Bill Cannastra

William Cannastra (November 6, 1921 – October 12, 1950) was a member of the early Beat Generation scene in New York. He was a "wild man" figure that the writers in the group found interesting, similar to their fascination with Neal Cassady. Characters based on Bill Cannastra were included in both the John Clellon Holmes novel "Go" (as "Agatson") and Jack Kerouac's "Visions of Cody" (as "Finistra"). He is also described in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".
Life.
William Cannastra was one of two sons born to an aristocratic mother and a machinist father who had emigrated from Italy. "The Cannastras lived at 525 Pennsylvania Avenue in Schenectady, a tree-lined street in the shadows of the Mount Pleasant ballfields. Young Bill, who had the yearnings of a career in the art world, instead placated his parents by studying at Harvard Law School. In the summer of 1949, when he moved to New York City to further pursue his studies, [Joan] Haverty went with him." 
Cannastra and Haverty met at an artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when she was 19 years old. He was "vacationing as a scallop-boat fisherman", according to Haverty's memoir "Nobody's Wife" and biographical sketch in "Women of the Beat Generation". It goes on to say, "She followed Bill to Manhattan at the end of the summer of 1949, and there she hung on to a precarious but happy existence, reveling in her seamstress job, window-peeping at night with Bill on the streets of New York ..." 
According to Ellis Amburn: "Joan sometimes dressed in drag as a sailor and joined Cannastra in kinky games, peeping through windows."
The address of Cannastra's loft in Chelsea (long since torn down, now a modern condominium building) was 151 West 21st Street.
Death.
Cannastra died on October 12, 1950, in a drunken stunt, wherein he was trying to climb out of a subway car window just as it was pulling away from the platform and was decapitated. He was 28 years old.
Allen Ginsberg refers to the subway stop where Cannastra died as Astor Place. Some other accounts, including one from the day it happened, have it as the Bleecker Street stop.
Cannastra was living with Haverty at the time of his death. Shortly afterwards she met Jack Kerouac, who immediately proposed to her. It was in the loft where Cannastra had lived that Kerouac found sheets of tracing paper which he then used to write "On the Road" in April 1951.
Cannastra in literature.
John Clellon Holmes, "Go".
In Holmes' "Go", Cannastra (alias Agatson) makes his entrance to a party:
Holmes discusses Cannastra in an interview in 1974:
Clellon's account of Bill Cannastra's death:
Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".
A number of lines in the poem "Howl" refer to Bill Cannastra:
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whisky and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles, 
Ginsberg explains the music reference: 
Jack Kerouac's "Visions of Cody".
In Jack Kerouac's "Visions of Cody", the character "Bill Finistra" is based on Cannastra; "Finistra" is a poet who is friends with Jack Duluoz and travels with him from New York City to San Francisco in 1948 so they can visit a friend named "Cody Pomeroy" who is based on Neal Cassady. "Finistra" is an important supporting character throughout the novel.