The Terrible Truth About Beatniks

I wrote this a while ago, and for some crazy reason removed it from the Pigsty.  Now it seems the time is right to post it again.  I’d just been rambling along about life as a teenaged suburban beatnik in the Bay Area in 1959, the high water mark of Beatnikdom…

While the Baby Beatniks are heading up the Bayshore Freeway towards the City of Gold, the fabulous Don’t Call It Frisco mighty night beacon signaling to freaks and rebels and adventurers everywhere, let us stop to consider exactly what was this thing they weren’t?

The first, essential thing to know about beatniks is this: there was no such thing as a beatnik. Beatniks were a newspaper and television invention just like flower power and, I don’t know, fill in the media hype for your own generation here. And hopeful wannabe teenagers like us rushed in to fill the void. And eventually became somebody real.

According to the media, you could tell a beatnik because beatniks wore berets and dark glasses and goatees and snapped their fingers a lot. In fact, they looked just like Dizzy Gillespie, the great bop trumpeter who had nothing whatsoever to do with the beat generation, except they probably listened to his records.

There was a beatnik spider in the newspaper comic strips who looked a spider version of Dizzy Gillespie, except he was a beatnik. Who knew why? Maybe he spun psychedelic spider webs.

The Hearst comic strip Jiggs and Maggie suddenly gained a beatnik nephew who was beat because he hung around their house all day, ate sandwiches and wouldn’t work. Day after day, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip savagely satirized beatniks and peaceniks as stupid but dangerous comsymps (communist sympathizers) out to destroy America for their kicks.

Television offered Maynard G. Krebs, a beatnik comic sidekick who looked and acted just Archie’s pal Jughead, including the sandwiches and fear of girls.

Hollywood churned out an epic supposedly based on Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans, but only the title remained when they finished their own story about crooks invading the coffee houses of Upper Grant Avenue. Mardou Fox, the novel’s black heroine from the Oakland slums was played by Leslie Caron looking so French and waif-like in sadeyed beret and little goatee. Kerouac’s character and Leslie Caron were turned into proto-flower power beatnik lovers who in their big scene bought all the balloons from a wise old balloon salesman and set them free to soar lyrically past Coit Tower as Andre Previn’s score soared lyrically too — free as a discarded sad-eyed waif painting left on a rainy San Mateo sidewalk.

Then the crooks came to the big poetry and jazz reading with guys snapping their fingers instead of clapping and Roddy McDowell, who they thought was a big beatnik turned out to be a crook and tried to blame his crimes on Jack Kerouac who fought it out with him in the alley while pretty French Mardou looked on in her beret. “Oh Jack, my hero!” Then they got married and went off to live in a subdivision in San Mateo.

Back in the suburbs, high school kids put on beatnik parties where you could tell they were beatniks because they came wearing sweatshirts and flip-flops.

Gypsy Girl (authentic sixteen year old San Mateo Baby Beatnik) in conversation, Spring 1960: “It’s a joke, man.”

Gary Cooper in unmade for television movie: “Smile when you call me a beatnik, or I’ll know you are the Enemy and I will be forced to fill you full of lead.”

We were forced to watch while the media trivialized, superficialized, and sucked the life from everything we stood for. Except we didn’t know what we stood for. But not that!

Actually, the whole sad beatnik circus was good for us. Exercised our ‘Us versus Them’ mentality. Taught us not to trust the media. If they could do this to poor harmless beats, then who else could they suck the life from to sell papers or commercials?

And it was good for the media too — a handy dress rehearsal for their assault on the hippies seven years later.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

When in doubt, jump and swing.

Gypsy Girl, Spring 1960

Dig? The Baby Beats weren’t real beatniks. But there were no real beatniks, so who cared? What we could do and wanted to do and did do was burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. This is not a beatnik aspiration but a human aspiration. Is this all there is? Not if we could help it!

Note: The happy beatnik is Maynard G. Krebs, goofy sidekick of teenager Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, sitcom which ran from 1959-63.