Neal Cassady Was an Asshole
In 1994 I made a trip out to Boston to visit a cartoonist friend and his girlfriend. I had a great time, and as the man said in Heart of Darkness it expanded my mind, largely owing to my hosts' laid-back attitude to life's weirdness. Relaxing around fellow nonjudgmental weirdos can be a good thing once in a while. Just don't overdo it.
Part of the trip involved a drive to Lowell, MA, birthplace of Jack Kerouac, one of my favorite writers. Even back then I was a gravehopper, and I wanted to pay my respects at Kerouac's final resting place. This was pre-Internet, so no Googlemaps or Find a Grave weren't handy, leaving us to pull into town and search for the tourist bureau. We found it pretty easily and stopped in to ask for directions to Ti Jean's grave. A nice man behind the desk gave us a stack of maps (which I still have resting on the bookshelf beside my collection of Beat books) and outlined the path to the cemetery. Damn good thing, because Lowell, at least at the time, had an aversion to street signs. We may well have driven past where little Jack first saw Dr. Sax along the river, or grooved on Thomas Wolfe within redbricked cottages in which the ghost of Gerard floated, saintly, holy, and everybody goes AWW!!! etc., but we wouldn't have known it. The trip to the graveyard was a pretty straight shot. Nice meditative place, and in sight, if I recall correctly, of one of Kerouac's watering holes.
But back at the tourist bureau, after showing us the way, the man behind the desk said, "You know ____________ over there actually met Kerouac! Hey, _________!" Let's call the man Tom, because I can't remember his name to save my life. It's been 15 years.
Tom was a jowly, dour fellow with scholarly glasses perched at the tip of his nose. He looked a bit like Mr. Weatherbee from Archie comics. The man behind the desk asked Tom to recount his story of meeting Kerouac to the nice out of town hipsters. Tom, as it turned out, was a schoolteacher back in the 60s. One day, while teaching his kids, someone tapped at the window. As you've guessed, it was Kerouac, though I can't recall if Tom knew this at the time. He walked over to the window, opened it, and asked him what he wanted. Jack said he wanted to talk to the principal, the same guy who was principal when he attended school there. Tom told us that it was apparent Kerouac had been drinking. He told the King of the Beats that his behavior was inappropriate and that this was no way to see the principal. Jack just sort of harrumphed and mumbled. Tom closed the window and went back to his class while Kerouac walked off.
A few minutes later, Kerouac entered the building, found Tom's classroom, and sat down. Once more Tom chided Jack for his bad behavior. Kerouac, smashed, babbled spontaneous prose, demanding the principal. Tom asked him to leave, and he did. End of story.
I don't know what my friends thought, but I wasn't all that surprised. I think Kerouac is one of the great modern American prose stylists. His work isn't just be-bop-vootaroonie gibberish. Well, some of it is, but most of it isn't. I'm currently reading On the Road: The Original Scroll, which is based on Kerouac's first draft rather than the final version edited to protect tender 1950s sensibilities. Frankly, it's excellent. Skip past the bogus transcendental holyman poses and embarrassing praising of the sweet life of migrant workers and you encounter some thrilling descriptions of 40s and 50s America, midpoint between the old untamed frontier and today's superhighway nation.
Much as I adore Visions of Gerard and Tristessa, however, I also know that Kerouac was a souse. A talented fellow who worked his ass off to craft enduring prose, but a mama's boy souse filled with regrets about his freewheeling past. I don't think Tom was interested in shattering my illusions; I think he was trying to introduce us to the man rather than the myth-the successful unhappy son of Lowell.
As I read through OtR:TOS (I have only 100 pages left to peruse), I reflect on the way I felt while reading the expurgated edition at 21 versus reading the unvarnished version today, 20 years later. At 21 (or was I 23?) I dug on the book's constant feeling of motion. The pages vibrated, like the pre-seatbelt deathtraps Jack and Neal drove from coast to coast and up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They grooved on life, smoked "tea," partied everywhere, and bumped uglies with chicks who were total strangers, man! As Neal Cassady would say: Yes! Yes! Trapped in the suburbs, I decided-unlike any other young man who read On the Road before me, I'm sure-that this is what life should be like.
