Me, Allen, Bill, Greg and Jack

I go down the Wild Street of Redondas, in the rain, it hasn't started increasing yet, I push through and dodge through moils of activity with whores by the hundreds lined up along the walls of Panama Street in front of their crib cells where big Mamacitas sits near the cocina pig pottery -

That's right Kerouac, what the hell, and why not. Anyways. What reminded me is, I was sorry to hear of the recent death of Jo Lustig, the Broadway agent who became a celebrated figure in the music and entertainment business. Lustig entered showbusiness as a press agent in an era, when, as one writer put it, "the term still carried a certain Runyonesque savour, implying verbal dexterity, passionate enthusiasm, a skill in broad exaggeration and a talent for schmoozing in equal measure".

That's good. Because that's just the way it was when Joe and I were in our prime, moving and schmoozing with the guys and gals on Broadway, checking out the speakeasies, the molls, the high spenders, the high kickers, and Nathan Detroit's crap game; hanging with Harry the Horse, Dave the Dude, Big Julie and Little Isadore, keeping wide of the mob and always doing for a living the best we could: an occupation at all times greatly popular on Broadway. Those were the days, and nights.

I can also vouch for the fact that Jo Lustig was, as the obituaries have more or less put it, one hell of a raconteur. But one particular story I have to correct. According to one writer, this involved "a mythical night in the late 1950s where, it was told, the Beat authors Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac were gathered in a Greenwich Village bar, `and nobody said anything interesting . . . ' "

Hell, that's wrong. All wrong.

In the first place there was nothing mythical about this particular night. I oughtta know. I was there. I wasn't part of no myth. This was real. It was a balmy June evening in, I reckon, 1958 or '59. There was me and Joe Lustig, Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac, and Joe obviously forgot about William Burroughs, though how could you, it's fair to ask. And the venue, one of many that night - was McSorley's Ale House, a drinking den of some repute even then, not least for its sensible "no molls" policy.

Not that I had anything against molls in their place, you understand, but that place just wasn't McSorley's. It was Mindy's, it was the Bohemian Club, it was the Roney Plaza on Miami Beach, or the Sixteen Hundred Club or 50 others, but it was never McSorley's. Given this sort of get-together, I mean all that high-falutin' literary talent hanging about, you mighta thought we talked about books. Wrong.

Here's how I recall it. Joe Lustig talked showbusiness and schmoozing, with the barman, who was crazy for a film part - any film part, and was given good advice. Ginsberg was crazy for the barman - any barman, but the barman wouldn't listen, except when Ginsberg ordered five more vodka martinis, which was pretty often that night, as I recall.

So Ginsberg talked to himself, though he may well have been thinking he was talking to somebody else, because as I recall, he had all the answers to his own questions. A year later he published this dialogue with himself as a poem. Pretty good poem, too.

Greg Corso talked about life in a juvenile institution and life in journalism, and damned if he, or we, could tell them apart. Meanwhile Burroughs had his stupid big Colt 45 along and between martinis was taking potshots at the dart-board. "Target practice" he was saying, over and over. I don't recall anyone was playing darts. Leastways, anywhere near Burroughs. And certainly not after he produced the live snake.

So me and Kerouac got to talking. We talked over lots of things. A Jesuit upbringing. Jazz. Sex. Spontaneous prose. Generosity. Consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration. Football. The Merchant Marines. The luminous emptiness of paranoiac confusion. Pool halls. Chill dawns and drugs and how the old moon looks above mid-America from the side of the road after a long hard night at maybe 4.45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in May.

As I recall it, Kerouac was just back after some kind of crazy trip. I don't mean drugs, though I don't doubt drugs were part of it. He'd been on the road, that's all I knew. With that freaky Cassady kid. Yeah, Neal. Now he had the whole story written up on a couple of rolls of cheap paper. Right there in McSorley's. Did I want to read it? Naw.

"Nobody said anything interesting?" That what Joe Lustig said? Well, hell, I reckon Joe just wasn't listening.