Still About Kerouac, Different Shape of Degrees of Separation

About ten years later I was living at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Philip Whalen was teaching a class in writing poetry. For an exercise he asked us to write about something beautiful.

        Michael McClure is beautiful    (I wrote)
        ten years later.
        Slightly grey
        that smile
        and still the handsomest man I've ever seen.

"Kerouac thought so too," said Phil. "Huh?" I said. "He said McClure was the handsomest man he'd ever seen," said Phil.

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I suppose this needs all kinds of footnotes. That in 1977 McClure had just then been at Zen Center for a reading. That in 1967 I served him mashed potatoes, or maybe it was peas, in the serving line at the free Thanksgiving dinner in the basement of All Saint's Episcopal Church on Waller Street (or maybe it was Howard Presbyterian on Oak Street) in the Haight. That in the Instamatic Archive I (still) have a picture I took of McClure and Freewheelin' Frank the Hell's Angel making music behind the stage at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967.