Cassidy was a superman. How big was his penis?

Plymell: (opens his hand and measures from the bottom of his palm to the top of his middle finger -- about six inches). It didn't relate to his cock much you have to go back to ...

Goblin: And Burroughs?

Plymell: I don't discuss Burroughs' private life or anybody else's (unless they first discuss mine.) That's Ginsberg's genre. Besides Bill packs a 38 special.

Goblin: So that kind of compensates.

Plymell: Yeah.

Goblin: Is there any hope for the free press? There seems to be fewer and fewer places where we can leave the Goblin and there's a growing apathy now towards print in general.

Plymell: You should ask Al Cohen who is here now. He drove up from San Jose for the show. He did a marvelous packaging job for the Haight Ashbury scene based on his Oracle press. Now there will be more packaged control as it happens. But you won't notice it. You have to find a niche like NIGHT magazine in N.Y.C. which concentrates on interviewing the famous. I was hired by Random House to do a book on Kansas. They gave me three thousand advance but while I was there I heard the Great Voice speak, my oracle, like the Etruscan Fish thing, out in Kansas near a great rock outcrop. I went up this Trail North which intersected east and west. I was at a sacred Indian place. I was there with my son and my sister. She didn't hear it but we heard the spirit voice which admonished us that some things should not be revealed. They're out there. They know it's too late now anyway. The action Inviolated. The motion had begun by earlier violations. Harte Crane knew that, so did Kenneth Patchen. They were poets. Just keep your print interesting and important. Trends and fads will blur. More real poetry would help.

Goblin: Would you ever sell your soul if a corporation offered you enough money?

Plymell: Do you mean like Ginsberg, who endorses anything that is politically and profitably correct? A whore of Moloch? Burroughs answered that a long time ago with the rhetorical: Wouldn't you? If you party with the CIA, or politicians and poets that control public monies, it is like partying with the mob. So is he bought off?

Goblin: I don't know if he intended to be bought off. Gay became okay and left-wing became quaint.

Plymell: You have to know what's propaganda and what isn't. The thing you have to ask yourself is: when does the soup thicken?

Goblin: I wanted to get back to you guys crisscrossing the nation. I thought Cassidy, being a speed freak invented that.

Plymell: No, Kerouac just documented his trail. In the 50's, we were a pot and amphetamine generation. I had an Yma Sumac album before I heard of On The Road. That generation may have been influenced by Benzedrine that was issued during World War II. Many housewives then took Benzedrine to keep slim and take on the enormous task of raising a family. It was the national drug. As Burroughs said he was a prodigy from the amphetamine era. We know now that it caused a lot of problems for women who were pregnant as well for their offsprings.

I used to go in the old honky tonk bars where Hank Williams, Hank Snow and all the Hanks played. All the old cowboy musicians would have mason jars full of bennies or "sweethearts" dexidrene. In Kansas, we also had Oxy-biotic that was over the counter nose drops stronger than methamphetamine. In "colored town" around Kansas City Jazz joints it was pot and always nose inhalers that we sliced up the soaked cotton from inside the plastic and scarfed it down. I write about it in my book, The Last of the Moccasins. Much of that scene took place in the early 50's around Kansas City, where Charlie Parker was born. I had never heard of the Beats at that time. I gave my friend Mexican Criss-crosses and he drove all the way to Guadalajara in his '50 Ford talking all the way. I lay in the back seat and slept. Ask Brannaman, who is also here now, about Big Nora, who fought him to drive his '50 Ford in a get away scene. No we didn't know anything of the Beats at that time.

Goblin: How does this go into Burroughs being a junkie, and not being into Benzedrine that much?

Plymell: Well you see junk is a pure drug. Its derivatives are pure, and as a medicine it can't be beat for contraindications. Benzedrine is not a clean drug in that sense. The only thing wrong with junk is that many people get hooked on it. As you know, the late Herbert Huncke, who liked junk, turned Burroughs on to it. Burroughs liked it as well. Many doctors use it. Its derivatives can be used in a maintained dose, if the person's system tolerates it and it can be easily gotten. The problems come when the profit and crime element enters and when people cannot maintain themselves properly. It's a matter of preference. And for some, opiate derivatives act as speed. I just read the book, The Drug User that S. Clay bought me for the trip home. It contains a lot of information about drugs. My wife and I just returned from a memorial for Huncke that took place on the Lower East Side.

Goblin: Allen Ginsberg told us he feels that Morphine and Heroin are a better drug against depression and psychosis than the anti-psychosis drugs that are being prescribed now.

