Neal Cassady
For a time I held a unique position: among the hundreds of
isolated creatures who haunted the streets of lower downtown
Denver there was not one so young as myself.
Of these dreary men who had committed themselves, each for his own good
reason, to the task of finishing their days as pennyless drunkards,
I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a
replica of childhood to which their vision could daily turn,
and in being thus grafted onto them, I became the unnatural son of
a few score beaten men.
Neal Cassady, The First Third

