Famous People I Never Knew #1: Neal Cassady

I'm a peaceful pig. Always have been. If there's a wild party going on, you can count on my being there - for about ten minutes. I've always preferred going for a walk by myself, maybe in Golden Gate Park, to ponder the mysteries of life and see if there's any more treasure beneath that statue.

But people keep asking me about famous people I knew when I was a young hippie pig in the Haight-Ashbury and a young beatnik pig in North Beach. Cutting down Haight Street in my beret and goatee with sandals on my trotters - people naturally wanted to meet me and possibly get a kind word or my autograph. Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, the President of the United States - they watched in wonder as this pondering porker trotted by.

Or was that in my dream?

In any case, I've decided to tell all, as I get around to it, beginning with the time I "met"Jack Kerouac's literary inspiration and Merry Pranksters chauffeur Neal Cassady.

In the Spring of 1962 I was hanging out in North Beach with my girl friend Linda Lovely and the raffish denizens of the Hot Dog Palace, spare changing tourists and dropping by the parish hall at St. Peter and Paul's Church opposite Washington Square at sundown for a free hardboiled egg sandwich (this actually was a hardboiled egg, shell and all, between two big slices of French bread wrapped in newspaper like fish n chips.)

My pal George the Beast had snagged a job as night clerk at the Hotel Dante, next door to topless pioneer Carol Doda's club The Condor. Kids, the Dante was not like hotels of today with chocolates on the pillow and turndown service. The Dante was a real Sam Spade dusty, dim light, dark hallways hotel above a bar where real men in fedoras and revolvers in shoulder holsters thought existential thoughts while they stared at the bare lamp bulb screwed above their single bed with the metal bedstead. Outside the street with its million stories and the fog drifting in from Bay as the foghorn groaned in the night...(oh, you fill in the rest).

So one day, George says to us "Hey, you want to see Neal Cassady's room?"

"Well....duh!" I sez to George, using a well-known anachronism since that tagline hadn't been thought up yet.

Cassady was just out of San Quentin. He had been busted for possession of marijuana and been sacked away for a couple of years. (Kids, sez the Old Pig in an aside to the young people listening with bated breath - it's true. When you are idealizing the Sixties remember this: it was a time when you could be sent to prison for years if a cop happened to put his hand in your coat pocket and found one joint. This happened to my pal Danny S. Except he beat the rap thanks to his tough, crooked lawyer, Niccolo Bellisimo)

Even in 1962 Neal Cassady was a legend - THE Dean Moriarity of On The Road, and of course we wanted to be within the glamour circle of his greatness, a real legendary member of the real beat generation. Not like me and Linda Lovely and George the Beast, not quite sure who we were, wanting to be real beatniks and looking like real beatniks but actually twenty years old and acting a lot like kids who had memorized Howl and thought Dharma Bums was a treatise on right living.

This was about four in the afternoon, nothing happening in the "lobby" of the Dante - a little space as big as your office with George behind the counter grinning like a cat with his gold earring gleaming. So George leads us up the stairs to the second floor and down the dark passage to an even darker doorway on the right hand side.

"There it is - that's Neal Cassady's room". Wow! I could almost feel the beat emanation exuding through the door. Was he behind it writing long mad letters to his famous pals? Was he out looking for another joint to put in his pocket? I'll never know. Because we went back down to the lobby and laughed and joked for a while and then when George got off for his dinner break, we all walked down to Huey Looey Gooey's for a big bowl of seaweed soup.