The Three Wise Men of Dope - This Ain't no Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995 - page 59

Huncke not only walked the mean streets—he wrote about them. At his best, he was a
very good writer—his best work equal to Kerouac's. But Huncke is also remembered for
introducing them to the word Beat:
Beat meant beaten up, broken down, bottomed out. It also meant cool. A beat person
saw through the dominant social codes of the time, the rules dictating that the good life
meant wearing a gray suit to work and religiously mowing your lawn. Beats bridled un-
der the suffocating postwar peer pressure with a sneering indifference they had earned pre-
cisely by hitting bottom.
Like Huncke. Beat.
The term stuck. Only later did San Francisco columnist Herb Caen denigrate Beat into
Beatnik, which he christened after the Soviet satellite Sputnik hit space in 1959. Appar-
ently Caen thought the beatnik poets were “way out there.” But beatniks were not Beats.
Beatniks were mainstream trendies, poseurs, imitators who, almost a decade later, flooded
into the cafes in their turtlenecks, berets, and trim goatees.
During Huncke's old age, he lived at the Chelsea Hotel, where he hung out with fellow
Beat Chelsea dwellers Gregory Corso and Marty Matz, plus an ensemble of gangsters, act-
ivists, hustlers, not to mention legions of tourists (mostly European) who wanted to meet
the Beat phenomenon. Despite Huncke's cult hero status, he was broke, and the rumor was
that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead was paying his rent for him. Even though Huncke
was in his mid-seventies, he was still active, still writing, still hustling for a few dollars
to feed his longtime heroin addiction, and still managing to get himself—and his Chelsea
colleagues—into lots of trouble. Most said it was worth it.
ROBERT CAMPBELL
The very first time I saw Herbert Huncke, he was standing in the lobby of the
Chelsea Hotel. He was a wrinkled old guy wearing a trench coat, and I wasn't
too impressed. As far as I was concerned, he looked like a lowlife.
Huncke always tried to put a hard front on at first. But the truth was, when
you got to know him, Huncke was always really friendly and gracious.
William Burroughs, in his book Junky, remarked on Huncke's hard front. When the thirty-
two-year-old Burroughs met Huncke for the first time, Burroughs had gotten hold of a real
Thompson machine gun (Tommy Gun) and a bunch of morphine in Syrette™ form—tiny
toothpaste tubes with needles. Burroughs wanted to make some money by selling the gun
and the drugs. Through a mutual friend, Huncke expressed special interest in the morphine
Syrettes.Butwhenthetwomettomakethedeal,HunckegaveBurroughsawitheringstare
that felt like Huncke wished him dead. “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from