Plymell: That may be addressed in the book I just mentioned, but I'm sure that is true. I saw a special on the drug situation in England where the doctor gave M &H a clean bill of health....except that some people become addicted and increase to a point the drug takes over. You have to realize that the Narc conspiracy controls even the doctors and are trying to make it harder for them all the while. The pharmaceutical business is bigger than the oil cartels used to be. They're not about to give up their billions. The biggest Columbia cartels want to keep their business too. Both kinds of cartels can buy governments, big and small, and compete for lives and dollars, so you figure it out. Why do you think these cartels can get away with what they do? They buy Propaganda. They buy advertising. They buy government officials. Isn't that obvious? If Big Tobacco can get away with it, think what the bigger money can do. They even have enough elasticity power to allow you to disagree with them. That's what I'm saying about selling out. How do you know when the propaganda ends and the truth begins? We are an ignorant society and believe what we are told.

Goblin: It's a terrible conspiracy. But I was wondering, as opposed to Benzedrine, where the coolness of being a junkie came out of.

Plymell: Well I suppose it is a bit more glamourous unless it strings you out completely. Then it's not a pleasant scene. But opiates aren't for everyone and as Gore Vidal wrote in his famous essay, he wasn't going for that Fu Manchu stuff, getting hooked on one hit. There's a wonderful account in an old criminal book I have of someone who went to an opium den on Mott St. in the city. He laid out all his street clothes and money to lie down in another room. He didn't like it, got a headache and never went back. His belongings weren't touched. That was around the year Huncke was born. Imagine that scene today. We have certainly become a more evil society because of the drug laws.

Goblin: It's just nowadays there's a resurgence of junkies and Heroin use. It's not just rock stars but people in small towns are taking it.

Plymell: Legalize it and educate people and that will help. Most people like money rather than drugs anyway, but when you have a drug czar like General McCafferty, who, by the way, let his troops get chemically poisoned by Sadaam in the Gulf War say something like if you legalize marijuana for medical use, others may use it for fun....then it looks as if we're back to the same old ignorance and propaganda. I would assume that the Republicans would be the party to legalizing drugs because they're the party that touts free enterprise. I think in the next century we will look back on this whole drug thing like crawling in the bomb shelters in the 50's. They will fight the drug thing because of its enormous profits, but they may have a hard time stopping truth. The congressional hearings going on now chaired by Senator Hatch already resemble the old faces of the McCarthy era. He talks about Peyote in the same breath. They don't even let the Natives have their religion. The issue becomes one of morals when they try to have rational discussions. Maybe it is more of a religious war. Maybe the Mormons are trying to get even. They lied once and blamed Black Kettle's tribe for something he didn't do (out by that rock) just to have an excuse to decimate all his people, put the women's vaginas on their saddle horns, made purses from their breasts to sell on the streets of Sacramento and San Francisco. I'm not making this up. Check the historical accounts. The same officials are in the saddle again with their drug czar general. Watch out. If you legalize it, the wrong people will get a hold of it? Who has a hold of it now? It's an incursive sentence that replicates itself without meaning to further the propaganda of that fool Clinton who didn't inhale. Really. Every old pot head knows you don't have to inhale, just hold it in your mouth to get smoke to the brain. You blow the good stuff out immediately anyway. That's the way its smoked, isn't it? You don't have to inhale. Good lying, by God.

Goblin: That's what I want to say to you. Sincerely, from the bottom of your heart, are you an optimist about the future of American society? Are you totally cynical about all the repressions and homogenization of culture, and all the bullshit you see around you. Do you still see any grounds for optimism?

Plymell: As long as you keep it out of politics. Recently coming on the train from L.A. We were standing on the wrong side of the boxcar. I was watching a guy with a toxic-waste mask with the XXX on his forehead, just letting toxic fumes out. Big companies let it out all the time and blame it on each other or file an accidental release report. Our air is doing more harm to our brains than any drug. There was a preacher on the train saying at least Bob Dole has values, well there's no meaning in that word. Because they think of values of traditional mores in the culture; and there are no values because the brain can't connect with those former values in the first place because the relays have been coated with poison air. The re-uptake can no longer function. Drugs can't bring back those old synapses. All we can do is try to find out how damaged people are and try to make them better. For instance, I think lead has already taken a great toll. I can see it in the cognition and language of the young. Other toxins have taken their toll on the population. When I got off the train in New York State and turned on National Public Radio, do you know what I heard? An environmental show. An expert was visiting the Dorks and Wedgies' homes. Do you know what he said to them? "If you can see daylight through cracks in your house, that means cold air can enter." And you ask if there is hope? Think about it. The raccoon we had in our walls last winter had enough inferential empirical cognitive reasoning to make that association! Or maybe a raccoon's brain isn't affected as much by toxicity.

E-MAIL CHARLES PLYMELL


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