At 41 it's still an exciting ride, but not a pleasant one if you know what happened later. Every time Kerouac takes a drink at a party, I wanted to scream, "Jack, stop! You're gonna croak at 47, bleeding out internally in the bathroom!" Yet, beside Neal, Jack was a comparatively old man when he kicked off. Fast-living roman candle Neal Cassady passed at age 42, drunk and dying of pneumonia beside a railroad track in Mexico. Joan Vollmer, wife of William S. Burroughs, is a willowy, speed-freak specter in OtR only a few short years away from having a bullet sunk between her eyes by her husband. Meanwhile, Billy Burroughs, Jr., snuggles with his father in a scene so adorable via Jack's description, you can almost forget Billy will be dead by 33, after a life spent being hit on by his dad's pals in Tangiers in his teens, shooting a friend in the throat, and pickling himself in booze. Meanwhile, you get a better idea of how nuts William S. really was, skimming Mayan codexes while expounding on orgone energy and government suppression of tooth-healing chewing gum. Throughout the work, you see the suffering family members and peripheral Beats who also wrote books and poetry without becoming t-shirt icons, quickly growing tired of Jack and Neal and their cadre of freeloaders crashing on their couches, borrowing money, trying to fuck their wives and daughters, and outright stealing from them. But for space, I'd also touch on Jack and Neal's penchant for finding magical negroes.
Kerouac grows disenchanted with Cassady in OtR, but not nearly fast enough. Cassady is a meathead. The sort of fast-talking experimentalist satyr who convinces you that because he lives on the edge, he possesses gnosis. In fact, all Neal knows about is how to beg, borrow, steal, cajole, mooch, and poison relationships. He's a bad penny surrounded by enablers, Jack Kerouac among the most guilty of the lot with his permanent canonization of the "Holy Goof" through OtR.
That's something I think I missed at age 21. Kerouac, who was a fairly conservative fellow, was annoyed with being considered the leader of the Beats, the father of the hippies, and the prophet of the First Church of Perpetual Freeloading Motion. What seemed so important and spiritual and real in his early 20s (during the course of OtR, Jack and Neal are in their early twenties, amazingly enough), turned out to be fairly empty and sad. The "mad ones" that Jack said he lived for were undependable losers who left him standing on cold street corners at midnight without food or cash, arms filled with a few scraps of clothing, hoping his G.I. Bill check arrives soon so he can buy sandwiches for the trip back home to Memere. Then it starts all over again. Kerouac has plenty of good stories, until you realize it's the same story over and over again-the old tale of going out to look for America and not being able to find it anywhere. Just a string of broken marriages, lost friends, annoyed hosts, poverty, and the need to dub the numbing effects of booze, sex, and drugs as kicks.
Actually, it's a remarkably depressing book. Read it as a cautionary tale.
Part of the trip involved a drive to Lowell, MA, birthplace of Jack Kerouac, one of my favorite writers. Even back then I was a gravehopper, and I wanted to pay my respects at Kerouac's final resting place. This was pre-Internet, so no Googlemaps or Find a Grave weren't handy, leaving us to pull into town and search for the tourist bureau. We found it pretty easily and stopped in to ask for directions to Ti Jean's grave. A nice man behind the desk gave us a stack of maps (which I still have resting on the bookshelf beside my collection of Beat books) and outlined the path to the cemetery. Damn good thing, because Lowell, at least at the time, had an aversion to street signs. We may well have driven past where little Jack first saw Dr. Sax along the river, or grooved on Thomas Wolfe within redbricked cottages in which the ghost of Gerard floated, saintly, holy, and everybody goes AWW!!! etc., but we wouldn't have known it. The trip to the graveyard was a pretty straight shot. Nice meditative place, and in sight, if I recall correctly, of one of Kerouac's watering holes.
But back at the tourist bureau, after showing us the way, the man behind the desk said, "You know ____________ over there actually met Kerouac! Hey, _________!" Let's call the man Tom, because I can't remember his name to save my life. It's been 15 years.
Tom was a jowly, dour fellow with scholarly glasses perched at the tip of his nose. He looked a bit like Mr. Weatherbee from Archie comics. The man behind the desk asked Tom to recount his story of meeting Kerouac to the nice out of town hipsters. Tom, as it turned out, was a schoolteacher back in the 60s. One day, while teaching his kids, someone tapped at the window. As you've guessed, it was Kerouac, though I can't recall if Tom knew this at the time. He walked over to the window, opened it, and asked him what he wanted. Jack said he wanted to talk to the principal, the same guy who was principal when he attended school there. Tom told us that it was apparent Kerouac had been drinking. He told the King of the Beats that his behavior was inappropriate and that this was no way to see the principal. Jack just sort of harrumphed and mumbled. Tom closed the window and went back to his class while Kerouac walked off.
