A
beat poet. He is the cab-driver in
Kerouac's
Big Sur. He wrote the slogan "Raid kills bugs dead." He lived with
Huey Lewis' mother for seven years and served as a kind of father-in-law for the future
rock star. He left a
suicide note and disappeared into the
Sierra Nevada in 1971. His
body was never found.
He wrote:
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a
bell does