Beaten? Bewilderedly Jack laughs and shakes his head, then with weirdly courteous patience launches into the derivation of the epithet — first uttered on a Times Square street corner in 1947 by the hipster-angel Herbert Huncke in some evanescent moment of exalted exhaustion, but resonating later in Jack’s mind, living on to accrue new meaning, connecting finally with the Catholic, Latin beatific. “Beat is really saying beatific. See?”
