what it was like to crawl around in life’s dirty bowels for forty years?

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

A lot of that information concerned her relationship with the late poet Allen Ginsberg. They had met around ’56 or ’57. They shared an apartment on Russian Hill and for some period of time maintained a life together, with Mom riding the hills of San Francisco on the back of Ginsberg’s motorcycle. Occasionally, they’d show up at the home of my mother’s sister, where Ginsberg enjoyed raiding the well-stocked liquor cabinet. It seemed she was crazy about him, and a letter that he wrote to Jack Kerouac indicated likewise: “I met a great girl who digs me, I dig—twenty-two, young, hip (ex-singer, big buddy of Brubeck, knows all the colored cats, ex-hipster girl) pretty in a real chic classy way—she has a wild mind, finer than any girl I met . . .—young life in her and real sharp. What a doll . . . Not a stupid square in any way, but not a flip. Instant digging each other—how wild and great.”

Sometime after the breakup, Mom, drunk and despondent, went to the apartment that Ginsberg was sharing with Peter Orlovsky and pelted the window with bottles and rocks, yelling, “You can fuck me in the ass, if that’s what it’s all about!”