I Want to Go Out Like Leonard Cohen.
I was just a post-punchball street kid from The Bronx when I started college at CUNY. Steps from the Number Four el train, I signed up for classes with a creative writing professor named Jerome Charyn. He came from The Bronx too, and he made it, in the world of letters.
I wanted to learn from him and expand my life, which until then was a tightly proscribed four-mile wide radius, from Inwood to the Southern Boulevard, from the derelict Yonkers pier to the big ballpark on River Avenue.
“Just a crazy kid with a dream.” That was me. I wanted to make a life with words. Audacious. At sixteen I had no idea what that really meant, except that for some reason it made everyone I knew fume, then spit: “Where do you come shinin’ off?”
Charyn introduced me to new friends, in print, and to that, I said “bring it on!”: Roethke, Rexroth, Kees, Ginsberg, Kinnell, Plath. John Hawkes, Kesey, Bellow, Borowski, Cleaver, Baraka, Claude Brown, Ellison, Baldwin, Elkin, Burroughs.
And then he assigned Leonard Cohen.
Leonard Cohen? I knew Cohen from his songs, free-form FM favorites such as “Suzanne”, “So Long Marianne”, “Sisters of Mercy.” But books?
Yes: “Beautiful Losers,” a book that made my provincial puppy head explode, as I knew it would, as soon as I picked up the Bantam paperback in the college bookstore. The jacket read: “The most daring new novelist on the scene today! Unexpurgated!” For me, it was “Naked Lunch” to the third power.
The years passed. The world took its toll. And Cohen was proved right, again and again.
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And: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody knows the fight is fixed…the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes; everybody knows.”
He kept at it and so did I.
https://www.amazon.com/Home-Front-Martin-Kleinman/dp/098250411X I always had my day job, and I always kept making stories. Cohen kept making songs and, then, got back to touring; for him, the fight was fixed: he was cheated out of royalties and needed the dough.
Some celebrities become an “oldies act.” They trade on past glory, befouling their legacy. They go for the easy applause, or the cheap laugh, or the familiar movie character — the bit they know will work. Not Leonard Cohen. I saw the Cohen exhibit recently at the Jewish Museum, in Manhattan. You should go. This was a man, a real mensch. He kept pushing and plugging, never complacent. In the exhibit’s startling video of Cohen’s life-work, the seventy-four year old teases about an earlier time in his life: “I was sixty then, just a crazy kid with a dream.”
The decades passed. He never stopped challenging us, or himself. I saw him at Barclay’s in 2012, a spry seventy-eight. “I promise you we’ll give you everything we got,” he said early on, and he sure did.
To the very end, his lyrics rendered the harsh illumination that makes the cockroaches dance crazy on the late night kitchen counter of life. His secret chord still holds pan-generational appeal, as evidenced by the mixed crowd at the Museum.
His truths are eternal: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So, when at last I see the dealer, and I’m out of the game, I hope it’s like Leonard Cohen, who gave it everything until it was time to relent and sing, with pride, honor and grace: “Heneni, heneni – I’m ready, my Lord.”