Supernatural On the Road
Photoset on tumblr
Some people had already made the parallel, and Kripke answered that yes, he was a fan of the Beat writers and had been very inspired by "On the Road" while creating Supernatural (they have a page on this in the SuperWiki ;) ).
If you don't know this novel, it was published in 1957, and is by Jack Kerouac and about his travels around America with his crazy friend Neal Cassady. In the novel, Kerouac changed all the names of course, and so we get this :
- Jack Kerouac => Sal Paradise => Sam Winchester
"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up."
"in spite of our difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother"
"and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,, mad to talk, mad to be saved"
"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything."
"'Is he your brother? […] He's a devil with a car, isn't he?' … 'He's mad,' I said, 'and yes, he's my brother.'"
"I'll watch him; he's my brother and listens to me."
"I told her this snake was Satan." (this guy is just a sex-fiend and a huge perv if you ask me lol)
"Dean found me when he finally decided I was worth saving."
- Neal Cassady => DEAN Moriarty => Dean Winchester
"Hel-lo, you remember me - Dean Moriarty? I've come to ask you to show me how to write." - to Sal.
"it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely in there with all the terms and jargon."
"He's not crazy, he'll be all right, and don't worry about his driving, he's the best in the world." - Sal.
"He was BEAT - the root, the soul of Beatific."
"I knew I loved Marylou, I knew I had to find my father wherever he is and save him, I knew you were my buddy et cetera, I knew how great Carlo is." - to Sal.
"'It's Carlo Marx!' screamed Dean above the fury. An it was."
"Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love"
"A western kinsman of the sun, Dean."
"But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his 'criminality' was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied"
"Son-of-a-bitch!"
- William S. Burroughs (who lived in the end of his life and died in freaking Lawrence, Kansas) => Old Bull Lee => Bobby Singer
"Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-everything drawl"
"It would take me all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned, not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States"
"He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx. We'd all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn't notice on the street unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness--a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night."
- LuAnne Henderson => Marylou => kind of a mix between Ruby, Anna, Bela and Meg it seems XD
- Allen Ginsberg => Carlo Marx => 2014! & crazy Free!Castiel
"When Ginsberg was in his twenties, I think I only saw him high on pot or benny. Without such, he was thoughtful, serious, sometimes morose and depressed. When high, he was gleeful, loud, boisterous, silly." - Carolyn Cassady.
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"In these days Carlo had developed a tone of voice which he hoped sounded like what he called The Voice of Rock."
"Carlo read them his apocalyptic, mad poetry."
"Carlo's basement apartment […] was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made."
"Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk"
- Carolyn Robinson => Camille => Lisa Braeden (but Lisa is a wa~y better woman in my opinion)
- ? => Galatea Dunkel => maybe Ellen Harvell ?
- Joan Vollmer => Jane (Old Bull's wife) => Karen Singer
Joan Vollmer had been killed by her husband Burroughs, who shoot her in the head (but not because she was a zombie haha, he "just" was high... yes I am really talking about the real life persons here ^^")
Etc.
So Sal meets Dean, who is LOOKING FOR HIS FATHER, and they take the road together. Sal is a writer but also a Colombia student and is fascinated by Dean's brightness and charisma. Dean who is a drop-out, who loves food, cars and women. Dean who stoles a little, fights often, and has a lot of sex.
At the beginning Dean is married to Marylou who's 16 and just as mad as him. And they go and go crossing the United States from coast to coast and all over again, and they get high and meet other crazy people, and they get drunk, and Marylou gets in Sal's pants and Dean had told him that she was a whore, and he leaves them and goes with and other woman - Carolyn - with whom he'll have children and a home. And Sal is left by Marylou too, and he gets even more drunk and high on some real shit, all alone thinking about Dean, and Dean founds him one day in his crappy hotel room and they go again together and so goes on and on...
They keep screwing up their lives and the lives of the people around them who can't stop themselves of being attracted somehow by Dean (and Sal is following, writing everything).
For the moment, with all the quotes and pictures above etc, we all agree that SpN IS a crazy adaptation of "On the road" with ghosts and demons and stuff, right ? It's so similar it hurts, isn't it ?
But now you'll ask where is my point and why I was talking about Destiel at the beginning.
It is a good question. Especially when Neal Cassady had always been crazy about girls, ended up with multiple marriages/divorces and who had slept with several girls in the same time at least once, and had claimed all his short (yes short dammit) life that he wasn't homosexual.
