extracts from jack kerouoc's lonesome traveler: chapter 5_ new york scenes

"Lester Young played there just before he died and used to sit in the back kitchen between sets. My buddy poet Allen Ginsberg went back and got on his knees and asked him what he would do if an atom bomb fell on New York. Lester said he would break the window in Tiffany's and get some jewels anyway...

...Let's get out of here, it's too literary. - Let's go get drunk on the Bowery or eat those long noodles and tea in glasses at Hong Fat's in Chinatown. - What are we always eating for? Let's walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and build up another appetite. - How about some okra on Sands Street"...

..Beatnik Angel Peter Orlovsky in the supermarket five doors away buying Uneeda Biscuits (late Friday night), ice cream, caviar, bacon, pretzels, sodapop, TV Guide, vaseline, three toothbrushes, chocolate milk (dreaming of roast suckling pig), buying whole Idaho potatoes, raisin bread, wormy cabbage by mistake, and fresh-felt tomatoes and collecting purple stamps. - Then he goes home broke and dumps it all on the table, takes out a big book of Mayakovsky poems, turns on the 1949 television set to the horror movie, and goes to sleep.

And this is the beat night life of New York."