Allen Ginsberg was a friend of mine -- very briefly

In 1966, when "The poet laureate of the Beat Generation" was at the height of his cultural powers, I had a memorable encounter with him in a diner in Princeton, N.J.

When Allen Ginsberg died in April of 1997 at age 79 he was given a deserved multi-media sendoff. Since I had accidentally met and ‘befriended’ Ginsberg (very briefly) in a Princeton in 1966, I added my two-cents worth to the eulogizing in the Post-Gazette.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

Allen Ginsberg, Howl! (1956)

Meeting Allen Ginsberg

We cool college guys of the mid-’60s could all recite by heart at least that much of Howl! , Allen Ginsberg's signature 1956 work.

Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac and the other big shots of the Beat Generation were the poetic superstars of our little gang at Villanova University.

Imagine how blessed we felt one drunken spring Saturday morning in 1966 when the guru himself and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky strolled into the Colonial Diner in downtown Princeton, N.J.

The diner was loud and smokey and lighted like an operating room. It was jammed with voracious Ivy Leaguers, 99 percent male and mostly drunk after a hard night's partying in the frat-like eating clubs on the Princeton University campus.

Ginsberg and Orlovsky sat right in the middle of our long cafeteria-type table.

"Mr. Ginsberg" we still called him, even after he humbly and repeatedly insisted that we call him "Al” and his friend "Peter."

We didn't know it, but our friend Al was already a practicing hippie. He wore a wild black beard but no tie or button-down shirt like he wore in his senior-citizen days, when he'd read his greatest hits on MTV.

His fingers were stained yellow brown with the nicotine of thousands of Camels. Strands of cheese from the pizza he and Peter shared fell into the tangle of his beard and looked like they'd live there for weeks.

Peter was the first male with a ponytail we overprotected Villanovans had ever seen.

If Al was drunk or on marijuana, we sure couldn't tell. He was as nice as could be, writing his autograph on any piece of paper anyone tossed his way and offering all takers slices of his pizza.

He answered a million questions from the idolatrous youths half his age.

Many wanted to know what he thought about this Vietnam war thing that was heating up.

Al's big policy statement position on America's escalating intervention in Vietnam was simple, geopolitically practical and surprisingly unradical for someone who within the year would be arrested for demonstrating against the war.

Al's advice turned out to be something LBJ and Robert McNamara's body-counters in the Pentagon eventually wished they would have heeded:

"America," Al said over and over, "has to crap or get off the pot" (That colorful all-Americanism wasn't exactly what he said, but it's close enough.)

Further details of our strange encounter with “Al” 31 years ago are hard to come by.

But eventually my Princeton pal and future fabulously successful lawyer found ourselves walking down a street with Al and Peter to the red VW camper bus they were apparently living in at the time.

Sober as judges and not yet ready to join the drug revolution, we turned down an offer of a joint. We merely bid Al and Peter a safe journey and off they drove into the future.