Well, maybe he wasn't really, but he did have several homosexual/bisexual experiences. Sometimes for money (they are epically broke all the damn time), sometimes by curiosity or just some urge while he's high/drunk, and sometimes, for like 20 years apparently, it's with Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg).
"Off the Road - 20 years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg" by Carolyn Cassady :
For instance : August 1947, Carolyn Robinson who was having an affair with Neal, was shocked to find LuAnne, Neal and Allen naked, in bed together. (well, according to wikipedia, don't know the source).
Peter Orlovsky. Allen, Natalie Jackson & Neal :
Basically here, Allen and Neal were with Allen's life-partner and one of Neal's girlfriends, and just look at them...
Now this is how Kerouac - who yet never seemed that keen to reveal that Cassady was having a weird and long-lasting affair with another man - described his first meeting with Allen :
"And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx, A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took at each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on. I was a lout compared. I couldn't keep up with them. […] They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perspective and blank."
Also highly-pigdly :
- "He wrote of Dean as a 'child of the rainbow'"
- "He brooked in his basement over a huge journal in which he was keeping track of everything that happened every day - everything Dean did and said" (Cas the stalker ladies and gentlemen XD)
- "Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul." (this one hurts a little)
- "I sensed some kind of conspiracy in the air, [...list of characters/friends] generally agreeing to ignore Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx. […] Dean, who had the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint, and Carlo were the underground monsters of that season" (Context, what context?! He don't really explain actually)
- "I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean was doing now. Dean was coming to Carlo's at three in the morning. I went there after the party." (Again : context, what context?! Hahaha ! XD)
- "Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. 'Now, Carlo, let me speak - here's what I'm saying...'" (No but seriously, who needs context now?"
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And those pages kind of scream drunk Team Free Will : 01 - 02
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Time they spent together, at least without Sal, and sometimes apparently alone :
- "I didn't see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions."
- "(I) promised myself a ball in Denver. Carlo Marx was already in Denver; Dean was there"
- "That night I found Carlo and to my amazement he told me he'd been in Central City with Dean."
- "I went to look for Carlo and Dean - nowhere to be found."
As you can see Kerouac doesn't give that much information about what they are up to when they disappear together (at least in what I've read so far). Also, I think that he was a bit of a homophobic (in the literal sens of the term, like he just doesn't want to know, suddenly becomes blind and deaf and oblivious, even it is so obvious that he himself can't remove all the subtext arf XD).
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But now let me introduce you of an other side of the story.
Allen Ginsberg's side...
"Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul."
"N.C., secret hero of these poems... "
- Extracts from Howl (Ginsberg's most famous poem, and the movie which talks about a part of his life)
"One day, Neal and I we've found together in bed at 4am, by circumstances with no place else to go and no place else to sleep. And I remember of being a little scared, and not quite sure what to do so... I sort of like turned over and stiffen my body and got at the edge of the bed. And he saw that I was shy. At the time I was still scared of feeling with an other person. So he put his arm around me, and pulled me, and put my head on his breast and... gave me love actually."
And now just look at these :
(not my gif btw)
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I guess that they didn't stay together because Neal Cassady had too much of a daddy issues, also some huge issues with women too (and I'm thinking on the fact that his mother died when he was a kid - but she didn't not burnt on the ceiling...) - and commitment issues, as well as some sexual identity crisis even if he was playing the free love card.
He just couldn't stop himself of screwing up his life, he said it himself (can't find the actual quote damn). And Ginsberg found a guy who loved him back, even if he and Cassady kept in touch, and that it seems he never forgot him (I think he kept writting poems about him till he died).
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All this to say that : DESTIEL WAS REAL.
All those characters, they are strongly based on real persons, and the deep brotherly bond Sam and Dean have was real, and Bobby was real, and Castiel was real... you can't denied that after reading these quotes and seeing those pictures right ? And "Dean" and "Cas" were lovers, and totally fascinated by each other.
I seriously don't care what haters say now, 'cause my OTP is even more real than canon.
To conclude, there is a movie adaptation of "On the Road" coming in May, and starring those guys as Dean and Carlo :
And now, (hoping that they don't screw up and focus too much on Dean and Marylou) you two go and kiss the hell out of each other on the Big Screen. Thank you.
And guys I'm expecting a lot of gifs and photosets, don't disappoint me.