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One night, Laki and I and Wiley, my girlfriend at the time, left the hotel and
went to the hospital and gathered around Herbert's bed. Herbert was kind of in a
goofy haze. He was in good spirits, though.
“I want you to call all of our friends,” he said, “and I want you to come back
here tomorrow morning at seven. We're going to have a big, old-fashioned pow-
wow!”
We all said, “Sure, Herbert! A powwow sounds good!” And then we had to
leave.
And Herbert died the next morning, right around seven!
On August 8, 1996, two years after Louis Cartwright, Huncke's “Get to the punch line”
partner had been murdered, Herbert Huncke died at the age of eighty-one. Not a bad
lifespan for someone who had systematically abused his body since he was twelve years
old, when he first ran away from his banker father and their upper middle-class Chicago
home.
Huncke deserves to be remembered as a prime influence upon the Beats, and as a tal-
ented writer who was subject to moments of real literary vision. For his ability to combine
a high literary prose style with street jargon, he has been compared to Celine.
DAVID LAWTON
The memorial service that they did for Huncke was awesome. It happened atthe
Friends Meeting House in the East Village. Marty Matz read fantastically, and
Corso read. Ginsberg was there taking pictures. He might have started things out
with a blessing. John Wieners 60 came in.
We did contributions too. I read a piece, sort of a journal entry of Huncke's
that was written in a stream-of-consciousness style. Paul Romero did some
singing, and he and I together sang the Woody Guthrie song, “Go to Sleep you
Weary Hobo.” Patti Smith ended up coming too.
At that event, you kind of knew that the era was over. So many of us were
out of the Chelsea by then, and now Huncke was dead, and Corso's health was
starting to worsen not too long after. And after that, Marty Matz died.
Jerry Poynton made sure that Huncke had written out his will, which is an
amazing document. It consists of, “So and so gets this little box. So and so gets
that little table.”
JAMES RASIN
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