Lately, I’ve been posting entries about old issues of Untamed, one of my favorite vintage men’s adventure magazines.
Untamed featured painted covers by two great pulp artists who are more widely known for their science fiction magazine covers, Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller and Leo Morey.
It also featured some wild stories that I find highly entertaining, though probably for different reasons than originally intended.
Consider, for example, the supposedly true story about Beatniks from the February 1959 issue of Untamed, titled:
“‘BEAT’ GIRLS: Worshippers of Zen and Sin?”
In this exposé-style piece, author Gilbert Nash sets out to answer that question with his buddy Bob.
Gil is a New Yorker who knows some Beats in the city. Bob is said to be a writer of detective novels from Bloomington, Indiana.
Bob tells Gil he wants “to get a close look at this Beat Generation he’d been hearing so much about, and see if he could get some idea what makes it tick.”
“I’ve read Kerouac and Ginsberg and all the so-called spokesmen for the Beats,” he confessed, his brow furrowed. “I’ve read all the books and articles I can find claiming to explain the whole thing. And frankly, all I get is more confused.”
Bob isn’t a fan of Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, or any of the other legendary Beat writers.
But he is especially intrigued by a recent article he’d read “about the kids who held plush Madison Avenue jobs on weekdays and indulged their Beatness on weekends, at ‘cool’ parties.”
That article “described how all the girls take off their blouses and bras and walk around with nothing on top.”
With this tantalizing image in mind, Gil and Bob set off on their “quest for Beatness.”
During the course of the evening they go to a Beatnik party and actually do encounter one topless “Beat Girl,” plus some others who are like, real crazy, Daddy-O.
She’s a 21-year-old who has already bedded hundreds of guys.
Joannie “keeps track of the number of men she sleeps with and announces the running total out loud at the appropriate moment.”
The “moment” is during sex. Joannie likes to shout out the guy’s number (“297 or 369 or whatever the number is”) while they’re going at it.
“It can be pretty disconcerting,” Gil notes.
Then there’s the blonde girl “who was not nude from the waist up, but might as well have been.”
“She wore a thin, faded man’s shirt, wide open at the throat and tied in a knot beneath her large breasts. There was a huge expanse of skin visible between it and her ragged shorts, which were obviously the barely surviving remains of a pair of dungarees.
She was talking in a low, steady drone. ‘Baby,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me about the past, baby. There is no past. The past is dead. The past is dead, baby. The future isn’t here yet. Maybe there’ll be a future, maybe there won’t. We’re in between. And in between is nowhere, baby. Nowhere.”
Man oh man, I dig that groovy Beatnik lingo!
I also dig the story’s unintentionally funny anecdote about how Beats liked to smoke peyote:
“‘Pot’ is a word that is used loosely, like most words these Beat kids use,” Gil explains in the story. “But generally it means the dried leaves of the peyote cactus, which are made into cigarettes and smoked. Though the stuff has obvious narcotic effects, for some odd reason it has not been made illegal in New York yet, and lots of the kids use it to get ‘high,’ or ‘far out.’ Aldous Huxley wrote a whole book about the sensations he had when he tried it, and now uncounted young people in New York grow the plants, dry the leaves, and smoke the stuff for kicks.”
The part about Aldous Huxley has a basis in fact. It refers to his groundbreaking 1954 book The Doors of Perception.
It’s also true that peyote and the psychedelic alkaloid it contains — mescaline — were not yet illegal in most states or under federal drug laws when Gil wrote his story in 1959.
Peyote is a cactus plant that has no leaves. And, it’s not smoked. Indeed, it’s not even smokable.
As noted on the Mystica web page about the use of peyote by American Indians and other fans: “Smoking peyote is impossible because it simply will not burn in a pipe or cigarette.”
I also seriously doubt if many people in New York were growing peyote in 1959. And, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone refer to anything but marijuana as “pot.”
If you think Gil’s knowledge gap about peyote and his search for topless Beat Girls sounds amusing, I think you’ll enjoy reading his story “‘BEAT’ GIRLS: Worshippers of Zen and Sin?”
You can read the entire story in PDF format by clicking this link.
And, if you like that, you should also check out some of the other vintage drug stories I’ve posted here in case you missed them, like the LSD story “I WENT INSANE FOR SCIENCE” and the one that has a photo purportedly showing cocaine being made from the pods of cocoa trees.
They’re ginchy!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Comments? Questions? Corrections? Post them on the Men’s Adventure Magazines Facebook Group.
Further reading, listening and viewing about “The Beat Generation” (and peyote)…
