I'D TITLE THIS "PEOPLE WHO DIED" BUT I DON'T WANT JIM CARROLL COMING TO KICK MY ASS

"I  have no heroes," John Lydon (aka Rotten) once told an interviewer. "They're all useless."

T rue enough, coming from the man who no doubt knew that one day he, too, would be cleaned up and brought before screaming kiddies half his age doing a Budweiser reunion tour. It is useless to have heroes, because we never allow our heroes to do anything other than what we think holds up to the moral code they set for us. They're never permitted to change, and therefore, they're never given the luxury that you and I have of fucking up. They never have the opportunity to follow a bad idea, and if they do, then they've sold out.

L ydon's quote has stuck with me ever since I first heard it, when I was nineteen and deeply into punk music. It made me very selective about who my heroes were, and I made sure they were all going to be damned useful.

A llen Ginsberg was a hero to a lot of folks, myself included, because he followed through with a lot of bad ideas.

I  may not have cared much for a lot of Allen Ginsberg's literary output, but I had to tip my hat in respect to him for his actions on a number of occasions -- first, for his appearance in the 1993 documentary "Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys", for his frankness in discussing his pedophilia and earliest homosexual memories. Second, for his standing in the front lines and getting bashed in the head at the 1968 Democratic National Convention here in Chicago. And third, for his influence on William Burroughs, an artist whom I have always admired, in his deciding to become a writer.

S o I was sorry to hear about Ginsberg's passing -- almost as sorry as I was about the equally recent death of Japanese film producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who produced several of Akira Kurosawa's movies (including Ran and The Hidden Fortress, the film that was cited by George Lucas himself as the strongest influence on Star Wars) and brought us the ever-memorable character of Godzilla. Tanaka's body of work, in many ways, influenced me as a poet far more than anything Allen Ginsberg ever wrote.

B ut it's strange looking at this now, because it's really what Ginsberg did, more than what he wrote, that affected me -- the way that he transformed himself from a guilt-ridden nineteen year old, punishing himself for his homosexuality and viewing it as an illness to be cured by psychotherapy, into a wildly experimental poet who wrote rapturous verse describing his giddiness about sex and drugs, thus becoming an advocate of the lifestyle that he came to finally view as natural to himself.

H is victory in that struggle is what made him a hero to me.

H eroes are useless, if we take from them only the result of their actions -- in order for them to be really useful, we have to examine their struggles and apply them to our own lives. What passes for heroes these days -- billionaire rock stars and overly made-up film and tv personalities -- have no marks of the struggle, and are therefore useless. The struggle for them was becoming famous.

B ut for others, the struggle is getting up and making it through the day. A waitress at a truck stop trying to feed three kids on the tips left by truckers and vacationing families passing through is a bigger hero than a spoiled kid banging a few chords on a guitar. Don't mistake celebrity for heroism. I may have enjoyed Godzilla more than I enjoyed Ginsberg, but Ginsberg hit my life harder, and changed it forever.

S o maybe heroes aren't useless after all.