Did the now famous black and white cover of Howl and Other Poems, peeking out of shirt and jacket pockets through the café, make those pockets profane? Was I to be badly thought of because I'd visited such an iniquitous chamber? Should I go to confession?

The end result of the trial a few weeks later — as in all such governmental idiocies — was that Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had become world famous and the book itself a best seller. It still is, with one million copies of it in print, and luckily "Howl" is also a great poem:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

A lot of very bad writing has come from conversations in the Trieste since then, writing that has now been forgotten entirely - the lurching shouts of second-rate wannabe poets; the self-important ruminations of men and women who, believing themselves great, were really thoughtless; the recitations from books of essays, fiction or poetry that were consigned to oblivion by the audience on that very afternoon in 1959, 1968, 1983, or last week; unreadable foolishness, published in books with press runs of fifty copies.

Now and then, sometimes someone has come into this café for a cup of coffee who has written something very important. The most important was Ginsberg himself, many times.

In the case of the Caffé Trieste, you can simply rely on the fact that all of the best writers of the San Francisco Beat Generation enjoyed conversations in this place. There were others. Francis Coppola wrote a good part of the first Godfather film here, on a yellow Olivetti.

Luciano Pavarotti sung here. Joe Rosenthal, who shot the famous picture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, was a regular. Jack Hirschman, the current poet laureate of San Francisco, can be seen here frequently. I myself introduced my son Brennan, when he was three, to Allen Ginsberg at the Trieste. Ginsberg offered him a cube of sugar. Later, I placed a few chapters of my novel My Father In The Night in the Trieste.

That afternoon in 1957, my brother Mike knew who Allen Ginsberg was, a fact that surely made him unique in the dental community. He's a writer himself now, and I'm sure that he took me to the Trieste because he was on some sort of literary pilgrimage. It may have been on that day that I decided to become a writer myself.