The poet Larry Fagin, who died in May, was twenty-one years old when he met a young man walking through Paris with a turtle on his shoulder. The year was 1958. The man was the poet and filmmaker Piero Heliczer. That night, Heliczer brought Fagin to a run-down hotel, at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, to meet some other American writers—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky—who had been living at the Beat Hotel.
