It is 1946, Kerouac has just come back to town, and Ginsberg is
eager to give him a demonstration of the insanity of the postwar
city, the result of the "atomic disease" now afflicting America.
Radioactive fallout has turned the population into "zombies,"
Ginsberg says, "Locked up in the sad psychoses of themselves." His
experiment is to be performance art, madcap mayhem undertaken in the
interests of metaphysical hunger and social prophecy.
Ginsberg and Kerouac get on the subway at Times Square. Once
seated, Ginsberg holds a newspaper in front of his face and pretends
to be reading it. He has torn a hole in the middle of the page,
however, and a melancholy old gentleman seated opposite him with his
small grandson is soon aware of the "glittering eyes of a madman
burning triumphantly into his." Ginsberg has told Kerouac that
his "victim" will show signs of "paranoid persecution," and in fact
under Ginsberg's unrelenting gaze, the old man becomes extremely
uneasy. Others in the car look pointedly away or assume expressions
of outraged indignation.
But, contrary to Geinsberg's prediction, several people,
including a man coming home from work, a young student and the
grandson, are transfixed with delight at his antics. The little boy
jumps up, sticks his face in the hole and stares pop-eyed, back at
Ginsberg. Then he claps his hands and cries, "Do some more, Mister,
do some more!"
Soon everyone in the car is laughing. Ginsberg's experiment has
apparently backfired; he's been outwitted. But he's not upset. He
needed collaborators, not victims, people ready to drop their
preconceptions at divine folly's cure, and in New York he has found
them.
--Ann Douglas
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