Kerouac re-appears in San Miguel
By Wayne Greenhaw

Atención received the following account of Wayne Greenhaw’s time spent in San Miguel with the Beats in response to Harry Burrus’s article in the November 23 edition questioning the well-publicized myth that the Beats hung out together in San Miguel in the late 1950s.

I first arrived in San Miguel in the summer of 1958 by train from Alabama to attend the Instituto Allende’s writing center. At the time I was 18, just graduated from high school and in search of adventure. I returned in the summers of 1959, ‘60, and ‘61. During one of these summers, I met and spent time with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady while hanging out in the old Cucaracha bar when it was located under the western portales opposite the Jardín where Banamex now operates. Today, my wife Sally and I own a home in San Miguel, where we live six months out of each year.

In a magazine article that later became a chapter in my book My Heart is in the Earth: True Stories of Alabama and Mexico, at the request of an editor, I rolled all of my first summers in San Miguel into one. Reading in Atención an account by Harry Burrus (see Atención, Nov. 23) questioning my memory, calling it “a fairy tale,” leads me to recount my memory.

When I first thought back on those days, it seemed the arrival of the Beats came in late July or early August of 1959 or 1960, but, like Mr. Burrus, I subsequently read that Neal Cassady could not have been in San Miguel the summers of 1958 or 1959 because he was incarcerated. However, he was released in June of 1960, and I was in San Miguel from early June through the week of September 16 that year. I was absent for several weeks in late August when I was spending time in Mexico City.

Although I remember certain details as though they happened yesterday, dates are not always perfectly clear. During my first summer, one of the writers who drank regularly at the Cucaracha told us repeatedly that he was a friend of Kerouac and that the Beats were coming. It became a humorous refrain among the regulars.

When they did arrive in an old green Mercedes, we were all surprised. We filed out of the Cuc, went down to the car parked on Hidalgo, and found in the backseat a skinny naked girl they called Sunshine. Believe it or not, there were very few cars in San Miguel in those days. An unfamiliar car and a naked girl aroused much curiosity.

The girl was quickly clothed and taken into the Cuc, where she was warned sternly that San Miguel police were known to arrest females wearing trousers, much less shorts, and that naked was out of the question. Police here were quick to action when people strayed from the norm. Once I witnessed police surrounding a young man with long hair, holding him on a bench in the Jardín and shearing his head.

After I shook Kerouac’s near-lifeless hand, I listened as he talked. I had read On the Road and thought it magnificent. When Kerouac talked, his words did not sound like his character Sal Paradise. Back then I was still enamored of all writers. Even Allen Ginsberg seemed in awe of Kerouac, which I didn’t quite understand. I had also read Howl and found it equally magnificent. Ginsberg said little and soon disappeared with a friend who lived in town. I found myself drawn to Neal Cassady, who spoke very little until late in the evening when we got into a drunken discussion about something unimportant to anyone but a couple of drunks. Late at night we took our animated conversation, along with drinks, out under the portales, sitting on the curb where several policia found us, arrested us, and carried us to the city jail in the municipal building north of the Jardín. The owner of the Cuc, Jesus “Chucho” Chorea, got us out the next morning. Asked what we owed, he said, “Nada;” as I learned later, we were not the f

irst Cuc customers Chucho had gotten out of jail.

Whether the Beats stayed three days or a week, I don’t remember. It seemed like a week. One morning after soothing baths in the agua caliente of Taboada, long before a hotel was built there, we went to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco where Kerouac stared long into the suffering face of the bleeding Jesus and other religious icons.

Although this short encounter with Kerouac was not all filled with joy, it was extraordinary and memorable to me. At the time, I dismissed it as a simple encounter. There were a number of other writers, movie stars and political personalities who came to San Miguel during those summers.

After I read about Cassady’s return to San Miguel in February of 1968 and being found unconscious on the railroad tracks west of town, dying a few days later, I returned to San Miguel that summer for a short visit. At the Cuc I met several old friends from earlier days. They said that Cassady had actually returned to the town in the spring of 1967 and spent much of the summer there. In his biography of Cassady, The Holy Goof, William Plummer wrote: “In the spring of 1967, Cassady had broken epistolary silence to write Ginsberg two desperate notes from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.” In the same book one of the last photos of Cassady made in the summer of 1967 shows him on a street in San Miguel holding a picture of what appears to be La Parroquia church.

While I do not pretend to have a photographic memory, this one, as Mr. Burrus writes, “persists and is passionately embraced.” And while I drank my share of cervezas y cuba libres in the Cucaracha, once participating in a search for the perfect peyote, I do not believe my memory is all hallucination.

