Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg 
were never in San Miguel together
By Harry Burrus

For many years, a claim persisted, in print and verbally, that Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady were in San Miguel in the summer of 1958 or 1959. After the irrefutable facts outlined in my previous Atención article eradicated that myth, abracadabra alakazam, a new one is threatening to replace it. It now seems, according to Wayne Greenhaw’s recent piece in Atención, they were actually here in the summer of 1960 when he was in SMA. Or, was it when he was in SMA in the summer of 1961? It’s a little murky. Because Mr. Greenhaw’s personal recollections are the apparent source of the stories about the three Beats together in SMA and his memories are restricted to his visits to SMA, no other years are in contention in the revised version of the myth— 1960 or 1961, it doesn’t really matter. Based upon more incontestable facts, neither year can possibly be accurate. 

It’s a simple test: remove any one of the three Beats from the equation of being here together and the story comes tumbling down. This extraction is easy to do, for each one. Once again, Cassady proves a lynchpin and that, alone, derails the SMA togetherness. The disruption also happens with the others. Let’s look at each Beat and examine his timeline. 

Neal Cassady was released from prison on June 3, 1960 and his wife Carolyn was there to greet him. A condition of his three-year parole was he could not leave the county. Neal wanted to make a new start in their relationship and they immediately went to a North Beach jewelry shop that sold Peter Macchierini designs where they chose matching gold rings. 

The summer of 1960, Cassady had two jobs. His first was the night shift at the San Jose Tire Shop. When he lost that job, he was hired by the Los Gatos Tire Company. At the end of July, Kerouac, Paul Smith and Lew Welch visited the Cassadys in Los Gatos, California. 

In a December 7, 2007 email to me, Carolyn Cassady confirmed that Neal could not have been in SMA from 1960 through 1963. “Neal on his parole couldn’t even leave the county, much less the country. I tell of that in my book— how he did begin to leave the county, but he couldn't come with me to Michigan without permission from every state we went through. So, of course, he couldn’t have been in Mexico.” 

As soon as his parole was over in summer of 1963, Cassady drove cross-country with some friends. He saw Kerouac in Northport. In an August 16 letter to Carolyn Cassady, Kerouac stated he hated the rudeness of Neal’s friends, but found Neal, when they were alone, as sweet and interesting as always. 

Neal Cassady was not in Mexico in 1960 or 1961. 

After the publication of On the Road in September of 1957, Kerouac physically and mentally wrestled with his fame and a wave of criticism. He left his Northport home on Long Island to come into the city to celebrate the new year of 1960 with Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, hitting a number of parties in Manhattan. Kerouac was determined to put his destructive behavior since Road behind him and focus on his writing.

During the spring and early summer of 1960, Kerouac wrote letters from Northport to his sister Caroline, his agent Sterling Lord, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg (who was in Chile), Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Carolyn Cassady. In a June 20 letter to Ginsberg, he wrote, “I never go anywhere or do anything. My last run to New York was so awful, a month ago, I haven’t been back.”

Kerouac was not looking forward to the premier of the film version of The Subterraneans in NYC at the end of June 1960. His novel Tristessa came out and, again, Kerouac, to his great dismay, was bombarded with harsh reviews. Ferlinghetti wrote Kerouac the first week of July, offering him the use of his Bixby Canyon cabin on Big Sur. Kerouac jumped at the chance to flee NYC. He responded to Ferlinghetti in a July 8 letter, saying he would be there July 22. En route to California on July 21, he wrote Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg from Chicago. Kerouac visited the Cassadys in Los Gatos in late July. By mid-September, Kerouac was back in Northport after suffering a nervous breakdown in Ferlinghetti’s cabin. 

That September, Kerouac wrote letters from Northport to Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. In his September 14, 1960 letter to Ferlinghetti, he commented on where he had been in the three years since Road came out: “You will notice that since I made money and have had the chance to travel anywhere, I’ve only taken two trips and both of ‘em to California!” 

Jack Kerouac was not in Mexico any time in 1960. 

During 1960, Allen Ginsberg was finalizing his Kaddish manuscript while visiting Chile and Peru. In June, he was staying at the Hotel Peru in Pucallpa. Ginsberg was searching for the hallucinogenic Yage vine. After more than six months in Chile and Peru, he returned to NYC, broke. Kerouac came to see him there in October and Ginsberg poured him a sample of Yage. 

Ginsberg had plans to join Gregory Corso and William Burroughs in Europe, but couldn’t leave because of lack of finances. His luck changed when the Poets Foundation sent him a $1,000 check. He and Peter Orlovsky left on the S.S. America bound for France. They were gone for two years and visited Europe, Tangiers, Greece, Africa and India. 

Allen Ginsberg was not in Mexico in 1960 or 1961. 

Over the years, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady were together in New York, Denver and San Francisco, but never in Mexico in the fifties or sixties. I wonder why it is so important to put these three Beat personalities together in SMA. It clearly did not happen. It’s time to bury the myth, once and for all.

