As a student in the sixth grade, I certainly hadn't known. The book Howl and Other Poems had subsequently been published by City Lights Books on November 1, 1956 and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the publisher, was arrested for obscenity. In the history of American poetry, there are few public events as famous as Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial.

That day at the Trieste, the trial was on the front page, and everyone knew who Ginsberg was. The atmosphere in the café (which had been founded by Gianni Giotta just a year earlier) was fervently noisy with talk. Over the din, the jukebox's opera arias bellowed, as they still do.

The telephone booth (the very old kind, of dark wood, about eight feet high with a pay phone in its interior and a small, semi-circular wooden seat that is so small and tightly-placed that it is virtually impossible to sit down on it) was very busy. The folding door, the sound of which opening and shutting has for years disturbed conversations, opened and shut all morning as the marvel of the trial was being discussed long-distance by a line of patrons.

It was the first event I ever saw of such literary intensity. Most interesting to me was the way everyone looked. By the standards of the Oakland suburbs in the 1950's, this place was on another planet. My brother and I had been taught to dress very presentably, in khaki pants, white shirts tucked in, the popular Eisenhower jackets of the era, with combed hair and scrubbed faces.

The patrons at the Trieste were dressed mostly in black, with a preponderance of turtleneck sweaters. Some of the men wore berets, a kind of cap that I had seen only in the pages of Life magazine in occasional photo-articles about the faraway charms of Paris.

My brother told me that wearing a beret meant that you were a poet, and I believed him until I went to Paris in 1971 to live for a couple of years, and discovered that bakers wear berets there, fruit-sellers, coal delivery men - all sorts of people. Poets, too, I imagine.

In any case, the men at the Trieste were not scrubbed. Some had beards. Most had just a few days of growth, and didn't seem to care at all that they looked so scruffy. Indeed, as I looked around, I saw that scruffy was the standard. My recently bathed appearance was the anomaly.

Our father, who would never appear in public without having shaved and combed his hair, would not have been able to tolerate the place. Still struggling against my first espresso, I wondered whether it was even legal to look the way so many of the patrons there looked.