An Insomniacathonian letter to the KING of AWAKENESS, MR. RON WHITEHEAD HIS OWN DANG SELF--------------------------------------(Page 3)

In the 1960s when my symphonic music was played in Pittsburgh, the more adventurous members of the Pittsburgh Symphony, joined by local jazz players and poets, took me on a ride to eat at Nathan's Coney Island in Johnstown, for a 2.a.m. chow-down.

After all those years ago, I still remember feeling like I had visited Johnstown Pennsylvania's equivalent of Mecca, the Taj Mahal or the Vatican....one of the world's Seven Culinary Wonders...Nathan's Coney Island hot-dog emporium in downtown Johnstown, and I never forgot it. I could taste that grease in my sleep to this very day.

I hadn't been there to eat in almost 40 years, but remembered the waitresses bring 12 hot-dogs laid out on their outstretched arm, like some great late-night ballet, with hordes of hungry workers from the nearby mattress factory storming in for their night shift 2 a.m. lunch break, and some of the wild-eyed old timers who sat in a near catatonic state sipping coffee whom I was told were still suffering post-traumatic shock, from the great flood that took place many years before in Johnstown, from which they had survived but from which they never had recovered.

And like an intoxicating perfume, all the subtle variety of various burning grease aromas, intertwining with the smell of spilled beers and used coffee cups with cigarette butts ground out in the bottom of them, and old pie crusts and syrup stains caking the Formica tables, along with the pickle juice, mustard and relish scattered on the tables, chairs and floor, all combined to build up your late night/early morning appetite. No master chef or interior designer could ever construct such a temple of late-night/early-morning chow-downing.

As we drove to Johnstown for our only sightseeing moment of the festival, I told John Cassady and
Jerry Cimino, the heroic owner and instigator of the Beatmobile., which he had driven all the way from California, that it was worth the 3000 mile trip just to eat a meal at Nathan's Coney Island.
I described to them how the fluorescent lights cut through a perpetual light cloud of smoke inside the cafeteria, like a drifting fog.... a haze of onions, peppers, gristle, pork, beef and chicken fats, combined with cigar, cigarette and pipe smoke, all slowly rising the ceiling, which after many decades was encased in various greases, looking like some giant Abstract-Expressionist Renaissance Sistine Chapel mural of various greases, caked there over the years, and excuding its own subtle smells, adding to the total ambiance.

When we pulled up to the landmark cafeteria, even though the place was packed, and the doorway and sidewalk outside was jammed with a crazy assortment of Saturday-night Johnstown bon vivants in various states of intoxication, eating hot dogs, fries, hamburgers, fried onions, stale pastries and drinking beer, whiskey, soda and coffee, shouting, arguing, laughing and releasing various exploding sounds of heavy digestion, i could sense that this was a different place from the one I remembered.

I sensed that before entering to eat, that like the family farmers for whom Willy Nelson and all of us play benefits for each year at Farm Aid, and like so much of what Kerouac chronicled, Nathan's Coney Island in Johnstown Pa. in October of 2004 is now another part of a vanishing America.

The ceiling mural of grease was still there, but the waitresses no longer delivered either the hot dogs or the Sundowners, (a terrifying heart-clogger cheeseburger with a greasy fried egg on top of it) on their outstretched arms to the tables.

Nathan's Coney Island was now a regular 24 hour day/night cafeteria, although what looked and smelled like black crankcase-oil where the fries were cooked appeared to be unchanged from the 35 years ago when I last dined there, and for which I later wrote a song called "Greasy Spoon."

I asked the oldest looking person behind the counter what happened to the waitresses serving meals with the hot dogs on their arms.
"The Health Department don't allow it no more. That's what made them hot dogs taste so good for all them years. The bigger the waitress arm, was, the better them dogs tasted. That's all history now. Like the coal miners in Windber. They ain't here no more either."

"Well, I guess that's progress" I said.

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