Harry Burrus is the author of 9 collections of poetry, 12 screenplays, and is the writer and director of the feature film Marrakech. 





The streets of (Nuevo) Laredo
By Bill Gallacher

Pull quote:
I am always ecstatic to get clear of Nuevo Laredo, be it going north or going south. Like waking up from a bad dream, the sense of relief is, for me, wondrously profound.


As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen.
All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.

– Traditional cowboy ballad

I must have crossed the US-Mexico border at Laredo at least 20 times. To be sure, I have had minor contretemps with obtuse officials on both sides of the border, but nothing had quite prepared me for the odd sequence of events that unfolded on September 25, 2007, which culminated in my walking through the twilight streets of Nuevo Laredo, a hooker by my side and my wife in pursuit two blocks behind us.

It began earlier that day just south of San Antonio, Texas, with the discovery that my one and only credit card was no longer in my wallet. After a careful reconstruction of the previous events, I realized that it had been accidentally left in some nameless and unreachable gas station in the state of Oklahoma. Okay. So it wasn’t the end of the world. I called the credit card company, cancelled the card, checked the cash on hand, finding enough there to safely last until my wife and I reached San Miguel.

We crossed International Bridge 1 in late afternoon and entered into the labyrinthine procedure of obtaining a car permit. For those of you unfamiliar with this activity, its main purpose is to provide remuneration for a legion of underemployed functionaries, whose job requirements, were they truly stated, would list the following as mandatory: the ability to simultaneously chatter with colleagues and watch the Mexican version of The Young and the Restless, while ostensibly processing applications for car permits. The other essential requirement seems to be an absolute inability, or perhaps absolute reluctance, to speak any English at all. (The two Laredos are very different by any imaginable standard, especially when it comes to language skills. On the American side almost everyone is bilingual, while just a hundred yards south, almost no one is.)

If you do manage to negotiate through the hurdles of documentation that the permit office erects in front of you, you will be asked to pay a final processing fee of approximately US$25. This payment can only be made by credit card, and from years of watching luckless travelers without credit cards being turned away, I knew how futile it would be to argue this point. Without a credit card, a driver is obliged to deposit US$400 cash, refundable on exiting the country with one’s vehicle. The reasoning, so they say, is that the Mexican government does not want North American cars brought in and sold illegally and the US$400 deposit is supposed to discourage this nefarious activity. But why the credit card? One can only assume that in the event that you do not return within the prescribed period they could subsequently bill you. I have never heard of this happening, and in any case it would be a simple enough matter to circumvent by having your credit card cancelled.

Even without a credit card and the US$400 cash, we were not entirely without options…or so I thought. Option one was to slip K’s credit card in with the documents. We do, after all, have the same surname. And given the distracted state of the señorita behind the window, I had high hopes this would work. It didn’t, which led to option two. A procedure does exist whereby the temporary importation of a vehicle can be made in a spouse’s name, if a waiver is signed by the registered owner. What proof do you have that you’re married, came the query from behind the glass. What proof? We have the same name, we are together, and what’s more, do you think we would be needling each other the way we are if we weren’t married? A quick check with the head honcho came back negative. We need proof. What kind of proof? Do you have children? Yes. Do you have a birth certificate? No, they’re adults. Why would we be carrying around their birth certificates? 

Few things are more debilitating than trying to negotiate from a helpless position, in Spanish, through a tiny hole in a plate glass window, while the person behind it peppers you with fatuous advice in English. Things rapidly went from bad to worse. It was then that K announced that she thought we did in fact have the relevant birth certificate in the car. It was there, so she claimed, for quite an unrelated purpose.

An hour later, with the contents of a fully-loaded SUV strewn about the immigration parking lot, we gave up. No birth certificate. Now, in the fading light of late afternoon, options were quickly running out. We needed cash. An ATM? There wasn’t one. There used to be, but not anymore. Why not? (Shrug.) Where, then? In Nuevo Laredo, maybe. ¿Quien sabe? You stay here, I told K, but give me your credit card and PIN, for it is now our only option. Give you my PIN? I’m not giving you my PIN. Old habits die hard, even in extremis. Okay, then, I said flatly, prepare to enjoy a scenic walk….

And so, two very tired and angry figures trudged off, up the steep hill into one of the most unlovely downtown cores in all of Mexico. I had been told to follow a street heading directly away from the river, from where the ATM was alleged to be a few blocks down. But after only a couple blocks, things did not look promising. It was then I saw her, backed against a wall. The pose was a dead giveaway, as was her “protector” lurking in the background. But it was too late. We had made eye contact, and I had blurted out my pressing need to find a money machine. Her eyes lit up like neon dollar signs. Just two more blocks, she told me, while insisting, despite my most vehement protestations, on accompanying me. We got to the machine and waited for K to catch up.

“Juanita, this is my... oh, never mind,” I said, as K withdrew the cash.

The women eyed each other, equally bemused, but for very different reasons.

“Give me 50 pesos, quick,” I muttered.

“Why?”

