Today’s Outrageous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The title of foremost wild man of the Beats belonged to Bill Cannastra. Like Neal Cassady, he was a non-artist who influenced a generation of writers and painters and set the bar for outrageous behavior, free sex and abandon, and drug use more than a decade before it became fashionable. The parties at his apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan in the late 1940s became legendary. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School but to the law he preferred spectacle, drama, and nihilism to the extreme, holding free-for-alls where anything went, including orgies with both sexes. He is often credited with giving Jack Kerouac the idea of using a roll of uncut paper as the best means to transcribe in one sitting the breathless novel the young writer was talking about.
Bill Cannastra: Beat Lothario
Cannastra died when he stuck his head out of a moving subway near Astor Place in New York City in the spring of 1950 at age twenty-one. He was drunk and high and thought it cool to wave goodbye to his friends. What they witnessed instead was his head rolling on the tracks as the train went on down the tunnel, his eyes wide open, staring into space with disbelief. Afterward, Cannastra’s former lover Joan Haverty was so distraught over his death that she accepted a spur-of-the-moment proposal from Jack Kerouac and married him two weeks later.
Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages
Okay, well, here is Allen Ginsberg’s recounting of Cannastra’s death, which doesn’t have the decapitated head with disbelieving stare in it. I tend to believe Allen’s account because life is rarely that perfect in its irony.
In a letter to Neal Cassady on Halloween 1950, Allen Ginsberg tells the tale (culled from RealityStudio):
The party was leaving [Ann Adam’s] house after a night of sticking and wandering, and on the way to Claude’s Claude and Cannastra had become friendly and got drunk, pawing each other, recently. Subway to Claude’s to get money, a touch O’the dawn. When they talked about the Bleecker Tavern (negress Winnie’s hangout) Bill lurched out of the window as a joke. He stuck his head and shoulder out, but apparently had misjudged his lurch and found himself hanging unbalanced out of the window. The others rushed to pull him back, and hung on to him, as the subway roared through the tunnel. His coat ripped, and they couldn’t get a grip on him by his shoulders as he was too far out. When he saw what was happening he began screaming to be pulled back. He ducked, trying to avoid the pillars in the tunnel, hunched his head, but suddenly there was a thud and he was knocked out of the window to the tracks, out of their hands. When the train stopped, she went to the last car where his body was dragged and saw that his head was broken and brains showing out of the temple.
Car Crash Du Jour!
Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in Manhattan, New York City’s Lower East Side as a press photographer during the 1930s and ’40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.
This image is entitled, “Killed in a Car Crash” and is culled from Weegee’s New York: Photographs, 1935-1960.
