CONEY ISLAND HOT DOGS By David Amram

I wanted Nikoletta to see the fabled Nathan's Coney Island in Johnstown. So
I took off the only two hours free that I had in the two day marathon event
in Windber, we went a few miles to eat a celebratory meal with John Cassady,
at the one place I wanted to take everyone to that I felt would be a
transcendental experience.

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
bringing 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 excluding 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, (as you both know, the
terrifying heart-clogger cheeseburger with a greasy fried egg on top of it)
on their outstretched arms to the tables.

I found out that Nathan's Coney Island is 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.

"Tell your friends how it used to be, 'cause it ain't that way no more, and
never gonna be" said the man behind the counter. "But we still got the
world's best hot-dogs!"

After our sojourn of chomping down the quadruple bypass specials, we
returned to nearby Windber, and I was asked to read the final pages of "On
the Road," to end the festival, to be filmed and then intercut with the old
video of Jack reading the same passages with Steve Allen playing the piano
from the 1958 telecast. There were people of all ages who attended this
event, and it was a heartwarming two days, seeing how much young people love
this great book, and the spirit it conveys.