Here's Another Article On Lucien Carr!!!!

[Dave The Dov]

I met Lucien Carr in a bar in New York in 1977. At 51, he was slender,
handsome but getting crinkly-faced, with still a mane of straight blond
hair
just starting to grey. He was easily the most debonair and
worldly-wise man
I'd met up to that point. His knowledge of women, for instance,
stunned
me--but I was a green kid, a former Catholic, from the good old
Midwest. He
talked about women he'd fucked the way my neighbors in Lyons, Illinois,
might have talked about tomatoes they'd bought in the market. I
couldn't
help liking the guy. He was defensive with me at first--and it was
clear he
still hated "the murder" of David Kammerer being brought up, with his
name
attached. There had just been a really salacious piece about the
killing in
NEW YORK magazine, I think, by Aaron Latham, and Carr was still
smarting
from it. He had three kids and didn't want them thinking badly of him.
But
once he saw that I was OK, just a little naive, and that I really loved
Jack's works, he opened up to me. He told me how impressed he'd been
by
Jack's looks--"the coal black hair, the startling blue eyes"--and how
he was
even more amazed by Kerouac's huge heart. "Every person Jack met was
someone new for him to love," he told me, and I could hear the love for
his
friend in Lucien's cracking voice. Later, and on a few other
occasions, he
took me back to his loft, where his dog peed on my shoulder bag and
recording equipment. He just laughed at my embarrassment and misery.
He
was a tough cookie, and he wasn't going to allow me to tape anyway. I
regret that, since it would be so wonderful to hear his voice now on
tape,
talking about those early days with Jack. (Even though, as of this
writing,
all 300 MEMORY BABE interview tapes are still locked up at U Mass,
Lowell,
special collections, because of threats from John Sampas. And I am
still
fighting a lawsuit to try to free them.)
What I have are my notes from that interview, which at least will never
be
put under lock and seal. Lucien told me never to take Jack too
seriously
when he wrote--that he invented more than he admitted. Jack wasn't
really
in love with "Mardou Fox" (actually Alene Lee, also now deceased) in
THE
SUBTERRANEANS, Lucien said. She was just good sex, but Jack had
inflated it
for the sake of the novel. I later learned that Lucien himself had had
an
affair with Alene--and that when he'd refused to marry her, she set
fire to
his house.
These were crazy, wild people who led the most improbable of lives, and
they
were all lucky to have had Jack Kerouac to chronicle those lives, or
most of
it would now be forgotten. Lucien clearly knew this and felt that
way--gratitude to Jack for making him a "hero" in the DULUOZ LEGEND,
even
though he was mad that Jack finally broke his promise never to write
about
the murder--since he told almost the full story in VANITY OF DULUOZ.
Despite having spent two years of his youth in a reformatory, Lucien
clearly
regarded himself as a lucky man. And frankly, I feel lucky myself that
I
got to know him too--if only a little.
Rest in peace, Claude de Maubris, with your chewed-up beer glasses and
Lautreamont under your arm. You inspired a great American writer.

--Gerald Nicosia, February 3, 2005
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