In my latest book, Ghosts on the Road: Poems of Alabama and Mexico, I have several personal poems about Kerouac and Cassady in San Miguel as well as poems about the artists David Alfaro Siqueiros and my friend Leonard Brooks.

Wayne Greenhaw, who divides his time between San Miguel and Alabama, is the author of various books, plays, screenplays and teleplays. In 2006, he was presented the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing.







LETTERS

Editor,

We would like to clarify some points mentioned in the November 30 article by Jesus Ibarra: ‘A Green and Sustainable San Miguel.’ The article says that Parque Landeta (adjacent to the Botanical Garden) is “stripped of native flora and overrun by foreign species” and that “the landscape of the park has also been damaged by heavy car and motorcycle traffic.”

First of all, there has been no stripping of native flora or damage by deforestation in the Park. Secondly it already is a very successful ecological preserve and public recreation area. For the last 15 years there has been an extensive restoration program, paid for by the Botanical Garden, which has focused on the existing native flora, supplemented by reforestation of native trees and shrubs. The species planted in the Park since 1993, in both the dry lands and the wetlands, are mostly original to our bioregion. This reforestation work has been shared by the neighbors of the Park, the communities of the Santa Cruz, schools and nonprofits (Audubon, FAI, CASA, Save the Rio Laja, Ecosystem Sciences, PEASMA), as well as many local citizens and residents. It has been an efficient and quiet work which has placed prolonged effort and expense on El Charco. This work includes gardeners, watchmen, signage, cleaning, maintenance of trails, firewalls and other measures to prevent and control fires, all without support 
from the municipal authorities. The results are encouraging and can be seen by anyone willing to see them.

Nor is it true that cars and motorcycles circulate throughout the Park, damaging the plants. There are clearly marked areas for parking, and roads for access to picnic areas and for service vehicles. Parque Landeta was conceived from its beginnings as both an ecological and recreational space, a park for the public. The city agreed to this concept in 1994, and this has been the foundation for our actions since. This policy has proved successful with the park being open to the public for many years without incurring damage to its natural resources. The proof is in the remarkable recuperation of the ecosystem and the increase of wild flora and fauna in the 35 hectares in the last fifteen years (see our monthly newsletters at www.elcharco.org.mx).

The negative evaluation of Parque Landeta exhibited by the Department of Ecology is perplexing and jeopardizes the seriousness of the recently presented program “Green and Sustainable, Hydrobiological Corridors.” Obviously, Biopolis, the company from Mexico City hired to analyze Parque Landeta, shows little understanding not only of the site itself but of the entire conservation project and its role in the urban development of San Miguel de Allende.

The Board of Directors of El Charco del Ingenio
Cesar Arias, Mario Mendoza, Bob Haas, Naomi Zerriffi



Editor,

If you take a walk around our excellent and generally well-maintained Juarez Park, you will pass numerous notice boards with the eighteen official Rules of the Park clearly posted. All of these boards broadcast the rules only in Spanish, which is indeed unfortunate, as this provides a fine excuse (at least for some) to ignore them.

Rule 14 states: En caso de traer alguna mascota, esta debe usar correa y deberás recoger sus heces fecales. Dogs brought into the park must be kept on a leash and their feces picked up by their owners.

My guess is that no more than half of the people who take their dogs to the park keep them on a leash. These are, by and large, the same people who make no attempt to clean up the paths, doubtless hoping that their animals do their business in the bushes, away from the walking paths, or, failing that, when their dogs do foul the paths, they, the owners will be far enough away to disown the deed.

The purpose of Rule 14, as I see it, is to achieve the following.

1. To keep the park as hygienically sound as possible (It does, after all, contain a children’s playground)

2. To prevent altercations between dogs and to give leashed dogs a fair chance when assailed by others

3. To ensure the safety of babies and small children

Rule 18, the final one, contains the following warning: Será consignada a las autoriadades correspondientes a la persona que no cumple esta reglamento. Anyone who does not follow these rules will be handed over to the appropriate authorities.

I am not suggesting that we become a police state. However, if Rule 18 were enforced, even once, I think people would very soon learn to comply. How to achieve this? I don’t know exactly. But, I do know that the park has a number of permanent employees doing routine maintenance.

At the bottom of the boards, appear the words: ATENTAMENTE LA ADMINISTRACION. Is this a phantom organization? If not, who are its members, and did they draft these Rules with any serious intent of enforcement, or simply as a hollow admonition? Isn’t it time that we, the public, demanded a little bite from this apparently toothless watchdog?

Bill Gallacher


Correction: Last week’s Letter to the Editor attributed to Jock Whitehouse was actually written by Jock Ferguson. We regret any confusion in this matter.