This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards

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Saturday night is what is left in our culture of the old orgy

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Navvy aged about 35, says "If I get three pints down me I can ..." (What he said is the sort of thing considered "unprintable". It amounted to the fact that when he went home he was able to have sexual intercourse with his wife with the maximum of efficiency, and when he woke up in the morning he was able to repeat the process with the utmost satisfaction.) ... The girls then tell a number of dirty stories. Observer does not find them very funny or original, but they are some of the dirtiest stories that he has heard. There are no tabooed words whatever. The girls, the man, and the old ladies, all freely use the odd half dozen common words that at the moment are never printed in England ... Observer leaves in company with two youthful drunks, who have been playing darts and flirting with the barmaid from 8.30 until just before closing time. She accompanies the group to the lobby, and then on to the doorstep. One of the drunks and the observer both kiss her good night. The kisses were long and interesting.

It smells of vice, misery, thuggery, the lowest kind of crookedness

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The drunkenness of the poor became an object of nervous regard by the other half of the city, alternately condemned, fretted over, and rubbernecked. There was always a crowd eager for vicarious degradation. At the start of the twentieth century, Georges Cain took in Les Halles by night, heard the laughter and song at La Belle de Nuit and Le Chien Qui Fume and Le Caveau, and then went next door to L’Ange Gabriel, a notorious bistro, something like the Maxim’s of the apaches. The gigolettes and the toughs come here to swallow some snails and upend bowls of mulled wine. The big room upstairs is filled with worrisome characters, the heroes of knife fights or confidence tricks, with predatory eyes and thin lips, their girls pale with carmine mouths. All of them are smoking cigarettes, speaking in low tones while rapidly glancing to the sides, half listening to some poor devil of a violinist scratching out lugubrious waltz choruses ... a song that had just appeared anonymously that year: “If you want to be happy / Hang your landlord / Chop the priests in half…” The sheet music sold on the streets like chestnuts in winter, the vendors just a beat ahead of the cops, who seized all they could find.

it was alleged Little Egypt would dance the hootchy-kootchy in the nude

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Some of the flavor of their ambiguous attitude toward the law can be derived from their sole published work, the 1888 In Danger. It begins with their citing as an inspiration a sermon by one Dr. Guthrie, “The City, Its Sins and Its Sorrows,” which they quote at length, and then they proceed to describe the temptations in mouth-watering detail, and go on to discuss the ease and convenience of crime in New York. Under the guise of alerting the public to the dangers of big-city crime, they offer explicit directions for making burglars’ tools, explain the logistics of skin games, and give formulas for rigging cards. The booklet is, in fact, an advertisement for crime, couched in all the subtlety known to the science of publicity at the time: Having instructed the potential criminal on how to pursue the profession, they detail its rewards: the unbridled nightlife, the monetary advantages, and, of course, the fact that anyone could do it. Howe and Hummel bring nineteenth-century Manhattan into relief as a wide-open town dominated by two industries: larceny and entertainment, which often overlap.

Beer followed beer. Bo Diddley and Jerome quarreled on the jukebox.

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Farren's trying to turn the clock back to the Sixties underground scene

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Crowded into beat-up station wagons, covering hundreds of miles a day, eating garbage food and living in cheap motels, the pace was crushing. Although Presley has never been directly associated with drugs, there is no doubt that the majority of musicians playing these backroad circuits depend heavily on amphetamines, Benzedrine and No-Doze. If the speed didn’t get to Presley, certainly the strain of seemingly endless one-nighters did. Nice white boys didn’t wear flash pink suits from the black side of town. They didn’t listen to black radio and learn R&B hits, and they didn’t get involved in brawls with rednecks who took exception to ’nigger lovin’ faggots’ getting the females in an uproar.

“Every day, every night was the same. He chewed his fingernails, drummed his hands against his thighs, tapped his feet and every chance he got he’d start combing his hair.”

"Hip chicks, exotic sounds, G-men, B-girls, stag parties, stogies ..."

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What the hell was Dr. Kinsey really doing, hanging around Times Square, asking men to tell him about their sex lives, getting them to drop their drawers and measure their cocks for science? He told Herbert, "I'll tell you what, Mr. Huncke. You can help me greatly if you'd introduce me to some of your friends, so l can interview them as well. In fact, I'll give you two dollars for every subject you can bring me."

Herbert jumped at the chance. "I think I can help you, Dr. Kinsey. Why don't you come back to the Square some evening and I'll introduce you to some  good people I know."

Burroughs and Kinsey - and on occasion, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and his wife, Edie Parker, Burroughs' wife Joan Adams, among others – would get together at one of several popular buckets-of-blood around the Square. Such dives as Gilroy's and The Angler. The good doctor Kinsey would remind his new friends of his study, and the Beats, having put on a glow, allowed that they were happy to "compile data."

It's interesting to speculate whether Kinsey's "facts," are weighted by the contacts Herbert Huncke provided him, the street hustlers, the excitable weekend queens confessing their transgressions.