A few minutes later, Kerouac entered the building, found Tom's classroom, and sat down. Once more Tom chided Jack for his bad behavior. Kerouac, smashed, babbled spontaneous prose, demanding the principal. Tom asked him to leave, and he did. End of story.
I don't know what my friends thought, but I wasn't all that surprised. I think Kerouac is one of the great modern American prose stylists. His work isn't just be-bop-vootaroonie gibberish. Well, some of it is, but most of it isn't. I'm currently reading On the Road: The Original Scroll, which is based on Kerouac's first draft rather than the final version edited to protect tender 1950s sensibilities. Frankly, it's excellent. Skip past the bogus transcendental holyman poses and embarrassing praising of the sweet life of migrant workers and you encounter some thrilling descriptions of 40s and 50s America, midpoint between the old untamed frontier and today's superhighway nation.
Much as I adore Visions of Gerard and Tristessa, however, I also know that Kerouac was a souse. A talented fellow who worked his ass off to craft enduring prose, but a mama's boy souse filled with regrets about his freewheeling past. I don't think Tom was interested in shattering my illusions; I think he was trying to introduce us to the man rather than the myth-the successful unhappy son of Lowell.
As I read through OtR:TOS (I have only 100 pages left to peruse), I reflect on the way I felt while reading the expurgated edition at 21 versus reading the unvarnished version today, 20 years later. At 21 (or was I 23?) I dug on the book's constant feeling of motion. The pages vibrated, like the pre-seatbelt deathtraps Jack and Neal drove from coast to coast and up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They grooved on life, smoked "tea," partied everywhere, and bumped uglies with chicks who were total strangers, man! As Neal Cassady would say: Yes! Yes! Trapped in the suburbs, I decided-unlike any other young man who read On the Road before me, I'm sure-that this is what life should be like.
At 41 it's still an exciting ride, but not a pleasant one if you know what happened later. Every time Kerouac takes a drink at a party, I wanted to scream, "Jack, stop! You're gonna croak at 47, bleeding out internally in the bathroom!" Yet, beside Neal, Jack was a comparatively old man when he kicked off. Fast-living roman candle Neal Cassady passed at age 42, drunk and dying of pneumonia beside a railroad track in Mexico. Joan Vollmer, wife of William S. Burroughs, is a willowy, speed-freak specter in OtR only a few short years away from having a bullet sunk between her eyes by her husband. Meanwhile, Billy Burroughs, Jr., snuggles with his father in a scene so adorable via Jack's description, you can almost forget Billy will be dead by 33, after a life spent being hit on by his dad's pals in Tangiers in his teens, shooting a friend in the throat, and pickling himself in booze. Meanwhile, you get a better idea of how nuts William S. really was, skimming Mayan codexes while expounding on orgone energy and government suppression of tooth-healing chewing gum. Throughout the work, you see the suffering family members and peripheral Beats who also wrote books and poetry without becoming t-shirt icons, quickly growing tired of Jack and Neal and their cadre of freeloaders crashing on their couches, borrowing money, trying to fuck their wives and daughters, and outright stealing from them. But for space, I'd also touch on Jack and Neal's penchant for finding magical negroes.
Kerouac grows disenchanted with Cassady in OtR, but not nearly fast enough. Cassady is a meathead. The sort of fast-talking experimentalist satyr who convinces you that because he lives on the edge, he possesses gnosis. In fact, all Neal knows about is how to beg, borrow, steal, cajole, mooch, and poison relationships. He's a bad penny surrounded by enablers, Jack Kerouac among the most guilty of the lot with his permanent canonization of the "Holy Goof" through OtR.
That's something I think I missed at age 21. Kerouac, who was a fairly conservative fellow, was annoyed with being considered the leader of the Beats, the father of the hippies, and the prophet of the First Church of Perpetual Freeloading Motion. What seemed so important and spiritual and real in his early 20s (during the course of OtR, Jack and Neal are in their early twenties, amazingly enough), turned out to be fairly empty and sad. The "mad ones" that Jack said he lived for were undependable losers who left him standing on cold street corners at midnight without food or cash, arms filled with a few scraps of clothing, hoping his G.I. Bill check arrives soon so he can buy sandwiches for the trip back home to Memere. Then it starts all over again. Kerouac has plenty of good stories, until you realize it's the same story over and over again-the old tale of going out to look for America and not being able to find it anywhere. Just a string of broken marriages, lost friends, annoyed hosts, poverty, and the need to dub the numbing effects of booze, sex, and drugs as kicks.
Actually, it's a remarkably depressing book. Read it as a cautionary tale.