People Who Died

P
Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.

Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.

Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were
five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.

red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner
who sat at my lunch table
in High School……car crash…...1954.

Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High school,
football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.

Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.

Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window
in 1963.

Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing
the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital
during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.

Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.

Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.

Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night
in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.

Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor
Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.

Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.

My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.
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