A pale-skinned, bearded man sits on the far side of a table strewn with magazines and newspapers in this horizontal, black and white photograph. The man’s shoulders are angled slightly to our left, and he looks steadily out at us with hooded eyes. Wrinkles line his forehead and cheeks between his nose and mouth. His straight hair is brushed up and back and he has a full beard. His left forearm, to our right, lies along the edge of the table, and he leans onto that elbow. The other hand rests on his knee. His long shirt sleeves are rolled up over the elbows, and he wears a diagonally striped tie. Something weighs down the breast pocket of his rumpled shirt. Two lit taper candles are in short, bulb-shaped candlesticks to the right next to an ashtray holding cigarette butts. The foil surface of a cigarette box gleams on the table behind the candles. A pair of glasses sits on two magazines in front of the man. A box television is directly behind the man, and other objects in the background are swallowed in shadow. A long, handwritten inscription along the bottom reads, “Lucien Carr, my oldest friend from college days, had introduced me to Jack Kerouac after they’d met at the West End bar on 113th St. & Broadway, and connected Jack + me to his fellow St. Louis uppermiddle-class (aristocrat we thought) confrère William S. Burroughs, late winter 1944. We lived down the hall from each other on 7th floor Union Theological Seminary, Columbia freshman dorm during W.W.II, I heard haunting Brahms sextet music through his door, knocked, we met. Kerouac heard _Old Angel Midnight_ eloquence in Lucien’s laconic “Celtic” intonations. Here four decades later, wise Old Dog Bureau Manager United Press International he was visiting former house-mate Alene Lee’s Soho loft. More eyes perused his wire-service prose than all Jack’s & my texts, I’ll bet. December 2, 1986. Allen Ginsberg.”