“For Juanita.”

“You’re giving her 50 pesos?”

“Yes. Just give it to me,” I yelled, “before we get clobbered.”

K’s instinct of self-preservation kicked in and she complied.

I pressed the bill into Juanita’s willing palm, apologized for any misunderstanding and took off without waiting for a response. Two hours later K and I were checking into El Rancho Motel, on the cuota highway to Monterrey.

I am always ecstatic to get clear of Nuevo Laredo, be it going north or going south. Like waking up from a bad dream, the sense of relief is, for me, wondrously profound. There are many reasons not to linger in these parts, for, quite apart from its singularly hellish immigration complex, Nuevo Laredo is rapidly becoming notorious as perhaps the second most dangerous place in Mexico— not yet the first, a distinction that still belongs to Juarez.

Lest anyone— perish the thought— imagine me to be crankier than I really am, let me tell you what happened to my wife and me a few years back in Puerto Vallarta. We had left our car parked on a quiet side street and gone into town, returning around midnight. While at first everything looked normal, as I neared the car I noticed that the side closest to the curb had been demolished, along with some luckless trees that had been planted on the sidewalk. My first reaction was that whoever was responsible had long since fled the scene, and that the probability of any kind of restitution had to be close to zero. But I soon discovered from a nearby resident that an under-age female driver had lost control of her vehicle, mounted the sidewalk, and crashed into a wall. What’s more, her father had sworn that he would show up the following morning and offer a settlement. 

Sure enough, he came as promised, and we trooped off to the local police station, where we both officially signed off on the repair bill and agreed that it would be the end of the matter. The father (a local bigwig, fortunately) counted out 25,000 pesos in 200-peso bills, we shook hands, and the whole thing was over in 24 hours. Now, who would have imagined that! All of which serves as a salutary reminder that in Mexico the sun can shine in the strangest of places, and that wherever you go, there you are.

Bill Gallacher, long-time San Miguel resident, writes the “Word Watch” column and regularly contributes ironic works to Atención.






LETTERS

Editor,

I read with interest your reader’s comments of December 9 on the rules for dog walking in Parque Juarez. It seems to me that while the rules may be posted only in Spanish, culturally they are very much English, American, Canadian, etc. In many of these places the habit of trotting around on a leash behind one’s dog and picking up its waste is well established and expected by most members of society. Aquí, not necessarily. Thus the temptation to be lazy.

Furthermore, in California at least, the science (no really) of dog behavior, as well as that of human psychology, enlightens dog owners and authorities alike, and may negate some of your reader’s assumptions about the source of the problems:

1. People who walk their dogs off lead are the same people who do not pick up after their dogs. Not at all. Dogs walked off lead are often better trained/ mannered than those on lead and their owners more conscious of their responsibility to reflect well on all dog owners so that controversies like this one do not arise. Leading to assumption #2, i.e.

2. Dogs who are walked on lead never start trouble with other dogs. In fact, a dog on lead is indeed handicapped with other dogs because he is not free to interact naturally with his peers. Also, his master may be behaving in a nervous manner, jerking on the lead, shouting, etc., thus conveying danger. Naturally the leashed dog, especially if it is small, gets defensive and trouble may ensue.

3. Finally, it is assumed that all off-lead dogs actually belong to someone (hiding in the bushes) in the park. The park itself and the children’s area within it are unfenced, and SMA has more ungroomed poodles and liberated Labs than could possibly be owned by anyone.

One final implied assumption in your reader’s response is that the perfect scapegoat to be dragged before the authorities (just once) for these infractions can actually be apprehended. Cultural attitudes aside, this would be much easier if the culprit were on the end of a leash, which is where you will find plenty of irresponsible dog owners.

Kate McCorkle



Editor,

I read the article by Jesus Ibarra on the need for blood donations in San Miguel. The parameters are too restrictive, regarding age for instance. There is no upper age limit for blood donations as long as the donor is well with no restrictions or limitations to activities. Epilepsy is not a contraindication to donate blood. Concerning medications, in almost all cases this will not disqualify eligibility based on reason and control of condition, for instance, controlled high blood pressure.

Heart disease in general is acceptable but there should be a six month wait following angina, heart attack, bypass and angioplasty. Donations are acceptable six weeks following childbirth. When donating whole blood the usual time limit is eight weeks. All the blood components are replaced in 24 hours EXCEPT the red blood cells that takes six to eight weeks.

For healthy men, donating as noted above is a health-promoting endeavor, as it lowers the iron load and reduces significantly the chances for a heart attack or stroke. On a personal note, I started donating blood at age 30, and over 35 years have donated 10 gallons of blood. Finally, concerning cancer, the American Red Cross and the FDA insist on a five year window to ensure no recurrence. Patients with tattoos and piercings are best avoided.

Given the present restrictions as noted by Jesus Ibarra, it is no wonder that there is a shortage of blood in San Miguel de Allende. My comments are supported by both the American Red Cross and the FDA.

Dr. David E. Rowe.