A call from Allen Ginsberg

Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie were two of my favorites. Victor was a skinny little Brit, a Penn graduate, who's long been a fixture on the offbeat New York literary scene, and Andrew, cum laude at Harvard, became the enfant terrible of big-time literary agents — known tellingly as “the Jackal” — with clients who range from the late Elmore “Dutch” Leonard to Salman Rushdie. He started the Wylie Agency in 1980, and they don't get any bigger.

Strangely, I never met Andrew, who remained in the Big Apple while Victor schlepped down to provincial Philly to deliver their loopy joint interviews with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Salvador Dalí, and Allen Ginsberg. I think I paid them $10 or $15 a pop. They didn't care. They were making their bones.

One time when Victor was in town, our mutual friend, the late poet Otis Brown — O.B., his bad self — brought him over to my apartment at Third and Bainbridge. We smoked some fine weed and then my girlfriend said she had to go out and said good-bye to everybody and split. Trouble was, she locked the door from the outside and took the only key with her and the only way to unlock that door was with that key. There were no latches or anything on the inside, so we were effectively locked in.

Now Victor Bockris, unlike me and O.B., didn't smoke much, and the weed really got hold of him and he told me he had to go out and get some fresh air. Well, when I told him about us being locked in, he went pale and I thought he was going to swoon dead away. So we got him to a comfy chair and, him being a Brit, I got him a nice mug of tea and, luckily, my girlfriend wasn't gone long. I wonder if Victor remembers that?

Bockris-Wylie really had big balls. Muhammad Ali was at his zenith then, the most famous and popular figure in the world. He was up at his training camp in Deer Lake in the Pennsylvania Poconos, when up show Bockris-Wylie wanting to interview him, but not as a boxer — as a poet! And Ali went for it like it was an opportunity from Allah Himself. Here was the Greatest, the self-proclaimed King of the World, and here were these two twerps in Brooks Brothers suits and weird accents who thought it would be interesting to interview Ali as a serious-ass poet. Whooee! He kept them up there for about a week, rapping and joking and having serious poetry talks and everybody loved it.

Their criterion for interviews was that the subject be interesting. "Interesting" was their trademark. I even think Victor said that being locked into my apartment was "interesting," despite his near panic.

Old Salvador Dalí was very interesting. He used to have these weekly soirees at his crib in New York and Bockris-Wylie became a fixture for awhile, and Victor brought down some pretty cool interviews. I think he liked to physically hand in the copy in sort of a Dickensian way. What with the train fare, Bockris-Wylie actually lost money writing for The Drummer.

Then they did this big two-part interview with Allen Ginsberg, who was riding at his highest then. We gave it a big play and got a lot of good response, and I decided to write an editorial about the whole deal.

I was just typing Allen Ginsberg's name when the phone rang and it was Allen Ginsberg himself.

“Allen! Jesus! I was just typing your name! Honest!”

“Look,” he said, “I haven't got time for any metaphysical bullshit about cosmic coincidences. Bockris-Wylie had some mistakes in that story, and I want them corrected in the next issue so that literary scholars 50 years from now will have the right information.”

That made sense even though I had never thought of The Drummer as a scholarly source. So Allen gave me the corrections and we ran them along with a little riff I wrote on the cosmic coincidence of his phone call.

I'm still amazed by it, even if he wasn't.