Kerouac

I have had a love affair with Jack Kerouac's On the Road since I first read it in 1975. I read it on a Greyhound bus traveling from Nebraska to Los Angeles to visit a friend, then from L.A. to New York to see my family, and then back to Nebraska where I was a depressed graduate student. On a whim, over winter break, I bought a 30 day unlimited travel Greyhound bus pass that I took full advantage of. Traveling across the country on a bus that stopped every hour or so at every podunk town we drove through, sitting in the smoking section in the back of the bus with assorted characters and not sleeping for three or four days was one of the great experiences of my life. At one point, some drunk sat next to me and he insisted we take turns having a swig from his whiskey flask as he talked to me all through the night. I was never much of a drinker, and the whiskey made me nauseated and dizzy. The smokey bus added to the ambiance. He rambled on and made little sense at all. I felt a little like I was in a twilight zone episode in which I was dropped down into the pages of the book I was reading. I didn't realize at the time how great the experience was. But it was. I was so tired, I was hallucinating by the time I got to L.A., and that wasn't even the long cross country leg of the journey. At another point, we stopped for an hour or two in Las Vegas, and I had my first encounter with that city. I bought a bag of apples and then lost all the money I had left for the trip to NY in my "Introduction to a downtown casino in Vegas at 2AM" module. (about $40...I was a poor student - why else would I be traveling by bus?) As I sat in the bus station at around 3:00AM with my bag of apples, I did feel somewhat like the homeless people I was sitting with. When one came over and asked me if he could have one of my apples, I felt justified in saying "no." However, I also felt really guilty and tried to explain that this would be all I had to eat for the next few days and I really was completely and hopelessly broke and I would probably run out of apples before New Jersey.

So... that was how I discovered the wondrous Jack Kerouac book. I read it on the road as it was meant to be read.

Since I am no longer riding Greyhound buses, no longer hitch-hiking, and sad to say, I have never hopped a freight train... the next best thing has been listening to the audio-book while I am driving in my car. It's not quite the same twilight zone experience as reading on a cross country Greyhound bus, but Matt Dillon does a great job reading the book, and at least in a car, it's a little closer than reading the book in my warm comfy bed. Every few years, I listen to the book while I drive. I am listening to it right now. It never gets old.

Kerouac died at age 47 in 1969... he was a bad alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver...he started vomitting blood and they couldn't stop the bleeding. Yes, 47.

If you've never read the book, go to the library and see if they have the audiobook... check it out and listen on a long road trip. It's best listened to if you've been up for two or three days. Here are a few quotes from the first few chapters:

"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, 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, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 1

"And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about.
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 3

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 3

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 4