BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Last night, I twice woke up to pee but I still had no memory of where I had seen yesterday’s sexy Tarrytown couple.
So, as planned, I walked to 151 West 21st Street.
Not because of the fancy apartment building that’s now there.
But because of the old brownstone that was once there.
And in which Bill “Wild Man” Cannastra lived, on the top floor.
Wild Bill in his top floor apartment at 151 West 21st Street.
Bill was a member of the Beat Generation, a group of authors who explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road are classic beat literature.
I’ve never been a Beat fan. As you know by now, I’m more into the likes of E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and their crowd.
When “Wild Man” Bill wasn’t hanging out here with Joan Haverty, his 19-year-old girlfriend, he was eating glass at cocktail parties (seriously! — a much favored trick of his) and running around Greenwich Village naked with Kerouac (although Jack always kept on his boxers).
But “Wild” would get the best of “Wild Man” Bill.
On October 12, 1950, Bill was drunk one night like every other night, but this time he stuck his head out of a subway window near the Bleeker Street station and—
Boom! Decapitated. Over. Gone.
Within weeks Kerouac married Joan (Bill’s girlfriend) and found here at 151 West 21st Street, the sheets of tracing paper on which he wrote “On the Road.”
Bill’s gruesome death was used as fodder for writings by John Clellon Holmes (in “Go”), Kerouac (in “Visions of Cody”), and Ginsberg (in “Howl.”).
Now what sort of prick uses some guy’s decapitation just as an excuse to write something?
Oh.
Never mind.
Tomorrow: My first job in book publishing.