"[3] Fitz Linkhorn barely managed to make a living pumping out cesspools, but his consuming vocation was "Born Again" preaching from the courthouse steps in 1930 Arroyo, Texas; it was a small, mostly Hispanic, and heavily Catholic town in the Rio Grande Valley.

Dove began hanging around the La Fe en Dios chili parlor in the ruins of the Hotel Crockett on the other side of town.

The hotel was closed, but the seldom-visited café was run by Terasina Vidavarri, a wary woman traumatized by her marriage, aged sixteen, with a middle-aged ex-soldier who raped her with a swagger stick on their wedding night.

Dove took up with a girl named Kitty Twist, a runaway from a children's home, and saved her life when she was about to fall under the wheels of a train.

The condoms, which were called O-Daddies and bore interesting names and colors, were made in a house by a mom-and-pop firm, Velma and Rhino Gross.

Dove's lengthiest stay was with the people who inhabited the twin worlds of Oliver Finnerty's brothel and Doc Dockery's speakeasy.

In the brothel he found, in addition to his old friend Kitty Twist, who had become a prostitute, Hallie Breedlove, a onetime schoolteacher who was the star of Finnerty's string of girls.

Hallie, who still retained vestiges of her former life as a teacher, was interested in Dove's mind and helped him to continue to learn to read.

The screenplay was written by John Fante, with Edmund Morris and Ben Hecht (the latter uncredited), and the film starred Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda, Anne Baxter, and Barbara Stanwyck.

In 1970, Lou Reed was approached about a project to turn A Walk on the Wild Side into a musical, a story he tells during his song of the same name on his 1978 Live: Take No Prisoners album.

The project never materialized, but he used the title for his song, "Walk on the Wild Side", describing the lives of Warhol superstars he saw at The Factory.